Forstner-Kaserne

The barracks in the Hardtwald

The military complex was built in the middle of the woodland at the Kanalweg between 1936 and 1938, as part of German rearmament, and was occupied in April 1938. It stood on the former Forstner-Straße, now Kanalweg. A surviving postcard shows the accommodation blocks shortly before the war. These buildings became the physical setting for the postwar camp.

The name belonged to a soldier of the previous generation: General der Infanterie Freiherr Ernst von Forstner, who lived from 1869 to 1950 and had commanded the 1st Baden Infantry Regiment. The compound appears in the records as General-Forstner-Kaserne and as Freiherr-von-Forstner-Kaserne, and the inventory of camps enters it simply as Forstner-Kaserne.

A centre for displaced people

After liberation, the Allies repurposed the barracks as a collection and repatriation centre. The site history published by the cooperative that now occupies the buildings identifies former forced labourers and prisoners of war among the people accommodated, and the district association’s account describes them as forced labourers deported during the war, mainly from Poland and the Soviet Union.

The administrative inventory records the site as Forstner-Kaserne / Staging-Center, opened on 24 January 1946 under UNRRA Team 519 at Karlsruhe, with assembly-centre numbers AC 619 and AC 691, later BN 203. Its recorded population categories were Polish, Lithuanian, Yugoslav, Latvian, Estonian and Ukrainian, in that order.

The same row places the staging centre in the wider relief structure. Its team director was named Ward; its area teams were at Mannheim, Ettlingen and Darmstadt, and it belonged to Area 2 at Ludwigsburg under a field supervisor named Nordby. The Ettlingen camp on the edge of the city, a much larger Ukrainian community, sat under the same area teams and the same field supervisor, so the two were administered from the same desks.

The records that survive from the camp are the monthly population and change returns filed for Karlsruhe with the International Tracing Service, catalogued as Dok-ID 81996521 to 81996853.

The recorded population

Karlsruhe’s municipal history reports that as many as 1,700 people were housed here at times, and the district association gives the same figure. The inventory gives a capacity of 1,400 on 31 October 1947. The figures describe different records and dates; neither is a Ukrainian-only headcount.

For Ukrainians specifically there is one camp-level figure. Stebelsky’s published table lists Karlsruhe (Staging Centre) with no entry in the earlier returns and 123 people in the return compiled for December 1947. The same table lists Karlsruhe (Rheinlander K.) separately, with 1,300 in the questionnaire returns of 1946 and 1947, 1,344 in May 1947 and 1,633 in December 1947, and Ettlingen on a third line. A staging centre is a place people pass through, and a single late figure is what such a place tends to leave behind.

After the displaced-persons camp

The inventory places closure between 30 September 1949 and 30 September 1950. The local accounts of the American takeover do not agree: the district association says the US Army moved in during 1947 and renamed the site Smiley Barracks, while the cooperative’s history dates that to about 1950. The municipal Stadtlexikon offers a third reading, ‘the end of the 1940s’, which sits closer to the inventory’s closing interval. Since the staging centre still had residents in December 1947, either the two uses overlapped or the earliest of the three datings is wrong.

American authority over the city itself began earlier and lasted longer. The Americans formally assumed occupation authority in Karlsruhe on 8 July 1945, and the former Forstner barracks, by then Smiley Barracks, became the seat of the US District Command Karlsruhe. At its height the American presence in the city numbered about 14,000 soldiers and family members, and from 1954 the Paul Revere Village housing estate was built nearby.

Homes and community buildings

The formal American departure came on 19 April 1995. The site then took on another civilian role: the MiKa cooperative, founded in 1997, converted former barracks into homes, and the wider redevelopment included health and social services, a kindergarten and community meeting spaces. The former military complex also became home to the American Library and the Mikado cultural centre.