Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Americans, and a German Town, 1945–1952

By Adam R. Seipp

A history of the post–World War II refugee camp located in Wildflecken, Germany.

In 1936, the Nazi state created a massive military training site near Wildflecken, a tiny community in rural Bavaria. During the war, this base housed an industrial facility that drew forced laborers from all over conquered Europe. At war’s end, the base became Europe’s largest Displaced Persons camp, housing thousands of Polish refugees and German civilians fleeing Eastern Europe. As the Cold War intensified, the US Army occupied the base, removed the remaining refugees, and stayed until 1994. Strangers in the Wild Place tells the story of these tumultuous years through the eyes of these very different groups, who were forced to find ways to live together and form a functional society out of the ruins of Hitler’s Reich.

“This well-researched and well-documented . . . book will contribute to the growing literature of the refugee crisis throughout postwar Europe and the variety of populations gathered on Allied occupied German territory, and thereby forcefully challenge the myth that the conspicuous and anxiety-provoking presence of “non-Germans” is a new “problem” for Germany. . . . It demonstrates clearly . . . that it was the presence of foreign east European DPs as well as American occupiers that served to push the integration of ethnic German refugees into the young Federal Republic and to reconstitute in the wake of a catastrophic war a new and highly functional Volksgemeinschaft.” —Atina Grossmann, New York University

“In clear, straightforward prose, Seipp does yeoman’s work with his extensive use of both primary and secondary sources. . . . His treatment of the pentagonal interaction of the camp’s residents, the town of Wildflecken, the US Army, the UNRRA and the Land of Bavaria contributes to a greater understanding of just how complex the reconstruction of a country’s socio-political infrastructure must necessarily be in the aftermath of a major conflict.” —German History

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780253007070

Book preview

STRANGERS IN THE WILD PLACE

STRANGERS

IN THE

WILD PLACE

REFUGEES, AMERICANS, AND A GERMAN TOWN, 1945–1952

ADAM R. SEIPP

This book is a publication of

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© 2013 by Adam R. Seipp

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-00677-6 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-253-00707-0 (eb)

1  2  3  4  5     18  17  16  15  14  13

FOR LESLIE, ROWAN, AND CORA

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Wild Place, 1933–1945

2 The Seigneurs of Wildflecken, 1945–1947

3 Keeping Refugees Occupied, 1945–1948

4 These People, 1947–1949

5 A Victory for Democracy, 1949–1952

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not exist without the help, guidance, and support of a great many people. For several years, friends, family, and colleagues have had to endure my decidedly Wildflecken-centric view of modern German history. Mostly, they made it possible for me to research, write, and publish a book about a subject that I still find fresh, compelling, and fascinating.

The influence of Konrad H. Jarausch looms large over my efforts to understand German history. His comments at an early stage, along with encouragment by Gerhard Weinberg and Norman Goda, helped to move the project forward. Laura Hilton and Kathy Nawyn were indispendible and patient guides to, respectively, the complexities of the DP camp system and the vagaries of the National Archives. Michael Meng has been a great friend and an intellectual sparring partner who forced me to refine many of my arguments long before they got to print.

Funding for this project came from the German Academic Exchange Service, German Historical Institute – Washington, College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M, Office of the Vice President for Research, Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs, and the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute. The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum both funded part of my research and gave me a congenial spot to work. My thanks especially to Dieter Kuntz, Nicole Frechette, Vincent Slatt, and Eric Steinhart.

Research travel for this project took me to lots of interesting places and gave me the chance to work with some really fascinating people. In Würzburg, Ingrid Heeg-Engelhart at the Staatsarchiv Würzburg was a great help making my way through a mass of documentation. Jochen Achilles and Birgit Daewes made my time in the city both productive and a lot of fun. Klaus and Rosemarie Zepke were wonderfully hospitable and generous guides to the place and its history. Andrea Sinn’s friendship helped to make Munich an even more terrific place to work. Susanne Urban and Dieter Steinert were immensely helpful in Bad Arolsen, while Panikos Panayi was an amiable companion at the Bundesarchiv in Freiburg. Michael Brodhead helped me during my trip to the US Army Corps of Engineers Archive.

