Niederlahnstein

The barracks before 1945

The site was built for the rearmament of the Wehrmacht: two barracks of thirteen and ten and a half hectares, begun on 1 September 1937 and completed on 13 November 1938, named after the artillery generals Adolf von Deines and Georg Bruchmüller. An artillery regiment staff moved in that November, and the barracks also held a veterinary hospital for army horses. Air raids killed at least eight soldiers, destroyed the drill hall and badly damaged an accommodation building and the armourer’s shop. American troops occupied the barracks on 27 March 1945.

A barracks camp beside Koblenz

The Niederlahnstein camp was separate from Gneisenau-Kaserne in Horchheim and Augusta-Kaserne in Pfaffendorf. In April 1945 the occupation authorities allocated different national groups to these compounds; the initial list described the Bruchmüller barracks as accommodation for Russians. Later accounts show how quickly its population changed.

The complex contained about forty substantial, multi-storey blocks. Ten served displaced people and another handled transit, while the French army used the remainder. Converted outbuildings held two chapels, stores and a police post. Repairs gradually transformed damaged accommodation, and an October 1948 inspection described a garden and an improved camp shop.

An early and unsympathetic outside view survives. The British head of the Hanau displaced-persons camp recorded that Italians were sent from Hanau to Niederlahnstein from late May 1945 on their way to Italy, and that a rumour was going round Hanau that Niederlahnstein was a bad camp. Visiting on 19 June he found it holding 6,700 people, run by American military rather than civilians, and clean, but its army atmosphere unpleasant; on 2 July he noted that residents could only go out with a pass. Some of those transferred from Hanau made their own way back.

Arrivals and a changing population

Polish transports from Frankfurt arrived on 15 June 1945, followed by former forced labourers from Hanau and Limburg. Within days the Polish group numbered 3,352. Overcrowding left some arrivals in garages, attics and corridors. These movements were transfers between places of refuge inside Germany, before any later journey to a home country or an overseas destination.

Most of the June 1945 arrivals had come from the Römerstadt and Sachsenhausen camps, and the transports were organised by the Americans with British cooperation. Poles were not the only group: Italians, French, Belgians, Dutch, Czechs and Estonians arrived too, and the Italians, more than 3,500 of them, had already taken the better buildings. Antagonism under the first British administration was sharpest with the Italians, and in mid-September 1945 they were moved to other centres, wrecking many rooms as they went. The Poles then overhauled the barracks: roofs repaired, rooms repainted, windows fitted, a field altar and theatre stage completed, and a chapel brought into use in October, with the Polish scouts prominent in the work. The papal nuncio visited at the beginning of November 1945 and the camp chaplain, Father Jurga, led the service in the new chapel.

Further residents arrived when the Lebach camp closed in March 1947. Its remaining Polish population was moved to Bad Kreuznach and Niederlahnstein. That transfer belongs to the reorganisation of camps in the French occupation zone as the Saar’s administrative position changed.

Who administered the camp

The first camp administration was British, under a lieutenant colonel. The camp was then assigned to the northern area of the French occupation zone with a French colonel as commandant and a liaison officer who worked closely with the Polish camp administration, while UNRRA took charge of relief. The French supported most of the Polish cultural and economic initiatives, and Polish accounts single out the care given to children’s education and health. The French military department responsible for supplying and administering the region’s camps, known as the PDR, was itself based at Niederlahnstein.

Schools, worship and shared meals

The Polish community organised a kindergarten, school, choir and theatre group. Its Polonia football club began on 28 June 1945. More than a hundred scouts took part in camp life, divided into troops including two for girls; young people helped in workshops and meal services, although relief staff objected to work by minors. Boys were generally employed in the joinery making toys, in the shoemaker’s workshop and in the kitchen, girls in the sewing room and serving meals in the canteen. The surviving dining-room photograph shows children and adults sharing long communal tables.

Scouting here was not self-contained. From June 1945 the troops in the camps around Koblenz were run from the Gniezno camp at Horchheim, and the Gneisenau theatre troupe gave a guest performance at Niederlahnstein in July 1945. The camp’s population divided into recognisable groups: young people from small towns and villages, Home Army soldiers who arrived straight from prisoner-of-war camps, and survivors of concentration camps who were mostly ill and exhausted, many of whom died in the local hospital.

Illness often required treatment outside the barracks. The St Joseph hospital at Niederlahnstein was requisitioned for serious cases and operations from the Gneisenau camp as well. Koblenz archival research identifies Niederlahnstein residents among the patients of the Kemperhof hospital: between 1947 and 1950 that hospital recorded 403 foreign patients, nearly all from the three barracks camps. This places Niederlahnstein within a wider network of care rather than treating it as an isolated settlement.

Different communities, different counts

The counts that survive answer different questions. A visiting British camp director put the whole population at 6,700 in June 1945; the Polish community alone reached 3,352 within three days of the first transport; and by the end of 1946, after the number of Poles in the French zone had fallen by nearly 70 per cent, fewer than 1,500 people were left at Niederlahnstein, which was why the Allies began consolidating the Polish camps. For 307 people in the Koblenz municipal database the barracks were the first recorded place of accommodation.

The Ukrainian population estimate concerns Ukrainians specifically. Separate Jewish buildings operated for a much shorter period, from December 1946 to June 1947. Most of their residents soon moved to the American occupation zone. The declining Jewish figures below therefore describe one community’s departure, not the closure of the entire Niederlahnstein camp.

Departure and closure

Repatriation split the Polish community: people from territories now inside the Soviet Union faced different choices from those whose homes remained in Poland, and the lists of those willing to return produced visible divisions. Children left in December 1945, 54 of school age and ten from the kindergarten, with further family transports in 1946. A train of nearly twenty goods wagons left on 30 June 1946 under American infantry escort, because those travelling feared looting by the Red Army; it went by way of Offenburg and reached Moravská Ostrava on 5 July. Trains from Niederlahnstein were routed towards the Swiss border and then through Austria and Czechoslovakia to avoid the Soviet occupation zone.

The end of the camp is dated differently by different sources. A German account gives 1948 as the closing year, while research in French records dates the evacuation of the residential camp to August 1949 and of the transit camp to that autumn. French occupation troops had in any case begun taking the barracks over from 1947, renaming them after General Billotte, and the site passed to the Bundeswehr in July 1956. Twenty-four former residents of the camp lie in a grave field of their own in the Niederlahnstein cemetery.