Mainz-Kastel

Goltz-Kaserne on the Rhine

The Von-der-Goltz barracks and the neighbouring Wilhelms barracks were built at Kastel in 1860 and were occupied for most of their military life by pioneer troops. The United Ukrainian American Relief Committee’s June 1948 report explicitly identifies the Ukrainian camp at Wiesbaden-Kastel as Golzkaserne, and city research identifies the former Von-der-Goltz barracks with the later Kastel Housing site.

It was a different compound from Gersdorff-Kaserne, which the city’s own lexicon places in the Europaviertel on the other side of the Rhine, and from the nearby Mudra-Kaserne in Kastel itself. The Arolsen inventory keeps the two Wiesbaden camps apart as well, giving Gersdorff-Kaserne the assembly-centre number AC 563 under Team 28 Wiesbaden and a closing date between October and December 1946, and Kastel the number AC 579 under a team of its own.

The familiar name Mainz-Kastel reflects the area’s older connection with Mainz. After the war the Rhine divided the occupation zones: Mainz was French-administered, while Kastel lay in the American zone and became part of Wiesbaden. This explains why the Ukrainian camp appears under Wiesbaden in statistical lists without being a camp in the city centre.

The barracks in 1945

The first displaced persons in the Goltz barracks were not Ukrainians. Wiesbaden’s Jewish local history records DP Camp No. 712 in the Goltz barracks at Mainz-Kastel, where about 400 Jewish displaced persons were housed; many of them were able to leave during the course of 1945 as rooms or flats were allocated to them in Wiesbaden across the river.

Ukrainians in Wiesbaden appear in the record first at the Gersdorff barracks, which the inventory lists with Polish, Baltic and Ukrainian residents and closes between 19 October and 20 December 1946. The Kastel camp was carried on in the register after that date.

The camp in the assembly-centre register

The Arolsen Archives inventory of DP camps carries the site in District 2 of the American zone as “DP-Camp von-der-Goltz-Kaserne / Wiesbaden-Kastel / Conturino”. Its assembly-centre number is AC 579, changed to W 126 in the renumbering of September 1948. The recorded capacity is 1,750. The camp had its own UNRRA team, T 517 Wiesbaden-Kastel, under a director recorded as Gacras, within Area Team 1022 Frankfurt am Main and Area 1 Frankfurt am Main; the field supervisor is given as Westerman.

The number AC 579 matters for reading the camp’s own newspaper. The commendation reprinted in Taborovi visti in August 1947 identifies the site as Camp 579, and the register confirms that this was the assembly-centre number of the Kastel barracks. The two records, one printed inside the camp and one compiled from occupation paperwork, are describing the same place.

The inventory closes the camp between 30 September and 31 October 1948 and lists its residents as Polish, Latvian, Estonian and stateless. That list does not name Ukrainians, although Ukrainian statistical returns count more than a thousand of them here in the same years; nationality entries in the inventory record what a given return happened to note, and a Ukrainian resident might be entered as Polish or as stateless. The surviving paperwork is held as ITS documents 82040911 to 82041331, and the Stadtarchiv Wiesbaden holds documents and photographs of the Wiesbaden camps under WI/3 Nr. 2616.

A community with schools and parishes

Alongside Cornberg, Mainz-Kastel stood out among the Ukrainian camps in Hesse for the range of institutions it sustained. It had an elementary school, a high school, vocational education, community organisations and two parishes. Their presence made it a centre for education and social life as well as accommodation.

Recent scholarship draws on a camp resident’s memoir to describe an unusually wide social spectrum: professional and political figures lived alongside agricultural and manual workers. The same study documents residence here from 1946 to 1949. Displacement had brought people with very different prewar lives into a shared community, rather than a settlement defined by one occupation.

A published obituary of a former resident records one marriage in the camp. It took place on 23 February 1946 in a church the internees had built themselves, and the bride wore a borrowed white dress that was “passed around to every small woman who was getting married”. The account is a single family recollection and cannot be checked against the camp’s own records.

The newspaper’s own account of the camp population gives about 90 per cent Ukrainians, with the great majority of institutions accordingly Ukrainian in character, and states that the camp’s minorities held posts and worked in the camp administration. Its report for the 1946/47 school year lists a kindergarten of 42 children, a primary school of five classes with 98 pupils, and a gymnasium of four classes with a matura group and 55 pupils. A drivers’ course was completed by 397 people, who then worked as drivers in the camp and for the Americans.

