Weyarn

A former orphanage becomes a camp

The accommodation belonged to the former monastery complex. At the beginning of the twentieth century the city of Munich established an orphanage there. In the 1930s it became a leadership school of the Hitler Youth, and towards the end of the war it served as a military hospital. UNRRA subsequently took it over as a transit home for displaced people.

The Ukrainian community celebrated its first anniversary on 13 October 1946. The programme states that a year had passed since 265 Ukrainian exiles came to stay at Weyarn, placing the community’s beginnings in October 1945, earlier than the inventory’s first administrative date of 24 January 1946. The distinction matters: a surviving administrative entry need not be the first day that people lived at a camp.

The camp’s own organisation

The camp drew its own organisation chart, and it is the clearest surviving account of how the place was run. It is headed ‘TEAM UNRRA-188’ — the relief team the inventory also names, based at Rosenheim — above the bilingual title ‘Ukrainian DP camp Weyarn’ and a small drawing of the monastery buildings.

At the centre stands the camp leader, flanked by a representative and a secretary, with a control commission and a camp court above him. Six branches descend: a manager, a physician, an inner administrator, a supply official, a camp police and an education leader. Under the physician are an infirmary, an outpatient clinic and a nurse. Under the inner administrator are lodgings and the allotment of work. Under the supply official are a storekeeper, an accountant and the kitchen with its own chief and workers. Under the education leader are a sports circle, a Plast scout troop, courses, a chorus, a children’s garden and a school with its teachers.

The inventory adds the administrative shell around that structure. Weyarn was assembly centre AC 95-386, renumbered OB 728 from September 1948; its nationality is recorded as Polish-Ukrainian; Team 188 at Rosenheim was directed by Carton, the area teams were at Rosenheim, Traunstein and Bad Reichenhall, and the whole sat in Area 7, Munich, under a field supervisor named Cagle. A second Weyarn entry records a rehabilitation centre numbered OB 766.

Food, clothing and practical support

A year of deliveries was turned into an illustrated public account. Small lorries represent incoming food, with separate lines for milk, fats, bread, sugar, meat, cheese, fish, potatoes and vegetables, covering 14 October 1945 to 15 October 1946. Bread came to 27,095.25 kg, milk to 9,955.31 kg, meat to 4,703.17 kg, fats to 2,744.08 kg, cheese to 1,052.84 kg and fish to 1,282 kg; the potato and vegetable figures, the largest on the sheet, are partly obscured. These are supplies received across an entire year, rather than a calculation of what any one person ate.

Another chart records the ordinary objects needed to make shared accommodation usable, delivered by UNRRA between 14 October 1945 and 13 October 1946. Thirty-four lines cover blankets, coats, shirts, underclothes, stockings and shoes; mattresses, towels and nappies; bowls, mugs, glasses, forks, spoons and knives; and saws, axes and oilcloths. Its illustrations make clear that relief involved both immediate necessities and the equipment of daily life.

The camp also kept accounts. A bilingual line graph of income, expenditure and balance runs across the same first year on a scale reaching five thousand Reichsmark, month by month; the lines are drawn but the values are not written on them.

Medical care and a changing population

The medical report runs from October 1945 to September 1946 and separates men, women and children. Its monthly bars show continuing use of the camp’s medical service through the first year, though the counts are given only by the length of the bars. The accompanying population chart likewise distinguishes these three groups, presenting the community as families and individuals of different ages rather than a single undifferentiated total.

The population chart carries written figures above its columns. Men rise from 28 in the first month to 142 by the last; women from 18 to 78; children from 15 to 45. The growth is steepest in the first half-year and then levels off, which is what one would expect of a camp that filled quickly and then held steady.

Different records answer different population questions. The camp’s own monthly totals reach 265 by October 1946, and the chapel plaque commemorates 265 Ukrainians during 1945–1947. The published Ukrainian series counts 253 at Weyarn in the questionnaire returns of 1946 and 1947, 269 in the UNRRA count of August 1946, 208 in May 1947 and 225 in December 1947. The inventory’s figure of 280 on 31 October 1947 is a measure of accommodation capacity, not a count of people present on that day.

A kindergarten, worship and an anniversary

An illustrated notice, drawn with a Cossack and a girl above the lettering, invites the camp to a display by its kindergarten: ‘On Tuesday the 21st September, at 7.30 p.m. there will be a display by our camp kindergarten, please come.’ The year is not stated on the surviving notice.

The anniversary programme organised 13 October 1946 around both religious traditions. At 10.15 a solemn liturgy was to be held in the large church for the Greek Catholics, while at the same hour the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church served the Orthodox in the camp hall. At noon a commemorative plaque was to be unveiled in the chapel; a festive gathering followed at five and a social evening at nine. An exhibition of Ukrainian folk art opened in the administration building two days earlier, on 11 October.

A surviving bilingual chapel inscription remembers the same number as the anniversary poster: ‘In the years 1945–1947 two hundred and sixty-five Ukrainian exiles stayed at Weyarn and prayed in this little church for their homeland.’ The German half of the text describes them as Ukrainians whom the Second World War had robbed of their homeland. Alongside the practical charts and the children’s notice, it preserves a community’s own account of what connected its members during displacement.

Departure and the building’s next chapter

The inventory places the camp’s closure between the end of March and the end of September 1949. Its earlier UNRRA administration had been associated with Team 188 at Rosenheim, and later records used the identifier OB 728. These identifiers distinguish the institution within the regional relief network.

The published Ukrainian series shows the community shrinking before that: 269 in August 1946, 208 in May 1947, 225 in December 1947. Hnizdovsky himself sailed for America in 1949, the year the camp closed.

In 1953 the educationist Max Riel bought the site from the city of Munich and founded a private school, which continued until 1984. That was a new chapter in the buildings’ history. The surviving camp notices, charts and plaque preserve the intervening years when this place housed Ukrainians waiting to rebuild their lives.