Rothenburg Town and Summer Camp

The Wildbad before 1945

The Wildbad grew up around a sulphur spring. Around 1900 it was rebuilt as a luxurious sanatorium, later run as a luxury hotel, and from 1925 as a convalescent home of the Bavarian health-insurance funds. The Wehrmacht requisitioned it as an auxiliary military hospital in 1939. In 1942 the hospital was cleared to make room for a Hitler Youth music school, and in 1944 the national association of local health-insurance funds moved its head office there after being bombed out of Berlin. In the last days of the war the town’s military commanders sat in the Wildbad, and it was there that American emissaries obtained the withdrawal of German troops on 16 April 1945.

UNRRA Team 167 and the Ukrainian centre

After the American entry the US military used the Wildbad as troop accommodation. On 19 June 1946 UNRRA Team 167 took over the sanatorium as its base for the Rothenburg district, subordinate to the US Town Major. An inventory drawn up in October 1946 found broken windows, damaged paintwork and two outlying buildings almost destroyed. According to the local history, the team mainly cared for and repatriated people from the Baltic countries; a 1950 town account describes the Wildbad as a DP camp for refugees it calls White Russian.

The team was led by an American administrative officer, E. Wilson. UNRRA had run the American zone from a building in Munich-Pasing since November 1945, and the Wildbad was its seat for the Rothenburg district. Alterations to the buildings needed the approval of the Town Major or of the engineer officer. The October 1946 condition survey survives in the town archive as Inventaraufstellung UNRRA 167, 2 October 1946, reference 000/35.

The Ukrainian centre is recorded separately. The inventory opens Rothenburg Town / Summer Camp on 20 August 1946 and closes it on 16 September 1949, with Ukrainian as the only nationality noted, assembly centre number AC 92-302 A and, from September 1948, the IRO designation OMF 368. No capacity is recorded. From November 1946 the centre came under Area Team 1041 Rothenburg. The heading suggests accommodation dispersed in the town together with a seasonal site; the inventory does not record which buildings the centre used, and it is not established whether the summer camp was the Wildbad, which served as a YMCA summer camp in 1949.

Ukrainian returns give the size of the community. UNRRA’s assembly-centre summary of 24 August 1946 counted 384 Ukrainians at Rothenburg, the summary of 31 May 1947 counted 348, and the PCIRO summary of 2 January 1948 counted 351. Cultural life was organised early: the Ukrainian Society St Raphael in Rothenburg issued an eleven-page catalogue of an exhibition of Ukrainian national art in 1946, in English and German editions.

Rothenburg carried three entries in the inventory, all opened on 20 August 1946 and all under Team 167. Beside the Ukrainian Town / Summer Camp stood La Guardia, a Latvian centre with a capacity of 230 under assembly centre number AC 92-302, and the Wildbad itself, a Lithuanian and Latvian centre with a capacity of 540 under AC 93-417. The Ukrainian centre carries La Guardia’s number with the suffix A. The inventory therefore records the Wildbad as a Baltic centre in its own right, which matches the local history’s account of the team’s work; and the Ukrainian centre outlasted both, closing in September 1949 after La Guardia had closed in December 1948.

A list of scouting and guiding in displaced persons camps records a Rothenburg camp for Latvian displaced persons as having Girl Guides and a Scout troop. The list gives no camp number or address, so it cannot be tied to either of the two inventory entries with Latvian residents, La Guardia or the Wildbad.

A district team, not a single camp

Team 167 was a district organisation. The inventory records it against camps at Ansbach — an area hospital and the Bleidorn barracks — and at Dinkelsbühl, Gunzenhausen and Langlau, as well as the three Rothenburg entries. All of them lay in Area A 3 Würzburg. From November 1946 they came under area team 1041, entered against the Rothenburg camps as AT 1041 Rothenburg and against the others as AT 1041 Ansbach.

UNRRA itself was wound up at the end of 1946, and its work passed to the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organisation. The change shows in the Rothenburg record as the substitution of the IRO number OMF 368 for the assembly centre number from September 1948.

A crowded town

The displaced persons’ centres were only part of the pressure on housing. The 1950 town account describes every room of any size being taken for accommodation, refugees put up in cellars, halls and schools, and inns in the town and the villages turned into mass billets; the music hall, the hall at the Glocke and the Rossmühle were fitted out as collection camps. Those were German expellees and refugees, a separate population from the displaced persons in the UNRRA centres.

After the displaced persons

The Ukrainian centre closed in September 1949, the year the Wildbad served as a YMCA summer camp. In April 1951 the Bavarian interior ministry leased the Wildbad for the newly formed riot police, whose school remained there until 1976. In 1978 the town exercised its right of first refusal and passed the property to the Neuendettelsau deaconry; after renovation it opened in the 1980s as a conference centre of the Evangelical Church in Bavaria, which it remains.

The town exercised its right of first refusal in February 1978, buying the Wildbad for 300,000 marks and passing it to the Neuendettelsau deaconry at the same price. A supporting association was formed in 1981 to build a conference centre there after a thorough renovation.

What survives for a researcher

The camp records themselves are held outside the town. The inventory points to the International Tracing Service holdings at Arolsen, where the strength and change returns for Rothenburg carry document numbers 82025547 to 82025864, and to the Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Repertorium 212/15-III, Fach 83, on the occupying power and displaced persons.

The town’s own records of these years are thin. The fire in the town hall in 1945 destroyed most of the municipal registry for 1920 to 1945, and the surviving historical registration cards, which run to 1945, are incomplete for the same reason. The civil registers are held from 1876 and pass to the archive as the statutory protection periods expire.