DP-Camp Wolkering

The barracks before 1945

The camp buildings were not built for refugees. In 1935, when the Wolkeringer Bach was regulated, a Reich Labour Service camp was constructed in the village: sixteen barracks for up to 500 people. Labour Service men straightened the Mühlbach until 1939, and the camp remained in Labour Service use until the end of the war. The nearby military training ground was enlarged around 1936.

The camp was part of the village economy while it lasted. The Wolkering Raiffeisen bank paid out the wages of the Labour Service men, and the drainage of the Mühlbach valley that the camp existed to carry out had been asked for by the farmers of the Zullfeld and the Schmiedfeld as far back as 1915. Sixteen barracks for five hundred men were, by any measure, a large addition to a parish village whose baroque church of Mariä Himmelfahrt had been rebuilt in 1746 and which counts 377 inhabitants today.

The displaced persons camp

After the war the barracks passed to displaced persons. The village chronology records an Ausländerlager for displaced persons in Wolkering from 1945 to 1947, and a separate entry for the water supply of the DP camp in 1948. The local history group’s account has Labour Service use running to the end of the war and the accommodation of displaced persons and refugees following it.

The Arolsen inventory carries the camp from its first listing on 24 January 1946 to a closing date of 28 July 1949. The two datings are not in conflict: the village chronology describes the years in which the barracks were most visibly a foreigners’ camp, while the inventory records an administrative existence that ran on into 1949. The file the International Refugee Organisation kept on Camp Wolkering, now in the French national archives, likewise runs from October 1947 to July 1949.

The illustrated Augsburg weekly Pu-hu printed a photograph captioned “Plast guard at Wolkering”: a scout on duty at the entrance to a tented camp beneath a painted banner. The report beside it describes the senior Plast kurin named after Zenon Kosak in the Ukrainian camp at Wolkering, twenty-three strong. It had been founded at Straubing in March 1946, had then moved to Polanten near Neumarkt, and had been at Wolkering since August 1947. The scoutmaster Ivan Pshoniak had organised it well; it had made many excursions into the forests and held several Plast campfires, one of them dedicated to those who had fallen for the freedom of Ukraine. The kurin was divided into two groups, Lev and Rys, and met weekly.

The report of the August 1946 Plast camp gives its numbers and its organisers. Thirty novice boys and sixteen novice girls took part. The camp was organised by the SUPE camp command in agreement with the school board and the parents’ circle, and with the technical assistance of the local UNRRA Team 120 — the same Regensburg team under which the Arolsen inventory lists the camp. A participant’s account on the following page describes the Plast leadership and the children’s parents coming out to them at the sunny glade in the Wolkering settlement.

The 1947 leaders’ training camp left a note of how the participants thought about the place. A recollection printed beside the report explains that they named their camp Na Smerekovomu Zrubi, On the Spruce Felled Trunk, so as not to use the name “the camp at Wolkering”, which would have reminded them again and again that they were in a foreign land.

Wolkering also appears in reports of Ukrainian religious life in the district. Ukrainske slovo reported that Ukrainian pilgrim-emigrants from Regensburg, Schwandorf, Wolkering, Dingolfing and Rosenheim-Neubeuern-Schloss travelled together, led by their pastors, to the pilgrimage site at Altötting on the Inn on 28 August 1946, the feast of the Assumption.

Run from Regensburg

Wolkering was administered from Regensburg throughout. The inventory places it under UNRRA Team 120 Regensburg, whose team director is recorded as Landstreet, and from November 1946 under Area Team 1046 Regensburg within Area 4, Amberg, with a field supervisor recorded as Barr. It carried the assembly centre number AC 93-353, replaced in September 1948 by the IRO designation NBO 406, and a capacity of 450 entered against 31 October 1947.

Team 120 also ran the Ganghofersiedlung in Regensburg, by far the largest centre in the district at a recorded capacity of 6,000, together with the von der Tann barracks, the district headquarters annexe, the general hospital and the Jewish community at Wörth an der Donau. Area Team 1046 reached much further out, over camps at Cham, Dingolfing, Ganacker, Hohenfels, Landshut, Michelsdorf, Straubing and Vilsbiburg among others. Set against these, Wolkering was a small unit: one village camp of a few hundred people in a district list of more than forty entries.

Who was counted there

At the end of February 1946 two American officers inspected the camps of Team 120, and their reports were tabulated by nationality. Wolkering appears with 341 people: 283 registered as Ukrainians, 39 as Poles, eight as Belarusians, one as Latvian and ten as other. The Ganghofersiedlung in the same return held 5,729.

The contrast between the two columns is worth reading carefully. At Wolkering almost everyone was entered under a national heading. In the Ganghofersiedlung the single largest entry was 2,605 stateless people, ahead of 1,389 Lithuanians and 1,099 Poles, and the Ukrainian line stands empty. Ukrainians from western Ukraine and eastern Galicia had destroyed Soviet papers to avoid forced repatriation, so a return of this kind records the status a person could safely claim rather than the place they came from.

Later counts keep the Ukrainian figure at much the same level. Returns collected by the Central Representation of the Ukrainian Emigration during 1946 and 1947 counted 412 Ukrainians at Wolkering; UNRRA assembly-centre summaries gave 343 on 24 August 1946 and 343 on 31 May 1947, and the PCIRO summary of 2 January 1948 gave 381. Set against the inventory capacity of 450, these figures describe a camp in which Ukrainians were the great majority for its whole life, although the inventory also records Polish and Russian residents without a head count for any group.

The surviving record

The records of the camp survive in more than one archive. The Arolsen Archives hold lists and documents for Wolkering, among them strength and change reports, under document identifiers 82042369 to 82042377. The Staatsarchiv Amberg holds files from the Bezirksamt Regensburg on the water supply of the DP camp in 1948 and on the camp itself with name lists for 1945 to 1947.

The Boshyk and Balan research guide locates the third body of material precisely. Within the IRO series AJ 43 in the Archives nationales de France, one carton gathers documents on a run of American-zone camps, and its entry 46 reads “Camp Wolkering à Wolkering, octobre 1947 – juillet 1949”. Its neighbours in the same carton include the Wildflecken staging centre, the Northern Kaserne at Würzburg, the von der Tann barracks at Regensburg and Maierhof at Passau — the same Regensburg district company the camp kept in the UNRRA lists.

After the camp

The barracks were used for German refugees and expellees as well as displaced persons, according to the local history group. The camp site is still a known place in the village: in April 2023 the Historischer Arbeitskreis Wolkering led a walk along the regulated stream to the grounds of the former Labour Service camp, and the 2022 anniversary publication for 1,200 years of Wolkering included the camp in its chronology.

Wolkering itself remained an independent municipality until 1 January 1972, when it merged into Thalmassing, and had 377 inhabitants in April 2025 — fewer people than the camp on its edge was rated to hold. The camp survives in the village as a line in a chronology and a stop on a local history walk, and elsewhere as files in Bad Arolsen, Amberg and Paris.