DP-Camp F, Ohmstede

The Eastern-worker transit camp on the racecourse

In 1942 the Organisation Todt built 45 wooden barracks on the racecourse in a first phase, with more added a year later; the Stadtmuseum counts 43 barracks. The complex was designed as the Ostarbeiter-Durchgangslager Ohmstede, a transit camp for up to 3,000 women and men brought from the East for forced labour, and it served the regional labour office as its central distribution point: workers were passed on from here to farms, industry and municipalities across the Oldenburg region. The camp had a sick bay, a maternity barrack, a delousing station, wash-houses and showers, a large kitchen block and an arrest barrack. Each residential barrack was meant for 75 people in three rooms of 25. The site was fenced with wire and guarded by civilians, and the district labour office administered it.

In April 1944 the camp registered 1,694 foreigners, of whom 1,205 were male and 435 female Eastern workers and 54 were Poles; by May 1944 there were 2,112, and towards the end of the war the camp held almost 4,000 people. Some 40,000 people are estimated to have passed through it. More than 324 people died in the camp, most of them in a typhus epidemic in 1944; about thirty further deaths came in an Allied bombing raid on 17 April 1945, though the sources differ on whether these were camp inmates or prisoners of the adjoining prisoner-of-war camp. Of the dead, 111 were children, many of them not yet three years old, among them infants born in the camp’s maternity barrack. They were buried in a mass grave at the western end of the Ohmstede parish cemetery, which is now a memorial with an Orthodox cross and plaques in four languages.

Baltic people were already present in the camp before the end of the war. A Latvian police unit of about a thousand men arrived in October 1944 with their weapons, horses and vehicles, some with their families; in January 1945 the regional labour office complained that transports of Latvian refugees, around 800 old people, infants and large families, had left the camp useless for labour allocation and closed to other transports.

Liberation and the DP camp

Canadian troops entered Oldenburg in the first days of May 1945 and reached the camp on 3 May. At that moment a mixed population of many nationalities was living in the more than forty barracks, and the Rennplatz camp turned from a transit camp into a reception and assembly camp for DPs. UNRRA Team 146 opened a registration and reception centre for the city in an old beer hall; Heuzeroth records that the British military government administered the Rennplatz camp itself until UNRRA took it over. An UNRRA welfare report gives the position on 1 June 1945: Ohmstede, listed as the Russian camp, held 3,081 people, the largest concentration of Soviet DPs in the city. Those Soviet DPs left the city in August 1945 as repatriation was completed.

Once the Soviet DPs had gone, the emptied barracks filled with Baltic DPs, above all Latvians, who had moved from camp to camp since their flight in 1944 and 1945 and who soon formed the majority. On 20 May 1946 the city housing office reported about 1,000 people in the Ohmstede/Rennplatz camp without being able to state their nationalities. The camp was overcrowded: some newcomers had to live in field tents supplied by the British and fetched water from a house on Rennplatzstraße. A sanitary barrack with a water tap, a wash kettle, a washroom and latrines served the residents of two residential barracks, and two large kitchens prepared the meals. A city survey of 28 October 1949 counted 52 barracks and calculated room for 760 people at ten square metres each, while about a thousand were living there. Until 1950 the residents were under the authority of UNRRA and, from the summer of 1947, the IRO, which could transfer them to other camps and whose permission they needed to travel.

The camp appeared in the Latvian emigration press within a year of liberation. A list of Latvian camps in Germany printed in Mūsu Pagasts on 1 May 1946 includes, among several Oldenburg entries, a DP camp at Ohmstede, Rennplatz 2, in postal district 23.

