Maierhof-Kaserne

A barracks courtyard beside the river

The complex began in 1893 with two accommodation buildings, an exercise hall and kitchen and latrine buildings; by October that year it held two companies of 320 men, and further companies arrived in 1895. Bathing facilities were poor until improvements in 1894 and 1910, before which soldiers could wash at the Nikolakloster bath house only about every ten days.

In March 1919 the troop barracks passed to the municipal administration of Passau. By 1930 an officers’ housing block at Innstraße 51 to 55 closed off the courtyard, a vehicle store followed in 1934, and from 1935 the reintroduction of conscription brought Wehrmacht recruiting and district command offices onto the site. A separate machine-gun barracks, built west of the main complex from 1913 for 94 soldiers, is an adjoining site and not part of this centre.

Accommodation after the war

On 25 April 1945 about 200 to 300 Russian prisoners of war were held at the barracks, and a shell strike killed the commanding officer, Colonel Georg Becher, and prevented a partial surrender. American forces requisitioned the site at the end of the war.

The city archive lists Maierhof among the several camps holding foreigners in Passau in the summer of 1945, alongside Bschütt, and names the Maierhofkaserne in its own list of the city’s foreigners’ camps together with the Waldwerke camp, the Loher und Söhne works camp and the Niedermayergarten. Responsibility for refugee affairs passed from the military government to the city administration on 27 August 1945, and at the end of September 1945 the number of refugees in the city and district rose from 17,000 to 28,000 within a fortnight.

The university archive dates the site’s use as refugee accommodation, chiefly for displaced people, from May 1945 to March 1949, and gives an average of approximately 1,500 people across that period. The administrative inventory records a capacity of 600 for the identified DP centre at 31 October 1947. The two measures are not comparable and the sources do not establish that they cover exactly the same premises.

The administrative record

The centre is registered as opening on 24 January 1946 and closing on 3 April 1949, under UNRRA Team 143 at Passau, with Hoguo recorded as team director from January 1946 and Cockroll as field supervisor. From November 1946 it fell under the Passau area team AT 1047 within the Amberg area A 4. Its assembly-centre number was AC 93-253, which became NBO 409 from September 1948.

The inventory’s archive note lists holdings and change reports for Passau in the Arolsen collection, reports on displaced persons from the district administration held at the Staatsarchiv Landshut, three refugee files at the Stadtarchiv Passau, and the existence of a photograph collection. Those Passau-wide holdings cover several centres and should not be read as records of this one.

Three other Passau centres held Ukrainians at the same time and are separately registered: the Bayrischer Löwe, closed in the winter of 1946 to 1947; the Donau camp, with a capacity of 445, closed on 17 March 1949; and the Innenstadt centre, with a capacity of 130, closed before 18 October 1948. Their figures belong to them and not to Maierhof.

Ukrainians at Passau

Stebelsky’s table of Ukrainians in the camps of the American zone enters Passau under the city name. It gives 600 from questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947, 508 in the UNRRA summary of 24 August 1946, 217 in the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947 and 121 in the summary compiled for the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organisation on 2 January 1948. Because Passau had four registered centres holding Ukrainians, these are city totals and not counts for Maierhof.

The steep fall between August 1946 and December 1947 shows how quickly the Ukrainian population of the city thinned as centres closed and people moved on. It does not show when Ukrainians left this particular barracks.

The Munich almanac of the Ukrainian Council for Physical Culture records that a Ukrainian sports section existed in the mixed camp at Passau during 1945 and 1946, without formal organisation, and that it came last of ten at the zonal men’s volleyball tournament in 1946. A Ukrainian sports society at Passau is also listed among the clubs of the Regensburg area. The almanac does not say which of the city’s centres it means, and Maierhof was not the only mixed one.

One contemporary notice puts a name and a room number to the barracks. In the searches column of the Regensburg weekly Ukrainske slovo for 13 October 1946, a man looking for relatives and fellow villagers from Perevolochna in the Zolochiv district asked that word be sent to a return address at Passau on the Danube, Maierhofkaserne, Team 143, block 6, room 19/II. The team number is the one the inventory records for this centre, so the notice ties a Ukrainian resident directly to these barracks rather than to Passau in general, and shows the block and room divisions in use there in the autumn of 1946.

A second Maierhof

The city archive also describes a barrack camp called Maierhof in the parish of Hacklberg, which the district refugee officer came upon in September 1948 and which had apparently been unknown to the responsible authorities. Its barracks held 82 people in roofs with holes and walls with finger-wide gaps, and after rebuilding they were occupied as 20 dwellings by 89 people. This was German refugee accommodation on a different site and should not be confused with the Maierhof barracks on the Inn.

Student housing and demolition

In the late 1970s students moved into the unrenovated buildings. Cheap accommodation developed into a small community also used by university employees. The university museum describes this as an interim use: the land had already been earmarked for sports facilities. Campaigners collected 2,000 signatures against demolition in 1985, but the buildings were demolished in 1995. Photographs of this later phase preserve part of the former camp’s physical setting.