Fallingbostel Camp

The heath before the camp

The Wehrmacht laid out the Bergen training area between Bergen and Fallingbostel in 1935 and 1936. Some 30,000 hectares were bought up and twenty-five parishes were dissolved. The district of Fallingbostel gave up 18,703 hectares, and ten of its villages — Wense, Untereinzingen, Obereinzingen, Hartem, Oberndorfmark, Oerbke, Böstlingen, Ettenbostel, Oberhode and Ostenholz — were cleared, their inhabitants resettled by 1 August 1938.

When war came in 1939 the workers’ camp at Fallingbostel was rebuilt as Stalag XI B, which grew into one of the largest prisoner-of-war camps in northern Germany. Stalag XI D (321) Oerbke, holding Soviet prisoners, stood in the same area from August 1941 until it was dissolved in June 1943; Stalag 357 Oerbke was established on its ground in 1944. Most of the prisoners registered to these camps in fact lived away from them, distributed among more than 1,100 working parties of thirty or forty men in the armaments industry at Hannover, Wolfsburg, Braunschweig and Salzgitter. British troops liberated the camps on the training area on 16 April 1945, the day after Bergen-Belsen. An American memoir of Stalag XI B puts 96,000 prisoners in the camp by mid-1944, and reports that more than 6,000 Soviet prisoners had died by mid-1942, mainly from typhus and under-nourishment, before Camp 321 was closed. These are a memoirist’s figures, not a camp register.

An American prisoner-of-war memoir describes the inside of Stalag XI B in its last weeks. Harold B. Farrar reached Fallingbostel about noon on 30 March 1945, after some 46 hours locked in a boxcar with sixty tired and sick prisoners, and was marched to the edge of town to what he calls a huge international prison camp housing thousands of captured soldiers, among them British, Canadian, Russian, Belgian, French, Dutch, Polish, Czech, New Zealand, Australian and Italian men and Americans taken in the Ardennes. His party marched out on 6 April, ten days before the British liberated the camp.

From repatriation to emigration centre

The British set up two distinct camps inside parts of the former troop camp. One was a collection camp, the Sammellager Fallingbostel, where Soviet displaced people waited to be sent home; they were moved east through the Soviet occupation zone before the end of 1945. Returning Soviet citizens were held first in filtration camps and screened by the security police, and those who failed the screening were often deported to Siberia — which is why so many people from the Soviet Union resisted repatriation. The other camp was the emigration camp, in which mainly Polish displaced people waited from the end of 1945 for permission to go abroad.

Once the Soviet transports had gone, the population at Fallingbostel and Oerbke consisted in the main of non-Jewish Poles and eastern European Jews, some 16,000 people in all. The Polish presence dominates the paperwork. Polish registration cards survive from July 1945, and by March 1946 more than 22,600 Polish displaced people were registered at Fallingbostel. Their cards recorded family composition, languages and accommodation alongside the standard UNRRA paperwork. These were records of presence and administration, not proof that every person eventually emigrated.

A British artillery regiment moved to Dushorn on 1 August 1945 to take over the policing of the camp area, and its published history puts the camp at 28,000 people of all nationalities, mostly Poles. It describes night patrols across the surrounding farmland, food taken from German farms and reprisals against Germans who had used forced labour. After a British soldier was shot at an outlying farm, 3,000 troops searched the camp room by room on 27 September 1945, looking for weapons and stolen goods, and repeated the search on 17 November. The account is a soldier’s view of the camp from outside its wire, not a description of life within it.

The administrative identifiers followed the same chronology. Fallingbostel held Assembly Centre number 2515 from August 1945 to May 1949 and DPACS number 9 from July 1947 to May 1949, with the compound numbering 9/68/72/107 in use between May 1948 and May 1949. Fallingbostel, Marx and Oldenburg were separate locations; a sequence of these names in a family’s papers can describe movements between camps.

