Grenadier-Kaserne

From military buildings to refugee accommodation

Military use of the Burgholzhof ridge began in 1927 with an army training ground, followed from 1935 by the building of the Flandern-Kaserne. In May 1938 the city of Stuttgart and the army agreed on a further barracks in the Mönchsberg-Rappenberg district, and in May 1939 the first battalion of Infantry Regiment 119 moved into the new Grenadier-Kaserne. It consisted of a guardhouse, five large barrack blocks, a staff building, a men’s building and a sports hall, with seven storage halls for materiel and vehicles; one of the surviving buildings had been a horse stable until 1945.

The setting therefore provided substantial existing buildings, rather than an entirely new refugee settlement. An official United States Army account locates the installations above Stuttgart’s wine-growing hills and traces their later transformation into a major military support and housing area.

An internment camp before the DP camp

Before the Ukrainian camp opened, the barracks held German internees. Ulrich Müller’s survey of the internment camps in and around Ludwigsburg lists Internment Camp 78 at Zuffenhausen, Grenadier-Kaserne, and describes it as a war-crimes camp from which men were moved on to Nuremberg and Dachau or handed over to the other Allied powers; its last inmates went to Kornwestheim in 1947. The garrison historian dates the internee use from 10 September 1945 to 4 January 1947, which fits the inventory’s opening of the displaced-persons camp on 7 February 1947.

A local history of the district repeats the reference to Camp 78 but states that 7,000 displaced persons were housed in it. That reading is not supported by the work it cites, which describes Camp 78 as an internment camp for Germans, and it is not followed here.

A Ukrainian centre in Stuttgart

Stebelsky’s tabulation of Ukrainians in American-zone camps gives Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, Grenadier-Kaserne, 1,583 in the questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947, 740 in the UNRRA return of 31 May 1947 and 1,509 in the PCIRO return of 2 January 1948. This is one of the few rows in that table that names a building rather than only a town, so the figures can be read as camp figures. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine separately gives Stuttgart-Zufenhausen a Ukrainian population of 1,580 for 1946 and 1947.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic parish history of Württemberg, citing Dmytro Blazhejowskyj’s directory of clergy in the diaspora, records that in 1947 the Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen-Grenadierkaserne camp held 1,482 Greek Catholics, 160 Orthodox and 13 others from Ukraine. It names Father Yulian Mykytyn as the priest serving Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen through the camp years, and reproduces a photograph captioned as the Ukrainian school at Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen at the end of the 1940s. Regular parish life in Stuttgart itself was organised from 1951, after the camp had closed.

The June 1948 relief report also places the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church at Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen under Bishop Platon, with Metropolitan Polikarp at Gronau. Alongside the camp listing, this establishes the locality’s importance as a religious administrative centre. It does not identify a particular room or building within Grenadier-Kaserne as the synod’s office.

Two neighbouring barracks, different histories

The inventory places Grenadier under Area Team 1003 Stuttgart and Area Team 1002 Ludwigsburg from November 1946, in Area A 2 Ludwigsburg and later A 2 Nellingen, and gives no UNRRA team of its own, which is consistent with a camp that opened after UNRRA’s Stuttgart team had been reorganised. Its closure is placed between 30 September 1949 and 30 September 1950. Flandern meanwhile had an UNRRA period from December 1945 and its inventory entry ends before 29 July 1948.

The 1948 relief report is particularly valuable here: it fixes the connection to Grenadier-Kaserne during the displaced-persons period. Neither a general photograph of Stuttgart nor an account of the separate Jewish camp at Stuttgart West on Bismarckstrasse establishes the history of this Ukrainian facility, and the inventory keeps the two apart.

After the DP period

American military occupation of the installations followed, and the United States Army used Grenadier-Kaserne for logistical support of the Stuttgart area for four decades. The barracks were handed back to the Federal Republic and the city of Stuttgart in 1993. From 2003 the buildings were demolished apart from building 406, and from 2006 the residential district known as In Raiser was built on the site.

Today these later layers can obscure the brief refugee chapter. The 1948 camp directory and the church records preserve an earlier moment when a place built for soldiers was the main institution supporting Ukrainian civilian life in Württemberg.