The day I arrived on my first visit to Wildflecken, I missed a bus connection, was offered a ride by strangers, and soon found myself invited to a family reunion. What started as a research trip turned into an unforgettable experience with wonderful people. Heinz Leitsch has helped this project along in countless ways. Peter Heil and Bürgermeister Alfred Schrenk were terrific hosts in the local archive. Walter Koempel and Norbert Rueckel offered their time and expertise. Werner and Evelyn Kirchner made me welcome (and kept me well fed) at the Hotel Würzburger Hof. Volker and Maria Zinn of the Kreuzberg-Apotheke opened their home for me and the rest of the NordicTreff Wildflecken, who welcomed me as a temporary teammate and treated me to a Kulturabend. I also have to thank the many people around the world who inhabit a virtual community of Wildflecken. Whether as former residents of the DP camp, locals who later emigrated, or American soldiers who came after the story I tell here came to an end, these people have given their time to tell me their stories. Special thanks to Janie Michelli, Andrew Zdanowicz, Chester Wolkonowski, and Dale Pluciennik.

The Department of History at Texas A&M continues to be great place to teach and write history. This has much to do with the successive leadership of Walter Buenger and David Vaught, as well as that of Deans Charles Johnson and José Luis Bermúdez. R. J. Q. Adams, Chip Dawson, Sylvia Hoffert, Walter Kamphoefner, Hoi-eun Kim, Arnold Krammer, Brian Linn, and the members of the Faculty Colloquium series have all been greatly helpful in this process. Chuck Grear did a terrific job with the map. Graduate and undergraduate students have consistently challenged me to find ways to explain the dark heart of Europe’s twentieth century in all its complexities. Special thanks to Jared Donnelly, who came through with some last-minute help in locating a photo. Muldoon’s Coffee Shop in College Station kept me caffeinated and didn’t object as I wrote much of the first draft of this book at a table in the back.

Leslie, Rowan, and Cora have been the center of my world throughout this process. This book would not exist without their love, support, and patience. Good friends have helped to see this project through, hosted me on various trips, and been there for my family while I was away. Special thanks to Matt Woods, Tasha Dubriwny, and Zariana Woods; Dario Vittori; Jonathan L’Hommedieu; Bruce Baker; Norm Leung; Jason, Meg, and Nathan Savage; and Mike, Anna, and Oscar Anderson. My extended family has been a source of support and comfort through all the moves and changes of the past decade.

My grandmother, Virginia Ramsey, died as I finished work on this book. My mother, Catherine Kane, has battled illness with extraordinary courage and strength through much of the time I have been writing. Finally, I want to honor the memory of Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, who lost his life on June 10, 2009, while protecting hundreds of people, myself included, from a gunman at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

STRANGERS IN THE WILD PLACE

Occupied Germany, 1945–1949. Prepared by Charles Grear.

INTRODUCTION

This book is an international history of a very small place. Over the course of less than two decades, Wildflecken, a tiny town in northern Bavaria, went through a series of extraordinary and wrenching transformations that mirrored the profound shattering and reformation of political, social, and economic life in mid-twentieth century Germany. An obscure farm town in 1935, Wildflecken became a base community for the rapidly growing German military machine of the late 1930s. In the aftermath of Hitler’s disastrous war, American-occupied Wildflecken became a catchment area for several distinct groups of refugees. Just as the refugee crisis began to ebb in the late 1940s, the nascent Cold War escalated, and the American presence, previously declining, dramatically reversed course. For the next forty years, Wildflecken became an American base town, one of many to dot the region as a guarantor of West German security in the midst of a global conflict.

