Ergolding Camp

From reserve airfield to accommodation

The airfield was not an inheritance from an older military site but a piece of requisitioned farmland. In 1936 the Munich air district command opened negotiations with the parish of Ergolding over an emergency landing ground of about ninety hectares between the Landshut to Plattling railway, today’s Rottenburger Straße, the main road and today’s Landshuter Straße. The land was meadow. On 22 September 1936 the farmers concerned agreed to give up the ground for an annual rent of sixty Reichsmark per Tagwerk, and eighty-one leases were signed.

Levelling began the same year. The buildings, huts and ammunition bunkers were put up east of the road that is now Rottenburger Straße, the aircraft hangars stood along the Plattling railway, and a spur line was laid for fuel and ammunition. On the outbreak of war in 1939 the reserve airfield received a company-strength ground staff; from the end of 1940 it was an outstation of the flying school at Pilsen, with about forty trainee pilots and six or seven instructors, and in 1943 it passed to the double flying school at Straubing. Flying stopped near the end of the war for want of fuel, and several Ju 52 transports landed with refugees from Czechoslovakia and were left standing on the field.

After the war the owners got their fields back once the ground had been cleared and resurveyed. Of nine huts, an orchard and several gardens, only six huts were left by 1946. The district authority repaired those six, and UNRRA then used them. That is the whole physical extent of the camp as the local history describes it.

A camp within the village

The reused huts were part of a wider local relief operation. In spring 1946, UNRRA also requisitioned the parish barn and cattle stable to accommodate horses and for other purposes. This was a support facility; the account does not identify the parish barn as residents’ accommodation. The same local history notes that liberated French and Russian prisoners were free to travel home at once, while civilians deported from the eastern countries stayed longer or for good and were gathered into the UNRRA camps.

One morning in the camp was reported at length in the Ukrainian camp bulletin Novyny. On 4 June 1947 the residents of the Ukrainian camp at Ergolding were, in the paper’s words, not a little surprised and alarmed to find their camp ringed by the cars of American constables. Many remembered recent years — forced repatriations, transfers, searches. The constables behaved calmly and only checked, politely, the papers of those going in and out. The “siege” lasted from seven in the morning until midday, and it emerged afterwards that it had been a police exercise.

A Ukrainian church in the camp

The Landshut Orthodox parish history is the clearest evidence of religious life at Ergolding. It records that a further four hundred Russians lived outside the town at Ergolding and Altdorf, and that only some of them came to the church of St Nicholas in Landshut, because there were Ukrainian Autocephalous churches in the camps that were, in its words, easier to reach by public transport. From November 1945 the archpriest Arkadij Moiseev took over the care of the believers in the Ergolding and Altdorf camps, where his own parish had no premises of its own.

That single sentence establishes two things about Ergolding: that a Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox congregation had a church in the camp, and that Orthodox residents of more than one tradition lived there together. The figure of four hundred is a combined count of Russians at two places and is not a Ukrainian population for Ergolding.

The recorded community

Ihor Stebelsky’s published table records 337 Ukrainians at Ergolding in the UNRRA summary of 24 August 1946 and 102 in the summary of 31 May 1947. A separate set of questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947 lists 195. No figure is given for the PCIRO summary of January 1948, by which time the camp had closed. These snapshots describe a community that fell by roughly two thirds inside a year; the sources do not explain the departures or name a shared destination.

Closure and the surviving site

The end was announced in the camp bulletin Novyny on 16 September 1947, under the front-page heading “Liquidation of the camp at Ergolding”. On the orders of the Area Team at Regensburg the liquidation of the camp had begun. The Romani residents, whom the bulletin calls Gypsies, were directed to Hohenfels, seventy-three people in all; part of the Ukrainians were to be moved to Hanaker and the rest to the Regierungsgebäude camp in Landshut. The bulletin put the whole population of Ergolding at about 250 people.

The camp inventory places closure between 20 September and 17 October 1947 and gives no capacity figure, which leaves the camp’s intended size unrecorded. It also carries an archive reference to holdings and change reports for Ergolding under document identifiers 81977312 to 81977316, a short run that has not been read. The Ukrainian camps that remained around Landshut, at Lebühlstraße and the Regierungsgebäude, stayed open into 1949 and 1950, so residents leaving Ergolding had places to go within the same relief district; no source consulted names where any of them actually went.

Of the whole airfield installation only the main building on Rottenburger Straße still stands, together with bunker ruins between the gardens of Heimgartenstraße. The Technisches Hilfswerk, Germany’s civil-protection organisation, moved into the surviving main building in 1971 and occupies it today.