Reinhardt-Kaserne

A camp in a damaged city

The former military buildings stood at the junction of Reuttier Straße and Finninger Straße. They were built in 1934 and later became known as Nelson Barracks. Neu-Ulm’s Ukrainian parish history records the accommodation of refugees after the war and the transfer of the installation to the US Army in 1951.

The surrounding city had suffered six air raids between March 1944 and March 1945. The Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte reconstruction atlas estimates 70 per cent destruction overall and records temporary accommodation in barracks and camps. Its figure of 4,000 people concerns the wider accommodation system, not the Ukrainian population of Reinhardt-Kaserne alone.

Ludendorff-Kaserne, built two years later on open ground at Memminger Straße, took a different path: it served first as a discharge and transit camp for German prisoners of war and then, from October 1946, as the town’s Jewish camp. The two installations went to the Americans together in 1951 and became Nelson Barracks, named for Sergeant William L. Nelson of the 60th Infantry Regiment, and Wiley Barracks.

The camp in the inventory

The inventory gives the camp its administrative outline. Reinhardt-Kaserne appears from its first listing on 24 January 1946, with a capacity of 2,000 entered against 31 October 1947, the assembly centre number AC 94-294 replaced in September 1948 by the IRO designation S 503, and a closing date between 31 March and 30 September 1951. It was served by UNRRA Team 165 Leipheim, with a team director recorded as Robertson and a field supervisor recorded as Brooke, under Area Teams 1061 Leipheim and 1062 Augsburg in Area 5, Augsburg.

The same team ran a compact group of camps along the upper Danube: the airfield camp at Leipheim, the Latvian camp at Kleinkötz, another at Lauingen, the Lithuanian camp in the Ludwig barracks and the Polish camp in the Luitpold barracks at Dillingen, the hospital at Günzburg, and the Jewish camp in the Ludendorff barracks across the town. At 2,000 places, Reinhardt-Kaserne was the second largest of them after Dillingen’s Luitpold barracks.

Its papers were dispersed at the time and remain so. The Arolsen Archives hold lists and change reports for Neu-Ulm; the Staatsarchiv Augsburg holds an OMGUS file on displaced persons in the Neu-Ulm district for 1946 and 1947; and the Stadtarchiv Neu-Ulm holds copies of camp papers taken from the Archives nationales in Paris and from the United Nations Archives.

How many Ukrainians

Stebelsky’s table of Ukrainians in the camps of the American zone records Neu Ulm at town level rather than barracks by barracks. Its four columns give 1,931 in the questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947, 2,051 in August 1946, 1,985 in May 1947 and 1,714 in December 1947: a large and remarkably steady Ukrainian population, and one of the biggest in Bavaria.

The Jewish camp on the other side of the town is separately documented, and its figures do not overlap: 1,699 in September 1946, 1,762 in November, 1,766 in February 1947, 1,747 in July, 1,654 in September, 1,672 in January 1948, 1,322 in May and 1,391 in March 1949, under a camp leader named Josef Schachter, with a camp hospital and a training camp for Haganah soldiers. The Ukrainians counted at Neu Ulm therefore belong overwhelmingly to Reinhardt-Kaserne, whose 2,000 places they came close to filling.

The community outlasted the camp’s peak. A Ukrainian newspaper reported in 1950 that about 800 Ukrainians were living in the Sedan barracks in Ulm and another 900 in private accommodation nearby, and that Reinhardt-Kaserne in Neu-Ulm held a substantial Ukrainian camp. A notice of 1951 recorded 250 new dwellings under construction in the town to move foreigners out of barracks and into permanent housing.

A newspaper begins inside the camp

The newspaper Ukrainski visti began in Neu-Ulm in 1945. A library bibliography identifies the initial publisher as Ukrainian Camp and records surviving copies of the first five numbers. The modest camp imprint became the beginning of a much longer émigré publishing history.

A letter written in 1946 gives an editorial address directly in the Ukrainian DP camp at Reinhardt-Kaserne. That correspondence connects the publication to this particular barracks, rather than merely to the town. It also shows how a newspaper office could function as a contact address for displaced people whose location might change again.