This is a book about land and the strangers who lived there, in close proximity to each other, during the years after the war. The land was a hilly, forested 18,000-acre tract just north of Wildflecken stretching out between the town and the border between Bavaria and the state of Hesse. Over twenty years, different groups and institutions laid claim to that land and asserted their right to make use of it as they saw fit. Military and civilian officials passed countless maps back and forth. They outlined in vivid and contrasting colors the shifting boundaries of a piece of property shaped and re-shaped by events taking place far beyond the valley of the Sinn River.

Strangers came to Sinn Valley by the thousands, beginning with the construction of a Germany military base in 1936. At the end of the war, the pace only quickened as streams of refugees flooded the valley to escape devastated cities, flee the oncoming Red Army, or because they had no way of returning home. To understand Wildflecken is to understand something important about the transformation of West Germany from defeat to stability. In postwar Germany, local and regional politics were dominated by questions of what to do with millions of people made refugees by the war. Debates over their fate had much to do with land and property, which became an issue of sovereignty as West Germany moved toward self-government but continued to play host to hundreds of thousands of occupation troops. To understand this nexus of competing groups, interests, and ideas, one must try to see it from a multitude of perspectives. This book examines the experiences of ethnic German expellees fleeing Eastern Europe, homeless German civilians from heavily bombed urban areas, non-Germans who came from liberated concentration camps, compulsory labor facilities, or from Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe (Displaced Persons or DPs), refugee administrators from both German and United Nations bureaucracies, American soldiers, and the community itself.

Many of these people were strangers to the country, foreigners who found themselves in the Sinn Valley because of the tides of war and the tumult of the postwar period. But all of them were strangers to each other, thrown together by choice and circumstance. While tension and conflict suffused the relationships within and between these groups, there were also opportunities for compromise and coexistence. In the debates over the future of a tract of land in northern Bavaria, the outlines of a plural and democratic Cold War state began to emerge. Out of this experience developed a distinct, stable, and self-consciously West German society from the ruins of dictatorship and defeat.

The creation of civic and governmental institutions in West Germany, and with it the Cold War political and military order in Central Europe, was closely linked to problem of refugees. Refugee policy was a crucial test of German self-government from the beginning of the occupation period. Debates over refugees shaped the creation of German institutions at all levels, from local to federal. Refugees also provided the backdrop for tensions between the West German state, its constituent parts, and the occupying powers. Refugees of all kinds were themselves often actors in these debates. If we are going to understand the central role of refugees in shaping postwar reconstruction and the history of the American military presence in Cold War West Germany, we have to foreground their voices and the voices of those responsible for managing and caring for them. As Paul Steege notes in his study of postwar Berlin, everyday life had a great deal to do with how the Cold War came to be and how it became part of the daily experience of those living on its front lines.¹

There have been a number of excellent local histories of German communities published during the first half of the twentieth century, driven by a new interest in studies that bridge the Nazi and postwar years.² Some of the most interesting local studies, like Neil Gregor’s work on Nürnberg or Helmut Walser Smith’s work on the Prussian town of Konitz, seek to use the local to elucidate themes that connect events at the community level to national and global levels of analysis. Atina Grossmann, in her excellent work in Jewish DPs in postwar Germany, has proposed entangling histories of DPs, Germans, and Americans. Drawing upon the insights of Frank Stern, Grossmann describes a triadic relationship through which these groups came to understand themselves and each other in the aftermath of the war.³ While Grossmann acknowledges the diversity within each of these groups, I would argue that the category of Germans was simply too broad, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the war. German refugees, particularly expellees from Eastern Europe, had a very different self-conception and were initially perceived as alien by their unwilling German hosts. This was especially true in small rural communities like Wildflecken where most expellees found themselves. Ethnic German expellees were able to integrate into these communities in part because of the presence of other groups of outsiders, notably DPs and occupation forces.

