Valka warehouse

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The Valka camp was an important place for accommodating homeless foreigners, the so-called Displaced Persons (DPs), in Nuremberg- Langwasser . After the end of the Second World War , the site of the former prisoner-of-war camp was converted into this immigration camp by the United Nations Emergency Relief and Reconstruction Administration (UNRRA) . The name comes from the Latvian-Estonian border town of Valka, which was divided into two parts by the First World War . The Valka camp was at times the largest such facility in Bavaria with almost 4,000 people from thirty nations.

course

Initially, mainly Latvians and Estonians stayed in these accommodations provided by the American armed forces. Many of them emigrated to the United States by 1947. The successor organization to UNRRA handed over the “Valka camp” to the newly established German refugee authorities. In the following years (until 1954) it was run as a "government camp for homeless foreigners" and was mainly inhabited by refugees from the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.

In particular, the high crime rate of the mostly unemployed residents caused major problems in the camp and kept the Nuremberg city administration busy. Although there were protests, a number of stone barracks were added to the camp in 1950/51 to accommodate a further 1,600 foreigners from other parts of Bavaria.

With the Geneva Convention in 1953, the Federal Agency for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees, today the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees , was founded. The approximately 40 employees of the Federal Office also initially lived in the Valka warehouse. Part of the camp was turned into a “federal collection camp for foreigners” surrounded by a concrete wall. All illegal aliens found in Germany were accommodated in this sub-area.

The Valka camp was closed in May 1960 and the remaining refugees were housed in the former police barracks in Zirndorf .

Literary reception

In the 5th edition of the autobiographical novel Die Glaserne Stadt by Natascha Wodin , the first-person narrator describes her childhood in the “Walka camp” in Nuremberg.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Norbert Manns, Heiko Hecht: Kleinfeldstudie: Reception systems, their capacities and the social situation of asylum seekers in the German reception system. In: National Contact Point Germany in the European Migration Network. Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, April 2005, accessed on April 20, 2019 . P. 3.

Coordinates: 49 ° 24 ′ 10.6 ″  N , 11 ° 8 ′ 35.6 ″  E