Warner-Kaserne

From military barracks to refuge

Built for the SS in 1934–1936, the barracks were adapted for refugees after the war. UNRRA formally took over on 15 December 1945. A recent history reports more than 8,500 residents in 1947, across all nationalities.

The complex was designed by Oswald Bieber and held units of the SS-Standarte Deutschland until 30 April 1945. The album kept by the camp’s UNRRA field supervisor describes what the relief teams inherited: Block C and three blocks of the same size, an administrative block, wash houses and garages, more than seven hundred rooms in all, and a seven-storey entrance tower left empty because its blown-out windows could not be reglazed. Blocks A and B had been more heavily bombed and needed a great deal of repair.

The administrative labels can be confusing because Munich had several barracks camps. The nearby Funkkaserne was another transit and emigration facility. An archival research guide lists Funkkaserne and Warner-Kaserne separately; their records and populations should therefore not be combined.

Administration, capacity and the assembly-centre number

The Arolsen Archives camp inventory records the facility as Munich-Freimann, SS-Kaserne, opening on 15 December 1945 and closing between 30 January and 30 September 1948, with a capacity of 7,000 at the reporting date of 31 October 1947. It carried assembly-centre number AC 95-351 and was served by UNRRA Team 107 Munich within area team AT 1066 Munich, a number that also appears on handicraft made in the camp. A second entry carries the same assembly-centre number forward from 30 September 1948 under the name Warner-Kaserne, with a capacity of 5,200 and a closing interval between 31 March and 30 September 1951, so the two entries describe one continuous administration rather than two camps.

The inventory’s list of nationalities names Yugoslav, stateless, Lithuanian, Polish, Estonian and Jewish residents and does not name Ukrainians, although Ukrainian returns for the same site are among the largest in Munich. The omission is in the source and is left standing rather than corrected.

How many Ukrainians

Ihor Stebelsky’s table of Ukrainians in the camps of the American zone gives four returns for Munich, Freimann S.S.-Kaserne, running from 2,575 in questionnaires collected during 1946 and 1947 to 3,250 in the PCIRO summary of January 1948. These count Ukrainians only, inside a camp reported at more than 8,500 of all nationalities in 1947. The Munich resettlement centre, the Funkkaserne, Laim, the Luitpold barracks and Schleissheim are separate lines in the same table.

A multinational community

A published first-person memoir describes a resident administration drawn from different national communities, with camp police, churches, schools and a clinic. A photograph dated 1949 shows residents standing before one of the long barracks blocks. The recollection presents the camp as a functioning community within the damaged postwar city.

The memoir also records a small friction of shared living: late-night Ukrainian singing could keep children awake. Such details give a more domestic picture than the institutional title “DP Center”. Families lived alongside other refugees with their own languages, religious practices and expectations, while the camp’s services met needs that could not wait for emigration.

The field supervisor’s album puts pictures to those services: the Greek Orthodox church inside the barracks and a wedding procession, the camp police and the funeral of their chief, children queuing for the midday meal, the children’s bakery, vegetables grown outside and flowers indoors, two tailor shops and a machine shop, and Ukrainian women embroidering shirts, blouses and table coverings for sale. Three provisional prayer rooms served Greek Orthodox, Jewish and Catholic worshippers.

A second sequence records public life: a football team, assemblies and lectures in the big hall, a Girl Guide group, ballet danced by camp performers, an Americanisation discussion course, and visits by American officers and by General Eisenhower.

Learning while awaiting departure

Schools, vocational training, a bakery, a garden and temporary prayer rooms served the crowded community.

A 2024 Ukrainian Weekly account describes the Ukrainian high school and the importance of learning another language before emigration. It recounts a departure for Canada in late 1948 to continue education at a Ukrainian Baptist institute. This is one documented route out of the camp, not a destination shared by every resident.

The camp sat inside a much larger Ukrainian Munich, where roughly 15,000 to 20,000 Ukrainians lived between 1945 and 1949 with three gymnasiums, a teachers’ seminary, four higher institutions and 74 newspaper and journal titles. Those were city institutions; none is documented as belonging to this camp.

Pressure to return, and leaving instead

Soviet repatriation officers visited the camp, and the album records one such visit: the visitors’ car surrounded, overturned and burned, their papers burnt in the road, and the dignitaries leaving with an American major and the heads of the national groups. A Hoover Institution curator, where the original prints are now held, described the sequence as a protest against a visit by a Soviet repatriation officer to the Freimann camp in 1948.

The album ends in departure rather than return: farewells, lorries drawn up before the tower, and people boarding trains for new countries in the same German railway freight wagons that had carried many of them into Germany as forced labour.

Art and the public image of displacement

A Hoover Institution photograph guide identifies a Ukrainian group and Ukrainian art exhibition among its Warner-Kaserne material. Its separate folders cover camp views, children and visitors during 1946–1950. They show how the camp was documented through both daily life and public events.

The barracks were a location for The Search in 1947–1948. Its story of a displaced child separated from his mother brought the refugee experience to cinema audiences.

Other camps at Freimann

Freimann held more than one displaced-persons institution and the names overlap. The inventory also lists a Jewish settlement camp at Munich-Freimann and Neufreimann, assembly-centre number AC 95-396, UNRRA Team 560, capacity 1,620 and 2,012 residents at 31 October 1947, open from 24 January 1946 to 15 June 1949; it notes that the differing Freimann and Neufreimann entries describe that one Jewish institution under changing administrative names. It is not this camp.

A Munich museum exhibition describes the former SS barracks in Freimann as housing Polish displaced people after the war and, from spring 1948, serving as a transit and resettlement centre with a high proportion of Jewish residents awaiting emigration.

Military use returns

The DP camp closed in 1950 and the US Army took over as Warner-Kaserne. The site later passed to German military use and is now the Ernst-von-Bergmann-Kaserne.

The barracks history records that the main building became the second largest structure in American army use anywhere after the Pentagon, that the complex returned to German control in 1968, and that it took its present name on 24 March 1980.

The surviving complex and the dispersed archives tell different parts of the story: the memoir photograph records residents in 1949, institutional collections preserve other views, and later military records document the building’s changed purpose.