Flakkaserne Stephanskirchen

Different chapters on the same ground

Until the mid-1930s the site was woodland, meadow and a single farm. Preparation for building the barracks at the Haidenholz began in 1937, and from 1939 the barracks completed in 1940 served an anti-aircraft unit. By 1942 about fifty huts stood between Haidholzen and Waldering, used to produce Luftwaffe ammunition and to house officers. Air raids in 1944 and 1945 destroyed parts of the barracks.

Between December 1944 and March 1945 the military ground held an outstation of Dachau concentration camp, with about 230 prisoners on average and 217 men recorded at forced labour in April 1945, shortly before it was abandoned. At least three of them died; two are commemorated by Stolpersteine in the Haidenholzstraße. American troops entered on 1 and 2 May 1945. From July 1945 until the end of 1946 the occupying forces ran an internment camp on part of the grounds for around a thousand former National Socialist functionaries, and from the beginning of 1946 a separate German refugee camp for 110 people occupied the southern part of the barracks. These were distinct institutions from the displaced-persons camp.

The reconstruction atlas dates the UNRRA and later IRO camp for displaced persons in the area of the former Flakkaserne from late 1946 to March 1950. The four occupations of the site overlapped in time and shared the same huts, so their populations must never be combined.

The camp in the administrative record

The Arolsen displaced-persons camp inventory carries one Stephanskirchen entry, headed DP 2 Stephanskirchen / Pavlovich. It records an opening on 20 August 1946, a capacity of 1,750 at 31 October 1947, the assembly-centre designations DP 6, AC 95-443 and AC 95-450 with OB 729 from September 1948, UNRRA Team 188 at Rosenheim, area team AT 1069 and area A 7 Munich, and nationalities given as Polish, Russian, stateless and Polish-Ukrainian. The closing is recorded as falling between 30 September 1949 and 30 September 1950.

That row and this camp are the same place. The reconstruction atlas and the local history both describe a single displaced-persons facility in the municipality, in the former Flak barracks, and the inventory dates match it; no other site in Stephanskirchen fits. The designation DP 2 reads as the Rosenheim team’s own serial numbering. The word Pavlovich is not explained by any source read here and remains open; it may be a camp or section name used in the tracing-service lists.

The two closing dates are different kinds of statement. March 1950 is the atlas date for the clearing of the camp; the inventory’s window of a year simply records when the entry dropped out of the returns.

A Ukrainian community

The Rosenheim Ukrainian Catholic community traces its beginnings to the postwar camps. Its own parish history recalls several hundred Ukrainians among the different nationalities living at Stephanskirchen from 1947. Some followed the Orthodox faith; others belonged to the Ukrainian Catholic Church and celebrated the Byzantine liturgy.

The published population returns count Ukrainians alone and are larger. A single Stefanskirchen row records 1,168 in the questionnaire returns of 1946 to 1947, 923 in the UNRRA return of 31 May 1947 and 883 in the PCIRO return of 2 January 1948. In his earlier 1986 printing Stebelsky groups Stephanskirchen among the notable Ukrainian concentrations in Bavaria, at over 1,100 people. The neighbouring Rosenheim camps are counted separately and fall over the same period, from 473 to 268 and then 177.

A Ukrainian sports society records the move that lies behind those numbers. The society Bohun was founded at Rosenheim on 3 August 1946 and in the spring of 1947 was transferred, together with its camp, to the nearby village of Stephanskirchen, where the survey counted 1,100 Ukrainians and the society 45 members. It ran sections for football, men’s volleyball, table tennis, chess and athletics, although the reviewer judged their activity slight and intermittent and the society’s organisation weak throughout. Only the footballers competed regularly, in the regional class.

This community continued beyond the barracks. The parish account describes emigration in the 1950s to Brazil, Canada, Britain, Australia and the United States. Those destinations belong to the wider Rosenheim Ukrainian community; they are not a complete passenger list or a breakdown of departures from this particular camp.

The youth paper Sumivets recorded one occasion in the camp in the summer of 1947. In the large theatre hall of the Ukrainian camp at Stephanskirchen, young people leaving for Belgium gathered with their families, their friends and representatives of every Ukrainian organisation. They had come from Berchtesgaden, Rosenheim and Neubeuern as well as from the camp itself. After an address by Father Budz and a speech by the chairman of the central committee of the Union of Ukrainian Youth, five banduryst players gave a concert, and one of them surprised the hall by playing the sopilka. The following day a train hung with flags and a large trident carried 560 Ukrainians away, with a crowd seeing them off from the platform.

Haidholzen after the DP camp

After the IRO camp was cleared in 1950, accommodation for German expellees expanded into a settlement for several hundred people. By 13 September 1950 the municipality counted 1,528 expellees among 5,705 inhabitants. New housing followed from 1952, the settlement received the name Haidholzen in 1953, when it already had 925 inhabitants and was the largest expellee settlement in the old district of Rosenheim, and the huts were systematically cleared and built over from 1956.

The camp school that served that settlement was founded in October 1946 by an expelled teacher and taught about 120 children in a single hut; it was wound up in 1958 and its classes were absorbed into the Stephanskirchen elementary school. It belonged to the German expellee camp and not to the displaced-persons camp, and the two should not be confused.

Parts of the barracks entrance remain. In May 2025, the municipality commemorated the end of the war at Haidholzen’s memorial, remembering the site’s history of persecution, war and displacement. A municipal history tour that year also traced the change from military compound to postwar neighbourhood.