Ganacker

The airfield before 1945

In August 1936 nineteen farmers were told by an officer of the Munich air district that their land was needed for an airfield, and had no way of refusing the leases. Work on levelling a runway and putting up buildings began that autumn on an area of three hundred and fifty hectares. Flying school 112 began training pilots immediately, and the station held the status of an emergency airfield of the second and, from 1939, the first category. Fighter squadrons arrived from the spring of 1944.

From January 1945 Ganacker was part of Project Silber: the first Messerschmitt Me 262 jets were stationed there and a concrete runway was begun. That work was done by concentration camp prisoners. A subcamp of Flossenbürg existed from 20 or 21 February to 24 April 1945, holding about five hundred men, most of them Jewish, first at the airfield and later at Erlau near Wallersdorf; at least 138 of them died between 2 March and 23 April 1945. The subcamp and the relief camp that followed shared a location and nothing else, and the two must not be described in each other’s terms.

The Flossenbürg memorial’s account of the subcamp sets out who was held there: about five hundred mainly Jewish prisoners from Poland, Hungary, France and Greece, together with Russian, Polish, French, Belgian, Czech and German prisoners, and prisoners from seventeen nations in all.

The Bundesarchiv finding aid for Luftgaukommando VII preserves two further traces of the wartime station. A file of June 1936 to November 1938 on the fixing of workers’ wages and wage scales names Ganacker among the duty stations concerned, and a weather-service volume enumerates the stations Landsberg/Lech, Lechfeld, Kaufbeuren and Landau-Ganacker for the years 1937 to 1943. Neither entry says anything about the postwar camp.

From airfield to refuge

An American bombing raid in April 1945 left damage heavy enough to end all flying, and units of the 71st US Infantry Division took the station on 29 April. In May the Americans established an UNRRA camp in the former airbase to accommodate people uprooted by the war. A surviving aerial image shows the large compound and surrounding fields shortly before that change of use.

Wartime forced labour, the postwar DP camp and later accommodation for German expellees were distinct institutions.

An UNRRA hospital operated at Ganacker. The papers of a Polish nurse, Wanda Zofia Ciecierska, described by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, include certificates documenting her nursing work for the UNRRA hospital in Ganacker, and the same description records that she married at the Ganacker displaced persons camp on 12 August 1946. The description gives no date for the hospital’s opening and no measure of its size.

A camp within a relief network

Ganacker was recorded as Assembly Centre 93-262. The administrative network included UNRRA Team 542 at Dingolfing, then Area Team 1046 at Regensburg from November 1946, and Area 4 at Amberg. From September 1948 the inventory gives the identifier NBO 426. These changing references help connect records created by different offices.

The inventory gives 8 January 1946 as its opening entry, later than the May 1945 establishment described in local historical research. It lists a capacity of 900 on 31 October 1947. This was the accommodation figure recorded for the camp, rather than a count of Ukrainians or a dated census of everyone living there. Its archive reference points to holdings and change reports under document identifiers 81984854 to 81984889, which have not been read.

How many Ukrainians

Ihor Stebelsky’s published table, which lists the place as Ganacher, records 707 Ukrainians in the questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947, 553 in the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947 and 736 in the PCIRO summary of 2 January 1948. These are counts of Ukrainians only, and each is smaller than the recorded capacity of 900, which is consistent with the inventory’s description of a camp of several nationalities. The rise between May 1947 and January 1948 suggests arrivals from elsewhere, but no source consulted says where from.

Moving between camps

Belarusian displaced people from Ganacker were among those who helped form the community at Osterhofen. Around 400 Belarusians gathered there from several places, including Dingolfing and Passau. A separate Belarusian camp developed in autumn 1946 and opened its educational institutions in February 1947. The number 400 describes that receiving community, not departures from Ganacker alone.

The end of the DP phase

The inventory records 30 June 1949 as the end of Ganacker’s DP camp. Local historical research dates its conversion to accommodation for German expellees from the former German territories in the east to 1949. That later camp continued until October 1962, when it was cleared and largely demolished. Almost every building of the former airfield has since been removed; only a few of the former officers’ mess buildings beside the road towards Haidenkofen survive in workshop use.