By February 1948 the newspaper’s imprint directed subscriptions and editorial correspondence to Ludwigstraße 10 in Neu-Ulm. It advertised group subscriptions and a 20 per cent discount for distributors. The printed authorisation referred to the European Command’s Civil Affairs Division and 14 July 1947. These details show a publication operating through subscriptions, distribution and formal licensing beyond the original camp address.

The paper’s own imprint, repeated at the foot of the last page of each issue, reads “В-во й редакція: Н. Ульм, український табір. РЕДАГУЄ КОЛЕГІЯ.” — publisher and editorial office at the Ukrainian camp in Neu-Ulm, edited by a collective rather than by a named editor.

A publishing house, a theatre and a literary movement

The newspaper brought a literary world with it. Ivan Bahriany, who set the political direction of Ukrainski visti, settled in Neu-Ulm and lived there until his death in 1963. The town’s Prometei press issued his Tyhrolovy in 1946–47 and his children’s books in 1948, alongside work by Iurii Kosach, Semen Pidhainy, Todos Osmachka and others, and the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party used Neu-Ulm as its publishing address.

MUR, the Artistic Ukrainian Movement, met in the town three times. Its fifth executive meeting was held at Neu-Ulm on 3 June 1946; its second congress there on 15 and 16 March 1947, at which Ulas Samchuk and Yurii Sherekh kept their positions and Iurii Kosach was re-elected to the executive; and its seventh executive meeting the following day.

Neu-Ulm also had the most notable of the conservative Ukrainian camp theatres. Rozvaha, founded by Iosyp Mandzenko-Siry, was among the first Ukrainian theatres in post-war western Germany; a participant’s later account dates the start of its activity to autumn 1945. It put on more than 200 performances, counting those given outside the camp. Beyond the standard repertory of everyday life it staged Lesia Ukrainka’s Boiarynia and Lisova pisnia, Mykola Kulish’s Myna Mazailo, Max Halbe’s The River and two plays by Iurii Kosach, Obloha and Zozulyna dacha — difficult pieces, put on by amateurs. The emigration of its leading members ended it.

The camp newspaper records an earlier hall. For the Christmas holidays of 1945 a theatre was built out of a ruined former military sports hall, by joint effort and with UNRRA support, with an auditorium for up to 1,000 spectators. The paper reported three performances there by the camp’s own Theatre Studio during the Christmas days.

Part of a wider Ukrainian network

In June 1948 the Ukrainian American relief committee placed Reinhardtkaserne first in its selective list of main American-zone camps. Its inclusion locates the camp within organised transatlantic relief work. The same report lists other major centres in Augsburg, Dillingen, Mittenwald, Regensburg and Bayreuth.

The history of Neu-Ulm also includes a camp postal service established in autumn 1949 after transfers from other Ukrainian settlements. That postal account names Neu-Ulm at town level; it does not justify assigning every later postal item or arriving family to Reinhardt-Kaserne.

A later philatelic account describes the stamps themselves. The group that had organised the camp post at Bayreuth took up the work at the new Neu Ulm settlement, and had the Bayreuth set of stamps and its souvenir sheet overprinted for it; the stamps were used for the last time in June 1950. That account also names the settlement at town level.

The camp’s surviving records

A substantial administrative archive survived the camp. The 1982 research guide identifies Reinhardt-Kaserne files for 1947–1951 in the International Refugee Organisation holdings of the French National Archives. Its contents cover army inspections, administration, refugee employment, health, family matters, movements, resettlement and transport. The listed subjects demonstrate the breadth of the surviving record, without revealing the decisions in individual files.

The guide sets the arrangement out carton by carton. One carton holds descriptions of typical refugee installations for 1947 to 1950, Reinhardt-Kaserne among them; the next opens the camp’s own archive for 1947 to 1951; a third carries the subject headings — army inspection reports, camp administration, refugee employment, camp police, legal questions such as marriages and divorces, medical questions, movements of refugees, resettlement and repatriation, supply and transport, and the Ukrainian emblem from the camp director’s office; and a fourth continues under the heading Welfare, a very general rubric taking in eligibility, transfer to the German economy, the organisation of sports and leisure, social work and the care of children. A separate file on Reinhardt-Kaserne runs from November 1947 to April 1951.

