Karlsfeld Camp

The barracks and what stood near them

A memoir by Bohdan Havrylyshyn, who lived here as a young man, describes a camp of several wooden barracks that had earlier been intended for Ukrainian forced labourers and were adapted by UNRRA for Ukrainian refugees. Rooms held eight double bunks and a single table with two narrow benches, with about fifteen young men to a room, and he records that the food and necessities supplied through UNRRA were sufficient.

Two other institutions in the same area must be kept separate from this camp. The Dachau subcamp list records an OT-Lager Karlsfeld that existed in 1944 and 1945 with between 700 and 1,000 prisoners, mainly Jews, working on bunker construction for BMW, alongside the much larger SS labour camp at Allach. The Rothschwaige transit camp and the Nizanim kibbutz on the Rothschwaige estate, both within the Karlsfeld municipal area, are further distinct places. None of them is the Ukrainian displaced-persons camp described here.

How little the administrative record holds

The German record for this camp is unusually thin. The Arolsen alphabetical list of displaced-persons camps in the American zone knows a DP-Camp Karlsfeld and gives an opening date of 11 December 1945, but nothing else. A local study by Petra Röhrle notes an assembly centre set up at Karlsfeld whose location cannot be reconstructed, and records that the military government regarded Karlsfeld in the immediate post-war period as a danger area of the district. The German survey that gathers these findings states plainly that the position of the displaced persons in Karlsfeld itself remains largely unclear.

The camp is also absent from the published Ukrainian population tables. Table 7 of Stebelsky’s survey, which lists camp by camp for the American zone from 1946 to 1948, has no Karlsfeld row, which fits a camp wound up during 1946 before the later returns were compiled.

What does survive is the paper the community itself generated. The UNRRA files in the United Nations Archives include a Team 125 folder for 1946 holding a Ukrainian religious and social weekly and the scouts’ monthly Skob, issued at Karlsfeld. Team 125 was the Munich-Laim team, which places Karlsfeld administratively alongside the Laim camp.

Life inside the barracks

A childhood recollection published in 2005 describes a camp enclosed by wire, with families sharing rooms in long barracks. Blankets divided one room into five family spaces. Bunk beds, photographs and the luggage saved during flight made up the household; washing facilities and toilets stood at the end of the corridor.

The same account remembers a father leaving each morning to teach geography and mathematics in the refugee-organised school. Possessions retained from home carried an emotional importance far beyond their practical value. This description records one family’s experience rather than a standard room allocation for the whole camp.

Rebuilding education

An oral-history interview describes a camp council, primary school, secondary school, teacher training and commercial education. The witness remembered wooden, two-storey workers’ huts associated with the BMW factory. His recollection of thousands of residents conveys the scale of the settlement, although it does not supply a dated census.

The secondary school expanded to 562 students in 1945–46, with 42 teachers recorded on 9 November 1945. Space shortages required two teaching shifts in two buildings. In spring 1946, approximately half the teachers and students moved to Berchtesgaden, where the school continued.

Surviving commercial-school publications also show practical training. A bibliography records a 45-page purchasing manual issued at Karlsfeld in 1945 and a 52-page work on consumer goods bearing a Munich-Karlsfeld imprint. These modest publications connected classroom work with skills useful for future employment.

Scouting and community life

The Plast scouting movement formed local groups as young people gathered in the camp. A surviving photograph records the Lys patrol of the Ivan Bohun unit in autumn 1945, standing together beside the barracks. The oral-history account places scouting alongside the schools and camp council as an institution rebuilt by refugees themselves.

The Shevchenko Scientific Society holds reports, rules, correspondence and lesson plans documenting Karlsfeld’s educational and cultural programmes. These records preserve the organised work behind community life. Their catalogue spans 1945–1949, a date range for the papers rather than proof that the camp remained open throughout those years.

Printing and sport

A bibliography of Ukrainian displaced-persons publications records two weeklies connected with the camp: Khrystyianskyi Shliakh, a religious weekly given as Munich-Mittenwald-Karlsfeld and published from late 1945 to December 1947, and Visti z Nashoho Zhyttia, a weekly issued at Karlsfeld in 1946. The same bibliography lists an English-language textbook printed at Karlsfeld in 1946 and a 1950 memoir volume whose subtitle names Rudolfstadt, Coburg, Dachau and Karlsfeld as the camps its author passed through.

Organised sport began here as well. An account of Galician sport in the displaced-persons camps states that sporting life in the emigration began at the Ukrainian camp in Munich-Karlsfeld, where the society Lev was founded in 1945 and developed everything from football to chess and table tennis. Its football team, by then recorded as Karlsfeld-Mittenwald, won the first Ukrainian displaced-persons championship in the spring of 1946 and won again in the following season.

The community moves on

The 1946 transfers dispersed people and institutions rather than ending their work. The Berchtesgaden school history traces its direct connection to Karlsfeld, while research on Orlyk’s camp newspaper records a large group arriving from Karlsfeld in May. The two camps belong to the same migration story but were separate facilities.

The same dispersal shows in the memoir and in the sports record. Havrylyshyn moved on to the Ellwangen camp to rejoin family already there, and the Lev club’s later titles are recorded under a Karlsfeld-Mittenwald and then a Mittenwald name. Institutions travelled with the people who ran them.

Karlsfeld after the camp

The municipality itself was transformed by the same years, although by a different population. Karlsfeld had 1,009 inhabitants in 1939 and 1,669 in 1946, and by 1950 expellees and refugees made up about a third of the municipality. Owner-built housing dominated the 1950s, and about 150 unauthorised settlement buildings were legalised in 1960. Camp residents were not counted in these municipal figures, so the growth of the village is not a measure of the camp.