Von-der-Tann-Kaserne

The infantry barracks

The War Ministry decided in 1887 to build a new barracks for the Regensburg infantry regiment, and chose a site outside the town on Landshuter Straße. The university survey of Regensburg’s barracks gives the reasons plainly: there were no breweries or inns nearby, the shooting and drill ground was closer, and the soldiers would be undisturbed by civilians. Building began in 1891 and continued in stages into the First World War. The Bavarian State Police used part of the complex for a time. In 1938 the barracks took the name Von-der-Tann-Kaserne, after the Royal Bavarian infantry regiment formerly stationed there, and it remained in military use until 1945. A surviving photograph shows soldiers on its parade ground in 1910, long before displaced people lived here.

Representation after liberation

On 23 May 1945, four weeks after American troops entered Regensburg, the Polish committee at Weingasse 1 informed the mayor that it now acted as the umbrella body for the Polish organisations in the city. Roman Smolorz’s study names two of them in this barracks: the Polish displaced-persons camp in the Von-der-Tann-Kaserne on Landshuter Straße, and an association of former political prisoners of Mauthausen also accommodated there. The committee claimed to represent 4,000 Poles in Regensburg, took responsibility for subordinate offices at Landshut, Mainburg and Schwandorf, and gave rapid repatriation as its main aim. Its leader was recorded as Colonel Kazimierz Rawicz, a name the study suspects was a pseudonym. The committee’s city-wide constituency should not be mistaken for a count of people living in this barracks.

Administration, dates and scale

The Arolsen inventory dates the camp’s opening to 19 October 1946 and its closure to 31 August 1949, records a capacity of 1,300 on 31 October 1947, and assigns it to UNRRA Team 120. Its archive reference points to holdings of the International Tracing Service and to files of the Bezirksamt Regensburg in the Staatsarchiv Amberg. The International Refugee Organisation kept its own file on the camp: the Boshyk and Balan guide to displaced-persons research lists, among the IRO papers in the Archives Nationales in Paris, a dossier on the Von-der-Tann-Kaserne at Regensburg covering October 1947 to October 1949. Neither the capacity nor the archive’s list of nationalities establishes a separate Ukrainian census; the records describe a mixed institution.

Published Ukrainian population figures do not reach this camp individually. Stebelsky’s table of Ukrainians in the assembly centres of the American zone lists Regensburg as a single entry, giving 4,664 for 1946–47, 1,985 in August 1946, 4,293 in May 1947 and 4,560 in December 1947. Those are city totals covering all the Regensburg centres together, and the largest share belongs to Ganghofersiedlung. They cannot be divided between the barracks and the settlement.

Medical care in related barracks blocks

A separate hospital history traces St. Josef to an IRO facility opened in 1948 for displaced people with chronic illnesses. It occupied blocks built in 1936 and described by the institution as part of Von-der-Tann-Kaserne. When Caritas took over in October 1950, the hospital had 300 beds, simple six-bed rooms and corridor toilets. These hospital figures refer to a medical facility, not the camp’s residential population. The former cinema subsequently became a nursing school in 1952.

What survives in the city

The former barracks ground now serves several purposes. The municipal account identifies Ostpark as the old parade ground, between Landshuter, Safferling and Plato-Wild streets, and the university survey records that the site today is partly parkland and partly the seat of several public authorities. The hospital continued to develop as St. Josef. The two histories preserve different parts of the postwar response to displacement: temporary accommodation and continuing medical care.