Reinsehlen Camp
The area's dry and nutrient-poor sandy soil provides a habitat for numerous endangered plants such as the sea thrift, childing pink and wild thyme.
[1] Aside from those areas put to new uses — see section Today below — various parts of the former DP camp are now private property with some tracts of land used for farming.
As the sandy soil with a layer of hardpan was too infertile for the desired grass-covered airfield, plenty of peat and dung was used as fertilizer.
Wooden huts were erected on the airfield, housing air traffic control, crew quarters, a mess hall and a military hospital.
[3]: 13–14 In 1945, during the final phase of the war, newly developed subsonic jet planes like the first jet-powered bomber Arado 234 were stationed at the airfield and the runway was extended by several hundred metres.
[3]: 18 On 7 April 1945, a US bomber fleet numbering over 1,000 planes entered German airspace to destroy the remaining military targets before the advance of American ground troops.
[4] Immediately after the end of hostilities in the area, members of the Royal Canadian Air Force occupied the airfield Reinsehlen.
[3]: 36 Training exercises by ground forces in the Lüneburg Heath during the early post-war period involved an area of around 48,000 hectares, of which 3,000 were in a designated nature reserve.
Until 1949 British and Canadian forces engaged in training exercises right up to the foot of Wilseder Berg,[5] which is today the centre of the Lüneburg Heath Nature Reserve.
In February 1946, the British military government in Allied-occupied Germany told the local authorities of the county of Soltau to expect substantial numbers of refugees.
However, the buildings had been totally stripped of all furnishings (including windows, doors and wiring) by Canadian and British troops and by German civilians.
[3]: 26–28 Over its period of operations from 1946 to 1950 the DP camp housed an average of around 1,500 people, making it one of the largest of its kind in Northern Germany.
There was a continuous inflow of around 20 to 50 people per month — soldiers returning from captivity and Germans resettled from Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein.
[3]: 36 In late September, the British issued an eviction order to the German authorities, stating that the whole DP camp should be vacated within eight weeks.
After an intervention by Heinrich Albertz, the Lower Saxony Minister for Refugee Affairs, the closure of the camp was postponed until the end of 1950.
[3]: 36 Most of the refugees eventually resettled in Hambühren,[6] where ammunition bunkers in a former Wehrmacht depot were transformed into housing units with some active help by the camp inmates themselves.
[3]: 85 Armoured vehicles were transported here mainly by train, to the camp's own loading ramps or via railway stations in the vicinity.
This was named after an accord between the governments of Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom, which was drawn up in 1959, ratified by the Bundestag in 1961 and which came into force on 1 July 1963, called the Soltau-Lüneburg Agreement (German: Soltau-Lüneburg-Abkommen) or SLA.
Since the Bundeswehr also used the Lüneburg Heath for exercises, and semi-annual war games were held by German, Dutch and American forces from other nearby bases, the local population was subject to substantial hardships.
[3]: 87 Crops were destroyed, woodlands damaged, paths made unusable, ammunitions, oil and other refuse were left behind by training troops.
[5] In addition, many serious and even deadly accidents occurred involving tanks and other military vehicles, often left in the road at night with no lights on.
[3]: 88 Locals formed action groups but failed to make any headway, as support from the federal German government was vital in all dealings with the Allied forces but was not forthcoming.
[3]: 93 Environmentalists also protested the fact that even after core areas had been excluded from the training grounds, around 1,600 hectares of nature reserve were still "doomed by the agreement to be devastated".
[5] In July 1967, Queen Elizabeth II visited Reinsehlen Camp on occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Royal Tank Regiment, stationed in Soltau at the time.
[3]: 90 In the 1980s, British forces constructed a large facility for cleaning tanks after exercises and a concrete road that connected it to the loading station at a total cost of 1.5 million DM.
[3]: 88 Reinsehlen Camp was part of a total of 4,600 hectares of red areas (named after the colour used on the maps in the SLA), in which military training was allowed all year.
[5] Only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1990, the British started to refrain from training during the region's peak tourist season, the period when the heather blooms.
They were responsible for cleaning up damage caused by the exercises and helped to repair some of the environmental degradation in the camp area after the British withdrawal.
[2][8] A new hotel was constructed, mostly from wood, with its low structures aiming to blend into the landscape whilst referencing the architecture of military camps.
In late October 1998, the Dalai Lama came to Reinsehlen Camp for a week to give an instruction in the basic tenets of Buddhism to a daily audience of more than 10,000 people.
