Hallendorf Camp 25

The barracks before 1945

The camp buildings were not built for refugees. Lager 25 stood north of Hallendorf on both sides of the Bleckenstedter Strasse and began, before 1939, as a camp of the Reich Labour Service. In 1939 it passed to the ironworks of the Hermann Goering combine and became a workers’ camp, one of dozens laid out between 1938 and 1945 to house the labour that built the works and the surrounding company town.

Lager 25 had lettered sub-camps. Two of them, 25A and 25C, were wartime labour camps that also held forced labourers, and both were used for displaced persons after 1945; 25B was a police camp. The compiled list of the area’s camps records that Lager 25C is occasionally confused with Lager 21 in published accounts.

A camp with a precise address

A notice printed in the Ukrainian newspaper Luna on 9 August 1946 gives an unusually direct link between the community and its location: applications for teaching posts were to be sent to the secondary school at Hallendorf, Lager 25, via Braunschweig. The number distinguishes this postwar Ukrainian camp from other facilities around Hallendorf.

One of those other sites was Lager 21, the Gestapo’s wartime labour-education camp near the Hallendorf to Bleckenstedt road. The memorial history of that institution belongs to a different numbered camp. The shared place name does not make the Ukrainian school a continuation of Lager 21.

Keeping education alive

The 1946 advertisement sought teachers of Ukrainian language and literature, history and English. It describes a Ukrainian realna himnaziia: a secondary school with an academically oriented curriculum. The request shows both the subjects the school wanted to sustain and its need to recruit qualified staff across the displaced Ukrainian community.

A later church biography independently records a religion-teaching appointment at Hallendorf’s secondary school in 1946. Together, the contemporary advertisement and the biographical record place both general education and religious instruction inside the camp’s daily life.

The same relief report that lists Hallendorf among the main camps counted, for the British zone as a whole, 33 grade schools with 1,869 pupils, 13 vocational schools, 25 kindergartens and eight colleges. Those are zone totals and cannot be divided between camps, but they show the network of schooling to which the Hallendorf secondary school belonged.

Churches, scouts and neighbouring communities

A Belarusian organiser’s recollections, examined in a 2022 University of Warsaw study, describe Camp 25’s churches, theatre, schools and scouts. Some Belarusians were living among the Ukrainians. When a separate Belarusian camp was established at nearby Watenstedt in July 1945, its first settlers included people who had left Ukrainian Camp 25.

This was a local transfer between neighbouring displaced-persons communities, rather than emigration from Germany. Watenstedt subsequently developed its own institutions; their history should be kept distinct from the institutions described at Hallendorf.

Political commemoration also had a place in camp life. Antons’s study of Ukrainian displaced persons in the British zone cites a June 1949 report in the camp newspaper Ukrainske slovo of ceremonies for Symon Petliura and Yevhen Konovalets held at Hallendorf and at Braunschweig. The detailed programme Antons describes, with morning services, requiems at symbolic graves and youth parades, is documented for Braunschweig rather than for Hallendorf.

A correspondent’s report in Luna on 9 August 1946 describes the camp under the heading Hallendorf. In the middle of the camp stood an autocephalous Orthodox church in the Ukrainian style, built from barrack material and carrying a single dome. A little further on was a theatre in which a drama studio worked actively, its amateurs, in the correspondent’s words, winning wide attention and general praise.

The camp theatre also performed away from home. A review in Luna on 8 September 1946 records four guest performances given in the Heidenau camp by the Hallendorf camp theatre under its artistic director, the artist M. Tahaiev, opening with Kvitka-Osnovianenko’s Svatannia na Honcharivtsi. The review reports Hrinchenko’s Stepovyi Hist as already in the theatre’s repertoire, with work under way on Tobilevych’s Suieta and on F. Meleshko’s drama Trioma Shliakhamy.

Hallendorf also fielded its own sports society. A fixture list printed in Luna on 7 July 1946 enters UST Kalyna of Hallendorf in the first round against UST Dovbush of Braunschweig on 30 June 1946, and against UST Dnipro of Hannover on 7 July.

The memory of a relief parcel

A photograph published in 1996 shows children receiving CARE supplies at Hallendorf. In the accompanying recollection, a former child resident remembered receiving a first parcel on Ukrainian Palm Sunday, aged seven. Decades later, that experience helped motivate relief work for children in Ukraine.

The photograph preserves a personal view of postwar relief: children gathered with supplies, rather than an administrative inventory. Its original caption identifies Hallendorf, but gives neither a year nor a numbered camp section.

The recorded population

Two independent compilations give figures. The historical series assembled by Ihor Stebelsky records 1,420 Ukrainians under Hallendorf for the questionnaire returns of 1946 and 1947, and leaves the later columns blank, which means no return was filed for that camp at those dates rather than that nobody was left. The relief committee’s own district table records 1,646 Ukrainians at Hallendorf on 30 June 1948, all of them living in camps.

Both are figures for the Hallendorf reporting entry. Neither divides the total between Lager 25 and its lettered sub-camps. Stebelsky lists Salzgitter separately, with 409 Ukrainians in December 1947, so the wider industrial district and the Hallendorf entry were counted apart.

The Ukrainian memorial at Westerholz cemetery

Hallendorf’s dead lay outside the village. The old Hallendorf cemetery was closed during the construction of the Reichswerke ‘Hermann Göring’ and its ground handed over to the steelworks; the dead buried there were exhumed and reburied on a new site in nearby Westerholz.

In November 1945 former forced labourers from Ukraine commemorated their compatriots at this cemetery with a memorial plaque set directly on the ground to the left of the entrance, its inscription in Ukrainian, Russian and English. The German war graves commission records that the memorial stone was erected by Ukrainian survivors shortly after the Allied liberation of Salzgitter, and that for many years it was the only reference on the site to the victims of National Socialism buried there.

The English part of the inscription is dated 1 November 1945 and reads: ‘HERE, UNDER 806 BARROWS LIE SEVERAL HUNDRED ANONYMOUS MARTYRS OF VARIOUS NATIONALITIES. MAY THEM REST IN PEACE IN THIS HOSTILE GROUND! ETERNAL REMEMBRANCE AND GLORY! UKRAINIAN CEMETERY 1 NOVEMBER 1945’. The plaque commemorated dead of various nationalities while naming the ground a Ukrainian cemetery.

The war graves commission records that in the 1970s metal plaques giving names and dates of birth and death were set into the ground at some of the graves, on the basis of an incomplete cemetery register.

After the camp

Hallendorf’s barracks did not stand empty. Lager 25A was turned over to housing from 1950, and the neighbouring Watenstedt camps became refugee transit camps and then flats for Germans expelled from the east.