Mattenberg Camp

A settlement built for industry

The Hessische Heimstätte and the city of Kassel planned Mattenberg for workers at the Henschel aircraft-engine factory. Construction of a first stage designed for 1,000 flats began in 1937, with mainly two-storey houses containing four dwellings each. Only about 600 of the planned 3,000 homes were completed. The local chronicle dates the expropriation of the Dönche for a troop training ground and the building of the settlement to the same year, and records that several farmers had to be resettled.

The forced-labour camp

From 1940 the site also served forced labour, and the barrack camp beside the settlement became probably the second largest foreign workers’ camp in wartime Kassel. A study of the city’s large camps records more than 6,000 people housed at one time in 54 barracks, from the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Italy, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, Alsace and Lorraine, who had to work at the Henschel aero-engine works at Altenbauna on the site of today’s Volkswagen plant at Baunatal. The camp had its own kindergarten caring for more than 400 children, and Soviet prisoners of war were held separately in fenced green barracks. Despite bomb damage the camp was used until the end of the war.

American troops reached Oberzwehren on 1 April 1945 after heavy street fighting, and Kassel capitulated three days later. Local history records that German occupants were ordered to leave the Mattenberg settlement that year and were allowed back only in 1949.

The assembly centre

The catalogue entry for the main camp opens on 14 December 1945 and closes on 27 June 1949. It records a capacity of 3,600 and a headcount of 2,965 on 31 October 1947, the assembly-centre number AC 540, the later designation K 109, and UNRRA Team 77 Kassel-Oberzwehren under the Kassel area teams and the Frankfurt am Main area office. Its recorded nationalities are Polish, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian and Yugoslav, with no Ukrainian entry. A third Oberzwehren unit, a control centre, was recorded from July 1947.

Neither the capacity nor the headcount is a Ukrainian figure, and neither belongs to the transient unit described below. Other Kassel camps in the same catalogue, including the Jewish camp at Hasenhecke in Wolfsanger and the Baltic camp in the Junkers barracks at Bettenhausen, are separate records with their own numbers, and their figures should not be read across to Mattenberg.

School, worship and an evening at the cinema

Contemporary photographs preserve a community making daily routines in provisional surroundings. One wooden communal building served as a school, a place of worship and a cinema, and a photograph shows people leaving after a film. Other images record informal gatherings and the ordinary work of obtaining supplies. A 1948 photograph, described by the institution that exhibited it, documents collection of the weekly firewood ration. The photographs also reflect a Lithuanian cultural community and a literary magazine produced in the barracks; these activities describe Mattenberg’s mixed social setting rather than an exclusively Ukrainian institution.

The photographer, a Lithuanian who lived at Mattenberg from 1947 to 1949 before emigrating to the United States, later became a well-known film-maker, and 36 of his photographs of the camp were shown in Kassel during documenta 14 in 2017. In 1948 a second Protestant congregation was formed in the settlement, which indicates how far the site had become a place of settled residence rather than a transit point.

A correspondent writing from Mattenberg in 1946 for Chuzhynoiu, the paper of the educational department of the nearby Cornberg camp, described a camp of more than 400 Ukrainians in which cultural and educational work among the young had developed quickly from the beginning of that year. He gave as an example the well-organised teaching in self-education circles: young people whose general schooling was for the most part slight were studying the history, literature and geography of Ukraine with enthusiasm. Commemorative academies had been held on 10 March, the eighty-fifth anniversary of Taras Shevchenko’s death, and on 25 February, the seventy-fifth anniversary of Lesia Ukrainka’s birth, with about 500 Ukrainians of the camp taking part; after the papers were read a choir of camp residents sang and reciters performed, and the drama and choral circles were preparing a large concert for Easter. The writer, O. Kolomiiets, added that Ukrainian life at Mattenberg was settling down from day to day and that the camp’s residents were much indebted to the Ukrainians of Cornberg, who willingly helped them.

The linked transient camp

The transient unit’s catalogue entry begins on 17 October 1947 and lists Polish, Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian residents. It records a capacity of 600 and a headcount of 686 on 31 October 1947, so at the end of that month its recorded population exceeded its stated capacity. The same entry places its closure between 31 October 1947 and 30 January 1948 and notes that it was linked to K 109 Mattenberg. That short interval cannot be treated as the closure of the whole settlement, which the main record carries into 1949.

For Ukrainians the only separate count traced is Stebelsky’s Table 7 for the American zone, where Kassel (Mattenberg) shows 12 in the UNRRA return of 31 May 1947 and nothing in the other three columns. That is a small figure beside the hundreds recorded at Korbach or Landau in the same table, and it predates the transient unit by five months.

From temporary accommodation to a city neighbourhood

Local history records that former German occupants could return to their homes in 1949. In the 1950s the settlement housed resettlers and people without homes, and the study of the wartime camps records that displaced people, the homeless, refugees and expellees moved into the barracks used as emergency accommodation, while Sinti and Roma set up a caravan site on the upper part of the Mattenberg. The site passed into city ownership in the early 1950s.

The wooden barracks continued in emergency residential use. The remaining ten were removed in 1968, burned down in a controlled operation by the professional fire brigade after their residents had been allocated social housing. This later clearance belongs to the site’s housing history, well beyond the short-lived transient unit.