Munster-Lager

The barracks before 1945

Munster was a village of 470 people on the Lueneburg Heath in 1891. A troop camp was then laid out about 1.5 kilometres from the village centre, beside the railway running from Bremen through Soltau to Uelzen, and was first occupied in June 1893 by an Oldenburg infantry regiment. The place grew around the camp, and the name Munster-Lager attached itself to the whole settlement.

Detention was part of the site’s history long before 1945. In the First World War about 21,000 prisoners of war were held there, the first 1,200 of them British soldiers brought from northern France in September 1914. In the 1930s the neighbouring Breloh ground was rebuilt as an army chemical-weapons testing station, and the Army Weapons Office moved part of its work there from Berlin in March 1945.

Refuge in a military landscape

After 1945 the extensive military sites served several purposes at once. The British set up the largest discharge camp for captured Wehrmacht soldiers in Germany here; about 1.7 million prisoners of war are said to have been processed home through Munster and Breloh, and in July 1946 the first 2,000 prisoners returned under the Seagull scheme arrived at what was then the central transit and distribution camp of the British zone. The displaced-persons camp sheltered Ukrainians in the same locality. These populations had entirely different status and reasons for being there.

The barrack camps were named by the British with letters of the alphabet. Some of them stood until the 1960s, when they were pulled down, by which time the town no longer wished to be called Munster-Lager. The local military history describes a Ukrainian camp of about 1,600 people during 1945 to 1949, and independently compiled Ukrainian returns are of the same order while showing that numbers changed.

The barracks landscape gave the camp ground enough for meetings that drew competitors from across the zone. The Almanac of the Ukrainian Council for Physical Culture, published at Munich in 1951, reproduces a photograph of the flag being raised at the British zone athletics championships held at Munsterlager on 21 and 22 September 1946, and a second photograph, captioned simply “Athletics meeting at Munsterlager (1946)”, of runners finishing on a churned track in front of a crowd held back by a rope.

A changing Ukrainian population

The 1946 and 1947 questionnaire survey recorded 1,529 Ukrainians. The dated returns then show 1,682 in May 1947, 1,374 in December 1947 and 988 in July 1949, after which the table’s columns for December 1950 and August 1951 are blank, meaning no return rather than nobody left. Each figure is a snapshot; they do not measure all the people who passed through the camp.

A separate count made by the United Ukrainian American Relief Committee gives 1,809 Ukrainians in the Munster district on 30 June 1948, all of them in camps. The two compilations used different sources and different reporting units, so they sit alongside one another rather than correcting one another.

Munster-Lager remained important enough to appear in the same committee’s list of the ten main British-zone camps on 30 June 1948. The original directory gives the camp number and district, providing a contemporary link between the community and its administrative location.

Sport at the camp was organised in a society of its own. The same almanac’s chapter on football reproduces a photograph of the first eleven of the Ukrainian sports society Sich of Munsterlager in 1947 and names them: in the first row, from the left, P. Mirykiv, M. Motuzenko, M. Kovalchuk, D. Palaida, E. Motolych, V. Shevchenko, M. Zykharkiv and B. Khomyn, with the society’s chairman, the engineer I. Manastyrsky; in the second row, D. Vulchyn, V. Korol and N. Khydra.

A parish through the postwar years

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox congregation recorded baptisms, marriages and funerals during 1945 to 1949. Its register also retained affidavits about earlier ceremonies and government-issued certificates. Documents that families carried or reconstructed before emigration became part of the parish record.

The surviving papers are arranged in five series: church correspondence and records, financial records, relief aid distribution records, the combined register book, and census records. They are written in Ukrainian, German, English, Serbo-Croatian and Polish, which is itself a measure of how many administrations a parish had to deal with. The relief distribution records show the congregation acting as a channel for aid as well as for sacraments.

The same surviving volume contains entries from the separate Fallingbostel Emigration Centre for 1948 to 1950, and the collection’s census record of 14 July 1950 belongs to Fallingbostel. The collection’s finding aid suggests that the two parishes may have shared clergy. The volume connects their surviving paperwork without demonstrating that the camps were one institution or that every resident followed the same route.

Children’s education and onward journeys

Primary schooling continued amid displacement. The University of Manitoba’s archival biography of a former pupil records education at Munster-Lager and Fallingbostel between 1946 and 1950, before settlement in Canada. This supplies a concrete example of schooling continuing through more than one camp.

The 1948 relief report also records a wider British-zone network of schools, colleges, kindergartens and vocational teaching, together with a breakdown of the Ukrainian workforce in which farmers and labourers far outnumbered every profession. Munster-Lager belonged to the network of communities served by this relief organisation; the zone-wide totals should not be read as figures for this camp alone.

The end of the camp period

The local history dates the Ukrainian DP camp to 1945 and 1949, consistent with the parish entries ending in 1949 and the July 1949 population return.

Munster’s later military installations followed a separate chronology. The town became a Bundeswehr garrison in 1956 and grew into the largest in the country, while British stationed forces kept their own garrison there until 1993. The wooden barrack camps of the displaced-persons years had gone by then.