DP camp Wehnen
Coordinates: 53 ° 9 ′ 58 ″ N , 8 ° 7 ′ 10 ″ E
The Wehnen DP camp near Oldenburg in the Bad Zwischenahn district of Wehnen was a camp for accommodating displaced persons (DP) after the end of the Second World War .
history
After the Second World War, Oldenburg belonged to the British zone of occupation . In 1945, the British military administration set up a DP camp in Wehnen on the grounds of a confiscated Wehrmacht camp site at Oldenburg airfield . There were displaced persons accommodated who had stopped at the time the war ended in Germany and could not return to their home countries even in part. The numerically largest group in the Wehnen camp came from Lithuania . The camp was initially administered by the UNRRA (from 1947 IRO ).
At the end of June 1950 the camp came under German administration and was declared a government camp for homeless foreigners . At that time, the camp had 859 residents. The Wehnen DP camp was dissolved in 1959.
In May 2015, a memorial was inaugurated in the presence of the Lithuanian ambassador Deividas Matulionis , made in Šilutė (Heydekrug). 200 people took part in a service with the Catholic priest Prelate Peter Kossen ( Vechta ), the Lithuanian priest Vidas Vaitiekūnas ( Voerde ) and the Evangelical Lutheran pastor Valdas Žielys ( Hagen ).
literature
- Andreas Lembeck: Life in Transit. On the post-war situation of the liberated forced laborers, foreign concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war , in: National Socialism and Forced Labor in the Oldenburg Region, ed. by Katharina Hoffmann and Andreas Lembeck. BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 1999, ISBN 3-8142-0624-X , pp. 187-225