Conti Camp

The Continental works before 1945

The Korbach plant opened in 1907 with 180 employees as a branch of a Frankfurt rubber-goods company, and passed to Continental of Hanover when the two firms merged in 1929. During the Second World War it produced tyres, aircraft tyres, rubber containers for aircraft tanks and padding for tank tracks. A study of the Continental group under National Socialism records that forced labourers and prisoners of war were used in growing numbers and already made up 51 per cent of the Korbach workforce in 1941, with the payroll rising from about 1,100 at the end of 1940 to 1,738 in November 1943. American troops entered Korbach on Maundy Thursday 1945 and production stopped.

The camp for displaced people therefore stood on a site that had itself depended on coerced labour. The study does not describe a displaced-persons camp on the works site, so the link between the wartime plant and the postwar camp rests on the location rather than on a documented continuity of buildings or people.

A camp on an industrial site

Research into the region’s displaced-persons camps identifies the Continental works as the Korbach location, and the camp catalogue confirms it. The catalogue records an opening date of 24 January 1946 and closure on 22 March 1949, the assembly-centre number AC 527, the later designation K 105, a capacity of 1,250 and a headcount of 1,240 on 31 October 1947, and residents of various nationalities. Relief work was organised through UNRRA Team 51 Korbach under the Kassel area teams. Its factory setting distinguishes Conti from other accommodation in the wider district.

Transfers from the smaller Waldeck camps

A recollection published in The Ukrainian Weekly in January 2013 describes a camp at Landau in Kreis Waldeck, formed immediately after the war, which was disbanded in 1947 with its population transferred to Camp Conti. The catalogue supports the identification: its Landau entry sits in Kreis Waldeck, opened on the same day as Conti, closed before 31 October 1947, and was served by the same UNRRA team and the same team director. This is the Waldeck Landau, not the town in the Palatinate or Landau on the Isar.

Conti was not the only receiving camp for the district, nor Landau the only feeder. The catalogue notes that the camp at Grebenstein in Kreis Hofgeismar was closed in June 1947 and its residents moved to Korbach. A further camp at Rhoden in Kreis Waldeck, also under Team 51, closed late in 1946. Stebelsky’s Ukrainian figures for Landau, which fall from 460 in the wartime questionnaire survey to 357 in May 1947 and then disappear, are consistent with these movements without proving the date or composition of any single transport.

Ukrainian residents

The Ukrainian questionnaire survey collected in 1946 and 1947 counted 477 residents at Conti. The UNRRA return of 31 May 1947 recorded 77, and the PCIRO return compiled at the start of January 1948 recorded 976. The scale of the change illustrates how different a camp could look within the same year, and the December figure sits close to the all-nationality headcount of 1,240 recorded six weeks earlier. The returns and the Landau recollection should be read together, but they do not establish the date or composition of each intervening transport.

Schools, youth and religious life

The 2013 recollection describes active Ukrainian social, political and religious life in the three camps it discusses, including Conti. Schools and the youth organisations Plast and SUM were part of that life. The writer adds that these camps were left out of the standard lists because of their small size. The account preserves an important record of community institutions, although it does not provide separate class sizes or membership figures for Korbach.

A Ukrainian evangelical congregation at Korbach is documented in the Baptist monthly Doroha Pravdy, which printed an account of the baptism held there on 4 April 1948. News that the service would take place had spread quickly through the whole American zone and brought believers from many camps, among them S. Nyshchyk, chairman of the church council of the Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Church, who came from Munich. The visitors arrived on the Sunday morning and were warmly welcomed by the local believers; the morning service began at ten in the hall where the congregation’s services were held, and was opened by Brother O. Harbuziuk with a reading and a sermon on the theme “Speech from Golgotha”. The choir from Cornberg sang after almost every sermon. In the afternoon those present gathered in the prayer house of the German believers, where eight people in white robes were baptised, and the newly baptised were then received into the church and the Lord’s Supper was held. The account was written by V. Peretiatko of Aschaffenburg.

Further moves and working life

Korbach was also one of the places from which Ukrainian displaced people moved to a labour-service camp near Gießen. The first arrivals there are dated to 23 January 1948 in historical research published by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education. The arrivals came from several camps, including Aschaffenburg, Cornberg and Mainz-Kastel. This documents a route out of Korbach rather than a single transfer of the entire Conti population. The catalogue’s closure date of 22 March 1949 gives an end point that the 2013 letter, which mentions closure without a date, does not supply.

Preserving the camp’s history

In October 2009, pupils from Bad Arolsen’s Christian-Rauch school researched the Korbach and Kassel-Hasenhecke camps in the International Tracing Service archive. The archive’s annual report describes a focus on camp life and displaced people’s experiences. This local research helped reconnect the factory location with its postwar role as a place of refuge.