Rheinland-Kaserne

The barracks and the town

The barracks were begun in the summer of 1912 as a Royal Prussian non-commissioned officers’ school, the school having outgrown Ettlingen’s castle. The outbreak of war in 1914 stopped that use; from 1914 to 1920 the buildings served as a reserve military hospital, and under the Weimar Republic, when Ettlingen lay in the demilitarised zone, they were used for civilian purposes. Military use resumed from 1936, and until the end of the Second World War the compound housed an army NCO school of the 5th Infantry Regiment.

The compound stands at the northern edge of the town between Karlsruher Straße and Durlacher Straße. Ettlingen was a separate camp community from Karlsruhe, whose similarly named barracks appear on a different line in contemporary population statistics; the camp inventory records the Ettlingen building itself as ‘DP-Camp / Rheinländer-Kaserne’, so the two are easily confused.

By May 1945 approximately 2,400 displaced people were housed here while awaiting repatriation. Contemporary German records commonly labelled this population Polish; municipal historical research notes that the category included a considerable Ukrainian presence.

Which army governed them changed in the first months. French troops took Ettlingen on 5 April 1945 and handed the town to the Americans at the end of June. The new boundary between the American and French zones ran at Neu-Malsch and Bietigheim a few kilometres to the west and was closely guarded, so that the camp’s residents could scarcely visit the displaced-persons camp at Rastatt, only a short distance away in the French zone.

Finding enough clean water was an immediate problem. The municipal waterworks history places 2,000 displaced people in the barracks alongside a town population that had risen to roughly 20,000. Refugees, occupation personnel and renewed industrial demand put exceptional pressure on an already inadequate supply system.

How the camp was run

The camp inventory compiled from International Tracing Service records gives Ettlingen an opening date of 24 January 1946 and a capacity of 2,000 on 31 October 1947. It was assembly centre AC 690, renumbered BN 202 from September 1948, and its nationalities are listed as Polish, Baltic and various. Administration ran through UNRRA Team 94 under a director named Ettinger, with area teams at Mannheim and Darmstadt, in Area 2 at Ludwigsburg and later Nellingen, under a field supervisor named Nordby.

That structure is visible in the camp’s own paperwork. The report on the closure of the centre in October 1950 was written by an International Refugee Organization field welfare officer and addressed to the Area Welfare Officer, Area 2, Nellingen — the same area office the inventory names.

The surviving records are listed with the entry: a run of population and change returns for Ettlingen held by the International Tracing Service, and three files in the Stadtarchiv Ettlingen covering the foreigners’ camp of 1945 to 1948, the transfer of the displaced-persons camp into German administration, and miscellaneous single documents.

The camp’s own post

For a year the camp ran a postal service of its own. On 15 March 1946 the leader of the Polish camp received permission from Mr Ettinger, the director of UNRRA Team 94, to issue stamps for the camp’s needs. The first issue appeared on 20 March 1946 in four values, printed by the firm Prägedruck in Karlsruhe on white ungummed paper in sheets of twelve. It sold out within three months, and a second issue in four further values followed on 20 July 1946.

The stamps were used on letters inside the camp and above all to the neighbouring camps at Pforzheim and Knittlingen, carried about once a month by UNRRA’s own vehicle. The German post office would not accept them: letters franked with camp stamps alone were returned to the camp administration without comment, and where a letter carried both German and camp stamps the postal clerks cancelled the German ones with care and left the camp stamp untouched.

The second issue was sold out by the time the camp was wound up. The philatelic account records that some members of the Polish camp committee left on one of the last UNRRA transports in March 1947 and emigrated to Brazil, Argentina, Canada and the United States.

Water, health and everyday life

A 1946 public-health assessment found that Ettlingen could supply only a little more than half the water needed per person each day. Bacterial contamination made the situation more serious. During the hot, dry summer of 1947, water wagons supplied higher parts of the town; by the end of the year residents had been ordered to boil tap water before drinking it.

These were town-wide conditions surrounding the camp, rather than a record of a specific outbreak inside it. They help explain why accommodation in a substantial barracks did not by itself guarantee comfortable living. Work on a new groundwater supply formed part of the wider postwar rebuilding of Ettlingen.

Schools and community

Ettlingen was one of the Ukrainian centres in Württemberg-Baden with a broad network of organisations, including a high school. Its importance therefore extended beyond beds and relief distribution: young people could continue interrupted education within an organised Ukrainian community.

Religious affiliation crossed national boundaries. A study of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, drawing on correspondence from late 1949 or early 1950, reports that Belarusians made up as much as 60 per cent of the Ettlingen Ukrainian Orthodox parish in 1949. A parish membership figure is consequently different from a count of Ukrainian camp residents.

Population in the records

The surviving statistical series records 2,147 Ukrainians in the 1946–47 questionnaire material and 1,694 in May 1947. These are dated community counts, not the number of people who passed through the camp over its lifetime. The encyclopedia’s rounded figure of 2,150 belongs to the earlier period.

Leaving the camp

On 1 July 1950 the guarded IRO camp became accommodation under German administration. A four-page report dated 16 October, preserved by Museums Victoria in the papers of the Australian welfare officer Esma Banner, is headed ‘Transfer of Inhabitants from the Ettlingen, Residual Center to private billets in the German Economy’, and the museum describes it as covering the transfer of 300 displaced people. It documents the practical transition from collective accommodation to living among the wider population.

By 31 October the local newspaper reported that the last Ukrainians had left for housing in North Baden. It also described difficulties caused by inadequate preparation and prejudice in receiving communities. The vacated barracks were again guarded and under occupation authority. This was settlement within Germany, distinct from migration to an overseas reception camp.

The inventory’s own closing entry is looser than the newspaper’s: it places the end of the camp somewhere between 30 September 1949 and 30 September 1950. The dated report and the dated newspaper item fix it within that interval.

The site afterwards

American soldiers occupied the compound from 1950, using it for the 77th US Engineer Battalion and a signals unit, until they left in 1995. In 1997 the site was divided: the town of Ettlingen bought the larger part from the federal property administration, while the federal government kept the area of the former research institute.

The buildings are still in use. The former barracks now accommodate the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation, the Heisenberg-Gymnasium, doctors and therapists, a pharmacy, a restaurant and a cinema bistro; the old officers’ mess became a clubhouse for Ettlingen’s choral societies, and part of the staff building became a school.