Between the liberation and the opening of the displaced-persons administration, the site absorbed prisoners from Bergen-Belsen. A day-by-day chronology of the Belsen relief operation records 2,468 Soviet prisoners evacuated to Fallingbostel on 2 May 1945, a further 18 on 8 May and 501 on 22 May. Joanne Reilly gives a higher figure for the first of these movements, recording that on 2 May 4,000 Russians were taken from Camp II at Belsen to nearby Fallingbostel, where many of their compatriots were already housed. The two accounts do not agree on the number.

Fallingbostel also appears among the internee camps for captured soldiers. The Latvian State Historical Archives record 4,500 former Latvian soldiers in the internee camp at Fallingbostel immediately after the war, later at Westerburg; among the camps that source lists, only Putlos, with 9,735, held more.

The work of leaving

An International Refugee Organisation processing centre operated at Fallingbostel by May 1948. The Mennonite Central Committee maintained an office there, supporting a separate community within the wider refugee population. Its correspondence records contested eligibility decisions and the weight placed on interviews and accounts of wartime experience.

The camp’s own paperwork used the name to match the work. The Orthodox census of 1950 heads its lists with the Fallingbostel DP Resettlement Processing Center, the formal title of a place whose business by then was assembling people for departure.

The Ukrainian parish’s correspondence likewise includes emigrant lists and certificates. Alongside official selection procedures, families needed documentation of births and marriages. The church archive preserves affidavits as well as civil documents, showing how religious and administrative records became part of preparing to leave.

Civilian relief workers also passed through. A history of the Guide International Service names Fallingbostel among its postings and describes it as a staging camp, where its volunteers took over the welfare of one emigrant until he and his wife left for England.

Community life while waiting

A May 1948 photograph records a shared birthday celebration for 92 people, ranging from one to 75 years old. It offers a glimpse of social life during the wait for resettlement: children, adults and older relatives participating in a community occasion. The photograph comes from the Mennonite collection and does not identify a Ukrainian gathering.

Children also continued their education. A University of Manitoba archival biography documents primary schooling across Munster-Lager and Fallingbostel during 1946–1950, followed by a family’s move to Canada. It is one recorded educational route through these camps, not a count of all pupils.

The Ukrainian Orthodox congregation

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox parish at Fallingbostel was served by Fr Serhii Gerus, whose papers make up the surviving Ukrainian record of the camp. The same priest appears to have looked after the parish at Munster-Lager, a garrison town some forty kilometres away, which is why the two sets of records were kept and are held together.

The parish kept accounts for income, expenses, church publications and icons. Around 1950 it recorded the distribution of food supplied by the World Council of Churches. Religious life and practical relief were therefore closely connected.

On 14 July 1950 a census listed Orthodox residents by accommodation block, including their ages and nationalities, with each block leader signing the return. It describes the Orthodox population on that day; it is not a census of all Ukrainians or everyone in the camp.

The cemetery at Hartemer Weg

The people who died in the camp were buried apart from the prisoner-of-war dead, in the Displaced Persons cemetery at Hartemer Weg in Osterheide. The Polish war graves index lists seventy-six burials there. Seventy-one of them carry both a year of birth and a year of death, and forty-eight of those died before their first birthday. The recorded deaths run from 1946 to 1950 and are heavily concentrated in 1946.

The names in the index are mostly Polish, with Ukrainian and other eastern European names among them. It is the plainest surviving measure of what the first postwar winters cost the families in the camp.

Closing, and what survives

Fallingbostel’s church register records baptisms and marriages for 1948–1950. The volume also contains earlier certificates and shares entries with Munster-Lager, a different camp about 40 kilometres away. Its earliest enclosed papers date from 1943; those papers do not establish that Fallingbostel’s postwar DP camp existed then.

Most of the remaining residents had either gone home or emigrated, above all to the United States, and on the account of the Lower Saxony State Archives the displaced-persons camp was finally closed in the middle of 1950. The Arolsen Archives’ guide to the Polish registration cards is more cautious, allowing that the camp may have continued into the middle of the decade. The latest securely dated material in the Ukrainian records is the census of July 1950.

The barracks at Oerbke did not disappear with the camp. The British Army kept the site as Camp Fallingbostel, and the Bergen training area beside it is still in military use.