Pionier-Kaserne

The barracks and its camp administration

The Pionier barracks were built in 1936 on Schweinheimer Straße, the first of four new complexes put up for the Wehrmacht at Aschaffenburg, and Engineer Battalion 15 moved in that October. During the war the site housed Engineer Replacement Battalion 9, whose commander was appointed battle commandant when Aschaffenburg was declared a fortress on 5 March 1945. The fighting of that spring ended with the barracks in American hands.

The camp appears as Assembly Centre 264 or AC 91-264 and later UF 305, with an administrative opening recorded on 20 August 1946. The camp inventory identifies UNRRA Team 612. A publicly shared camp-police document also bears the wording Pioneer Casern and Team 612, independently connecting the name and administrative team.

The hospital, the churches and the camp societies

A former resident’s account describes a hospital at Pionier, while identifying Lagarde as an important cultural centre for the neighbouring camps. The camp newspaper confirms the hospital from the other side: a notice of October 1947 gives its office as room 10 at Pionier Kaserne, and the funeral of the press historian Professor Arkadii Zhyvotko set out on 15 June 1948 from the hospital’s Orthodox chapel in the camp for the municipal cemetery, led by children from all the Ukrainian schools of the town.

Pionier residents joined people from Lagarde and Artillerie for a large church celebration on 21 October 1946. More than 3,000 worshippers attended the anniversary of the Union of Brest at a Roman Catholic church in the city’s outskirts. The contemporary report records a shared gathering rather than a service confined to Pionier.

The camp had a church of its own, visited with those of Lagarde and Artillerie by a Canadian relief delegate on 1 February 1947, and a church choir that sang at residents’ funerals alongside the camp’s Ukrainian police. A Prosvita reading room in block VI served as the meeting hall, a branch of the Union of Ukrainian Women held commemorative evenings there, and the Ukrainian Teachers’ Association and the Students’ Community of Aschaffenburg both gave the camp as their address.

Schooling, trades and the printing press

Vocational teaching was organised inside the barracks. In 1948 the Training and Technical Combine invited applications to its directorate at Pionier Kaserne 4/314, asking candidates to name the department they had chosen. A course for adults who could not read ended on 24 August 1948 with nineteen graduates, who had spent three months learning the Ukrainian alphabet and were to go on to the Latin one.

The camp was also a publishing address. The Ukrainian independent weekly Nedilia, which reported on all the Aschaffenburg camps, printed its imprint as Aschaffenburg, Schweinheimer Straße 50, the street of the Pionier barracks, and it was distributed as far as Britain, Canada, the United States and South America.

One of the larger Ukrainian communities

The Ukrainian return for August 1946 records 2,261 residents. The figure was 2,070 in May 1947 and 1,836 in December 1947. The separate questionnaire series collected during 1946–1947 gives 1,999. In each of these returns Pionier was the largest of the town’s camps.

Size did not mean the strongest camp life. When leaders were elected in the four Ukrainian camps on 22 December 1946, only about 314 people had voted at Pionier by midday, some 17 per cent of those entitled and the lowest turnout of the four, against more than 95 per cent at Bois-Brûlé.

The inventory’s capacity entry is 2,000, dated 31 October 1947. It describes the planned accommodation figure, not a complete headcount. The resident returns and capacity record were compiled at different times and for different purposes.

Life beyond one barracks

Across Aschaffenburg, Ukrainians maintained representative and welfare organisations to help with legal problems, material needs and overseas resettlement. Pionier belonged to that broader community, while retaining its own camp identity and population returns.

From Pionier to Fiori Barracks

The inventory records the end of the DP camp on 9 February 1949. On 21 March 1949 the director of the local military government wrote to the city requiring every building in the Pionier and Lagarde barracks still used by German offices to be cleared by 5 April; the barracks had served for almost four years as accommodation for displaced people and as the depot of the municipal vehicle fleet and fire brigade.

The first units of the 18th Infantry Regiment moved into the rebuilt Pionier barracks in September 1949, and in 1952 the compound was renamed Fiori Barracks after Private First Class Nanti I. Fiori. A photograph dated 11 May 1950 shows the compound after the camp period, rather than depicting refugees still living there.

What the records preserve

The city archive’s reorganisation of UNRRA material has made wartime employment papers and later investigations easier to connect. The camp’s administrative identifiers provide a more precise starting point than the town name alone, especially because Aschaffenburg had several distinct camps.