Main camp VII A
The POW Crew Stalag VII-A (short: Stalag VII A) was a prisoner of war camp of the German Wehrmacht , which in the autumn of 1939 in the northern city of Moosburg (Bavaria) between Amper and Isar halfway between Freising and Landshut one on Railway line (separate train station) was built. Towards the end of the Second World War , 80,000 prisoners of war of many nationalities were interned there and in its subcamps . It is considered to be the largest prisoner of war camp in Germany. A third of the camp area served as a prisoner-of-war camp for Soviet officers. The camp was liberated on April 29, 1945 by troops of the 7th US Army advancing towards Munich . After the end of the war it served as an internment camp for the American occupation forces .
history
The plans for the construction of the prisoner of war camp were initiated in September 1939, shortly after the start of the Second World War. The General Command of Military District VII in Munich envisaged an area north of Moosburg an der Isar between the rivers Isar and Amper . A camp for 10,000 prisoners of war was to be built here within 14 days.
The first prisoners came on October 19, 1939. They were initially temporarily housed in tents. A delousing facility was set up in the hall of an adjacent artificial fertilizer factory. From 1940, additional barracks were built. By the summer of 1940 the area of the camp had grown to 350,000 m².
The camp initially housed Polish soldiers captured in the 1939 war . After the western campaign in 1940 , an increasing number of French soldiers (and members of the Polish armed forces in France ) were deported to Moosburg. After the attack on the Soviet Union in mid-1941, a large number of Red Army prisoners followed . By the end of the war, the number of inmates grew to 80,000 (including an increasing number of Western Allied airmen who had been shot down in the bombing over Germany , as well as around 200 generals alone ); they were used in surrounding industrial establishments, in agriculture and in trade. Tens of thousands of prisoners of war were housed in sub-camps and work details in the area. About 2000 German guards from the 512th Landesschützen Battalion were stationed in a separate barracks area between Moosburg and the Stalag. Moosburg itself only had about 5,000 inhabitants at that time.
Due to the presence of the camp, the entire surrounding area was spared from bombing.
Liberation and Post War
On April 29, 1945, the camp was liberated by a unit of the 14th Panzer Division of the United States Army under General Charles H. Karlstad , the transfer being relatively orderly and almost without a fight. The bridge over the Isar was defended by the Wehrmacht and still blown up.
The site was converted into an internment camp for German civilians who were to be held accountable for their activities during the Nazi era ; the "Civilian Internment Camp No. 6 ". Up to 12,000 Germans were temporarily detained on the premises. In 1948 the US military government gave up the camp and transferred the site to the Free State of Bavaria.
He built new apartments here for numerous expellees . From 1948 the new Moosburg district of Neustadt emerged from this settlement , so that few buildings still remind of the camp. Three remaining barracks of the guards were added to the Bavarian list of monuments on February 15, 2013 following demolition plans by the city of Moosburg .
Commemoration
Dead of Stalag VII A were buried in the Oberreit cemetery (district in the direction of Thonstetten ). It is said to have been around 1000 to 2000 dead, including 800 Soviet soldiers. In 1958 the remains of the dead were reburied and the cemetery abandoned. In 1982 a memorial cross was erected on the former cemetery. In 2014, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the construction of the camp, the memorial was redesigned and a historical memorial stone was added.
On the 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation, a green area on Böhmerwaldstrasse was officially named the Stalag Memorial Square in April 2015 . The so-called Franzosenbrunnen is also located here , which was designed by the Italian-born French artist Antoniucci Volti during his time in the camp.
One of the barracks still in existence in the camp was given an additional roof in 2020 to protect it from the weather.
literature
- Dominik Reither, Karl Rausch, Elke Abstiens, Christine Fößmeier: On the trail of lost identities. Soviet prisoners of war in Stalag VII A Moosburg. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2018, ISBN 978-3-7460-9608-7 .
See also
Web links
- Stalag Moosburg eV association (founded in 2013) Current activities on the Stalag memorials in Moosburg, central summary and linking of various documents mentioned below
- Stalag VII A Moosburg (www.moosburg.org, multilingual)
- Detailed information - Stalag VII A (bauerka.de; floor plan; also about the time as a civil internment camp after May 1945)
- Roger Devaux: Treize Qu'ils Etaient. The life of the French prisoners of war with the farmers in Lower Bavaria during the Second World War. Treize Qu'ils Etaient Editions Memoires et Cultures, 2007, ISBN 978-2-916062-51-8 . (French)
- Greg Hatton: STALAG 7a , on the site b24.net (English; names occupancy levels, officers from both sides, access numbers on February 2: 2000 officers from Stalag Luft III (from Żagań , Poland) and another 2000 prisoners on February 7, 1945 from Nuremberg and others on April 1; two mediators from Switzerland (as protecting power), fighting during the liberation on April 28/29, 1945)
- Jim Lankford: The Liberation of Stalag VIIA (English, on the site 14tharmoreddivision.org or initially in On Point: The Journal of Army History. 2005, with apparatus and with aerial photo of the Stalag, the Isar and Moosburg from the time)
- Oberreit Memorial (at thonstetten.de)
- Newspaper report (June 28, 1982) from the inauguration of the memorial in Oberreit on June 26, 1982 and a brief exhibition about the KG warehouse in the town hall.
- Moosburg has a hard time remembering
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Rademacher: German administrative history from the unification of the empire in 1871 to the reunification in 1990. Population 1939. (Online material for the dissertation, Osnabrück 2006).
- ^ The prisoner of war camp Stalag VII A. at: moosburg.org
- ↑ In memory of the victims of Stalag VII A on www.merkur.de , April 27, 2015
- ↑ Christine Fößmeier: A little part of Moosburg's history takes a deep breath at www.idowa.de , May 29, 2020
- ↑ Andreas Hilger : Two volumes on the history of Soviet prisoners of war of the Second World War. Review. In: Sehepunkte . 18, No. 7/8, 2018.
Coordinates: 48 ° 28 ′ 50 ″ N , 11 ° 56 ′ 26 ″ E