Wildflecken’s story is best told in the manner that Saul Friedländer calls integrated history, an effort to write the history of a place in a way that reflects the multivariant and multifaceted interactions that took place in and around it.⁴ It is possible to write a history of the town of Wildflecken that mentions the DP camp in passing and mostly as a dangerous nuisance, or a study of the American base that stood there for forty years with little mention of the expellee settlements that base construction uprooted.⁵ What is missing from these approaches is a sense of the vital interaction between and within each of these units, or the immersion of one small town’s tumultuous story within the context of local, regional, national, and international dynamics.

There is also a considerable need to reappraise the periodization of the postwar refugee crisis. DPs, expellees, and occupation troops feature prominently in studies of the postwar rubble time (Trümmerzeit), a period of about three years dominated by recovery from the physical and emotional destruction of the war.⁶ However, the refugee crisis was actually far more pervasive and enduring. The Jewish DP camp at Föhrenwald near the Munich suburb of Wolfratshausen did not close until 1957. Two years later, there were still forty-four camps with about 9,600 refugees from Eastern Europe in Bavaria alone.⁷ Expellees and DPs were not just a feature of the immediate postwar period; they were an integral component of the early history of West Germany. Because that history is entangled with the story of the American military presence, these narratives have to be viewed in an integrative, complicated, and fundamentally convergent way.

The integrated history of Wildflecken can only be written from the perspectives of institutions that left their records in Germany, the United States, France, and from personal memories of individuals who have since dispersed around the world. For a few years, events taking place in Wildflecken had implications in Washington, Bonn, Munich, and the district capital of Würzburg. Decisions taken in each of those places not infrequently clashed with those made in the others. Each had a dramatic impact on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people in and around Wildflecken. These interactions at times were quotidian and left few tangible records, as when a young expellee woman married a Polish DP and started a family. They were sometimes broader and more regional, as in the case of networks of black market traders that included DPs, expellees, and locals, along with police sent to break them up. Finally, these interactions played out across a grand stage of international events, as when conservative members of the Bavarian parliament denounced the West German government for giving precedence to the United States Army over a few hundred farmers in a rural valley in northern Franconia. Such an approach calls for shifts in perspective from the intimate and local to the national and global and for telling stories in a way that is firmly rooted in the discrete chronology of the seven years during which these interactions took place, while embracing the parallel structure of many of the meta-histories examined within.

This book makes two principal arguments. First, during the half-decade following the Second World War, the United States Army found itself deeply engaged with an enormous and unprecedented refugee crisis across occupied and semi-sovereign Germany. Directly and indirectly, American decisions and influence proved decisive in both the successes and failures of refugee management and integration. Second, the presence of non-German foreigners, notably DPs and American troops, sometimes had the entirely unintended but very important effect of catalyzing the integration of expellee populations into pre-existing communities. In a world filled with foreigners, in which the dynamics of power clearly favored those outsiders, the community of insiders could grow to encompass ethnic Germans who fled their homes in Eastern Europe.

As American attention shifted from the occupation of defeated Germany to the rebuilding of a new Cold War ally, so too did refugee policy. The management of the multiple refugee crises in postwar Germany was a significant component of and challenge to the American occupation and its efforts to set up sustainable institutions in the ruins of Central Europe. Despite the centrality of refugee issues in the day-to-day management of the American occupation, very little attention has been paid to the relationship between occupation troops and the multiple categories of refugees in postwar Germany.⁸ Much of what has been written has emphasized the troubled efforts of American Constabulary troops to keep order in the DP camps and the halting, initially uncomprehending American response to the problems of Jewish DPs.⁹ Local histories of American occupation often mention the problem of expellees and conflicts over the need for temporary accommodation for them but do not identify the important continuities between American basing needs during the occupation period and the post-1950 creation of permanent bases for Cold War defense.¹⁰ Given that expellees comprised roughly one in five of those Germans living under American occupation, the American military government at all levels had to dedicate a considerable amount of energy to expellee issues. Sylvia Schraut, one of the relatively few scholars to explore this connection directly, concludes that expellees could not have gained the rights they enjoyed in post-war Germany without the intervention of the American military government.¹¹

