Schloss Neubeuern

A castle becomes temporary accommodation

Before the war, the castle housed a boarding school, opened on 5 May 1923 on the model of Schloss Salem. The National Socialist authorities judged it politically unreliable and closed it on 13 February 1941. To forestall expropriation the owner sold the whole castle complex to the German state in the spring of 1942, and a National Political Institute of Education was installed there, the only one in the Munich and Upper Bavaria district. The castle also served as a military hospital during the war and the occupation, and the municipal history records a medical company setting up a field hospital there in 1945.

The building stood on a sandstone outcrop above the town, with steep slopes on three sides. Its medieval keep and later residential wings formed a distinctive complex. The central wing had been rebuilt to designs by the architect Gabriel von Seidl between 1904 and 1908, decades before displaced families arrived.

The displaced community

The administrative inventory identifies the castle as Assembly Centre 95-379, under UNRRA Team 188 at Rosenheim, in district 5 of the American zone, with the area team at Traunstein and Bad Reichenhall from November 1946. It lists approximately 600 people and records Polish-Ukrainian, Latvian and Estonian groups. This figure is an approximate headcount without a stated census date; it is not a count of Ukrainians alone.

Published population returns give Neubeuern its own row and count Ukrainians only: 254 in the questionnaire returns of 1946 to 1947, 419 in the UNRRA return of 24 August 1946 and 345 in the UNRRA return of 31 May 1947. No figure appears for the PCIRO return of 2 January 1948, which is consistent with the inventory’s closing window but does not on its own prove the camp had gone.

A published family recollection independently places a Ukrainian family in the castle during the first postwar years. Their later home in Minneapolis displayed the 1946 castle painting. The same account describes the wider circle of Ukrainian artists rebuilding their work in Bavaria and the continuation of Ukrainian cultural life after emigration. The castle image connects that artistic legacy to an identifiable place of temporary refuge.

A chronicle note published in the Ukrainian Catholic weekly Khrystiianskyi shliakh on 16 February 1947, under the heading “From the camp at Neubeuern”, describes the community from inside it. Its author calls the Ukrainians there a small group settled in a village near Rosenheim, and singles out their exceptionally comfortable and handsome quarters: the old castle of the counts of Wendelstein, with everything to hand, a church of its own, a spacious park, orchards in the neighbourhood, family rooms, a refectory with a stage, works of art, walls panelled in carving and hung with stamped silk.

The same note records what the camp had made of itself. Ukrainian artists found shelter and work there — it names Lutsyk, Moroz, Tanasevych, Stebelsky and Fidyk, and the carver Ostash, then making small caskets for a living — along with the writers Kosach and Shcherbak, whose collection Viter nad Ukrainoiu had recently appeared. The camp intended a journal of its own: a first Shevchenko number called V dorozi was cyclostyled for March 1946 but could not be circulated for reasons of censorship. Plast was active, lectures were given, poets, singers and two amateur theatre groups performed. By the beginning of 1947 the writer found all this at a standstill, and blamed quarrelling among the residents for a camp that never flourished as it might have.

What the camp was like from day to day is not established. No source read here describes its schooling, its church life, its work or how departures were organised, and the inventory names only the team director and field supervisor. The camp is documented by its administrative record, by the population returns and by one family’s memory, and that is the limit of the evidence.

Return to a school

The camp inventory places the end of its recorded operation between 25 August and 20 September 1947. The castle’s founding consortium met in 1947, school life resumed on a small scale in April 1948, and the reopening of the boarding school as the Privates Landerziehungsheim Neubeuern am Inn followed in June 1948. The school was to be open from then on to children of every social class and nation as a contribution to understanding between peoples, and in 1948 the castle also housed a youth-leader school of the newly founded Bavarian Youth Council.

Two dates in the inventory row sit oddly with that closing window. The assembly-centre number is dated from September 1948 and the headcount date is 31 October 1947, both after the camp is recorded as having closed. The inventory does not explain this, and the dates are reproduced here as recorded rather than reconciled.