Ganghofersiedlung

The Göringheim before 1945

The estate was built for the Messerschmitt aircraft works, at its height Regensburg’s largest employer with up to 14,000 staff. Helmut Halter’s study of the city under National Socialism records that the first phase was built in a few months by 80 firms, 75 of them from Regensburg, that the last flats were occupied in September 1938, and that tenants were exclusively works employees. The name Göringheim was proposed by an SA brigade leader and approved by Göring; 16 of the 24 streets were named after dead SA men, the main axis is today’s Theodor-Storm-Straße, and the estate school was named after Horst Wessel. A second phase finished with 242 flats holding 3,182 people in late summer 1941, and by March 1942 the estate was described as extended to about 840 dwelling units. Barracks for forced labourers, most of them from Ukraine and other Soviet republics, stood nearer the works and were a separate installation.

Requisition, administration and scale

After the war the United Nations refugee organisation requisitioned the whole Göringheim, by then renamed Ganghofer-Siedlung. Halter records that its inhabitants had to leave in the autumn of 1945 and that Germans, the authorities included, were afterwards refused access. Robert Werner dates the American military government’s order to create a new foreigners’ quarter to October 1945; the editorial annex to the Sadée letters dates the full evacuation to 20 October 1945 on the order of the American general Lucian Truscott, and says the 925 vacated flats were allocated to about 6,000 displaced people from Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, the Basque country and the concentration camps.

The Arolsen Archives inventory records the assembly centre as AC 93-259, later NBO 407, under UNRRA Team 120, open from 24 January 1946 to 30 September 1949, with a capacity of 6,000 on 31 October 1947 and Polish, Ukrainian, stateless, Russian, Lithuanian and Latvian residents. That opening date belongs to the UNRRA centre; people were living in the requisitioned houses from the previous autumn. Sebta’s study of the Kurinnyi archive, citing Ukrainian sources, records 4,723 residents in October 1945 and approximately 4,560 in December 1947. Werner puts between 4,000 and 6,000 displaced people in about 880 houses in the by then fenced settlement, with an entrance gate on Theodor-Storm-Straße, and traces how the composition changed: most residents recorded as Russian were sent home, in part by force, during 1945, and about 1,200 Polish nationals followed by the end of 1946, after which Ukrainians became the largest group. Stebelsky’s published returns list Regensburg only as a city total and cannot be attributed to this camp alone.

The paper names the UNRRA officers who ran the settlement in 1946. Berent F. Landstreet had worked as director of UNRRA Team 120 from 4 December 1945, “almost from the very beginning of the existence of the DP settlement on the Ganghofersiedlung”, and the issue of 21 July 1946 reported his return home to Philadelphia after seven months in the post. His successor, C. E. Wheeler, addressed residents on the front page of 28 July 1946: «Наша мета — зробити цей табір найліпшим у цілій Німеччині» — our aim is to make this camp the best in all Germany — and said that once the settlement had been brought into proper shape a competition would be announced for a new name for it.

Oselia: a Ukrainian community

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine sets out the institutions the residents built. The camp’s governing bodies were elected and political blocs competed in camp elections; the administration was headed first by V. Zaiats, then by Ahenor Artymovych in 1946, Yakiv Serbyn from 1946 to 1948 and P. Balei from 1948. A Ukrainian Catholic parish was led by Rev O. Sharanevych and later Ye. Haidukevych, and a Ukrainian Orthodox parish by Rev V. Shevchuk. The school system ran from kindergarten through elementary and secondary schools to vocational courses in home economics, radio mechanics, driving and photography, and to the Ukrainian Technical and Husbandry Institute.

Youth and cultural life was equally organised: the Plast and SUM youth associations, the Sich sports club, a church choir conducted by I. Kurylenko, a drama group and orchestra led by I. Povaliachek, a music school, and from 1947 to 1949 the Ensemble of Ukrainian Actors directed by Volodymyr Blavatsky. There were medical and social services, camp workshops for tailoring, barbering, toys, leather, jewellery and ceramics, and the Ukrainske Mystetstvo co-operative. Several periodicals appeared: the weekly Slovo in 1945–46 under Spyrydon Dovhal, Ukrainske slovo in 1946–47 under Yuliian Tarnovych, Visnyk oseli from 1947 under I. Durbak, and a Weekly Information Bulletin in 1946. The Boshyk and Balan bibliography lists these Regensburg imprints with somewhat different runs, giving Slovo as a weekly from December 1945 to 1948 and Ukrainske slovo as a weekly from June to August 1946, and lists many further titles printed in the city, including manuals from the Technical and Husbandry Institute, without attributing every one of them to the camp.