Schools, opera, cinema and church

The Baltic camp developed a full communal life. The Stadtmuseum records schools, a Latvian opera and evening film shows in a kind of cinema; a German neighbour remembered that the cinema and the camp hairdresser were used by Germans as well, that many Latvians played instruments and that Germans came to the camp’s concerts and performances. A 1954 list of communal rooms names a library with books in several languages, a doctor’s room, two shops, a hairdresser and a kindergarten. A Latvian Lutheran congregation held services, Bible study, youth meetings and Sunday school in the camp; by 1960 the camp children attended German schools and received weekly supplementary lessons in Latvian language, history and geography, and plays, concerts, lectures and dances were still being organised.

Emigration hollowed out the community. The Urdze family’s history of the settlement puts the number of Latvians and Estonians who left the camp for Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and Sweden between 1945 and 1950 at about 4,000; only the fit could go, and the sick, the old, invalids and large families stayed behind. From 1 July 1950 responsibility passed to the German authorities: a British liaison officer had warned the mayor on 29 September 1949 that the Oldenburg DP camps would remain as resettlement camps and be handed to German administration, and in November 1949 the city proposed to concentrate DPs unfit for work in the Rennplatz and Sandweg camps. The city calculated that about 500 residents of the Latvian Colony would need social assistance.

One evening at the camp is recorded in the Ukrainian press. In October 1947 the Augsburg weekly Nashe Zhyttia reported that the Ostap Veresai Brotherhood of Bandurists had given twenty-four concerts in the camps of the British zone and, besides serving the Ukrainian emigration, five concerts in the camps of the Baltic peoples at Kiel, Hamburg and Oldenburg; and it printed a letter sent from Oldenburg on 19 September 1947 by the representative of the Latvian committee and the representative of the Estonian committee. They asked the editor to publish their impressions of the concert given in their camp, which they named in the letter as Oldenburg-Ohmstede. The bandurists, they wrote, had come to their Baltic camp in spite of transport difficulties and had given them a cultural rest and the best memories of Ukrainian music and song. The theatre hall was overfull and their people greeted the kobzars with warm applause. The concert had given them a full idea of the heroic struggle of the Ukrainian people, past and present, for its national independence, a striving close and comprehensible to them because the Baltic peoples also longed for a free life. The kobza-bandura, of which they had until then had only an approximate notion, had been shown as an instrument of great technical possibilities, and the historical songs of Suprun, Nechai and Morozenko fully revived the picture of the people’s hero-fighters for independence; the simple sopilka, on which three Ukrainian melodies were played, was also a success. They had taken to heart the recited topical verses and the march of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, thanked the brotherhood for coming to them from distant Bavaria, and wished that such visits might be practised more often between themselves and the Ukrainians as freedom-loving peoples with common aspirations and desires.

The Latvian Colony and the Rennplatz estate

Under city administration from 1950 the camp, with about 1,000 residents, was the largest Latvian settlement in the Federal Republic. A note of a departmental meeting on 27 October 1952 records that the Ohmstede barracks were to remain as the city’s last camp for foreigners while the other camps were wound up one by one, and that the site received the official name Lettenlager; residents and neighbours called it the Lettische Kolonie. A 1954 count gave 609 residents: 504 Latvians, 60 Germans, 18 Lithuanians, 8 Poles, 6 Ukrainians, 4 Belarusians, 2 Hungarians, 1 Romanian, 1 Finn and 5 stateless people. In the same year tuberculosis was diagnosed in 18.3 per cent of the residents, attributed to damp, poor hygiene and overcrowding. A psychiatrist from Bethel who visited in March 1958 described the mental toll of thirteen years of barrack life.

In 1955 the city and the housing association GSG planned a housing estate on the camp site, and from the beginning of 1959 the first blocks of the Rennplatzsiedlung rose while the barracks came down. On 1 September 1960 the camp still held 364 people. Residents moved into the new flats from late autumn 1960, the last of them by the end of 1961, when the last barrack was demolished. The street names Rigaer Weg and Kurlandallee, a Latvian Lutheran church opened on Kurlandallee in 1964 and the Kulturzentrum Rennplatz, which grew out of the Latvian youth and cultural centre, mark the site today. About 300 Latvians still lived in Oldenburg in the 1970s.