The guide even records a Ukrainian emblem from the camp director’s office. Alongside the newspaper’s changing addresses, this surviving object connects the official machinery of the camp with the national identity of the community it housed.

From refugee accommodation to a new garrison

The Ukrainian parish’s building history places the US Army takeover of Reinhardt-Kaserne in 1951 and the end of its American military use in 1991. Later conversion brought offices and public services into the former accommodation buildings. This reuse should be distinguished from nearby Ludendorff-Kaserne, whose later American name was Wiley.

The camp and the press followed different timelines. A 1951 end to refugee accommodation in the barracks did not end Ukrainian publishing in Neu-Ulm. Later bibliographies continue to record the newspaper under Neu-Ulm addresses. A camp institution could move into the town and outlive the housing arrangements in which it had begun.

The buildings are still in use. The Americans left in the middle of 1991, and the converted accommodation blocks at Reuttier Straße now hold the tax office, the police, the fire service, the technical inspection authority, businesses and clubs. On the Wiley site, eighty hectares of it, there is now a housing district and the Neu-Ulm university of applied sciences.

Ukrainian life in Neu-Ulm outlasted the camps themselves. A comparative study of Ukrainian migration and diaspora formation records that after the camps were dissolved and Ukrainians were dispersed across Germany, community life remained possible only in settlements such as Munich and Neu-Ulm. The study does not say how large the Neu-Ulm community then was.

The camp in the newspaper's own chronicle

The weekly carried a chronicle of the camp. It reported the feast of St Michael the Archangel celebrated with particular solemnity by the Ukrainians of the camp, and on the evening of the same day a solemn memorial service for the 359 Ukrainian soldiers killed at Bazar on 22 November 1921. On Sunday 25 November an academy was held in the camp to honour the memory of the heroes of Bazar. On 23 December an assembly of farmers in the camp founded a professional union of Ukrainian farmers. On 30 December 1945 a general assembly of the camp’s women founded a women’s organisation and elected its leadership.

A committee for the care of the disabled in the Novyi Ulm camp announced a voluntary collection taken on the third day of the Christmas holidays, for the purchase of prostheses and aid to the disabled, which raised 3,007 Reichsmarks and 80 pfennigs. A People’s University was opened in the camp, its stated aim to reach all who wished to advance their learning in one or another branch of knowledge. On the initiative of farmers and agricultural specialists a farmers’ association was founded at the camp; it ran beekeeping courses regularly attended by 49 people and agriculture courses attended on average by 18.

On Wednesday 12 December 1945 the literary circle of the camp held an author’s evening of the poet Yuriy Klen, and on 27 December an author’s evening of the poet Ivan Bahrianyi, a member of the MUR writers’ association. Readings by the poet Yar Slavutych and the fabulist Ivan Manylo followed at the camp’s traditional literary Wednesday on 16 January 1946. On 21 and 22 November 1945 residents had their first opportunity to hear the ’Ukraina’ choir, and during the Epiphany days a chapel of bandura players gave three concerts in the overcrowded camp theatre, which the paper says held over 1,000 spectators. An artistic society was founded in the camp on 14 March 1946.

The paper reported the camp’s official machinery as well. After an inspection on 5 December 1945, Lieutenant-General Guaite concluded that the Neu-Ulm camp was in good condition and well organised; the inspection took place in the presence of the local UNRRA administrator Ritfeld, Lieutenants Stott and Stewart, and the camp’s deputy director. Elections to the camp court were held on 21 January 1946, more than a thousand people took part, and UNRRA appointed the court’s president. A camp radio station began operating on 11 March 1946, a chess section had existed at the camp club since February and numbered up to sixty members, and fifteen people attended the founding meeting of a professional union of journalists and writers of Novyi Ulm and Ulm on 9 March. The paper urged readers to prepare to elect a camp council, and asserted that the camp had been held to be the most united and disciplined, free of regional and political enmity.

The camp converted to steam heating although the German engineers who surveyed the system had declared that it would not work; the paper reported that all the blocks were then heated. A letter from Canada was printed, whose writer asked that her sincere greetings be conveyed to all the Ukrainians of the camp, and wrote of trying to help them reach a country of true democracy.