Bergen-Belsen, Oerbke, Wietzendorf
In addition to the camp in Bergen-Belsen, POW camps were also established in Oerbke and Wietzendorf.
In 1940, the Wehrmacht took over the former construction workers’ camp a few kilometres south of the barracks complex and used it to house a work detail made up of French and Belgian POWs. In 1941, the camp was expanded and designated as a Stammlager (Stalag for short, meaning ‘main camp’) for Soviet POWs. It was known as Stalag 311 (XI C) Bergen-Belsen. At least 25,000 people were imprisoned in this POW camp. In addition to the camp in Bergen-Belsen, POW camps were also established in Oerbke and Wietzendorf.
By the end of the war, at least 50,000 Soviet POWs had perished in these three camps. In the summer of 1943, Stalag XI C Bergen-Belsen was disbanded and part of the camp – now a ‘branch camp’ of the Stalag in Fallingbostel – was used as a central military hospital for Soviet POWs and Italian military internees until January 1945.
Prisoner groups
Most of the prisoners in the Bergen-Belsen POW camp were soldiers from the Soviet Union. There were also large groups of prisoners from Italy and Poland.
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The first transports from the Soviet Union arrived in Bergen-Belsen in July 1941. By the start of November, some 21,000 Soviet POWs had been brought to the main POW camp. A military hospital was established in the adjacent wooden huts of the former Army Construction Camp. Massive new buildings were supposed to be erected in the main camp to house the prisoners, but their construction proceeded slowly. As a result, the prisoners were forced to sleep in self-constructed earthwork dens, improvised shelters made of branches, or provisional tents. This situation lasted into the autumn. The prisoners grew emaciated and masses of them fell ill on account of the lack of adequate food and shelter. Dysentery was already rampant in the camp by August.
In the summer and autumn of 1941, nearly 10,000 prisoners were assigned to the around 150 work details of the main Bergen-Belsen POW camp. At least 500 POWs were selected by a Gestapo Einsatzkommando (‘task force’) and murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This murder campaign mainly targeted POWs who were Jews or communist political functionaries.
After a typhus epidemic broke out, the camp was placed under quarantine in November 1941. Thousands of sick prisoners and those who were unable to work were sent back to the main camp from the work details of the Bergen-Belsen, Fallingbostel, and Oerbke camps. Some 14,000 Soviet POWs died in Bergen-Belsen by the spring of 1942 due to the dire living conditions in the camp and the heavy labour they were forced to carry out. The first prisoners who died were buried in individual graves, but from October 1941, deceased prisoners were buried in mass graves in the camp cemetery around 600 metres away.
From the summer of 1942, there were very few prisoners left in the camp outside of the military hospital. When the southern section of the camp was taken over by the SS in June 1943, Stalag XI C (311) was disbanded. However, the military hospital with its 1,200 beds remained as a branch camp of Stalag XI B, which was located in Fallingbostel. Sick POWs were sent to this hospital from work details in the region, and large numbers of people continued to die there.
In January 1945, the Wehrmacht finally relinquished the entire POW camp, leaving the grounds to the SS. More than 19,500 Soviet POWs had been buried in the camp cemetery by this point.
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Italian military internees clearing rubble on Celler Strasse, Hanover, 30 May 1944 © Historisches Museum Hannover Fascist Italy was allied with Nazi Germany until the summer of 1943. After the dictator Mussolini was deposed and Italy subsequently surrendered to the Allies, the Wehrmacht occupied northern Italy and established a new fascist Italian puppet state there. Some 600,000 Italian soldiers who refused to continue fighting on Germany’s side were disarmed and transported to Germany for forced labour. In the eyes of Germany’s National Socialist leaders, the Wehrmacht, and the German population, these Italian soldiers were traitors. They were denied the status of prisoners of war under the protective provisions of the Geneva Convention. Instead, they were officially viewed as interned soldiers from a state that remained allied with Germany and were thus designated ‘Italian military internees’ (IMI). This meant they had no access to the vital services provided by the International Red Cross, such as food parcels, shipments of medicines, and inspections by international delegations.
In the autumn of 1943, the camps in Oerbke and Wietzendorf served as transit camps for tens of thousands of Italian military internees who were sent from there to work details all over northern Germany. From January 1944, Wietzendorf was one of the largest camps for Italian officers. It was known as Oflag 83. The camp in Oerbke had a hospital for Italian military internees; this was moved to separate areas of the Bergen-Belsen POW hospital at the end of July 1944. Most of the patients were suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis or injuries from work accidents. By the end of the war, 142 Italian military internees had died in the Bergen-Belsen military hospital and were buried in a separate section at the edge of the POW cemetery.
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Stalag XI B branch camp in Bergen-Belsen, 1944: huts for officers (foreground) and female soldiers (background) of the Polish Home Army. © SnG In October 1944, around 1,000 male and female officers and soldiers from the Polish underground organization known as the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) were sent to the Stalag XI B branch camp in Bergen-Belsen. Half of these prisoners were women who were housed in a separate complex of huts. The Armia Krajowa had organized an uprising against the German occupiers in Warsaw in August 1944. The prisoners sent to Bergen-Belsen included the deputy commander of the insurgents and other members of the Armia Krajowa’s military leadership and Warsaw’s cultural elite.
When the Polish insurgents surrendered, the Wehrmacht had promised to treat them in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The Polish POWs therefore received much better treatment than the Soviet POWs and Italian military internees. An International Red Cross delegation was allowed to visit them in Bergen-Belsen.
These members of the Polish Home Army spent only a short time in the Bergen-Belsen POW camp. The female officers were transferred to a camp near Erfurt at the end of the December 1944. Ordinary female soldiers were transferred at the same time to the Oberlangen camp in the Emsland region, where they were liberated by Polish units of the British Army in April 1945. The 500 male officers, by contrast, experienced an odyssey. In January 1945 they were transported from Bergen-Belsen to a camp in Pomerania, but they soon had to start marching westwards for weeks on end ahead of the advancing front line. After an intermediate stop in the Sandbostel POW camp, they were finally liberated by British troops in Lübeck on 2 May 1945.