There has been a great deal of work on the Displaced Persons camp system and on the wider issue of DPs in the postwar years. Historians have examined the creation of DP communities within and outside the camps, the interaction between different groups of DPs and equally diverse German civilians in the wake of the war, the experience of emigration, the subsequent creation of diasporic communities, and the important role that the DP problem played in helping to create the framework for an international humanitarian regime in the second half of the twentieth century.¹² There has been a particular focus on Jewish DPs (the She’erit Hapletah, or surviving remnant), an important group within the DP universe but by no means the largest.¹³ The majority of DPs, Jewish and non-Jewish, came from Eastern Europe and endured some part of the terrible double occupation of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. This not only made many of them hesitant to return home, but also created what Daniel Cohen has recently termed estrange(ment) from the national body in the wake of the war that could only be rectified after the end of the Cold War.¹⁴ For most of the Wildflecken DP camp’s history, its inhabitants were non-Jewish Poles. The transformation of Eastern Europe during the early Cold War framed discussions within the camp about inhabitants returning home and international debates about what to do with the DP camp system.

The past decade has also seen a tremendous interest in the story of Germans made homeless by the war (Evakuierte), the ethnic German expellees who fled or were expelled from East-Central Europe in its wake, and the German communities in which they found themselves.¹⁵ Rainer Schulze’s extensive work on Celle, Doris von der Brelie-Lewien’s research on Fallingbostel, and Schraut’s study of Württemberg-Baden, among others, remind us of the centrality of expellees in the everyday social and political life of occupied and post-sovereign West Germany.¹⁶ Both German and non-German historians free of the Cold War association between expellees and revanchist politics have taken a new look at the East European milieu that produced the expellees, the murderous ethnic politics of the war years, and the experiences of defeat and expulsion. The historian Andreas Kossert’s 2008 study Kalte Heimat, which attacked many of the comfortable myths of the speedy integration of expellees into their host society, was a commercial and critical success in Germany. Remarkably, the first synthetic study of the expellee crisis did not appear in English until 2007. At the same time, a growing literature on both sides of the Atlantic has questioned the notion that West Germans in the postwar period forgot the Nazi and wartime past. As Robert Moeller has argued, a selective past, a past of German suffering, was in fact ubiquitous in the 1950s.¹⁷ At the core of this narrative of suffering lay the expellees, civilians forced from their homes during or after the war and now reconceptualized innocent victims of Communism.

The problem is that most studies of DPs and expellees treat the two groups in isolation In reality, DP and expellee camps were often in close proximity, and efforts to ameliorate the plight of one group could have a profound effect on the other. Contemporary observers certainly saw these two categories as linked, both through the challenges of refugee management and in their origins in the broader postwar crisis. West German observers in the 1950s tried very hard to place the experience of expulsion within the wider narrative of refugees after the war. The sociologist Elisabeth Pfeil wrote in her 1950 study Five Years Later that the problem appears not just in Germany. If we have 12 million expellees to cope with, Europe has 30 million who had to leave their homes by force or who cannot go back to them.¹⁸ Malcolm Proudfoot, who worked with the DP camp system and became one of its first chroniclers, took a similar line in his posthumously published 1956 study of people made homeless by policies adopted by Germany and the Soviet Union.¹⁹

Over the next few decades, the stories of the DPs and the German expellees effectively decoupled. In the wake of the disastrous collapse of Yugoslavia, historians of Europe have focused attention on the European and global phenomena of ethnic cleansing and forced population removal in the modern world.²⁰ Timothy Snyder, in his study of Eastern Europe’s bloodlands has revived this older argument by situating the source of these refugee flows in the geographic zone in which German and Soviet occupation overlapped during the period surrounding the Second World War.²¹ The experience of the expelled ethnic Germans now appears more prominently, but it is difficult to integrate their story with the multifaceted forced and compulsory labor program of the Third Reich, which produced the DP problem. An ambitious and multinational effort to write a history of forced population movements during and after the Second World War, for example, has an awkwardly placed chapter on forced laborers at the very end, with little to tie it to the rest of the book.²² Jessica Reinisch recently noted that there is no consistent historiography that looks at the many different kinds of refugees and dislocated people in the same context.²³ On the surface, there is good reason for this. DPs were managed by the UN and received considerable assistance from the international community. Expellees, on the other hand, were the responsibility of German authorities. As West German state and local governments grew, so did their capacity to deal with expellee issues. Because neither the UN nor the American occupiers had any mandate to manage expellees, they generally did not play any active role in doing so.

