Camp Mack

The institution before the camp

The buildings were designed as a hospital. The Bayreuth district asylum opened at Wendelhoefen, outside the town centre, on 16 May 1870, with a main block and wings for 250 patients in six departments, a hall, a chapel and large gardens. Later building took capacity to 567 beds, and the institution was renamed the Upper Franconian asylum and nursing home in 1906.

Its history under National Socialism was destructive. On 1 October 1940 the Gauleiter ordered the institution dissolved. Of the 651 patients, 523 were moved by special train to Erlangen, Ansbach and Kutzenberg, and from there patients previously housed at Bayreuth were taken to killing centres under the Aktion T4 programme. The buildings became a children’s evacuation home of the National Socialist welfare organisation, occupied from 26 October 1940 by 420 girls.

An air raid on 11 April 1945 badly damaged several buildings, and stores and fittings were looted after the welfare organisation abandoned the site at the end of the war. That was the condition in which the camp began.

A former institution becomes a home

The American military government set up Lager Wendelhoefen in the damaged buildings, first for arrested former German officials and then for up to 1,400 displaced persons. The Stadtarchiv’s account names their origins as Poland, Ukraine and above all the Baltic, which matches the mixture the camp records describe.

A recollection preserved by the National Library of Latvia describes an initial stay in a larger Bayreuth camp with many Polish residents, followed by a move into the Baltic camp at Wendelhoefen. Another museum account independently identifies Camp Mack’s premises as a former psychiatric institution. The camp brought together Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians under UNRRA administration.

Relief records identified it as Assembly Center 92-279 and later OMF 318, under the Bayreuth team. The inventory’s 820 is a capacity entry dated 31 October 1947, rather than a count of Ukrainian residents. The surviving cultural material is particularly rich for Baltic life; the administrative nationality entry establishes the additional Polish-Ukrainian connection without turning the whole camp into a Ukrainian settlement.

A list of Latvian camps in Germany printed on 1 May 1946 includes the camp, giving its address as “Bayreith 13a. Wendelsnofen, DP. Camp Mack Oberfranken”. The list uses variant spellings for Bayreuth and Wendelhoefen, and places Camp Mack among the Latvian camps within months of its recorded opening.

Two catalogue entries, one name

The Arolsen camp catalogue carries two rows using the name Mack. One, for Bayreuth, gives Assembly Center 92-279, later OMF 318, opening on 24 January 1946 and closing on 31 July 1949, with nationalities listed as Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish-Ukrainian. The other, for Wendelhoefen in the Bayreuth district, gives Assembly Center 93-401, opening on 30 January 1946 and closing between 15 April and 20 May 1947, with the nationality given simply as Ukrainian.

Whether these are one installation recorded twice, an annex, or two administrative phases cannot be settled from the catalogue alone, and the underlying tracing-service returns have not been read. The two entries are kept apart here.

Rooms, meals and school

In one family’s recollection, households with young children received separate rooms, while two families with older children shared a room partitioned with blankets. Meals initially came from a communal kitchen, chiefly soup and porridge. Later, families cooked their own rations on small wood-burning stoves that also supplied heat. These domestic arrangements show how families adapted institutional rooms to everyday living.

A primary school offered language, mathematics and religious instruction. Volleyball, basketball and table tennis gave young people organised recreation; scouting brought excursions and camping trips. The museum photograph of school volleyball players preserves this part of the camp’s social life. A second collection dates a group photograph to summer 1948, securely placing the young people at Camp Mack then.

Skill on display

The original Bayreuth exhibition catalogue is unusually precise about where objects were made. Plates attributed to Camp Mack show painted and carved wooden dishes, boxes, candleholders, silver ornaments, dolls and wooden sandals. Several captions distinguish Latvian, Lithuanian or Estonian work within the broader Baltic category. The photographs make these surviving records useful beyond the names of organisations and administrators.

The regional exhibition presented creative work from several camps to challenge the idea that displaced people lived passively on relief. Its introduction discusses scarce supplies and the use of recovered materials and homemade tools across the participating camps. That is the exhibition’s regional context; the individual captions provide the direct evidence for Camp Mack’s contributions. Ukrainian embroidery and carvings illustrated elsewhere in the same volume came from Leopold-Kaserne.

Leaving Bayreuth

Clinical work resumed on the site in the autumn of 1947 with about a hundred patients, and the district bought the grounds back from the Bavarian state in 1951. The camp and the returning hospital therefore overlapped, although no source retrieved here explains how the buildings were shared.

The museum collections preserve two onward journeys. One account records departure for Indiana in 1949; another describes transfer to Memmingen before emigration to the United States. Leaving Camp Mack could therefore mean another German camp before the ocean crossing. The camp’s final year was 1949, although the inventory and a later recollection differ over the month of closure.