Gneisenau-Kaserne

A distinct camp in Koblenz

American units took the right bank of Koblenz on 27 March 1945. On 11 April the acting mayor proposed the right-bank barracks to the American command as accommodation for displaced people, and by 22 April a circular from the Ehrenbreitstein administrative office told all departments that foreigners were to be housed in barracks. The four sites were allocated by nationality: the Flak barracks at Niederberg for French, Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg nationals, Augusta at Pfaffendorf for Italians, Gneisenau at Horchheim for Poles and the Bruchmüller barracks at Niederlahnstein for Russians.

The compound stood on the right bank of the Rhine in Horchheim. It belonged to a network of four barrack camps established in and around Koblenz in spring 1945, but each had its own identity. Augusta-Kaserne in Pfaffendorf and the barracks at Niederlahnstein were separate centres, not alternative names for Gneisenau.

Municipal administrative figures often counted several camps together. For example, the 16,000 people reported at Gneisenau and Augusta on 29 April 1945 were a combined population. That figure cannot describe Gneisenau alone, still less its Ukrainian residents.

Relief and community government

UNRRA Team 20 reached the Gneisenau barracks on the evening of 21 May 1945. Its American director, who wrote a retrospective report in March 1947, began with five people instead of the thirteen a camp of 3,000 was supposed to have, and found about 3,500 Poles and Ukrainians in war-damaged buildings normally meant to hold 1,500. By early June the recorded population was 2,803 Poles. Administration of the camps from outside, and the transports, lay with the French military department known as the PDR, based at Niederlahnstein.

An elected congress followed on 1 July 1945, with one deputy for every hundred residents; the first had 35 members and elections were repeated every six months because the population changed so fast. The congress chose a president and a camp leader and formed a cabinet with an accountant and commissars for public welfare, education and culture, registration and public works. The director held a veto he never had to use, and justice inside the camp was administered by a former Polish judge whose sentences he confirmed, sometimes softening them. On 6 January 1946 the French approved the change of name to Gniezno, which then appeared on letterheads and stamps.

The original seating plan makes the arrangement visible: congress members and cabinet faced a presiding group, with separate places for the international director, liaison officer and visitors. The surviving official seal carries the camp’s chosen name beside its UNRRA team number.

Learning, faith and daily life

A Ukrainian Greek Catholic choir formed part of the religious life, alongside a Roman Catholic women’s association; the camp chaplain ran religious lectures and study groups for young people, and Corpus Christi in June 1946 was marked by a procession through the camp. Schools and workshops offered education and vocational training, the library held 800 volumes by July 1946, and English and French language courses were the mainstay of the adult programme. An 80-bed hospital and a children’s clinic supported medical care, with serious cases and operations sent to the requisitioned St Joseph hospital at Niederlahnstein.

Residents were employed within the camp as cobblers, barbers, cooks, nurses, teachers and casual labourers, and in December 1945 the Koblenz postal directorate asked the French military government to let a Polish work party rebuild the city’s post office. UNRRA kept work voluntary until the end of 1946, when the French authorities imposed compulsory labour on displaced people.

Family life resumed quickly. Marriage had been forbidden to forced labourers, and mass weddings of dozens of couples in a day were not unusual in Koblenz; 78 children were born to Gneisenau residents in May 1946 alone, the mothers going to the hospital at Arenberg. Up to fifteen unaccompanied children are documented at the camp, the responsibility of UNRRA’s Child Search Tracing Section; nine were repatriated on 26 April 1946 and eight left in August for Reutlingen, where five boys began training as car mechanics.

The camp also took part in the region’s social life. Its theatre visited Niederlahnstein, residents attended cinema screenings at Augusta twice a week, and a football match against German sides from Horchheim on 25 August 1946 was abandoned in the rain after the camp won the opening game. A camp newspaper produced at Gneisenau from September 1945 served all three camps in the region.

A Ukrainian community within a larger population

The Ukrainian historical overview gives approximately 1,370 Ukrainians for 1946–1947. A later study of French-zone camps records around 3,500 people of all backgrounds in March 1947, against an estimated maximum capacity of 2,000. The two figures answer different questions: one identifies the Ukrainian community, the other the pressure on the whole compound.

Return, resettlement and closure

Repatriation ran mainly in 1946. No large transport left Gneisenau before March that year; a group of 900 departed on 26 April, a convoy of the same size on 6 May and 300 people from Niederlahnstein station on 21 May, and the director recorded the repatriation of 1,023 Poles on 1 June. Conditions could be poor: the welfare officer complained that a party of 124 leaving on 31 August 1946 sat in overcrowded wagons from morning until after ten at night, with luggage limited to 60 kilograms a person. By 1 August he already judged the number willing to return insignificant.

UNRRA ceased work on 30 June 1947 and the IRO took over, shifting attention towards resettlement; 44,109 fully supported displaced people remained in the French zone on 1 July 1947. The camp was evacuated in 1949; research in French records dates the completion to April, and local history records French military occupants by July.

What survives

The buildings outlasted the DP camp, but its everyday history survives chiefly through records and scattered images. Municipal hospital and civil registers document the years of displacement alongside international relief records. Their coverage differs: ordinary postwar returns could omit people in large camps altogether, as well as those already repatriated. Combining these sources explains why a single list cannot represent everyone who lived here.

Numbers from the municipal database show how far the record reaches. Of 4,722 people documented at Koblenz as forced labourers or displaced persons, 4,275 came from eastern European countries, among them 734 from Ukraine. For 1,026 of them the Gneisenau barracks were the first recorded place of accommodation, against 310 at Augusta and 307 at Niederlahnstein. Copies of the UNRRA files from the UN Archive in New York are held, with German translations, by the Stadtarchiv Koblenz.