Main camp III A
The main camp III A (Stalag III A) was a main camp for prisoners of war of the Wehrmacht in Luckenwalde in Brandenburg . It was administered by Wehrkreis III (Berlin) .
history
After the German attack on Poland began , the first Polish prisoners of war arrived in Luckenwalde in September 1939 and initially lived in tents. By winter they built the first barracks in which they were then also housed.
After the start of the campaign in the west , the Dutch and Belgians initially came to the camp, but they only stayed for a short time. The 40,000 French prisoners of war who arrived in the summer of 1940 stayed there until the end of the war in 1945 and formed the largest group of prisoners of war.
In the spring of 1941, Yugoslav prisoners of war came to the camp , and from summer 1941 Soviet prisoners of war . During the war, Italian, Romanian, British and American prisoners of war also passed through the camp.
The function of the main camp was to register the newcomers, determine their physical condition and then distribute them to the various work detachments. There were up to 1000 different work details, mostly in agriculture, forestry or industry, in Berlin and Brandenburg. In the main camp itself there were only ever between 4,000 and 8,000 prisoners of war housed. For example, on April 14, 1941, 4,185 inmates were in the camp, but 35,472 inmates were assigned to work detachments outside the camp. A total of around 200,000 prisoners of war from ten nations passed through the camp.
The Stalag III A was basically conducted according to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Land Warfare Regulations ; This means that every prisoner of war was entitled to correspondence with his relatives and aid items from charitable organizations. This was overseen by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Soviet prisoners of war, on the other hand, were not treated according to these conventions, as the Soviet Union had not signed them and Germany refused to comply with them. Soviet prisoners of war were also significantly worse off than Western Allied prisoners in terms of medical care and food. Therefore, they made a large part of the approximately 4000 to 5000 of the dead Stalag III A . In the winter of 1941/42 alone, up to 2,500 Soviet prisoners of war died from a typhus epidemic . Due to the “racial separation” of the prisoners ordered by the OKW, colored soldiers from the colonial troops of Great Britain, France and Belgium were concentrated in some Stalags, including Luckenwalde. In 1940 the majority of the French colonial soldiers were released or brought to France, but around 500 men were retained in Stalag III A for " tropical medicine study purposes ", some of which were also used as extras in UFA propaganda films such as Germanin - The Story of a Colonial Act . Her further fate is unclear.
On April 22, 1945, the Red Army liberated the camp inmates.
organization
The administration of the Stalag III A was divided into the six departments of the commandant's office, labor deployment, medical services, defense and postal surveillance, administration and driver readiness. They were led by officers or so-called special leaders, who were civilians called up for military service because of their special skills (e.g. interpreters). The camp ran a commandant and a deputy commandant. They were all older officers, mostly reactivated from civilian life.
| Surname | Rank | Year of birth | period of service |
| Westernhagen, Bruno von | Colonel | 1879 | August 1939 – October 1941 |
| Sturm, Karl | Colonel | 1895 | October 1941 – January 1943 |
| Treitner, Georg | Colonel | 1889 | January 1943 – August 1944 |
| Wolff, Julius | Colonel | 1889 | August 1944 – November 1944 |
| Lutter, Alfred | Colonel | 1894 | November 1944 – April 1945 |
State rifle battalions (LSB) were deployed to guard the camp and the work details. State riflemen were predominantly older soldiers who had already served in the First World War or were only partially fit for the front for health reasons. The LSB 303, 305, 307, 316, 326, 333 and 334 were deployed in Stalag III A, but only one or two at a time. The surveillance of the work details, which could be far away from the main camp, was also carried out by civilians who were appointed auxiliary guards. In some industrial companies there was also a factory security staff who took over the guarding.
There were different monitoring keys for the different groups of prisoners of war. Soviet officers had one guard for every five prisoners of war. For Yugoslav soldiers (20: 1) and French soldiers (50: 1) the ratio was somewhat looser. The use of weapons against prisoners was permitted in the case of escapes after three shouts, with the exception of escapes by Soviet prisoners of war without a shout.
Reuse
After the end of the war in 1945 until the beginning of the 1990s, the group of Soviet armed forces in Germany used the site as barracks. After their departure, a large part was converted into the Luckenwalde Biotechnology Park. The last barracks in the headquarters area were demolished in autumn 2010. The bypass of the federal highway 101 intersects the former storage area in the area of the Zapfholzweg exit. The cemetery of Stalag III A has been preserved and can be visited. The Luckenwalde local history museum has a memorial room and an archive on the camp.
See also
literature
- Uwe Mai: Prisoner of war in Brandenburg, Stalag III A in Luckenwalde 1939–1945 . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-932482-25-5 .
- Jack Stewart: Trapped with the enemy. A GI tells . Wellhöfer Verlag, Mannheim 2014, ISBN 978-3-95428-144-2 , p. 192 ff.
Web links
- Stalag III A (English)
- Stalag III A (PDF; 471 kB)
- Luckenwalde local history museum
Individual evidence
- ^ Bernhard R. Kroener , Rolf-Dieter Müller , Hans Umbreit: The German Empire and the Second World War, Volume 5/1 . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-421-06232-3 , p. 777.
- ↑ Uwe Mai, pp. 147–156.
- ↑ Uwe Mai, p. 55.
- ↑ Uwe Mai, p. 44.
- ↑ Uwe Mai, p. 45.
Coordinates: 52 ° 5 ′ 28.3 " N , 13 ° 7 ′ 49" E