Jägerkaserne

The barracks before 1945

Work on a new infantry barracks by the Ochsenkeller began in 1897, on the slope above the Altmühl meadows that a postcard of 1898 shows still half open ground. The complex is the one that later carried the name Jägerkaserne and that now houses the Bavarian Bereitschaftspolizei.

From 1939 to 1945 the site was Oflag VII-B, a prisoner-of-war camp for officers. Polish officers were held there after the Polish campaign of 1939 and moved on a year later; French, Belgian and British officers taken in 1940 replaced them, New Zealanders and Australians captured in Greece and on Crete arrived in 1941, South African and British officers from the African campaign in 1942 and American officers taken in Tunisia in 1943. The camp was dissolved in April 1945 and its prisoners ordered to Moosburg.

American troops entered Eichstätt on 26 April 1945. The town came through the war without bomb damage, and its role as a large prisoner-of-war and hospital centre left it with buildings that could be used at once for the displaced.

The main camp and its neighbours

The barracks stood on Kipfenberger Straße. Surviving photographs show substantial masonry buildings alongside wooden huts, with fields and wooded slopes beyond. The site was the main residential camp, but several services and groups occupied other buildings around Eichstätt. A hospital used the building that later became the youth hostel. An orthodox Jewish group lived separately in the former agricultural school on Gemmingenstraße.

The inventory identifies the barracks as Assembly Center 92-277 and later OMF 343, administered by UNRRA Team 555. It is a separate site from Rebdorf and the agricultural-school accommodation. Treating every reference to Eichstätt as a reference to one barrack compound would obscure the different communities and uses.

Changing communities

The first postwar reception camp accommodated liberated displaced people of several nationalities. A Latvian newspaper dated 6 February 1946 uses the exact Jägerkaserne address in a family-tracing notice. The inventory also lists Ukrainians among the groups associated with the facility, though the retrieved sources do not provide a separate Ukrainian census or a date for their departure.

One dated Ukrainian figure does exist. The comparative table of Ukrainians in the camps of the American zone records 436 at Eichstätt in the UNRRA return of August 1946, with no entry in the questionnaire collection or in the returns of May and December 1947. The row carries only the town name, so it cannot be assigned to the barracks alone: Eichstätt also had the agricultural-school accommodation, the area hospital and the separate site at Rebdorf.

At the end of November 1946, 550 Jewish displaced people came from the crowded Ulanenkaserne in Bamberg. They included survivors of Nazi persecution and people who had endured wartime deportation to the Soviet Union, returned to Poland and then fled renewed antisemitic violence. By April 1947 the published community figure was 1,341. These numbers describe the later Jewish phase, not an exclusively Ukrainian camp.

A further use of the barracks is recorded in the memoir of a Czechoslovak airman published by the Free Czechoslovak Air Force Associates. He writes that after his escape from Communist Czechoslovakia he and his companions “were sent to a Military Czechoslovak Refugee Camp, at Eichstätt – Jägerkaserne, under a command of a certain Czechoslovak Major Bruner”. The memoir gives no dates or figures for that camp and does not say how it stood in relation to the assembly centre.

Education and religious life

Residents organised a kindergarten and primary schooling, alongside a synagogue and sporting activities. Two clubs, Hapoel/Makabi and Elizur, offered organised sport. A small elected committee and camp police handled internal affairs, with international relief supplying material support. The kindergarten photograph preserved with the university’s research offers a direct view of children and carers among the huts.

Religious education was especially important in the separate orthodox accommodation. Its study institutions and ritual bath were located at the agricultural school, rather than automatically inside the barracks. Vocational training offered through ORT also formed part of the wider Eichstätt community, preparing people for new work after emigration. The precise location of that training changed or remains uncertain in the published account.

Departure and the surviving buildings

Emigration reduced the camp population, particularly after the foundation of Israel in 1948. The Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte states that from May 1948 so few remained that the camp was cleared by the end of September 1948, although its own heading for the section reads 1945 to 1949. The university’s research places the Jewish camp’s closure in October 1949, while the camp inventory records only an interval, between 30 September 1949 and 30 September 1950.

The Bavarian Bereitschaftspolizei was founded at Rebdorf in 1951 and moved into the Jägerkaserne in 1952; the rebuilding of its quarters, begun in 1978, was completed in 1991. The surviving buildings enabled researchers and returning families to revisit the setting during the 2019 symposium and later film work.