Luttensee Camp

From barracks to a camp

The buildings were designed by Hans Wagner and constructed in 1934–1936. Originally planned as an SA camp, the complex became a mountain-infantry barracks. Its administration building, six accommodation buildings and two officers’ buildings were arranged around a parade ground. Timber-clad upper storeys and shallow pitched roofs gave the military buildings an Alpine appearance.

A historical photograph captioned “Ukrainian DPs, 1945, Mittenwald, Camp Luttensee” records the site’s early postwar community. The camps gave people uprooted by war somewhere to live while their futures remained unsettled. The photograph documents Ukrainian presence at Luttensee without establishing a precise opening day.

The Luttensee barracks was treated as part of the same displaced-persons operation as the two barracks down in the valley, which the occupying administration called the Collective Camp Mittenwald. People were moved in from smaller camps that were being wound up. One group of Ukrainian families reached Luttensee by way of Sonthofen and Oberammergau after the camps they had been sent to were liquidated in turn.

A changing Ukrainian population

The population returns identify Luttensee separately from the other Mittenwald barracks. They record 372 Ukrainians in the 1946–1947 survey, 197 in May 1947 and 863 in December 1947. These are Ukrainian counts rather than the total number of residents of every nationality. The different dates show how sharply a camp’s population could change.

The rise in the December 1947 figure follows, rather than contradicts, the departure of most of the earlier Ukrainian residents. The Mittenwald labour department recorded the camp at about a thousand residents, Ukrainians and Russians together, and noted that the camp populations fluctuated continually as people emigrated and as residents of smaller liquidated camps were brought in.

Camp life before the move

Residents rebuilt the institutions they had carried from camp to camp. A Ukrainian Catholic church, a Ukrainian Orthodox church, a kindergarten and an elementary school were established soon after arrival. Touring theatre companies and choirs visited, among them the Ukrainian Bandurist Capella under Wolodymyr Bozyk, and the camp held sports events and tournaments.

A male choir was formed to mark the execution of two members of the Ukrainian Military Organisation, then expanded to fifty mixed voices for the commemoration of the 1918 uprising on 1 November. A programme for Ukrainian Independence Day on 22 January included an exhibition of the original proclamations of independence and of the union of eastern and western Ukraine, assembled by a former officer who had taken part in those events. Lectures on Ukrainian history and culture were given in the camp every other week.

Schooling at Luttensee was modest. The Mittenwald camp administration’s report for 1947 records an elementary school with four classes and a kindergarten that shared its rooms with the Belarusian community, one teacher in the school and one in the kindergarten, and a December return of 16 pupils and 17 children. The sub-area labour department likewise described Luttensee as having only a few grades of elementary school, a few courses and a single workshop, which made celluloid goods.

The move to Pionierkaserne

Ukrainian families at Luttensee found the camp hard to live in because its administration was Russian and its signs and public announcements were in Russian. They petitioned UNRRA to be allowed to move into the almost empty Pionier barracks in the valley. In February 1947 the Ukrainian delegation was granted that right and the Ukrainians were moved; two eyewitness accounts place the transfer at the end of January and in February 1947 respectively.

The Luttensee choir went with them and continued at Pionierkaserne, reduced to fewer than twenty voices. The camp itself did not close with the move: the December 1947 return still counts 863 Ukrainians at Luttensee, and the Mittenwald supply department was still serving it at the end of that year.

A chapel built by displaced people

Ukrainian and Belarusian residents helped build the small Orthodox chapel that remains at the site. It was consecrated on St Nicholas’s Day in 1949, and the Mittenwald exhibition dates the consecration to December 1949. Its tent-shaped roof and small onion dome gave the camp a recognisable place of worship. The neighbouring Belarusian memorial, an obelisk erected in 1948 east of the barracks, is listed in the Bavarian monument register as a memorial to Belarusian prisoners of war, and belongs to another community’s history within the same landscape.

A family account preserved in the Mittenwald exhibition connects the chapel with everyday work and a new beginning. A Lithuanian engineer helped with its construction; he and a former forced labourer married there in 1950. The family received permission to emigrate to the United States the following year. This is one family’s route out of the camp, rather than a departure date for all residents.

Luttensee within Mittenwald

Mittenwald also served people travelling onward through a transit camp. Surviving registration cards record accommodation, clothing and food issues, medical examinations and travel arrangements. Most surviving arrivals date from April 1946 to October 1947. The archival account does not locate that transit operation precisely, so its short stays and journeys should not be treated as the experience of every Luttensee resident.

The camps were supplied as one system. At the end of 1947 the supply department of the Mittenwald assembly centre reported that it served Jägerkaserne, Pionierkaserne, Luttensee, Karwendel and two hospitals, together about 5,000 residents. The Hotel Karwendel in the town of Mittenwald was a separate camp for Jewish displaced people and should not be confused with the Karwendel-Kaserne barracks in the valley.

What survives

The barracks, Orthodox chapel and Belarusian memorial are recorded in Bavaria’s monument register. The chapel underwent restoration in 1982 and 1984. A local historical visit in 2017 brought people onto the military site to see this surviving reminder of the displaced communities who had once lived there.

The site remains a Bundeswehr training area, and the accommodation buildings of the 1930s barracks still stand. In 1947 Mittenwald also hosted the first large postwar gathering of Ukrainian scouts, about 1,200 of them from the British and American zones; a jubilee meeting in 2017 retraced the route through the town and the cemetery where some camp residents are buried. That gathering belonged to the town as a whole and is not recorded as a Luttensee event.