DP-Camp B, Ammerländer Heerstraße

Forced-labour camps on the road, 1939 to 1945

The first camp on the road was in the Krückeberg inn at Ammerländer Heerstraße 120, used from September 1939 to May 1940 as a residential camp for 150 Polish civilian workers and from 1940 as a prisoner-of-war camp for French and Soviet prisoners, with about 300 held there at the end of the war. Further out, the building firm Dieks & Kuhlmann put up a barrack at the end of August 1940 on its land by the Wechloy railway crossing, at Ammerländer Heerstraße 209, for Polish and Eastern workers; by November 1941 the firm applied for a second hut because of heavy overcrowding.

In June 1941, at the instigation of the chamber of industry and commerce, a communal camp for the city’s tradesmen was built on the Dieks & Kuhlmann premises at Ammerländer Heerstraße 211. It held about 200 Polish and Eastern workers. A post-war survey found 180 occupants, though it is unclear whether this referred to the firm camp, the communal camp or both. A city information board at nearby Prinzessinweg today names the communal camp at number 211 among the labour camps that lined the route of the wartime bypass road, the largest construction project in Oldenburg under National Socialism, whose unfinished section between Ammerländer Heerstraße and Hauptstraße was routed over Prinzessinweg after forced labourers had repaired the carriageway.

Hoffmann’s register of the city’s community and firm camps names the man in charge of the communal camp at Ammerländer Heerstraße 211: its Lagerführer was called Loof. The Prinzessinweg board sets the road’s camps in the wider figures for the city, recording that in 1945 more than 12,000 foreign people were held in the Oldenburg labour-office district, of whom nearly 7,000 were in the sixty camps of the city itself, the largest of them on Rennplatzstraße with room for more than 4,000.

A mixed DP camp after liberation

Canadian and British troops occupied Oldenburg in May 1945 and the foreign workers in the city were freed. UNRRA Team 146 set up a reception centre in an old beer hall in May 1945, where DPs arriving in the region were registered, examined and assigned to an assembly camp. An UNRRA welfare report records the position on 1 June 1945: the camp at Ammerländer Heerstraße held 273 people and was one of two camps described as mixed, the other being Unterm Berg with 1,020. Most of the city’s 8,540 DPs at that date were Soviet citizens at Ohmstede and Italians in the Hindenburg barracks.

Repatriation emptied the city’s camps through the summer of 1945; the British military government counted 3,970 foreigners in seven camps at the end of September, and on 1 November only 1,376 foreigners lived in Oldenburg. The arrival of Baltic DPs in the city’s transit camps then raised the numbers again. A list sent by the city housing office to the Oldenburg interior ministry on 20 May 1946 records about 400 people at a camp at Ammerländer Heerstraße 81, about 60 Latvians in a barrack at the corner of Ammerländer Heerstraße and Prinzessinweg, and about 37 people in a house at Ammerländer Heerstraße 60. The camp at number 81 and the wartime camps at numbers 209 and 211 carry different addresses.

The inventory’s nationality line, with Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians in the majority and Poles, Ukrainians and Russians also present, is attached to every lettered Oldenburg camp and describes the group of camps rather than this one alone. The inventory gives no opening or closing date and no capacity for DP-Camp B. Oldenburg as a whole was recorded under assembly centres 223 and 224 with about 5,000 residents, mostly Balts and Poles.

Camp life as reported for the city

The UNRRA reports describe conditions for the Oldenburg camps collectively. In early August 1945 the team noted shortages of food for children and nursing mothers, of infant clothing and of hygiene articles, and reported that the barrack camps were dilapidated, overcrowded and lacking windows, doors and heating for the coming winter; 45 tons of clothing had already been distributed. The same reports mention a weekly Lithuanian newspaper, scout groups, dances and concerts in the national camps, three schools for Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian children, and evening English classes for adults preparing to emigrate.

Into the 1950s

The camps at Ohmstede, Sandplatz, Unterm Berg and Ammerländer Heerstraße, together with Wehnen outside the city, continued beyond the founding of the Federal Republic into the 1950s. Responsibility for the remaining DPs passed to the German authorities on 30 June 1950.