Luitpold-Kaserne

From artillery barracks to temporary homes

Built in 1892 and 1893 and named after Prince Regent Luitpold of Bavaria, the barracks stood at Alt-Württemberg-Allee 40 on a site of some 2.4 hectares, of which about 0.8 hectares were built over. Various field artillery regiments occupied it until 1938; from 1939 to 1945 it served as a military horse hospital. The barracks-conversion history states that in 1945 Luitpold and the neighbouring Jägerhof-Kaserne together formed a camp called the Kosciusko-Lager, whereas the archival inventory records Luitpold separately as Assembly Centre M. Kopernik and Jägerhof as Assembly Centre Sikorski. That difference in naming has not been resolved.

The first months

The city archivist Ulrich Müller found the barracks already in use in the first days of peace. In a letter of 2 May 1945 the mayor listed the Flak-Kaserne at Ossweil, Luitpold, Jägerhof, Fromann, Mathilden and Karls barracks as the places where liberated foreign workers were housed. By 8 May the town was delivering 7,500 meals a day to foreign civilian workers in its barracks. UNRRA then sought to keep national groups together, which is why Poles and Ukrainians came to be concentrated in Ludwigsburg.

On 30 July 1945 the chairman of the Polish central association in Ludwigsburg gave the occupancy of the barracks holding Poles. Luitpold appears with 1,218 people out of 9,353 across six barracks. Sixteen months later, on 7 December 1946, the first exact UNRRA statistic recorded four camps in Ludwigsburg and Aldingen with 3,094 residents in all, of whom 890 were at Luitpold as camp number 644.

Camp 644 in the Ludwigsburg assembly centre

Luitpold was not run on its own but as one camp of the UNRRA Assembly Centre Ludwigsburg. A letterhead reproduced by Müller from a letter of 2 April 1947 names Ernest W. Sibley as director and Herman A. Oprel as deputy director, gives the headquarters as 35 Stuttgarter Strasse and the staff billet as the Bahn-Hotel, and lists the constituent camps, among them Jägerhof-Kaserne 643 and Luitpold-Kaserne 644. The same four camps, with Karls-Kaserne 646 and Aldingen 717, were still under UNRRA in spring 1947.

The inventory adds the administrative frame: Team 91 at Ludwigsburg under the director recorded as Cock, Area Team 1002 from November 1946, Area A 2 Ludwigsburg, and the field supervisors Metzger and Nutter. A recorded capacity of 800 on 31 October 1947 is an accommodation measure rather than a count of residents, and it is not a Ukrainian figure.

A changing camp population

In May 1947 the camp received another substantial group when the remaining 621 residents of the Aldingen camp, DP-Camp 71 or UNRRA camp 717, were transferred here and that camp closed. The transfer figure does not establish how many people were living at Luitpold afterwards. During 1947 about 450 former displaced people in the Ludwigsburg district, mostly Poles and Ukrainians, had their displaced-person status withdrawn by UNRRA or IRO and passed to the German refugee administration.

The Ukrainian community

The parish history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church in Württemberg, drawing on Dmytro Blazhejowskyj’s directory of Ukrainian Catholic clergy in the diaspora, records that in 1947 the camp at Ludwigsburg-Luitpoldkaserne held 723 Greek Catholics and 74 Orthodox. It describes Ukrainian pastoral care in the two camps of Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, naming Father Volodymyr Voznyak at Ludwigsburg in the earliest period and Father Yulian Mykytyn from 1951. The same account dates the ministries from 1944, which is before either camp existed, so only the 1947 figures are treated as evidence here.

Müller warns that Ukrainians were often recorded as Poles in 1945, because the only German authority that counted displaced people, the registry office, had no category for Ukrainians, and because people from what became Soviet western Ukraine were reclassified only after the Potsdam conference. Sixteen, seventeen and twenty births registered as Russian in 1945, 1946 and 1947 were, in his judgement, probably children of Ukrainian women. In February 1946 the mayor supported a working association called Ukrainian Folk Art, founded by about 1,000 Ukrainians living in Ludwigsburg to make craft goods, and wrote to eight firms producing lacquers and plywood asking them to supply materials. That association was a town-wide Ukrainian initiative and is not attributed to this barracks alone.

Stebelsky’s tabulation of Ukrainians in American-zone camps gives Ludwigsburg 797 for 1946 to 1947 and 773 on 31 May 1947, with no entry in the UNRRA return of 24 August 1946 or the return for December 1947. These are figures for the locality and cover all its camps. The Land civic-education portal records vocational courses for smiths, joiners and electricians at a Polish camp in Ludwigsburg it calls Kopernikus, the name the inventory attaches to Luitpold, although that account does not itself name a building.

Following the camp through its records

The inventory places the surviving records within the wider Ludwigsburg camp file, documents 82007923 to 82009434, which covers the whole town rather than this barracks. Müller worked from the city archive series L 3 and L 9, from United Nations records in New York for the December 1946 statistic, and from the IRO papers in the Archives Nationales in Paris. He closes by noting that the files allow the subject to be described only from the perspective of German and Anglo-American administrations, because the displaced people themselves left almost no written trace.

Departure and after

The inventory places the camp’s closure between September 1949 and September 1950. Emigration from northern Württemberg was handled by a resettlement centre that had first been at the Flandern-Kaserne in Stuttgart and moved on 24 August 1948 to the Flak-Kaserne at Ludwigsburg-Ossweil; an IRO statistic for 31 March 1950 counted 517 Ukrainians among those preparing to sail from it, alongside 638 Poles, 438 Latvians and other groups. On 31 January 1951 the last people still classed as homeless foreigners in Ludwigsburg were transferred to state hostels elsewhere in Germany.

The Bundeswehr used the barracks from 1956 until 1994. Redevelopment removed the northern accommodation block and several internal buildings in 1999, and a new tax office opened on that ground in 2001. The northern halls were demolished in 2000 and a police headquarters for Ludwigsburg opened in their place in 2004.