Atop a sandy slope on the outskirts of Scheinfeld, a small town in Bavaria halfway between Nuremberg and Wurzburg, sits a 17th century castle built by the Schwarzenberg family. It was in this imposing structure that a Lithuanian DP encampment was established on Apri 28, 1946 to house 1,500 Lithuanians tranferred from the DP camp in Regensburg. The camp was headed by an American reserve officer of Lithuanian decent, Stanley B. Milnus, whose parents had come from the Vilnius region of Lithuania; chairman of the camp's committee was Professor Ceslovas Masaitis, a Lithuanian mathematician.
Administered and occupied entirely by Lithuanians, the Scheinfeld camp was liquidated in 1949 after its administrator, Steponas Birutis, left for America. Committee chairman Masaitis later instituted a Lithuanian fraternal order in the United States that carried the "Scheinfeld" name.
A camp publication features the photo on the right ladies representing "Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia...waiting for the dawn of their independence."
UNRRA Team 569 Director Anton A. Pritchard writes: "In the month since the camp has been opened, the following welfare projects have been organized:
The following suggestions are respecfully submitted, with the full realization of their lack of originality:
Another report, dated July 15, 1946, reiterates the creation of an internal camp money system and the scarcity of emenities.
Therefore it appears that Scheinfeld Lithuanian camp money was used in the canteen from May through July 1946. However, because of acute shortages of goods, opportunities to actually spend the money were greatly diminished, and the monetary system subsequently was abandoned.
It is surmised that all Scheinfeld notes were destroyed, with one authority keeping an estimated fifteen sets as sourvenirs, thus accounting for the hoard discovered in England.
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Scheinfeld camp money is bilingual--Lithuanian on the obverse, English on the reverse. |
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