The Friedland camp was established in September 1945 by the British military administration near the border with the American and Soviet occupation zones, approximately 15 km south of Göttingen. The immediate context was the massmigration resulting from the war around 1945. Whilst the first refugees had already reached Lower Saxony in the winter of 1944–45, from the summer of 1945 onwards large numbers of refugees arrived in the British occupation zone. The military administration sought to control the influx into its zone and, in view of the difficult supply situation, to limit it; to this end, it ordered the establishment of the Friedland camp and eight further transit camps in the province of Hanover. The camp’s primary tasks were the registration, provision of supplies and onward transfer of those entering the British zone, thereby channelling the vast numbers of displaced persons and wanderers in post-war society. Welfare organisations and churches played a key role from an early stage in providing for and supporting the new arrivals.

In the early days of the Friedland camp, five main groups of people arrived there: 1. refugees who came to the western occupation zones alone or in small groups from the areas east of the Oder and Neisse rivers; 2. returnees and evacuees; 3. displaced persons and/or those systematically resettled as part of transport operations and‘operations’, 4. released prisoners of war, and 5. cross-border commuters from the Soviet occupation zone. Depending on their former place of residence, last place of stay, the whereabouts of relatives and their options for relocation, they passed through the Friedland camp travelling either from east to west or from west to east. Between 1945 and 1949, approximately 1.7 million people passed through the camp. Most stayed for only a few hours or days.

In addition to its main function as a transit camp, the Friedland camp also took on other tasks from time to time: from 1947 to 1951 and again from 1960 to 1963, it served as a reception camp for unaccompanied adolescents and young men from the Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR; and from 1949 to 1952 it also served as a residential camp for displaced persons and foreign refugees for whom other authorities in Lower Saxony no longer assumed responsibility. From 1948 onwards, Friedland also served as a demobilisation camp for German soldiers returning to the British Zone from Western Allied or Soviet captivity. Following the closure of the demobilisation camp in Münster/Westphalia, from April 1949 onwards it was the only demobilisation camp for former members of the Wehrmacht in the Federal Republic.

The Friedland camp gained national and international prominence following the arrival of the last demobilised prisoners from Soviet captivity in 1953–54 and 1955–56. The so-called ‘Homecoming of the Ten Thousand’ was a major media event in the early Federal Republic. The Friedland camp became an emotional focal point for the hopes and aspirations of many, whilst at the same time serving as a stage for complex political manoeuvres during the Cold War.

‘Operation Link’ began in March 1950 with the reception of resettlers, initially only from Poland, which became the GDL’s main task in the decades that followed. Since 1950, over two million (late) repatriates have been registered in Friedland, a good half of whom came from Poland, and, increasingly since 1986, approximately one million from the Soviet Union and its successor states. Since 1 October 2000, the GDL has been the only initial reception centre for late repatriates in Germany.

As a temporary exception, the GDL has repeatedly taken on the initial reception of international refugees since the 1950s: Between November 1956 and January 1957, 3,555 refugees from Hungary – who had fled to the West following the suppression of the democratic uprising, and of whom just under 11,000 were granted asylum in the Federal Republic – were cared for in Friedland. Following the coup against the democratic Allende government, 70 refugees from Chile arrived in January 1974 as ‘quota refugees’ outside the asylum procedure and were accommodated at the GDL Friedland for up to four months. At the end of 1978, as part of a humanitarian aid operation, around 1,000 refugees from Vietnam were admitted to the Friedland Refugee Centre. Some of the refugees remained in the camp for several months; others were transferred to so-called ‘central accommodation’ after just a few days. Further refugees from Vietnam followed until the mid-1980s, totalling approximately 4,500.

In addition to receiving these quota refugees, the GDL Friedland also briefly served as ‘forced asylum-seeker accommodation’ during the 1970s and 1980s. Against the backdrop of overcrowding at the country’s only ‘collection camp for foreigners’ in Zirndorf (Bavaria), just under 150 asylum-seekers from various countries were assigned to the Friedland GDL between 1974 and 1976. Between 1984 and 1986, due to insufficient capacity at the relevant reception centres in Lower Saxony, over 5,500 asylum seekers, primarily from Lebanon, Turkey and India, were accommodated there.

Between 1 July 1998 and 30 September 2000, and from 1 March 2004 onwards, the GDL also took on the role of Lower Saxony’s state reception centre for Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

In 2009, Iraqi refugees were admitted to the GDL Friedland for the first time as part of the UNHCR’s resettlement programme. Since September 2012, refugees – the majority from Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Iraq and Syria – have been arriving regularly at the GDL Friedland as part of the resettlement and relocation programmes. Furthermore, since 1 January 2011, the Friedland Reception Centre, together with the Braunschweig site, has officially served as the initial reception centre for asylum seekers in Lower Saxony.

From the early 1950s at the latest – largely fuelled by the ‘Return of the Ten Thousand’ in 1955–56 – a discourse on the culture of remembrance began to take shape around the GDL Friedland. Alongside the motif of the ‘Gateway to Freedom’ – which had been promoted since the early 1950s, primarily by the welfare organisations active at the GDL^[1] – this found its most visible expression in several local monuments. Particularly noteworthy are the Friedland Bell, the statue of the returnees entitled ‘Reaching for Freedom’ by the sculptor Fritz Theilmann (1902–1991) and the ‘Friedland Memorial’ by the artists Martin Bauer and Hans Wachter (1931–2005) on the Hagenberg, as well as the bells and various works of art inside the Catholic Church of St Norbert. All the structures mentioned date from the period between 1949 (consecration of the Friedland Bell) and 1967 (the inauguration of the Friedland Memorial and the installation of the stone sculpture ‘Reach for Freedom’), with a concentration of commemorative activities evident around the mid-1950s. The monuments are thus firmly embedded in the history of the German mindset of the 1950s and 1960s. The thematic focus of the monuments is essentially limited to the two major groups in Friedland: refugees and displaced persons on the one hand, and – predominantly – released prisoners of war on the other. The Association of Returnees, Prisoners of War and Relatives of the Missing in Germany (VdH) emerged (alongside the churches) as a key sponsor of institutionalised remembrance in Friedland. The iconography of the monuments gives expression to a German discourse on victimisation from the post-war period in West Germany, embodied in stone, images and text, which focuses equally on the fate of refugees and displaced persons as well as that of German prisoners of war.^[2] Furthermore, the repeated use of Christian motifs, symbols and narrative references reveals (as with other monuments to expulsion or war) a religious dimension and sacralisation of this discourse on victimhood. The background and causes of flight and displacement, or of German soldiers’ captivity and return – the ‘historical depth of murder and displacement, the historical sequence of initial and subsequent German crimes’^[3] – remain absent from the memorials. Beyond the memorials, the memory of Friedland found expression in other forms, such as songs, poems, the film *Die Glocke von Friedland* (*The Bell of Friedland*) or the VdH’s ‘Friedland Prize’. ‘However, despite its emotional, symbolic and political significance, the camp had been losing public attention outside the local and regional context since the late 1950s.’^[4] In the personal and family memories of people who were themselves admitted to the GDL, particularly resettlers and late resettlers, Friedland, by contrast, often occupies a place of its own that is enduringly remembered.