• Source: Stalag VIII-B

Stalag VIII-B was most recently a German Army administered POW camp during World War II, later renumbered Stalag-344, located near the village of Lamsdorf (now Łambinowice) in Silesia. The camp contained barracks built to house British and French World War I POWs. The site had housed POWs of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.




Timeline


In the 1860s, the Prussian Army established a training area for artillery at a wooded area near Lamsdorf, a small village connected by rail to Opole and Nysa. During the Franco-Prussian War, a camp for about 3,000 French POWs was established here. During the First World War, a much larger POW camp was established here with some 90,000 soldiers of various nationalities interned here. After the Treaty of Versailles, the camp was decommissioned.
It was recommissioned in 1939 to house Polish prisoners from the German invasion of Poland, which started World War II in September 1939. Later during the war, approximately 100,000 prisoners from Australia, Belgium, British India, British Palestine, Canada, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, the United States and Yugoslavia passed through this camp. In 1941 a separate camp, Stalag VIII-F was set up nearby for Soviet POWs.
In 1943, the Lamsdorf camp population was split up, and many of the prisoners (and Arbeitskommando) were transferred to two new base camps Stalag VIII-C Sagan (modern Żagań) and Stalag VIII-D Teschen (modern Český Těšín). The base camp at Lamsdorf was renumbered Stalag 344.
The Red Army reached the camp on 17 March 1945.
In 1945-1946, the camp was used by the Soviet-installed Polish Ministry of Public Security to house some 8000-9000 Germans, both POWs and civilians. Polish army personnel being repatriated from POW camps were also processed through Łambinowice and sometimes held there as prisoners for several months. Some were later released, others sent to Gulags in Siberia. About 1000-1500 German prisoners died in the camp due to maltreatment and deprivation: malnutrition, lack of medicine and acts of violence and terror by the Soviet guards. Camp commander Czesław Gęborski would be put on trial for his role in running the camp.




Stalag Luft VIII-B


By 1943 the famous camp for Allied flight personnel in Sagan, Stalag Luft III, was overcrowded. About 1,000 (mostly non-commissioned) flight personnel were transferred to the prison camp at Lamsdorf (now Łambinowice). The flight personnel were housed in what became a camp within a camp when a portion was sectioned off with barbed-wire fencing, and designated Stalag Luft VIII-B. Food continued to be provided from the original camp's army-administered kitchen.




Medical facilities



The hospital facilities at Stalag VIII-B were among the best in all the Stalags. The so-called Lazarett was set up on a separate site with eleven concrete buildings. Six of them were self-contained wards, accommodating each about 100 patients. The others served as treatment blocks with operating theaters, X-ray and laboratory facilities, as well as kitchens, a morgue, and accommodations for the medical staff.
The lazarett was headed by a German officer with the title Oberst Arzt ("Colonel Doctor"), but the staff were entirely POWs. They included general physicians and surgeons, even a neurosurgeon, psychiatrist, anesthesiologist and radiologist.




Evacuation and repatriation



In January 1945, as the Soviet armies resumed their offensive and advanced into Germany, many of the prisoners were marched westward in groups of 200 to 300 in the so-called Death March. Deaths resulted from the bitter cold and exhaustion. Those that encountered western allies were liberated immediately by the American army or the Scots Guards. Those overtaken by the advancing Soviets became virtual hostages and sometimes held for several more months. The latter would largely be repatriated towards the end of 1945 through the port of Odessa on the Black Sea.




Arbeitskommandos



There were more than 700 subsidiary Arbeitskommandos (working parties outside the main camp or labor camps) at various locations in present-day southern Poland and northern Czech Republic. The RC Chaplain Father John Berry said in 1943:
"...there are about 600 Working Parties and .... you will be able to guess why so many of you will have not yet had a visit".
Arbeitskommandos were set up to house lower ranks that were working in the coal mines, quarries, factories and on railways. Among them were:




= British POWs at Auschwitz

=
E715 was a POW camp for British prisoners which was administered and guarded by soldiers from Wehrmacht because it was a subcamp of Stalag VIII-B camp. However, as it was attached to the Monowitz concentration camp (codenamed Buna after the synthetic rubber it made) which was one of the 28 sub-camps under the control of Auschwitz III, the SS had effective control. E715 was next to the I.G. Farben chemical plant just a few hundred meters away from the entrance to Monowitz.
The first 200 British POWs arrived at Auschwitz in September 1943 but over the winter of 1943 another 1,400 British POWs (mostly captured in North Africa) were transported to E715. Between February and March 1944, 800 were transferred to camps at Blechhammer and Heydebreck-Cosel in Germany. After that, British POWs numbers remained approximately 600 for the remainder of the war. Most POWs were put to work in machine shops making pipes and repairing chemical plant equipment.
POWs regularly bore witness to the atrocities occurring at Monowitz because the SS made no attempt to conceal their brutality; the Allied POWs routinely saw inmates from the Arbeitslagers being hanged, pushed off buildings, fatally beaten and shot. Some POWs made contact with concentration camp inmates and passed on information about the war's progress that had been acquired using secret radios in the POW camp. Sergeant Charles Coward even managed to pass intelligence about the atrocities occurring at Monowitz through letters to the British War Office. This led to representatives from the Red Cross making two visits to E715 in the summer 1944.
With the start of the Soviet Vistula–Oder Offensive in January 1945, Auschwitz was evacuated by the SS. The Wehrmacht closed POW camp E715 on January 21, 1945 forcing the British POWs to undertake a forced march to Stalag VII-A at Moosburg in Germany. Three days earlier, the inmates of Monowitz had been sent on their own death march to Gleiwitz near the Czech border where they boarded trains to Buchenwald in Germany and Mauthausen in Austria. Although the British POWs received better treatment than the concentration camp prisoners, they only received slightly more food. In April 1945, the British POWs at Auschwitz were liberated by the U.S. Army at Stalag VII A in Moosburg.
Sgt. Charles Coward testified about what he saw at Monowitz at the IG Farben Trial during the Nuremberg trials:

I made it a point to get one of the guards to take me to town under the pretense of buying new razor blades and stuff for our boys. For a few cigarettes he pointed out to me the various places where they had the gas chambers and the places where they took them down to be cremated. Everyone to whom I spoke gave the same story - the people in the city of Auschwitz, the SS men, concentration camp inmates, foreign workers - everyone said that thousands of people were being gassed and cremated at Auschwitz, and that the inmates who worked with us and who were unable to continue working because of their physical condition and were suddenly missing, had been sent to the gas chambers. The inmates who were selected to be gassed went through the procedure of preparing for a bath, they stripped their clothes off, and walked into the bathing room. Instead of showers, there was gas. All the camp knew it. All the civilian population knew it. I mixed with the civilian population at Auschwitz. I was at Auschwitz nearly every day ... Nobody could live in Auschwitz and work in the plant, or even come down to the plant without knowing what was common knowledge to everybody.

Even while still at Auschwitz we got radio broadcasts from the outside speaking about the gassings and burnings at Auschwitz. I recall one of these broadcasts was by Anthony Eden himself. Also, there were pamphlets dropped in Auschwitz and the surrounding territory, one of which I personally read, which related what was going on in the camp at Auschwitz. These leaflets were scattered all over the countryside and must have been dropped from planes. They were in Polish and German. Under those circumstances, nobody could be at or near Auschwitz without knowing what was going on.
In 1998, Arthur Dodd, a former British POW from Camp E715, published Spectator In Hell, a book about his time imprisoned at Monowitz.




References


Notes

Bibliography
New Zealand On-line history
Photos and personal stories of British prisoners
Camps in Silesia (in Polish)* History of the Lamsdorf camps (1870, World War I, World War II Stalag 344/VIII-B, Stalag 318/VIII-F and post-war German camp) and the Blechhammer camps (in French)




External links



"Lamsdorf: Stalag VIIIB 344 Prisoner of War Camp 1940 - 1945".
Hallam, J.H. "POW Diary 1944, Stalag VIIIB".
Beattie, Reg. "Captive Plans". Archived from the original on 2012-04-02. Retrieved 2011-09-16.
Beck, George Irving. "A Prisoner of War's Diary from Stalag VIIIB — 1940-45". WW2 People's War.
Hall, Don. "Lamsdorf Stalag XIII B". Diary of a Canadian pilot.
Marchant, Eric. "British POW describes Arbeitskommandos E196, E702 and Saubsdorf". WW2 People's War.
Routledge, Norman (June 1945). "Detailed scrapbook from English POW held at Stalag 344 (VIIIB)". Writings, drawings, camp publications, money, forms and labels, and newspaper clippings.
"Lamsdorf Remembered".
"Stalag VIII-B discussion board".
"The Central Prisoner-Of-War Museum In Łambinowice-Opole". Archived from the original on May 9, 2012.

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