Ukrainske slovo was edited inside the settlement. Its imprint, printed at the foot of the paper through the run, gave the editorial address as «Адреса Редакції: „Ukrajinske Slowo“, Regensburg, Ganghofersiedlung UNRRA, Team 120. Permited by UNRRA, Team 120, Regensburg», and named the Mittelbayerische Zeitung of Regensburg as typesetter and printer. A historical sketch in the issue of 18 August 1946 records that at the end of October 1945 the UNRRA directorate formed a Ukrainian section at the Ganghofer settlement, and that most of the city’s Ukrainian displaced people, until then living scattered across Regensburg, moved there. The same sketch explains that a parish was then needed on the settlement, because many of the faithful, mainly older people and women with children, could not reach the church of St Giles some two to three kilometres away.

The paper also records a court and two parishes on the settlement. In July 1946 it reported that the American authorities had recently approved a temporary statute for a DP court organised by the national groups housed in the settlement: the statute had seventeen articles, the tribunal consisted of one professional sworn judge and two elected lay judges, and the American military court was the court of appeal. A notice in August 1946 reminded residents that the court chancellery took cases and gave information on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings in the building of the Polish settlement administration, on the second floor. The paper printed weekly service schedules for the Greek-Catholic pastoral ministry of Regensburg II (Oselya) and for the parish of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in Regensburg, whose chapel stood by the settlement.

Schools, work and the camp economy

In her letter of 1 May 1946 the Dutch UNRRA worker Wil Sadée described Team 120, fifteen people, caring for approximately 5,000 residents who included Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, Basques and Romanians, living about three families to a house, each nationality keeping its own school alongside recreation, scouts, a newspaper, religion and sport. Her work that week was at the railway station, where around 1,200 Polish arrivals from another camp had to be moved from goods wagons. By 15 May she had taken over education, supervising kindergarten, elementary school, gymnasium, trade school and sewing school, meeting the school directors every Thursday and helping Ukrainian groups who wanted to found a girls’ secondary school. Medical staff comprised one American doctor, two New Zealand nurses and about thirteen displaced-person doctors, with serious cases sent to the city hospital.

The annex to her letters describes the camp economy. UNRRA paid every resident a standard ration of 21 cigarettes a week and working residents could earn up to 100, while camp money was issued for a camp shop. Twelve workshops operated on the UNRRA site, among them a cobbler’s shop repairing some 250 pairs of shoes a week, and UNRRA employed 105 of its own police. The camp administration issued its own postage stamps to pay for camp infrastructure. On 21 May 1946 the whole settlement showed its national skills to invited Allied personnel with sport, folk dance, singing, scouts and exhibitions, and a straw poll on repatriation that month asked every resident to write whether they wished to return: most did not.

Health provision appears in the paper’s official notices. The UNRRA Team 120 health department at the Ganghofersiedlung called all foreigners registered with UNRRA who lived privately in Regensburg and the surrounding district to report for lung X-ray photography on Monday 12 August 1946, or at the latest on Tuesday 13 August; a further notice placed the examinations in the gymnasium hall at the Ganghofersiedlung. In September the department announced that displaced people X-rayed by the Swiss Red Cross could collect their cards at the hospital building on the settlement, “where milk is issued”. The schools are datable from the same columns: the first matura of the Ukrainian eighth-grade humanities gymnasium on the settlement was completed on 20 March 1946 under the gymnasium’s director, V. Velychka; the administration of the Ukrainian national school at Regensburg-Oselya announced that normal classes would begin on Tuesday 20 August 1946; and the school board published a twenty-eight-page report for the 1945–46 school year.

