Aufbau Camp

The building before 1945

The town of Pfarrkirchen built the complex on Arnstorfer Straße by 1906 for its agricultural school, with an attached boarding wing that was occupied at the end of 1907 and took a hundred pupils from the start. The Bavarian state took the school over in 1938 and introduced the Aufbauschule, the course that led directly to university entrance; from 1938 the boarding house was renamed Deutsches Schulheim and its clerical management removed. When the Realschule and agricultural classes were run down at the end of the 1942/43 school year, the official title of what remained became Deutsches Schulheim, secondary school for boys.

In 1945 a military hospital occupied both the school and the boarding building and the boarding institution closed. The surviving postcard shows the named school building, rather than a generic view of Pfarrkirchen.

The camp and its annexes

The administrative record lists Assembly Centre 93-411 and the later code NBO 425. It associates the facility with Teams 545 at Pfarrkirchen and 539 at Eggenfelden. The capacity figure of 500, recorded on 31 October 1947, covers the entry for Aufbau and annexes; it does not establish how many Ukrainians lived inside the principal school building. The archive reference points to holdings and change reports for Pfarrkirchen under document identifiers 82022347 to 82022397, which have not been read.

The word annexes has a concrete meaning in the same inventory. A separate entry for Schalldorf, a village in the Pfarrkirchen district, carries the assembly-centre numbers AC 93-284 and AC 93-411 A and the same pair of relief teams. The A suffix marks it as an annexe of the Aufbau entry. Schalldorf was its own place with its own record, and its figures should not be read as Pfarrkirchen figures.

How many Ukrainians

Ihor Stebelsky’s published table of Ukrainians in the assembly centres of the American zone gives Pfarrkirchen 500 in the questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947, 359 in the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947 and 416 in the PCIRO summary of 2 January 1948. The table counts Ukrainians only, so these are neither capacity figures nor total camp populations, and the entry is for the town rather than for a named building. Schalldorf appears separately with 373 in August 1946 and 66 in May 1947, a fall consistent with the closing interval the inventory gives for that annexe.

Schooling after displacement

A 2012 University of Alberta thesis draws on an interview with a former Ukrainian resident who had fled the Lviv region as a child. Her family reached Aufbau in 1945. She recalled completing three years of gymnasium during her displaced-persons years, which the thesis places at gymnasiums in other camps — Karlsfeld first, then Dinkelsbühl, then Dillingen in Bavaria — rather than at Pfarrkirchen. The family then moved to Edmonton. The account documents residence at Aufbau and the recovery of interrupted schooling elsewhere; it describes one family’s experience, rather than a transfer of every camp resident.

Returning the buildings to education

The German school reopened as an Oberrealschule in 1946, but it could not go back into its own premises. The school history records that the building was held by the military hospital until 1946 and then by the refugee organisation, so that in the 1948/49 school year its 566 pupils were taught in the rooms of the boys’ school, in inns and in other buildings around the town. Two institutions were therefore competing for the same site throughout the camp years.

The inventory records the camp’s closure on 24 March 1949. The school history dates the return of the main building to the school to 22 April, followed by extensive renovation, and the boarding institution reopened as the Staatliches Schülerheim in September 1949. These dates describe successive administrative and building changes rather than a single event.