Falkenberg Camp

A place with several histories

The barrack camp at the Falkenbergsweg existed from 1936 to 1976 and passed through several uses. Two wartime labour camps stood on the ground: a small camp on the rise, and a larger one at the foot of it for male forced labourers, many of them barely in their twenties and mostly from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. At the end of 1943 the upper camp was rebuilt for Italian military internees, and the contractor August Prien, which was building prefabricated emergency housing nearby, put five hundred of them into it.

The complex was cleared in the summer of 1944. From 13 September 1944 until 8 February 1945 the empty upper camp became the Neugraben annex of Neuengamme concentration camp, holding five hundred young Czech Jewish women deported through Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau; the Hamburg memorials foundation records that they were transferred to Neugraben from the Veddel (Dessauer Ufer) satellite camp. They were made to build temporary housing and lay water mains and roads before transfer to Hamburg-Tiefstack and then to Bergen-Belsen.

An aerial photograph taken on 3 April 1946 records the former annex huts. The wartime prisoners and the later displaced-persons community are different populations on the same ground; their numbers must never be combined.

A list of camps in Germany printed in the Latvian displaced-persons newspaper Mūsu Pagasts on 1 May 1946 gives the site its British postal designation, recording “DP. Camp 515, Falkenberg” at Neugraben under Hamburg 24. The entry names the camp and nothing more: no population, and no nationality.

The same designation appears in the Ukrainian press with a street address attached. A tracing notice in the Regensburg weekly Ukrainske slovo of 15 September 1946 asked that replies be sent to “DP Camp 515, Falkenberg-Neugraben, Falkenbergsweg 1”. The notice records one reply address and nothing more about the camp.

Why Ukrainians stayed at the Falkenbergsweg

Northern and western European forced labourers went home after the war. Others who had lived in the camp during the war years now counted as displaced persons and simply stayed in the huts. The site’s published history states plainly that Ukrainians and Belarusians who had worked for the German war economy moved into the barracks as they fell empty, because they did not want to return to countries by then under Stalin’s control.

Hamburg families who had been evacuated during the bombing also moved in, because housing in the ruined city was scarce. From the start, then, the camp was shared between displaced foreigners and German residents rather than being a closed Ukrainian settlement.

The same report prints the resolution passed at the camp. The general meeting of the DP workers of the Falkenberg camp, having heard a whole series of facts showing the very hard consequences for displaced people — especially for those with families — of charges for maintenance out of all proportion to the market prices of the goods issued in the DP camps, affirmed that Instruction No. 125 worsened an already hard existence; that it endangered health, above all that of children and the young, because after the high deductions a family worker’s wages did not suffice to buy the additional food, greens and vegetables needed to live; that it took away all appetite for work even from the most diligent worker; that it wronged the DP worker, because the sum deducted was far greater than the market value of the food supplied to displaced people and than the real value of the accommodation in which they lived; and that it fell disproportionately on the ordinary consumer doing the heaviest work, since the same rate for food and lodging was deducted from every category of worker. The meeting resolved to ask the Military Government of the British zone of Germany to review the rates, as paragraph 1 of Instruction No. 125 provided, and either to lower them or to exempt non-working members of a family.

Families and everyday life

A childhood memoir published in 2023 recalls a Ukrainian family moving from Fischbek to Falkenberg in 1948. Five families shared a room divided by blankets. An Orthodox church operated in a barrack. The recollection conveys the close quarters in which religious life and family routines continued.

A photograph from summer 1950 shows a wedding procession among the camp buildings. Hamburg’s memorial exhibition uses it to illustrate how displaced people married and founded families while waiting to leave or establish a more permanent home.

A report in Ukrainske Slovo of 26 September 1948 preserves the camp’s own reckoning of what work paid for. Military Government Instruction No. 125 required every working displaced person to pay one mark a day, half of it for food and half for accommodation, with 3.50 marks a week for each of the first two children and 3 marks a week for each child after that. The writer asked what that meant in practice for a family with, say, three children and one working father, a labourer: at the wages then paid for unskilled work the whole of the week’s earnings stayed in the firms’ cash offices as repayment for the keep of the worker and his family, and there was nothing left for the cobbler or the tailor, for soap, a postage stamp or an exercise book for a child. He gave an instance from the camp itself. One barrack there was old, leaked and was cold in winter, being by then like a sieve; fifty-two people lived in it, of whom seventeen worked, so that 255 marks a month were being paid in rent for that one hut.

A divided Orthodox community

Religious life was not always peaceable. Antons’s study of Ukrainian displaced persons in the British zone records that at Falkenberg a priest of the autonomous Orthodox jurisdiction was set upon with knives and knuckledusters, and that British military police had to intervene. The incident was reported in the Ukrainian camp newspaper Ukrainske slovo on 26 June 1949.

Antons notes that another historian places the same or a similar attack at the neighbouring Fischbek camp. The two Hamburg camps are frequently confused, and this account is recorded here with that caution attached.

What the population records show

Falkenberg’s Ukrainian population rose between the 1946 and 1947 questionnaire returns and May 1947, then fell steadily. Stebelsky’s table gives 1,113, then 1,567, 1,367, 950, 303 and 229 at six dates between 1946 and August 1951. These counts concern Ukrainians specifically.

Other returns measure other things. In June 1948 a relief committee counted 2,253 Ukrainians in the Hamburg district as a whole, which is more than Falkenberg alone; Stebelsky separates Falkenberg from Hamburg’s other camps in the same way. A 1950 survey recorded 659 displaced people of all nationalities at Falkenberg, which is not a competing Ukrainian total.

Moving on, or remaining in Hamburg

The memoir follows one family’s onward journey: the father left for industrial work in France in 1949, while a child’s school record places her at Seedorf in 1949 and 1950 before reunion in France. This was an individual route through another German camp, rather than a transfer of the entire Falkenberg community.

In summer 1950, Hamburg’s social administration took over its remaining six DP camps. Residents began paying rent for their barrack accommodation, fences were removed, and some camps also housed homeless Germans. Institutional control changed even where residents remained in the same place.

Officially the site was now the Wohnunterkunft Falkenbergsweg, a municipal residential barracks. An average of about 750 people lived there through the 1960s, and the former SS hut in the upper camp was turned into a day nursery. The camp was demolished in 1976.

A site still being researched

A memorial stone stands where the women’s annex was. It was damaged repeatedly and its plaque removed several times, so in 1992 a further plaque was fixed at the Neugraben district office. Remains of the barrack foundations survive in the ground, although no barracks stand.

In June 2025, local proceedings discussed Denkort Falkenberg, an educational project combining the camp’s history with the surrounding nature reserve. Proposals included digital walks, interpretation panels and protection of buried foundations. The committee requested accessible, multilingual presentation.

An April 2026 announcement reported an archaeological survey undertaken in 2025 and a forthcoming presentation covering the site’s uses as forced-labour camp, concentration-camp annex, DP camp and residential camp. This continuing work can add detail to the physical history of the barracks.

Commemoration on the ground has continued. In 2020 students from the Süderelbe Secondary School erected an information panel and a memorial column at Falkenbergsweg 71, and in 2023 the City of Hamburg acquired the site from the Federal Real Estate Agency.