Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne

The barracks in the final days of war

Jakob Stein’s retrospective police account describes an incident on 21 April 1945. A German non-commissioned officer brought six captured soldiers to the police station and was directed to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne. He returned saying the barracks was locked and that he had released the prisoners. This episode belongs to the collapse of wartime authority, before the displaced-person accommodation documented here.

The camp in the register

The inventory record for the barracks gives an opening date of 24 January 1946 and a closing date somewhere between 30 September 1949 and 30 September 1950. Capacity was 2,600 on 31 October 1947, well over three times the figure recorded on the same date for the Aufbauschule camp in the same town. The assembly-centre identifiers were AC 93-375 A, AC 93-447 and AC 275, later NBO-481, and supervision came from UNRRA Team 133 at Amberg and Team 570 at Vilseck.

Capacity is registered provision on one date and not an occupancy figure, and the three recorded categories are not a breakdown. The record’s own archive references point to the monthly returns for Amberg among the papers of the International Tracing Service and to files at the Staatsarchiv Amberg, including the district’s monthly reports to the military government on inhabitants, refugees and displaced persons for 1945 to 1950.

Searching for a sister

On 24 March 1946, the Regensburg Ukrainian weekly Slovo printed a tracing notice from Honorata Lylyk, looking for her sister Sofia Balaichuk, last reported in Suhl II in Thuringia. The reply address was specific: Amberg, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne, block E, room 2. Among columns of similar searches, this small announcement connects the barracks to the effort to reunite families separated by war. It records a contact address rather than the outcome of the search.

The notice matters chronologically as well as humanly. It is dated two months after the inventory’s opening date and about a year before the local press dossier’s account has civilian accommodation beginning. Block and room numbers imply an established residential allocation rather than an improvised stay.

Several camps within one city

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne belonged to a wider network of accommodation in Amberg. The other three locations named for January 1949 were Möhlkaserne, Leopoldkaserne and a tuberculosis sanatorium. The city recorded 5,152 displaced persons alongside 10,132 refugees. These figures describe Amberg as a whole; they do not give the population of Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne or the number of Ukrainians living there. Refugees and expellees were counted in a separate category from displaced persons and the two cannot be added together.

The other barracks in the town were separate installations with their own chronologies. The Leopoldkaserne was begun in 1913 and opened on 28 September 1914; the Möhlkaserne was begun in 1934, opened on 20 October 1935 and became the American Pond Barracks from 1950.

The published Ukrainian population table has one row for Amberg and does not break the town down by camp. It records 10 Ukrainians in the UNRRA return of 24 August 1946, 135 in the return of 31 May 1947 and 86 in the return compiled for December 1947. Even if all of them had been living in this barracks, they would have been a small minority of a camp registered for 2,600 people. The register’s Polish and Polish-Ukrainian categories point the same way, towards a mainly Polish community with a Ukrainian element within it.

A register of Latvian camps in Germany, printed in the parish newspaper Mūsu Pagasts on 1 May 1946, lists a DP camp at the “KW. Kaserne” in Amberg, postal district 13a, east of Nuremberg. The entry places the barracks among the Latvian camps in the spring of 1946, beside the Polish, Polish-Ukrainian and Russian categories that the inventory records. The register gives no numbers and no duration.

The buildings before and after displacement

The barracks project was approved in 1864 and construction began in April 1866; the first battalion of the 6th Infantry Regiment moved in in 1889. After 1945 the barracks first served as quarters for American soldiers, and was called Fort Hess until 1947; the local dossier then has it become accommodation for homeless Poles and Ukrainians.

In 1951, after the displaced-person phase, the Federal Border Guard used the premises. Soldiers returned in 1956 with the reintroduction of conscription, and Panzerbrigade 12 was raised there in 1959. Much later the site became a college: the Free State of Bavaria bought the ground in order to install a Fachhochschule in it, which was opened at the beginning of October 1995, and since 2013 it has been the Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule Amberg-Weiden.