Damloup-Kaserne

From military barracks to temporary home

Rheine became a garrison town in 1936. The town handed the military authorities a six-hectare site on Mittelstraße, and in October 1936 the third battalion of Infantry Regiment 79 moved into the newly built Damloup-Kaserne, named after a village near Verdun that had been bitterly fought over in the First World War. Because the permanent buildings were not enough, the barracks were extended by a hutted camp known as Lager A, between Mittelstraße, Darbrookstraße, Bühnertstraße and Im Sundern, where units of the Reich Labour Service and later the Wehrmacht were stationed.

After 1945, the military buildings were put to civilian use. Damloup first accommodated displaced people and later German expellees and refugees from the Soviet occupation zone. These successive uses explain why sources describe different kinds of residents at the same address.

Ukrainian residents and family tracing

The Paris-based periodical Hromada printed notices from people trying to find relatives and acquaintances scattered by the war. Its February 1949 issue includes correspondence addresses at the Rheine DP camp in Damloup-Kaserne. This is direct contemporary evidence of the camp’s place within Ukrainian networks of communication.

A camp address could connect a person in Germany with readers living elsewhere in Europe. The notices show that recovery after displacement involved more than finding shelter: it also meant discovering who had survived and where family members had gone. They do not establish that the missing people themselves lived at Damloup.

Organised Ukrainian life at Rheine left a trace outside the town as well. A study of the Lintorf camp near Düsseldorf records that the Ukrainian church choir from Rheine and Lingen performed there on 1 December 1952. The choir is described by town rather than by camp, and by that date the Ukrainian population recorded at Rheine had already fallen a long way from its 1946 level.

Work beyond the camp

Displaced people accommodated at Rheine were sent out to work elsewhere in Westphalia. A labour-office return of 16 January 1947, held in the Staatsarchiv Münster, records about 250 Ukrainians and Poles from a camp near Rheine employed as male labour on the rubble clearance in Münster; a study of that work notes that January 1947 is the only month for which the origin of the workers can be established with certainty. The return says a camp near Rheine, not Damloup-Kaserne, and the town had more than one place of accommodation.

Numbers on the clearance fluctuated sharply. In February 1947 some 300 displaced people were at work, 600 to 700 after the March frosts and only 62 by May, when 500 were withdrawn altogether. The study attributes much of this to British priorities, since from 1947 the occupation authorities were offering resettlement or work in Britain to exactly the fit young men the German administration wanted for the rubble.

Speaking beyond the camp

On 6 November 1949, Ukrainian residents gathered in Rheine’s market square for an anti-Soviet demonstration. A local newspaper report, reprinted the following month in ABN-Korrespondenz, described hundreds of men and women from Damloup-Kaserne, blue-and-yellow flags, speeches in German and a concluding Ukrainian song.

The report shows residents addressing the town around them rather than remaining invisible behind a camp address. Because it was reproduced by the anti-Bolshevik movement, it is best read as evidence of this public event and its organisers’ message, not as proof that every resident shared the same politics.

Rheine in the population returns

Ukrainian relief statistics and UNRRA and IRO returns list Rheine across six reporting dates. The figures below describe the published Rheine entry. They are not a verified census of Damloup alone: a compiled camp directory records two camps at Rheine in the British zone under the numbers 3157 and 31/157, with Poles, Ukrainians and others, and the town also contained Gellendorf and Barackenlager B.

The figures document a declining Ukrainian population across the reporting period. They cannot tell us how much of that change came from overseas emigration, transfers between camps or movement into ordinary housing.

A changing site

The hutted Lager A beside the barracks was wound up from 1946 onwards. A local sports club laid out a new ground on the former parade square and began playing there in 1948; work on a new municipal school started on the rest of the land in 1953, although the last huts survived until 1979. The permanent barracks followed a different course: military administration returned in 1958, the first recruits arrived at the start of 1959, and Rheine grew into the second-largest Bundeswehr garrison in North Rhine-Westphalia.

By 1955, Damloup was a transit centre for roughly 1,500–2,000 refugees from the Soviet zone. A separate 400–600 displaced people lived at Barackenlager B on Schorlemerstraße. These totals concern different sites and populations. The new Bundeswehr location administration was established in 1958 and occupied rooms at Damloup.

Military use finally ended in 2014. Temporary refugee reception resumed in 2015, decades after the Ukrainian DP period. In January 2022, Rheine bought the former barracks site for redevelopment as the Europa-Viertel am Waldhügel. The 1936 photographs and later street view preserve the physical setting through these changes.