Luitpold-Kaserne

The first postwar community

The municipal archive describes a Polish DP centre established in summer 1945 under UNRRA Team 308, among the largest displaced-persons camps in Swabia. As early as June 1945 it held 2,551 Polish residents: 1,118 men, 687 women and more than 300 children in over 300 families. People slept in improvised dormitories of stacked beds, in former factory halls roughly converted into quarters. The neighbouring camp at Lauingen, with about 1,375 Polish residents, belonged to the same pastoral district, as did six American guard companies. From July 1947 the International Refugee Organisation took over from UNRRA by stages.

Redemptorist priests sent by the Polish military chaplaincy served the camp. One took up work in Augsburg on 8 June 1945 and was sent to Dillingen a month later to replace an injured colleague; with a third priest he cared for the Polish faithful at Dillingen and Lauingen, and by October 1945 they had blessed 107 marriages at Dillingen and 80 at Lauingen. Sunday services took place in the town’s Studienkirche, while weekday services used a camp chapel fitted out in a former cinema hall with a plain movable altar and a wooden cross. When one of the priests was killed in a car accident in June 1946, about 3,000 people attended the burial with more than 80 banners.

From November 1945 the camp ran school lessons and vocational training for about 700 pupils, with scout groups for boys and girls and a choir that sang at services. At Christmas 1946, 430 small children were given presents donated by UNRRA and the American Red Cross, and children from Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian families took part; choirs from neighbouring camps sang together. Camp photographs preserve that organised communal life, including a Polish church choir at Christmas 1946 and a women’s choir at a vocational graduation. These are images of the Polish community, not photographs identified as Ukrainian performances.

Ukrainian life in the barracks

Ukrainians appear in the camp record from 1946 onwards. The UNRRA liaison office at Augsburg reported on 22 August 1946 that 200 Polish Ukrainians had been screened at Dillingen under Team 308; the same report warns that no accurate breakdown of Ukrainians was possible, because screening teams reported unevenly and military authorities were still unsure how to classify Ukrainians by citizenship and nationality.

The Ukrainian American relief committee’s report of 30 June 1948 lists Dillingen’s Luitpoldkaserne among its main American-zone camps. Published Ukrainian population returns give 1,655 residents in May 1947 and 1,362 in December 1947, against 300 in August 1946 and 1,656 in the questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947. The camp was therefore part of the Ukrainian institutional network even while administrative records kept a Polish or Polish-Ukrainian label.

A watercolour dated 1949 depicts a building containing family accommodation, a Ukrainian Orthodox church and a Ukrainian school. The church entrance had a small porch topped by a cross, with a bell beside it. The university library that holds the drawing describes how these different uses occupied adjoining parts of the same building. Services in the Studienkirche were held in Polish and in Ukrainian, and a plaque there commemorates the Ukrainian services today.

Camp money and daily needs

Surviving paper money carries the name Polish D.P. Center Luitpold and UNRRA Team 308, in denominations from 1 to 50 units. The notes replaced a Reichsmark that had lost its value and were used inside the camp, in the canteen and the workshops. They were designed by a Lithuanian artist who had fled his country in 1944 and who ran an art studio at the Lithuanian gymnasium in Dillingen from 1946 to 1948; his initials appear in the border ornament.

The camp money belonged to a wider district scheme. A Lithuanian numismatic account quotes a UNRRA letter of 17 June 1946 recording that Team 308 had “a Point system operating for P.X. and amenity supplies”, whose object was “to allow a fair distribution of supplies to all camp dwellers, with special facilities offered to the various working groups”. The same account places the Lithuanian camp at Ludwig in that district, with money issued in two printings, the first on white paper and the second on light-violet paper, and states that UNRRA officials used the same basic design for the Polish money issued at Luitpold. The system reached the camp at Nördlingen, fifty-five kilometres away, which held 500 Latvian and Lithuanian residents and whose notes began to circulate in June 1946.

Following the camp into 1949 and beyond

The 1949 watercolour is important evidence that the Ukrainian community continued after 1948. The administrative inventory places closure between 30 September 1950 and 31 March 1951, and an earlier endpoint given in a recent local account cannot describe the full Ukrainian camp phase. Remaining residents were moved to other institutions, the site passed to German authorities, the buildings were demolished in the early 1960s, and a modern barracks area now stands on the ground.

In the records, nationality labels, administrative numbers and dates changed while people moved between institutions. Reading those records alongside a contemporary relief directory and images of school and church life produces a fuller history than treating Luitpold as exclusively Polish or exclusively Ukrainian throughout its existence.

The Dillingen municipal holdings include a file of strength reports for the Luitpoldkaserne and Ludwigskaserne camps issued on 1 October 1947, twelve inventoried pages preserved as thirteen digital reproductions. The archival description records that the names in these reports have been entered into the Central Name Index. It gives no breakdown by nationality and does not separate the two camps.