Wasen, Waiblingen

The Elma forced-labour camp

The camp was built in 1944 for forced labourers of Elma Fluggerätebau, an aircraft-parts firm that had moved from Bad Cannstatt to Waiblingen in 1941 and supplied components for the Bf 109 fighter and the Arado 234 jet bomber. Elma employed many forced labourers; it first housed them in a camp on the works site, where the Bosch plastics plant now stands, and later in a second camp on the Wasen. A sketch in the Stadtarchiv shows the layout of residential barracks for forced labourers on the municipal Wasen. The Stuttgart forced-labour documentation records up to 300 Russian forced labourers of the Mahle group, to which Elma belonged, in their own camp on the Wasen. In its final form the camp consisted of eight standard barracks, each about 40 metres long and 8 metres wide, without toilets or running water.

Former forced labourers and the UNRRA lists

Aircraft-parts production ended in 1945 and the Americans used the Elma works as a central repair shop for their vehicles. At the end of the war Waiblingen had about 14,000 people to feed, 4,000 more than in 1939, and the town’s five larger barrack camps for forced labourers were still occupied by their former inmates, now displaced persons who were to be returned to their home countries. According to the Stadtarchiv’s account, evacuees from bombed cities and the first German refugees from the East were also being housed in the town by mid-1945.

The Arolsen inventory shows that the Wasen camp remained in use for DPs into 1946 and 1947. UNRRA Team 205 Waiblingen, under Area Team 1002 Ludwigsburg from November 1946, reported on the camp from 24 January 1946 as assembly centre 682, recording Polish and Ukrainian residents; the reports and change notices for Waiblingen survive in the ITS holdings. The inventory gives no capacity for the camp, although a capacity date of 31 October 1947 is entered, and it dates the end of the list series to between 20 December 1946 and 20 February 1947. Waiblingen is one of the five DP communities that regional research counts in Württemberg-Baden in the autumn of 1946.

Expellees, then the Rinnenäcker estate

The occupying power ordered the town to receive German expellees from Czechoslovakia and the former eastern territories, and Waiblingen took in 3,027 by 1948, more than 1,700 of them Sudeten Germans. Most were lodged in private houses, by requisition where necessary, but many had to live in camps, among them the Wasen. To make room for them, the Stadtarchiv records, the evacuees and the displaced persons had to be moved out or sent home first, because the housing of expellees took priority. The photographs of 1946 show families in the wooden barracks, unpaved lanes strung with washing lines, and residents keeping a semblance of order and dignity in very poor conditions.

The housing shortage eased only from 1953, when the barracks were no longer needed. With help from the town, the district and the savings bank the expellees built their own homes, above all in the Rinnenäckersiedlung, at its foundation the largest expellee settlement in the south-west; housing controls in the town were lifted only in 1963.