Haunstetten Camp

The place the settlement occupied

Haunstetten was an industrial village south of Augsburg rather than part of the city. A Messerschmitt settlement was laid out for the aircraft works in the 1930s: the city archive’s picture panel shows a model of the planned settlement in 1932 and an aerial photograph of its extension in 1938. The works drew the bombing that destroyed 62 houses in the village and severely damaged 41 more, and American forces entered without fighting on 28 April 1945. The accommodation displaced people were given was this recent workers’ housing rather than purpose-built barracks.

A settlement seen from inside

A Ukrainian paper published at Somme-Kaserne in September 1946 carried a signed complaint about the treatment of former concentration-camp prisoners, and named the Ukrainian settlement at Haunstetten as its example. The writer says he reached the settlement about June 1945, that some ten former camp prisoners were there then, that they were issued a third of the ration given to others and none of the extra food other Ukrainian centres provided, and that the better items in the clothing relief went out by the back door. He adds that the position with UNRRA aid had since changed.

It does establish that a Ukrainian settlement with its own social welfare office existed at Haunstetten from the first summer after the war, and that former concentration-camp prisoners were among its residents.

The same paper carried an announcement for Haunstetten in its issue of 13 October 1946. The Dniprova Chaika music, drama and comedy theatre was to open its autumn season at Haunstetten on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 October with S. Artemovsky’s opera Zaporozhets za Dunayem. The notice does not say where the company was based or how long it went on performing there.

A school that travelled with its community

The school’s roots reached back to Modrany in Czechoslovakia, where many of its teachers had previously worked at a Ukrainian gymnasium. After the war they organised a new school in the Haunstetten DP camp. A later reunion account traces the school’s move to Füssen and then, in 1946, to Mittenwald.

Former pupils remembered teachers maintaining demanding standards despite shortages of textbooks and other teaching materials. Their account belongs to the history of the school across its successive locations; it does not show that every later Mittenwald pupil had lived in Haunstetten. The continuity lay in teaching, organisation and the effort to preserve a Ukrainian education through repeated moves.

Several communities in Haunstetten

Haunstetten also had substantial Baltic displaced-persons accommodation. The Volksbund’s local history identifies Baltic communities here and at Hochfeld, while identifying Somme-Kaserne with Ukrainians. These accounts describe different communities within Augsburg’s wider refugee landscape; the Ukrainian school and population evidence cannot be used to classify every Haunstetten resident as Ukrainian.

The photographed Baltic settlement occupied requisitioned housing associated with the Messerschmitt works. Its entrance sign in 1947 identifies a colony of Baltic nations. This is the settlement shown in the photographs below; the Ukrainian finding aid does not identify the school’s precise street or building, and the only Haunstetten address in the Ukrainian press that has been traced is a house number given in a family-tracing notice.

Worship, relief and practical support

A September 1945 report preserved in the history of Augsburg’s Russian Orthodox parish describes a congregation whose members lived both in and outside the city, with most living at Haunstetten. Its work combined worship with social and charitable help. The parish sought premises for workshops, especially shoe repairs, and reported support from the American military administration and refugee-relief authorities.

The same parish history records a library and small printing operation in the postwar years. These belonged to the wider parish network, rather than to a documented Ukrainian camp administration. They show how refugees could find books, worship and practical assistance through institutions extending beyond their accommodation.

The housing settlement after displacement

The housing history followed a different timetable from the school. Local research records 318 Heimbau Bayern apartments and 70 Messerschmitt apartments requisitioned for displaced people. By early 1950 that settlement’s displaced-persons use had ended; from February it became American military housing, and the apartments returned to civilian use in July 1957. The Bavarian reconstruction atlas records the same release date but attributes all 318 dwellings to the Messerschmitt settlement, so the two accounts are given here as they stand.

The archival date range for the Ukrainian community ends in 1947. That is distinct from the Baltic settlement’s later housing history and American use. The school’s continuation in Mittenwald is the clearest documented institutional link connecting Haunstetten with the subsequent lives of displaced Ukrainians.

A further caution belongs with these numbers. In September 1950 Haunstetten counted 1,949 expellees among 9,253 inhabitants. Those were German expellees under German administration, a different category from the displaced persons of 1945 to 1947.