This distinction was far less meaningful in practice than it now appears. These two groups, part of what Wolfram Wette has called experiences of uprootedness, occupied the same limited space and often had to draw from the same pool of locally available resources.²⁴ Both interacted with each other, with pre-existing communities and, just as crucially, with a new group of strangers in postwar Germany, the Allied troops who transitioned from conquerors to occupiers. Without examining the interactions within and between these very different groups, we cannot understand the uneven, contested, and above all, highly contingent rebuilding of postwar German society. Negotiations between Americans, German administrators, DPs, and ethnic German refugees shaped the physical, political, and cultural landscape of West Germany within the broader framework of the new Cold War world.

For many living in occupied and semi-sovereign West Germany, the DP and expellee issues were not at all distinct. Local communities, many of which faced their own material deprivation, often concluded that neither group had a legitimate claim to material assistance. Certainly, DPs were often regarded as foreigners and subjected to a variety of stereotypes and anxieties about violent crime. Germans perceived the DPs as a threat and the specter of revenge hung over interactions between locals and those who had recently been the subsumed into Hitler’s racial empire. As Richard Bessel has vividly evoked the problem, DPs represented evidence of a world turned upside down. . . . the victims of the Nazi regime now could victimize their former masters.²⁵ Similarly, expellees often found themselves unwelcomed guests in a country with its own monumental problems. Expellees were, as a pastor in Lower Saxony described them, like potato beetles that devoured more than their fair share of resources in his already suffering region.²⁶ This pervasive sense of insecurity in the face of refugees was particularly acute in rural and small-town Germany, in large part spared the worst of Allied bombing. There, expellees, DPs, local communities, and occupation troops lived cheek-to-jowl, with important consequences.

The German refugee crisis was primarily a rural and small-town phenomenon. Particularly in the early years, badly damaged cities could not support their own reduced populations, much less encampments of refugees. In Bavaria, which absorbed by far the largest number of expellees, this meant a profound transformation of rural life that Paul Erker has called de-provincialization.²⁷ In Bavaria in 1948, sixty percent of expellees lived in communities with less than 2,000 inhabitants. In Lower Franconia, forty-six percent of the 174,000 expellees lived in communities with less than 3,000 people and sixteen percent lived in towns of fewer than five hundred.²⁸ The question of what do with this new and materially deprived population was also a question of how to transform small towns in rural Germany. Wildflecken is an excellent example of this broader process at work. Part of a region known for terrible rural poverty, the area had seen a number of rural development plans come and go before it became a base community shortly before the outbreak of war. Wildflecken after 1945, like many parts of rural West Germany, found itself torn between competing visions of its postwar future, largely driven by the question of what was to be done with the expellees.²⁹

At the same time, DPs had priority in the assignment of potential accommodation space. DP camps, intended to be temporary, ended up proving far more durable than anyone could have anticipated or wanted. In March 1948, Bavaria alone contained 242 DP facilities, the majority in rural or suburban settings. In the Munich area only one of the nine camps operating in 1946 sat near the heart of the city. The others lay either in the suburbs near the industrial facilities or in small towns not far away. The smallest of the camps in Germany held about five hundred DPs. The biggest, with a standing population of around 15,000, was Wildflecken.³⁰ Some DP facilities comprised just a few buildings. Larger camps, typically outside of devastated cities, were effectively small towns.