Performances came into the camp as well as out of it. The Ukrainian Opera Ensemble from Munich gave guest performances at Mainz-Kastel, and the paper reported that the theatre hall, which holds up to 700 spectators, was filled to the brim at all three of them. The theatre ensemble at Mainz-Kastel staged Maty-naimychka on the Mainz-Kastel stage. In the second half of October 1947 the Cultural Section and the YMCA planned a programme of events, and the camp choir prepared for a theatrical and artistic competition to be held in the IRO’s Frankfurt district at Hanau on the 25th of that month.

Residents also raised money for others. The KODUS representation at Wiesbaden-Kastel thanked all who had taken part in a collection campaign in the camp, and set out what earlier appeals had brought in: a “shock” collection held on 4 October 1946 raised 5,298 marks, and events and further collections added 5,193 marks, so that the intensified campaign in the camp yielded 10,491 marks.

The camp in its own words

On 25 August 1947 the Culture Department issued the first Taborovi visti, or Camp News. Its pages linked Ukrainian literature and historical anniversaries with cooperative business, occupational registration and emigration. A notice invited residents to contribute articles, making the publication a forum for the camp itself.

The cooperative reported shop sales of 253,367 German marks for the first half-year. Its workshops also filled residents’ orders. Such accounts reveal an organised camp economy alongside externally supplied relief.

The first issue set out what the journal was for: it was to perform for the miniature “state” of the Mainz-Kastel camp the same role that the great world press performs for great states.

Later issues describe the camp governing itself. The paper wrote that Mainz-Kastel had by then been living for several months under a regime of democratic self-government. It also recorded that, after the camp administration was taken over from UNRRA, the administration that emerged from general elections faced immediate demands in every sphere of camp life, and that the camp council adopted the camp’s first monthly budget, for July, at its meeting of 30 June 1947.

The cooperative’s later accounts add to the picture. Forty-seven camp residents found work in its production centres, the soundness of its trading allowed it to spend on general national relief purposes, and the newspaper printed its business balance sheet as at 1 October 1947.

Making the barracks liveable

A commendation reproduced in the newspaper identifies the site as Camp 579. Following the July 1947 cleaning campaign, inspectors praised its grounds, accommodation and fire precautions, and the inspection commission singled out displaced persons camp no. 579 as second for the appearance of its camp squares and living quarters, raising Mainz-Kastel to the rank of one of the cleanest camps in the Frankfurt District. Residents had removed about 700 tons of rubble. The same issue announced that the camp choir would sing on Radio Frankfurt on Tuesday 26 August from 18.30 to 19.00.

The rubble is a reminder of what the buildings had been through. Kastel lay across the river from a heavily bombed city and the barracks were nineteenth-century military accommodation pressed into use for families; clearing the site was work the residents did themselves rather than work done for them.

Rations were cut in the camp’s second autumn. The newspaper reported that the contingent of rations for workers for October 1947 would amount, for the camp together with 55 rations for the Wiesbaden hospital, to 320 rations, and that the number of people receiving a ration had been reduced by approximately 50 per cent.

The population changed over time

The four surviving figures below come from different reporting dates or series. They should not be read as a cumulative total of everybody who passed through Mainz-Kastel. The encyclopedia’s rounded 1,800 is close to the 1,797 recorded in questionnaire material, while the December 1947 return records a smaller Ukrainian community.

None of these is a count of the whole camp. Against the inventory’s recorded capacity of 1,750 places for residents of every nationality, the Ukrainian figures suggest that for a period in 1946 and 1947 Ukrainians made up a large part, though not necessarily all, of a full barracks.

Preparing for emigration

The August newspaper compared work-related migration to Belgium and the Netherlands, planned recruitment for France and individual arrangements for Canada. It treated emigration as a practical problem involving employment, documents and family eligibility—not simply a decision to board a ship.

These discussions took place while the camp still functioned. The June 1948 relief report continued to list it among the main Ukrainian centres, and memoir-based research documents residents remaining into 1949. The inventory’s closing window of September to October 1948 marks the end of the site as a registered assembly centre rather than the end of every residence there.

Emigration had its own camp institution. A Resettlement Administration was formed at the M. Kastel camp by the camp council on 2 January 1947; it resolved at its meeting of 16 July 1947 to dissolve itself and to hand its competences to the camp command. Its published statistics counted, on the principle that everyone up to the age of 65 was theoretically able to work, 720 men and 545 women, 1,235 people in all, of whom 75 per cent were agricultural workers, 10 per cent ordinary labourers, 5 per cent skilled workers and about 15 per cent members of the intellectual professions.

By the autumn the schemes had produced results. The newspaper reported that Canada had accepted the candidatures of forty camp residents, of whom 27 were accepted and had already left overseas; that France had offered very good working conditions in the mines; and that an emigration project to Australia had just been announced in the camp. It also printed a letter from the IRO director to the camp administration dated 2 October 1947.