Zwölf Apostel

An established town inn

The hotel’s own description traces the Gasthaus zu den 12 Aposteln to the seventeenth century and Berndl family ownership to 1925. The municipal accommodation guide identifies the building at Kapuzinerstraße 3. Its history as an inn preceded its use to house displaced Ukrainians.

A wartime view of the building

A colour photograph preserved by Altötting’s city archive shows Zwölf Apostel behind a crowd and a wounded Wehrmacht serviceman using crutches. The archive dates the image approximately to 1940 and records Büchner’s original description of the subject as the district’s first wounded man. The serviceman has not been identified. The photograph documents the building before its Ukrainian accommodation phase.

The return of 12 August 1947

Haringer’s enumeration for 12 August 1947 covers four named buildings. It records 200 Polish Jews at the Gasthaus Bayerischer Hof, 200 Ukrainians at the Gasthof Zwölf Apostel, 50 Yugoslavs and Ukrainians together at the Gasthof Altöttinger Hof, and 200 Yugoslavs in the former domestic science school Josefsburg of the Englische Fräulein. It adds that individual people were lodged in other houses, among them the inns Schex, Alte Post and Huber, and in private homes.

Zwölf Apostel therefore held the largest single group of Ukrainians in the town on that date, within a dispersed pattern of accommodation rather than a fenced compound. The reported 200 is a count on one day, not the number of people who passed through the inn, and the return does not say how long any of them stayed.

Registered centres and unregistered houses

Altötting’s displaced-person administration ran through UNRRA Team 305, whose director was recorded as Watson from January 1946 and whose field supervisor was Brooke. From November 1946 the town fell under the area teams at Traunstein and Bad Reichenhall, within the Munich area A 7. The American military government kept its district base at the Hotel Zur Post on the Kapellplatz, and all displaced people in the town drew ration cards from a central issuing point which they spent in Altötting’s own shops.

The Arolsen inventory registers four numbered Altötting centres. Altötting I, the Polish House, opened on 23 December 1945 and closed between 25 August and 20 September 1947, with Jewish, Polish, Polish-Ukrainian and Yugoslav residents. Altötting II, the Bayerischer Hof, is recorded as Jewish with a capacity of 312 and a closing date of 12 April 1948. Altötting III is recorded as Yugoslav with a capacity of 126, and Altötting IV carries no nationality at all.

Zwölf Apostel does not appear in that inventory under its own name, and neither does Altöttinger Hof. The inn housed displaced people without being constituted as an assembly centre, which is why its Ukrainian residents survive in a local historian’s enumeration rather than in an assembly-centre register. This also means the inn has no opening date, no capacity and no assembly-centre number of its own.

Ukrainians counted at Altötting

Stebelsky’s table of Ukrainians in the camps of the American zone enters Altötting under the town name rather than by building. It gives 136 from questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947, 92 in the UNRRA summary of 24 August 1946 and 169 in the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947, with no figure in the summary compiled for the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organisation on 2 January 1948.

These are town totals gathered on different dates and by different bodies, so none of them can be read as the population of Zwölf Apostel. The May 1947 figure of 169 for the whole town sits below Haringer’s 200 for this one inn three months later, which is a useful warning that the two counts were made on different principles.

Ukrainian community life in the town

The Munich almanac of the Ukrainian Council for Physical Culture records a Ukrainian sports society at Altötting. Prolom was founded on 5 May 1947 under the chairmanship of Osyp Liskevych, in a town the almanac describes as famous for its pilgrimages and as holding 130 Ukrainians. Only the men’s volleyball section was ever active, the society never developed a programme, and it dissolved itself in the autumn of 1947.

Its short life fits the pattern of a scattered population living in inns rather than in one large camp with its own halls and grounds. The almanac’s figure of 130 Ukrainians is its own count for the town and is not attached to any one building.

Not every Ukrainian left. The city archive’s feature of December 2023 recalls a Ukrainian-born musician born in 1907 who settled in Altötting after the war, sang bass in the shrine choir and taught local children to read music and sing. He died in 2001. The archive does not connect him with any particular building.

Keeping the Altötting houses apart

Four inns and institutions in the same small town are easily confused. The Bayerischer Hof at Neuöttinger Straße 5 was the seat and social centre of the Jewish displaced-persons community, with a prayer room; it had served the Wehrmacht as an auxiliary military hospital and was demolished in the 1960s. The Josefsburg was a former domestic science school. Altöttinger Hof stands at Mühldorfer Straße 1. Zwölf Apostel is a separate house at Kapuzinerstraße 3, and only it and Altöttinger Hof are recorded as holding Ukrainians.

Pilgrimage and hospitality after the war

In July 1950, a pilgrimage notice placed the organising office at Zwölf Apostel, opposite St Konrad’s church. It also directed participants from the Hohenelbe district to gather at the inn. This shows the building serving as both meeting place and practical coordination point for a large pilgrimage. The arrangements do not establish when Ukrainian accommodation ended.

Later civic gatherings

The inn continued to host organised visitors decades later. On 3 February 2007, Altötting’s mayor recorded an evening meal there for guests from European pilgrimage towns following a congress. That municipal diary entry extends the building’s documented public life beyond the displacement years.