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

Abstract

By its very nature, what one might call microcosmic history always risks losing sight of the proverbial forest for the sake of a primary focus on the trees. To put the matter in the terms of military history, this sort of historical analysis focuses on the tactical level—the level of history in the ‘weeds’—rather than on the operational or strategic level. Adam Seipp’s Stangers in the Wild Place never really falls into the clutches of such a predicament. True, he does examine the history of a quite specific and very strictly delimited place, namely the small town of Wildflecken (literally the ‘wild place’ or the ‘wild spot’), as well as an 18,000-acre tract of land lying immediately adjacent to the town. These localities find themselves in the Rhön Highlands of the northern Bavarian administrative region of Lower Franconia and border the current German federal state of Hesse. Both in the Nazi period and during the years covered by Seipp’s book, the Rhön remained a rather isolated region of Germany. In part for that very reason, the rapidly expanding German Army under Hitler’s regime acquired the area adjoining Wildflecken for the building of a barracks ( Kaserne ) and an accompanying manoeuvre-exercise area ( Truppenübungsplatz ). The large base opened in 1938, though its reputation for raw winter weather typical of the Rhön, and the relative isolation of both the barracks and the town, eventually led to a soldiers’ rhyming lament: ‘better a bum full of ticks than a day in Wildflecken’ ( Lieber den Arsch voller Zecken als ein Tag in Wildflecken ). Nevertheless, the Wildflecken Truppenübungsplatz became a significant training area for regular German Army and Waffen-SS personnel and remained so until the end of the Second World War. Its isolated location, the forested topography of the Rhön and effective wartime camouflage combined to ensure that the area went largely undamaged before the end of the war. In the course of the final conquest of Germany in 1945, advancing formations of the US fourteenth Armored and 3rd Infantry Divisions occupied Wildflecken, the former Kaserne and the exercise-area in April of that year after driving out retreating German forces.