Gersdorff-Kaserne

The compound on Schiersteiner Straße

The first barrack buildings were completed in spring 1897. Further construction created a larger military complex with accommodation blocks, parade grounds and a garrison hospital. Before the Second World War, the area had also passed through French and British occupation and a period of civilian use.

Wiesbaden’s municipal lexicon dates the move of the von Gersdorff regiment into the new barracks to April 1897, with further building in 1907 to 1909 and 1909 to 1912, and further military hospital buildings alongside the accommodation.

The wider complex contained sections known as Ochamps, Oranien and Gersdorff. This history explains why different names appear in descriptions of the same neighbourhood, but it does not make every Wiesbaden barracks a part of Camp 563. The Von-der-Goltz compound in Kastel was elsewhere.

Camp 563 in the administrative record

The Arolsen Archives camp inventory records the facility as Gersdorf-Kaserne at Wiesbaden, assembly centre AC 563, with Polish, Baltic and Ukrainian residents, served by UNRRA Team 28 Wiesbaden under a team director named Bayer and a field supervisor named Westerman, with an area team in place from November 1946. Its closing is given as an interval between 19 October and 20 December 1946. No capacity is recorded.

The inventory’s opening field reads 24 January 1946, but the same date recurs in the opening and team-director fields of many unrelated entries in that spreadsheet, so it behaves like a reporting date rather than a verified start. A compiled history of the American installation instead dates the displaced-persons camp on Schiersteiner Straße from April 1945, which fits both the municipal account and the police records of April to November 1945 discussed below.

Filmed at the gate

The clearest surviving picture of the camp is a United States Army Air Forces film held by the National Archives under the title Polish D.P. Raids. Its cameramen followed American military police into the compound and recorded the entrance board reading D.P. CAMP 563 with a hanging sign for the UNRRA office, the camp gate with its sentry box, buildings marked Gersdorff Kaserne, and the barrack blocks with firewood stacked along their fronts.

The same film records the camp’s own institutions in its signage: an office of the Polish camp administration in Wiesbaden, a Polish police post and a DP police bureau, alongside the UNRRA office and an American Red Cross field director’s room. It also records what the title means in practice, with military police searching rooms, pulling suitcases from the tops of cupboards and going through luggage, including a room where a bedridden man and a child in a cot were searched. The footage is a policing record, made by the policing authority, and it shows self-administration and suspicion side by side.

Refuge after forced labour

The Volksbund’s research describes displaced people being housed mainly in Gersdorff-Kaserne, with accommodation organised by nationality. Its archival case study establishes a Lithuanian family’s registration in the camp by January 1946. The inventory additionally identifies Polish and Ukrainian residents and links the institution to UNRRA Team 28.

Providing shelter did not immediately restore health or security. A historical study of Wiesbaden describes severe difficulties in feeding, clothing and providing medical care for the displaced people assembled in the barracks. Former forced labourers had arrived after years of coercion, poor living conditions and deprivation.

That study puts the numbers gathered in the barracks at more than 7,000 and at times as many as 11,000 destitute people, drawn overwhelmingly from eastern European countries. This is a description of the compound at its fullest rather than a dated census, and it should not be read as a headcount for any one day or as a count of any one nationality.

The same study examines hostility outside the camp. Police records extensively catalogued alleged offences by foreigners, while overlooking how Nazi persecution, hunger and the collapse of ordinary supply had shaped the situation. These records require historical context: allegations and discriminatory labels cannot stand in for a balanced description of the people living at Gersdorff.

From Camp 563 to Lindsey

The transition back to military use was not described with a single consistent end date. The camp inventory places its administrative closure in late 1946, while Wiesbaden’s municipal history gives 1945–1947 for the compound’s collection-camp phase. The police site history describes renovation after refugees left in 1946. These accounts suggest that the wider site and the particular administrative camp record should be read separately.

A compiled installation history gives the sharpest date for the American takeover: the camp is described as operating under United Nations direction, and supporting the American Red Cross in Germany, from April 1945 through November 1946, with the designation Camp Lindsey applied on 13 November 1946. That falls inside the inventory’s closing interval of 19 October to 20 December 1946.

The compound subsequently became Lindsey Air Station. American military use continued into the early 1990s, after which the site was redeveloped as the Europaviertel. Surviving historical photographs show the substantial buildings that framed the camp years, although the views reproduced from the police album predate the displaced-persons community.