Rosenhaven

From captivity to a city-centre camp

The resistance initially arranged accommodation in the buildings. Danish Red Cross management began on 7 June 1945. Unlike a remote barracks compound, Rosenhaven placed displaced people within the everyday life of the town, close to the park at Munke Mose.

Around 230,000 refugees reached Denmark over the winter and spring of 1944 and 1945, most of them German but about 34,000 not. At the liberation the Danish authorities became responsible for both groups and decided to house them separately and on different terms. Non-German refugees could move freely outside the camps and have contact with Danes, which German refugees could not. Their care was handed to the Danish Red Cross, which tried to divide the camps by nationality, and during May 1945 the Soviet refugees on Funen were gathered at Rosenhaven. Most camps, German and non-German alike, were placed outside the towns; Rosenhaven was the exception.

The men had reached Odense by their own efforts. An artillery captain told a local paper that they had got away from their German guards in south Zealand and reached Nyborg with help from the resistance, then marched to Odense to ask the Red Cross for help. Most were soldiers of the Soviet army who had been in German captivity and were moved to Denmark in the last months of the war as the Red Army advanced. About sixty of the refugees were women.

Sleeping in the theatre

A photograph taken on 26 June shows how a public hall became shared accommodation: beds line the walls beneath chandeliers, tables and chairs fill the middle, and a Soviet flag hangs above the stage. People sit beside their beds and gather around tables. The room still looks unmistakably like a theatre.

Another museum photograph preserves a closer view of three men at Rosenhaven during the same summer. Their varied jackets and caps contrast with the wide view of the crowded hall. Together, these images record both the communal surroundings and the people passing through them.

Supply was the largest practical problem of the first months. Tobacco, clothes and shoes were short, and from May 1945 the resistance movement organised collections for the Soviet refugees which Fyens Stiftstidende reported, printing the thanks that followed. Among the smaller complaints, one resident wrote in the communist paper Trods Alt that they slept in makeshift dormitories and had little to do.

One Soviet resident told a journalist in June 1945 that the stay in the Odense camp amounted to “a sad existence in idleness”, despite the local population’s hospitality and friendliness. The remark survives in an endnote to a study of non-German displaced persons in Denmark, which cites Morten Baarvig Thomsen’s account of the camp.

A summer among the townspeople

Residents staged four successful performances at Odense Theatre. Music and dance reached an enthusiastic audience despite the language barrier, and the proceeds supported people on Soviet-occupied Bornholm. On 17 August, the town gathered at the station as the departing former prisoners boarded a train; the mayor addressed the farewell.

The performances began with a newspaper description of music inside the camp: a reporter sitting in one of Rosenhaven’s crowded rooms, an incomprehensible language around him and now and then an accordion, a balalaika or another instrument accompanying the conversation. A refugee actress led the resulting cabaret, helped by the theatre’s head stage manager, a communist and a member of the local Freedom Council committee. She did not leave on the August train: she had been picked for a national tour billed as Russia thanks Denmark.

There were other public occasions. On 21 June 1945 the Soviet refugees were invited to Odense athletics stadium for an event organised by the Danish Communist Party, at which its chairman spoke, and a special issue of Fyens Stiftstidende on 28 June carried a tribute to them. The nickname Russerhaven attached itself to the place.

A colour photograph in Odense City Archives places seven former prisoners on a bridge at Munke Mose between May and August 1945. It captures an ordinary pause outdoors: men leaning on the railing, talking and enjoying the sunshine. The park became part of their lived surroundings, beyond the camp’s sleeping quarters.

Return and the next residents

Freedom to move around Odense did not mean freedom to choose whether to return: Soviet citizens were repatriated even against their wishes, under the decision taken by the allied powers at Yalta in February 1945 that they could be sent back by force. The last of them left Rosenhaven on 17 August 1945.

After their departure, about 300 Austrians occupied Rosenhaven from October 1945. They had at first been classed as German refugees because of the annexation of Austria in 1938, a ruling later reversed. They spent the winter there, short of warm clothing, and protested at their transfer in January 1946 to other camps including Tarp near Esbjerg, threatening a hunger strike; a letter to the Danish Red Cross said they would regard the move as a punishment, for cultural, church and private reasons and because of the raw maritime climate of the west coast, and it carried eight pages of their signatures. The transfer went ahead. Rosenhaven closed as a refugee camp in March 1946; the buildings are now used by Teater Momentum and Den Fynske Opera.