Land and infrastructure lay at the heart of an evolving political struggle over the future of the camps and their inhabitants. Initially, officials from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and their American sponsors sought out standing structures like disused German military barracks and industrial facilities to house DPs. At the same time, German authorities tasked with managing the expellee problem coveted exactly the same buildings. Before either the DP problem or the expellee crisis could be resolved, the changing strategic calculus in Central Europe brought the U.S. Army into the contest directly in its effort to secure basing facilities for its troops. For individuals, communities, and policy makers, the problems of DP management, expellee integration, and the future of the American military presence in Germany were not only indistinct, they were inseparable. Contests over property had significant policy implications. The initial postwar crisis, in which standing and usable housing was at a premium, created a zero-sum game between competing German, American, and UN officials. In the midst of all of this were the refugees themselves and the populations of rural communities. For them and for their leaders, the contest over property was a proxy for a larger debate over sovereignty, victim status, and national identity. In practical terms, the property issue could and did drag on interminably, causing acute frustration on all sides and causing many observers and participants to question the decision-making process in an emerging Cold War democracy.

Wildflecken was not a typical German town after World War II, but neither was it particularly untypical. Refugees of various categories were nearly ubiquitous in the immediate aftermath of the war. Wildflecken reveals particularly well the multi-sided nature of the refugee problem because all of the actors involved occupied a relatively small physical space and interacted with each other intensively across a period of several years. Not only was the Wildflecken DP camp one of the best documented in Germany, but the area was later part of a very public political debate in the early Federal Republic. This rich documentary record reveals a complex interplay of forces over a finite piece of territory and its inhabitants. The problems of refugee management, economic reconstruction, and occupation politics required compromises from all sides. These compromises, sometimes after bitter and hard-fought competition, ultimately helped to forge a more functional and democratic society in postwar western Germany.

The large and populous DP camp at Wildflecken lay at the geographic and symbolic center of the story. Initially, it housed both Christian and Jewish Poles, though Jews soon had the option to move to their own camps. For DPs, many of whom had no desire to return to Poland, it became a home that they were prepared to defend. By imagining it as a Polish town in absentia, they built a durable community with its own politics. Particularly in the years before the Currency Reform of 1948, the DP camp also acted as the center of the local economy, a fact that generated enormous resentment from area residents. For local elites, the facilities on which the camp stood held the key to the economic reconstruction of the area, and what they saw as intransigence on the part of Polish DPs kept them from achieving their aims. For expellees, the grounds of the disused base offered opportunities to build new communities. However, the wretched state of the local economy made such endeavors difficult. The American mission in Germany added a further layer of complexity. Present initially to provide local governance and basic security, the U.S. Army’s interest in the Wildflecken area rose and fell over the course of the occupation period. By the time the Americans decided to build a permanent base at Wildflecken, they had been in the district for six years. When the Americans finally made up their minds about the fate of the Wildflecken facility, they suddenly and profoundly altered the postwar spatial and social order in the Sinn Valley. Over the next four decades, they accomplished the kind of transformation that many locals had previously sought, but in a way that no one could have imagined a few years before.

This project began as a study of the interactions between German communities and the new American military mission along the inter-German border in the 1950s. The story of the American military presence in West Germany ties many of the strands of this history together. For concrete and practical reasons, the history of American basing was fundamentally and inextricably tied to the refugee problem. Many of the most important American facilities in West Germany were built on sites previously used as camps for refugees. When I got to the archives, I found that the problem of refugees intruded into plans by West Germans and Americans alike to develop infrastructure in the border region. These refugees, both UN-supported DPs and ethnic German expellees, proved to be both a logistical nightmare and a vivid reminder of the human costs of Hitler’s disastrous bid for a racial empire in Europe. In nearby cities like Würzburg, Aschaffenburg, and Schweinfurt, the building of American base communities in the late 1940s and early 1950s collided head-on with material needs of different refugee groups. Examples of this relationship abound. Construction