Camp Ohio

The site before 1945

The municipal memorial describes a large compound of 26 barracks and vehicle halls on 75,000 square metres, established in 1942 as the station of the Hannover/Burgdorf fire-police detachment. The dpcamps research page gives 1943 for the same construction and names the unit as Feuerschutzpolizei-Abteilung 2 ‘Hannover’; the two dates are not reconciled here. The same page reports that in June 1944 a resistance movement involving Ukrainian members of the Burgdorf fire brigade and forced labourers in a nearby camp led to 300 arrests, with forty of those arrested sent to Neuengamme concentration camp, and that two of them later lived in Camp Ohio. It states that the participants have not been identified.

Liberation and administration

The dpcamps account records that the United States Ninth Army liberated Burgdorf on 11 April 1945 and opened Camp Ohio, and that British military authorities formally took over its management on 28 May 1945, when the area became part of the British zone under the 503 Military Government Detachment. It reports that in September 1945 more than 200 residents formally refused repatriation when they registered, writing to the camp commander to ask to be treated as stateless and eligible for emigration, and that in 1946 Soviet officers visited in search of people to repatriate. As the population grew a second camp was built opposite the first, the two being known as Camp Ohio I and Camp Ohio II. The Arolsen Archives inventory records the camp as Ukrainian, in the British zone, under Team 80, with no opening or closing date, no assembly-centre number and no capacity; its archive reference is to emigration applications and other International Tracing Service documents. A separate camp listing gives the number 2711 for Burgdorf and names Balts, Poles, Yugoslavs, Ukrainians and others. These numbering systems are not reconciled by the sources read.

Learning, work and community

Children attended the camp school: a photograph dated May 1946 shows a first-grade class seated at desks in a wooden classroom. A 2012 report of a public discussion evening in Burgdorf, drawing on a camp diary, records that the camp had a kindergarten and a school and that residents could attend an agricultural school and complete a course. A large group portrait identifies an agricultural course held from May to October 1947.

Work was visible throughout the camp. Photographs identify the clothing warehouse, a canteen, butchers, shoemakers, a tailor’s workshop, a painter, baking and embroidery classes, and residents employed by North German Timber Control. The 2012 report lists employment with Burgdorf firms, giving 275 people at the canning factory, 200 at the Tappe furniture works, 23 at the Henckel weighing-machine factory and 42 in various craft businesses, the Klauke sawmill and timber trade and Frees & Nilson. Those figures are described as forced labourers working for named firms; the report gives no dates and does not say that all of them were Camp Ohio residents, so they are not a camp employment census.

Sport, music and worship brought residents together outside work and lessons. Zaporozhets, the camp football team, appears in a photograph dated 21 January 1948. The collection also records men’s and women’s choirs, participants in the Ukrainian play Poschylys’ u durni in January 1946, a theatre production in April 1947, and a touring musical and Cossack ballet group that performed at various camps. Residents’ recollections describe Ukrainian Catholic, Baptist, Russian and Lithuanian churches, with a priest visiting regularly from the camps at Seedorf and Heidenau for Ukrainian Orthodox worshippers. Five Ukrainian Catholic priests and one Ukrainian Baptist pastor have been identified by name in that research; the 2012 report likewise records Ukrainian and Greek Catholic masses in the camp.

Beyond the fence

Camp Ohio was not the only such place in the district: the 2012 report names further camps at Heeßel, Hülptingsen, Otze and Ramlingen, which must be kept distinct from it. Children born to camp families were usually delivered at the hospital in Celle and their births registered there. Life outside the camp could also be lethal: the dpcamps page records the explosion of an ammunition dump in a disused salt mine at Hänigsen in June 1946, which killed 89 people, among them 20 displaced persons. Graves of camp residents remain in the Burgdorf cemetery on Uetzerstraße.

Leaving Burgdorf

The municipal memorial names Brazil, Australia, Great Britain, Canada and the United States among the countries where residents subsequently settled; the dpcamps account adds England, Belgium and Luxembourg. Neither gives destination-by-destination totals. Burgdorf residents sponsored the memorial in 2017.

One journey: Burgdorf, Britain, Canada

Daria Valkenburg traces her father Wasyl Makota’s journey from Camp Ohio to Britain and then Canada. He entered the camp in October 1945 and left in April 1948 through the Westward Ho! recruitment programme. Her account describes agricultural work in Scotland before mining training and employment. In Britain he also played music with other Ukrainians. He later applied to Canada and reached Halifax in June 1951. His experience shows how resettlement could involve several moves rather than a single journey from camp to permanent home.