DP-Camp G, Sandplatz

A DAF camp for forced labourers

Sandplatz was one of three large camps in the city with a high proportion of Polish and Soviet civilian workers. The German Labour Front (DAF) camp at Cloppenburger Straße was built at the end of November 1942 for about 500 people, and its residents at that time were mainly foreign workers employed by the Oldenburgische Leichtmetall works. The first arrivals recorded in November 1942 were 65 Ukrainian women and men.

Hoffmann’s table of the city’s camps gives Sandplatz an occupancy of 500 in November 1942 and lists Eastern workers, Poles, Ukrainians, Dutch, Belgians and French among its inhabitants between 1942 and 1945. Police controls enforced the rules that governed such camps: in January 1944 workers from Sandplatz were reported for being in a public house on Cloppenburger Straße an hour beyond their permitted time outside the camp. The parish burial register for Ohmstede records a resident of the Sandplatz camp who died on 24 April 1945, in the last days before the city fell, with the cause given as enemy action.

Hoffmann’s interviews with former forced labourers put named people in the camp. Halina Nowicki, deported to Oldenburg in the summer of 1943 after her village near Nowogródek was destroyed and its inhabitants forcibly evacuated, was chosen by the family of an engineer and stayed a year as their domestic servant; in September 1944 she was assigned, like all foreign domestic servants at that time, to armaments production and worked until the end of the war for the firm Oldenburgische Leichtmetall on Uferstraße. From then on she no longer lived with the German family but in the Sandplatz camp, where a great many of that works’ foreign civilian workers lived, and the change of workplace brought with it a considerably worse position for both food and housing. The brother and sister Leslaw and Regina Wazniak, born in 1937 and 1935, lived in the Rennplatz camp until their father died in June 1944 and afterwards with their mother in the Sandplatz camp; Jan Nowicki, born in 1935, was housed with his family in the Sportplatz and Sandplatz camps after a short stay at Rennplatz. Shortly before the end of the war the Sandplatz camp, like others in the city, was partly hit by an Allied bombing raid in which Jan Nowicki and his two siblings were injured along with other camp residents.

From liberation to a Baltic camp

Canadian and British troops occupied Oldenburg in May 1945, and the foreign workers in the city were freed. UNRRA Team 146, which was responsible for the DPs of the city, set up a reception centre in an old beer hall in May 1945; arrivals were registered, medically examined, dusted with DDT and assigned to one of the assembly camps. An UNRRA welfare report gives the position on 1 June 1945: Sandplatz then held 198 people and was listed as a Polish camp, while the much larger camps at Ohmstede, the Hindenburg barracks and Unterm Berg held Soviet, Italian and mixed populations.

The population of the city’s camps fell rapidly as western Europeans, Italians and Soviet citizens were repatriated in the summer of 1945. At the end of September the British military government counted 3,970 foreigners in seven camps in the city, and on 1 November 1945 only 1,376 foreigners lived in Oldenburg. Numbers rose again as Baltic DPs were moved into the transit camps in the city. A list sent by the city housing office to the Oldenburg interior ministry on 20 May 1946 records about 400 Estonians at the Sandplatz camp, alongside Estonian groups at Gut Dietrichsfeld and Bloherfelder Straße and Latvian and Lithuanian camps elsewhere in the city.

This Estonian phase is also reflected in the émigré record: the Immigration History Research Center Archives at the University of Minnesota holds, within its records of displaced persons from Estonia, a folder titled Camp Sandplatz in Oldenburg, various correspondence, 1945 to 1946. The Arolsen inventory’s nationality line, with Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians in the majority and Poles, Ukrainians and Russians also present, matches this picture of a Baltic camp with smaller groups of other nationalities. The inventory gives no opening or closing date and no capacity for the camp.

Schools, newspapers and emigration classes

The surviving UNRRA reports describe the cultural life of the Oldenburg camps as a whole rather than camp by camp. The team responsible for the city mentioned a weekly Lithuanian newspaper, scout groups, dances and concerts in the different national camps; three schools for Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian children aged six to fourteen were operating, two kindergarten groups were planned, and groups of adults attended evening classes in English three times a week to prepare for emigration. The report of early August 1945 also recorded shortages of food for children and nursing mothers, of children’s clothing and of basic hygiene articles, and described the barrack camps as dilapidated, overcrowded and short of windows, doors and heating for the coming winter.

Into the 1950s

The city’s DP camps at Ohmstede, Sandplatz, Unterm Berg and Ammerländer Heerstraße, together with the Wehnen camp 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, after which they were administered as homeless foreigners.