DP-Camp H, Unterm Berg

The DAF camp Sportplatz

The camp at Unterm Berg and Biberstraße was one of the three large camps in the city with a high proportion of Polish and Soviet civilian workers. The authorities planned it in 1942 for 1,000 foreigners as a community camp of the German Labour Front (DAF) in the Donnerschwee district; in the following years its population rose to about 1,500. Hoffmann’s camp table dates it from August 1942 to 1945 and lists 1,350 Poles and Eastern workers together with Italians, Dutch, French, Romanian, Lithuanian and Latvian workers. An air-raid list of about April 1944 gives the DAF community camp Unterm Berg and its coffee-house annexe 809 men and 143 women, the largest entry in the city after the Ohmstede transit camp.

The camp also ran the kitchen for the smaller Polish camp Rotes Haus in Donnerschwee, whose residents remembered the one daily delivery of soup, potatoes, bread and margarine from the central camp. A Polish witness who had lived in the open Rotes Haus camp as a child recalled that the Sportplatz camp, where the Ukrainian women and men lived, was quite different: barracks fenced with barbed wire and a camp police that supervised everything, into which the Polish children were not admitted. Workers from Unterm Berg were among the twenty-two Eastern workers and one Polish civilian worker found by a police check at the Frohns public house on Cloppenburger Straße in January 1944 and reported for being there, visiting an inn being forbidden to them. Baltic refugees also reached the camp late in the war: Hoffmann records a Latvian couple who moved into the DAF camp Unterm Berg in November 1944 after a short stay in the Ohmstede transit camp.

Hoffmann’s witness interviews also put named families in this camp. Jan Nowicki, born in 1935, was housed with his family in the Sportplatz and Sandplatz camps after a short stay in the Rennplatz transit camp; his family, like that of the Wazniak children, had been deported to Oldenburg in the summer of 1943 after their village near Nowogródek was destroyed and its people forcibly evacuated. As in the Rennplatz transit camp, it was above all Polish and Soviet civilian workers who lived in the Sportplatz and Sandplatz community camps, with a small number of workers from western European countries among them.

A mixed camp, then a Lithuanian camp

After the Canadian occupation of the city in early May 1945 the camp became one of the assembly camps supervised by UNRRA Team 146. The UNRRA welfare report for 1 June 1945 lists Unterm Berg as a mixed camp with 1,020 people, the third largest of the seven camps in the city after the Hindenburg barracks and Ohmstede. Western Europeans and Italians were repatriated during the summer, the Soviet DPs left in August, and by the end of September 1945 the British military government counted 3,970 foreigners in the city’s seven camps.

In the following months the camp became the home of the city’s Lithuanian DPs, who according to Heuzeroth were most numerous at Unterm Berg. The city housing office’s list of 20 May 1946 gives 250 Lithuanians in Lager Unterm Berg, with a Lithuanian or Latvian group in the Clubhaus and Lithuanian artists in a house on Donnerschweer Straße nearby. Lithuanian DPs, like Estonians and Latvians, were exempt from forced repatriation, and from 1 January 1946 the British concentrated Lithuanian refugees from northern Germany in the Wehnen camp outside the city, which became the region’s Lithuanian Colony.

The Lithuanian community at Unterm Berg produced its own press. The catalogue of Lithuanian DP periodicals at the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago records a scout newspaper of the Lithuanian exile camp Unterm Berg, Oldenburg, published in 1945 and 1946 under changing titles, and describes the Oldenburg troop’s scout paper, begun in September 1945, as the first scout periodical in western Germany. A hectographed weekly information sheet of the Oldenburg Lithuanian DP camp appeared from January 1946 to 1947, and the UNRRA team’s report of August 1945 had already noted a weekly Lithuanian newspaper, scout groups, dances and concerts in the national camps of the city. Film of the Unterm Berg DP camp survives in the American Lithuanian TV Archives among footage of camp life, schools, scouts and folk dancing shot by a Lithuanian DP cameraman.

Into the 1950s

The camp outlasted the founding of the Federal Republic: Brinkhus-Šaltys and the Wikipedia article on the city, citing Sparenberg, both name Unterm Berg among the Oldenburg camps that continued into the 1950s. Local memory associates it with the neighbouring stadium, which the British had requisitioned after the war; the Wikipedia article on the stadium records that residents of the refugee camp at Unterm Berg took the stadium apart and burned its timber before the ground was reopened in 1949. A list of the city’s public order office dated 24 January 1950 still gives Lager Unterm Berg as a residential address. Responsibility for the remaining DPs passed to the German authorities on 30 June 1950, and in October 1952 the city recorded that its camps for foreigners were being wound up one by one, with only the Ohmstede barracks to remain.