Gießen Ukrainian Workers’ Camp

The depot and the huts

The American depot was laid out after the war on the site of the Gießen civil airport of 1929, at the eastern edge of the town, and grew to cover about 200 hectares. It later became the central goods distribution centre for American forces in Europe. That is the installation whose work the camp existed to serve.

The camp itself was modest. Residents were housed in twenty English huts of the Nissen type and four wooden barracks. A metal hut held 28 people, mostly single men with a smaller number of women, while families lived in the wooden barracks. Those had 23 rooms each and were meant for about 40 people, but in practice held between 50 and 70. The first groups laid drainage, water and electricity within a few weeks and repaired some of the accommodation themselves.

Jobs promised, housing needed

The camp was organised by an officer of the Ukrainian central representation responsible for work placement, who had lived in the Lagarde barracks at Aschaffenburg until the end of December 1947. He formed a staff of five, appointed as the camp administration by the united Ukrainian American and Canadian committee at the IRO. By April 1948 the administration had eight departments and 217 people were living in the camp: about 130 were still building it and ten were already working in the depot.

The relief committee’s report of 30 June 1948 describes a scheme with the potential to employ more than a thousand Ukrainians. About 200 were then employed; the remaining 800 jobs depended on providing accommodation. The report records an ambition and a practical obstacle, rather than a completed thousand-person workforce, and its figures separate people already working from those whom the military authorities expected to employ once housing became available.

Later negotiations with the Americans committed the IRO to offering between 300 and 500 jobs at the depot, according to how many workers the Ukrainian representation could supply, together with better rations and a separate Ukrainian work group under its own leader. The camp catalogue records the unit only as a workers’ camp, opening on 13 May 1948 and closing on 30 June 1949, administrative dates that do not match the account drawn from the camp’s own correspondence.

Life around the depot

A memoir written by a member of the camp’s supply staff describes the work performed in 1949: loading, packing, driving, operating handling equipment and repairs. Only ten Ukrainians were employed at the depot in April 1948, none qualified as mechanics or drivers, so they were given unskilled work and were often distributed among German gangs. The administration hoped to recruit skilled workers from other Ukrainian camps in order to take over a section of the depot outright.

Conditions were unequal. Ukrainian workers received the ordinary daily ration of about 2,500 kilocalories, while Polish and Baltic displaced people and German employees also received a heavy-labour supplement bringing them to roughly 3,200. Some Ukrainians registered as Balts and moved to the Baltic camps at Hanau, Frankfurt or Marburg for better conditions. Pay ran between 77 and 86 pfennigs an hour, roughly 140 to 160 marks a month, with department heads, interpreters and stenographers on 200 to 220. Supplies came mainly from the IRO administration at Fulda, and fuel, warm bedding and warm clothing were tightly rationed.

Employment also determined the right to stay. Only depot workers and the staff of the administration, camp police and housekeeping could live in the camp, and anyone dismissed from their job had to leave with their family at short notice. Unmarried men, and men whose families remained in other camps, were preferred for transfer to Gießen. The camp director was appointed by the American military administration.

Culture and political discussion

Residents assembled a library and a workers’ club, bought radios and established a barber’s shop and a tailoring service. Concerts and theatre gave the camp a social life beyond depot shifts. The IRO refused to support a fortnightly travelling cinema on the ground that fewer than 200 people lived in the camp, and turned the request down even when the administration offered to pay double for the tickets.

Most of the workers belonged to the Orthodox or the Greek Catholic church, yet they were required to work on their own feast days while Catholic holidays were free. The supply officer’s memoir recalls a strong branch of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party, and makes a careful distinction: despite the camp’s political reputation, most residents and staff were not party members.

The memoirist’s own route continued from Germany to Australia in 1949 and later to the United States in 1954, which illustrates how leaving a camp could begin several stages of migration rather than one direct journey.

Work and the prospect of leaving

A later study places Gießen beside the Ukrainian workers’ camp at Hanau. Across the two, more than 600 Ukrainians obtained employment with American military installations. The combined figure belongs to both camps and cannot be assigned to Gießen alone.

Workers were offered priority in resettlement, and the camps existed in part to make the labour of mostly male Ukrainians useful enough to improve their chances under the IRO programme at a time when Canadian and Australian schemes preferred Baltic applicants. The workers’ camp was dissolved at the end of 1949: most residents emigrated overseas, while the sick, the disabled and the elderly were moved to camps in Bavaria. Both Ukrainian workers’ camps closed as overseas resettlement increased and American installations recruited more German workers.

A camp preserved in photographs

The photographs published with the research come from the family album of the camp’s cultural affairs officer. They show men repairing a curved hut roof, rows of metal and wooden buildings, and depot lorries with their Ukrainian drivers in 1948.

Keeping the Gießen camps apart

Gießen held more than one camp. The catalogue also records an Artillerie-Kaserne assembly centre in the town, opened on 1 February 1946 with a capacity of 780. Stebelsky’s Table 7 lists 500 Ukrainians at Gießen in the questionnaire survey collected during 1946 and 1947, with blanks in all three dated returns. That figure predates the workers’ camp and should not be attached to it.