Leipheim Airfield Camp

The airfield before the camp

Work on the airfield began on 1 April 1936, on 132 hectares taken from Leipheim, 88 from Bubesheim and 30 from Günzburg. The town’s own account records that the project was presented as a demonstration of national strength rather than a preparation for war, which helped reconcile a population losing farmland to it.

From 1940 the site carried a Messerschmitt works. The Me 321 transport glider first flew from Leipheim on 25 February 1941, and the Me 262, the first jet aircraft to enter series production, made its maiden flight there on 18 July 1942. On 19 March 1945 a raid by 84 B-24 bombers destroyed 28 Me 262s on the ground, and the last air attack came on 9 April. American forces took the airfield at the end of April 1945 and designated it Airfield R-59.

The earlier Jewish DP community

The Jewish camp opened in December 1945 under UNRRA and was the first Jewish camp in Bavarian Swabia. Its residents came mainly from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. They established schools, a library, religious education, a kosher kitchen and vocational training, together with a Talmud Torah, a ritual bath and a yeshiva, and the camp had a swimming pool. The newspaper A Heim and the Makabi sports club served the community, and a nearby training farm prepared residents for agricultural work.

Recorded population fell from 3,150 in May 1946 to 1,411 in January 1949. Many Jewish residents emigrated after Israel’s establishment in 1948; those remaining were transferred to other centres as this phase closed in 1949. Those figures describe the Jewish camp, not the later Ukrainian arrivals.

The Ukrainian community arrives

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine names Leipheim among the Ukrainian camps of the American zone holding between 2,000 and 5,000 people, in the same group as Karlsfeld, Augsburg, Mittenwald, Regensburg, Aschaffenburg, Berchtesgaden, Bayreuth, Neu-Ulm and Dillingen. By 1948 the Ukrainian camps between them were running 102 elementary schools, 35 gymnasiums, twelve other secondary schools and 43 trade schools, and had published 232 periodicals and 818 books.

The 1949 move from Augsburg carried institutions as well as families. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine records that Ukrainian organisations continued their work in Leipheim and Munich after leaving Augsburg. This was a relocation of an existing community rather than the creation of an entirely new one.

A family-held chronology records the opening of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences in Leipheim on 12 May 1949 and a visit to its museum on 6 June. It also records journeys from Leipheim to Munich for resettlement discussions. Scholarship, church organisation and migration arrangements were taking place alongside one another.

At Leipheim’s first postwar children’s festival in 1949, Ukrainian girls from the airfield DP camp performed dances. The photograph is catalogued by Bavaria’s cultural-heritage portal with that explicit identification. It records camp residents taking part in the town’s public life.

Camp life recorded on film

The Australian film Mike and Stefani was made around a Ukrainian refugee family seeking resettlement. The national film archive identifies Leipheim scenes of laundry, kindergarten meals, a camp council meeting, carpentry, radio-engineering classes, shoemaking, sewing and English lessons. These scenes preserve an unusually broad visual record of daily work and preparation for departure.

The film was directed by R. Maslyn Williams and shot on location in Bavaria in 1949. It combines reconstructed episodes with events filmed as they happened: the Australian selection interview was recorded in Bavaria, while earlier wartime experiences were re-enacted. Its climax is that interview, in which the couple are confronted with a resettlement scheme that could direct them into two years of assigned labour and separate them.

It had been commissioned to support Australia’s immigration programme, so it is both evidence of camp surroundings and a shaped public account of refugee migration. In the event its picture of the selection procedure was thought too bleak, and the film received only a limited release.

Film footage of Christmas 1949 shows food collection, firewood, a decorated tree and a family celebration. Its date also demonstrates why the end of the earlier Jewish camp phase in spring 1949 cannot be treated as the end of all displaced-persons activity at Leipheim.

From Leipheim to another country

An Augsburg exhibition reconstructs a family’s move from Somme-Kaserne to Leipheim-Airport and departure on 16 June 1949 for Australia. Their paperwork originally named Canada as their preferred destination. The example demonstrates that a transfer within Germany and a later journey overseas were separate events, and that the final destination could differ from the first plan.

The camp was dissolved in June 1950, and the United States Army returned to the airfield in October of that year. Flying units followed in 1957, the German air force took the station over in 1959, and flight operations ended in 1994; military use of the site ceased on 31 December 2008, and an intercommunal industrial park now occupies the ground.

Former residents maintained links long after leaving. The Shevchenko Scientific Society holds a 1987 bulletin issued by the committee of former residents of the Somme-Kaserne and Leipheim camps in Germany. The community’s memory crossed both camp and national boundaries.