The Ukrainian Technical and Husbandry Institute gave its address in the paper as Ukrainisches Institut Regensburg, Ganghofer Siedlung, Paul-Heyse-Strasse 2, and was still enrolling new students in October 1946. The bandura choir named after Taras Shevchenko, under Mr Bozhyk, gave concerts in the gymnasium hall of the settlement on 26 and 27 October 1946, and a scout campfire brought together scouts of all the nationalities living in the settlement. In November 1946 the settlement advertised itself to displaced people elsewhere — «УКРАЇНСЬКА ОСЕЛЯ В РЕҐЕНСБУРЗІ ЩИРО ВІТАЄ В СЕБЕ ПЕРЕСЕЛЕНЦІВ З ІНШИХ ТАБОРІВ!», the Ukrainian settlement in Regensburg warmly welcomes resettlers from other camps — and the paper ran literary competitions for prose and for children’s writing, with entries to be sent to its Ganghofersiedlung address by 15 December 1946.

Preserved on film and in photographs

The settlement’s life survives on film in Striving for Dignity. Producer Bohdan Z. Malaniak wrote in 1995 that Ukrainian and English versions had been made and that he donated both to The Ukrainian Museum in New York in 1984; the university’s 2015 annual report recorded Walter Koschmal’s rediscovery of the documentary in a New York archive and screenings in Regensburg and Munich. A 2025 study published in Kyiv identifies postwar negatives from Regensburg–Oselia, also named Ganghofersiedlung, within the photographic holdings of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, and reproduces selected images in a chapter on 1945–1949.

The full text of that study reports that six of the negatives in the collection were taken in the Regensburg–Oselia camp, while for 174 negatives the place of photography could not be determined. Three of them show school classes of the 1946/47 school year, each photographed with a placard reading «Українська народна школа. І А [І Б/ІІ Б] кляса. Реґенсбурґ—Оселя. Навчальний рік 1946/47» — Ukrainian folk school, class I A, I B or II B, Regensburg–Oselia, school year 1946/47.

The study’s captions name the camp’s elementary school as the Ukrainian folk school named after Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytskyi, and identify in a class photograph of 1946 the teacher Mariia Holub, the catechist Father Panteleimon Shpylka and the school director Yurii Teodorovych; a photograph dated 1946 to 1949 shows the camp’s toy workshop with its manager Stefania Nahirna. Two of the reproduced images are of printed notices: the school’s announcement of Shevchenko commemoration days for Sunday 23 March 1947, and an announcement by the Committee of Stateless Ukrainians in Regensburg of a commemorative event on 16 and 17 March 1946.

A neighbourhood of shared homes

Historical photographs show rows of pitched-roof houses with small gardens and wooden balconies, the setting in which families shared houses while nationality groups maintained separate schools.

A Ukrainian commemorative monument also stood in the settlement, between Franz-von-Kobell-Straße and Wilhelm-Raabe-Straße, its cross and trident visible in a photograph reproduced from Völkl’s 1992 study. Werner’s account describes members of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army becoming dominant in the settlement, with followers of Stepan Bandera in leading positions, and states that the monument was probably removed around 1958. These are claims made in a work of contemporary journalism, and they describe organised groups rather than every resident.

Dissolution and afterwards

The camp was dissolved in September 1949. Werner reports that the displaced people still there, mostly Ukrainians, were moved to camps at Ulm, Ingolstadt and Amberg, a good 3,000 of them according to surviving name lists, while others had already emigrated to the United States, Canada and Australia, and some to Belgium. The Sadée annex dates the return of the settlement to the German population to October 1949, and Halter records that the Free State of Bavaria later handed it back to the Heimbau housing company with its fabric unchanged. A file of IRO documents on the Ganghofersiedlung camp for 1949 survives in the Archives Nationales in Paris; neither it nor the transfer lists have been consulted here.

The camp’s local stamps outlived it. The Collectors Club of Chicago’s Philatelic Encyclopedia records an overprint, “1-Ulm / D. 1”, found on Ganghofersiedlung local stamps and issued, it says, by Ukrainian nationals in 1950 for the Sedankaserne displaced persons camp at Ulm, one of the places to which residents of the settlement had been transferred. The entry cites John Bulat’s Comprehensive Catalogue of Ukrainian Philately of 2003, which has not been consulted here.