Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne

A barracks becomes a relief centre

The compound was built between 1899 and 1901 on open ground at the eastern edge of the Neckarstadt, a generous layout for 1,080 soldiers with fourteen main buildings and a parade ground. Before the First World War it held the two infantry battalions of the 2nd Baden Grenadier Regiment Kaiser Wilhelm I No. 110, known locally as the 110ers. During that war, emergency huts on the parade ground housed prisoners of war, mostly French and Russian; the camp was laid out for more than 23,500 men and had its own church, a library and numerous workshops. After the demilitarisation imposed in 1919 the barracks were used mainly for civilian housing, and the Wehrmacht only returned in 1936.

The American authorities established a centre there on 30 March 1945 for displaced people from Mannheim and northern Baden. At the end of the war the city contained at least 20,000 displaced people, predominantly eastern European forced labourers, and about 19,000 were still in Mannheim in 1946. Those are citywide estimates, not the barracks population. The city archive’s own information panel states that in 1945 and 1946 the barracks accommodated more than 5,000 forced labourers and deportees of the Nazi regime, mainly from eastern Europe, which is a figure for this site.

The centre’s early task was to provide accommodation and organise departures in a damaged city. Returning people to their countries required transport and supplies on a large scale, and as many as 2,000 people a day were sent home. Relief arrangements also had to serve those who remained, including people unwilling to return to Soviet rule. The barracks were not the only such accommodation in Mannheim: the city archive names the Lüttich-Kaserne on Ulmenweg among the collective quarters, and the camp inventory records further entries at Neckarstadt, Käfertal, Sandhofen and a technical school.

A privately compiled garrison list names the units quartered in the barracks during the Second World War: the staff and I. Battalion of Artillerie-Regiment 69, together with a medical detachment and a Wehrmacht welfare officer. The list covers the military years only.

The September 1945 crisis

On 6 September 1945, 600 Soviet Ukrainian displaced people at Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne resisted a planned return transport. An archival study by Wolfgang Jacobmeyer describes physical resistance and threats of suicide. American officers postponed the departure for four days. UNRRA observers recorded intense relief at this short reprieve.

This episode shows why departure cannot always be treated as a willing homecoming. For the people involved, even a delay mattered. The source establishes the protest and postponement; it does not provide a complete account of what happened to every member of that group afterwards.

A mixed camp and a search for relatives

By March 1946, Latvian tracing notices used the address Mannheim DP Camp, Latvian Group, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne. These small newspaper entries connect the barracks to the practical effort to locate missing relatives after wartime separation. A Latvian camp list dated 1 May 1946 records the camp as entry number 146, “Mannheim 17a. Latvian Camp, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne pie Reinas”, placing the Latvian camp at the barracks in postal district 17a on the Rhine. The camp inventory separately records Latvian and Ukrainian residents under assembly-centre identifiers 694 and 695, with no capacity figure. A distinct Latvian camp with a capacity of 1,200 was opened elsewhere in Mannheim in February 1947 and ran until January 1949; it is a different entry and its figures do not apply here.

Team 23 at Mannheim under the director recorded as Tomasek and, from November 1946, Area Team 1001 appear in the administrative record. The inventory dates reflect a shorter organisational entry than the whole centre’s history: the city’s historical publication still reports 960 displaced people in the barracks in 1948. The difference is why an inventory closing range is not used here as proof that everyone had left.

How many of the residents were Ukrainian is not recorded for the barracks. Stebelsky’s tabulation of Ukrainians in American-zone camps gives Mannheim 560 in the questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947 and 576 in the UNRRA return of 31 May 1947, with nothing in the two other columns. That row names the town and covers every Mannheim camp, so it cannot be read as a count for this building. Nothing has been traced about a Ukrainian school, church or association at the barracks, and that gap is real rather than a matter of unread sources.

The surviving site

The United States Army named the barracks after Sergeant Samuel J. Turley, killed near Metz in 1944, and the city archive counts Turley Barracks among Mannheim’s important American installations from 1947 to 2007. The private University of Maryland ran its European campus there from 1994. The site was handed back in 2007 and purchased by Mannheim’s development company in 2012.

Its redevelopment combines housing, work and community uses around the protected historic barracks and tree-lined courtyard, across a planning area of 12.6 hectares. This surviving urban setting makes the camp’s location identifiable even though its purpose has changed completely.