former DP camp Hannover-Vinnhorst

American troops liberated about 42,000 displaced persons when they entered Hanover on April 10, 1945: civilian forced laborers, prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates. These displaced persons (DPs) had to be cared for, registered, and repatriated to their home countries. The Jewish DP community in Hanover, which at times had more than 1,200 members, was the largest in what is now Lower Saxony after Bergen-Belsen. One of its three large camps ("Camps") was located far outside the city center in the district of Vinnhorst on the Mittelland Canal.

According to eyewitnesses, the large administrative building was occupied in June 1945 by Jewish former concentration camp prisoners who had been released from the hospital. The house had been built according to designs of the important Werkbund architect Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) in 1923/24 for the wholesale company Gebrüder Mayer in the style of expressionism and was acquired in 1938 by the city of Hanover for residential purposes. It had 105 rooms. According to the responsible team of the UN Refugee Relief Agency (UNRRA) in March 1946, 111 women, 96 men and 11 children and young people of Polish nationality lived here. Many female DPs knew each other from their shared imprisonment in the Salzwedel concentration camp in the Altmark region. When Russian troops took over the town, they had been evacuated to Hanover by the Americans.

The camp was presumably dissolved after the wave of emigration to the newly founded Israel in 1949. Hannover's second large DP camp, the "Zur Befreiung" kibbutz in Ahlem, also no longer existed at that time. And the camp near the city center in houses of the pre-war Jewish community at Ohestraße 8/9 was vacated by the occupying power and given to the city in June 1949. The mass of foreign Jewish DPs had left Germany - some decided to stay, and now set up home in private apartments.