Advertisement
Lamsdorf. Stalag VlllB
Marion’s Uncle Roland, Dr Webster, was captured in Dunkirk in 1940, then spent time in two Oflags (camps for officers). He tangled with dysentery and typhus at the first and the cramped conditions of an old castle (not Colditz) at the second.
In 1941 He arrived at Lamsdorf Stalag Vlll B (now in Poland) and became one of a team of British medics in charge of the health of the prisoners there.
My dad arrived in 1943 on a cattle truck train from Chieta in Southern Italy, via Rome, the Bremner Pass, Innsbruck and a transit camp, Stalag VIIA at Moosburg in Austria. Then through Nuernberg and Dresden to Lamsdorf.
Both would have arrived by train. The station is a single platform (Sowin) with little to see. The Russian prisoners arrived at the next stop down the line where there is an early 20C brick building still functioning but now with its Polish name Łambinowice written in peeling paint above the exit from the platform.
It still looks a bit bleak today.
The march to the camp is about 2km.
In 1864 it had been established as large military training ground. During the
Franco-Prussian War a
prisoner of war a camp for French was added. In it more than 3000 men were incarcerated, 53 of them perished and are buried at the local cemetery. The camp was reactivated during
World War I, when the Germans set up one of the largest camps for prisoners of war, housing roughly 90,000 internees, mostly from the United Kingdom, Russia, Italy and Serbia. Due to poor housing conditions roughly 7000 men died in captivity.
Closed down after the Treaty of Versailles, the camp was yet again reopened on September 3, 1939, immediately after the outbreak of the Polish Defensive War. The infamous Stalag VIII-B camp housed roughly 100,000 Polish prisoners. After the outbreak of the Soviet-German conflict some of the Poles were transferred to other places of detention while thousands of Soviet prisoners were amassed in tragic conditions in a separate camp nearby named Stalag VIII-F. Altogether, throughout the World War II more than 300,000 Allied and Soviet prisoners have passed through the gates of the camp at Lamsdorf, between 40,000 and 100,000 of them died. Most of those who perished are buried in mass graves in the nearby village of Klucznik and at the local cemetery. In October 1944 soldiers and officers were brought here from the
Warsaw Rising, including over 1,000 women. Later, most of them were transferred to other camps.
Lamsdorf had many work camps associated with it where most prisoners preferred to be. Dad might have expected to be transferred to a coal mine, because of his north eastern origins. But on a notice board three week after his arrival he saw a chance of factory work, a transfer to Freudenthal (this is Bruntal that our itinerary took us to first).
Uncle Roland worked in the ‘revier’, the clinic, later there was a larger ‘lazarett’ hospital in the camp as well. In 1941, as sole doctor, he established a quarantine area for a Typhus outbreak risking his own health and successfully bringing in under control.
In 1943 he moved to a larger prisoners’ hospital at Kozel 63km away. Here he was part of a team who treated all prisoners, Russian, French, British and others who were associated with VIIlB and VlllF i.e. the work camps like Freudenthal.
We were guided through excellent displays by Sebastian, the duty manager for that day, at Poland’s Central POW Museum.
There are three rooms at first floor level, dimly lit with many project films at the press of a button.
The first room compared Oflags (for officers) to Stalags for privates and NCOs.
The second room compared the terrible conditions of the Russian camp (VlllF) to those at the British/ W. European and Commonwealth camp VIIIB). The death rate for Russian prisoners was 50%. The death rate for British was 4%.
Why were the Russians treated so badly? ......... Stalin didn’t sign the Geneva Convention. But also the Nazi dream put Eastern Europeans put Russians lower on their pecking list that the Western Anglo Saxons, and although they Russia and Germany started as allies they soon fell out.
The third room looked at Polish prisoners taken at the start of the war when the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia was still in place. There's a major focus upon the 22000 Polish officers and intelligentsia killed by Russian secret police in a forest at Katyn in Russia, and upon those incarcerated at Lamsdorf before being moved elsewhere in 1940.
Outside of the museum there’s still the cemetery which has graves from all the
eras of the camp.
The VIIIB camp compound itself is now covered in trees but there’s still a granite cobbled road which was the main thoroughfare through the camp. A walk down it gave us a sense of the scale of the camp. It’s difficult not to read every little bit of brickwork next the road as evidence, but there’s very little to see.
The best moment was the discovery of a big copse acacia trees heavy with white fragrant blossom to the right of the track. They are probably self sown, we’ve spotted large numbers since, but it is as if nature has made the best of what was a brutal place.
The lowest point for me was the Russian Cemetery with thousands of unmarked graves. But there is on this site is a large memorial to all who buried at Lamsdorf.
Down the road from this cemetery is the VlllF Russian camp with fences, a watchtower and remains of brick huts remaining (the VlllB huts were made of timber).
I took away a new understanding of how complicated it was for post war Polish / German Polish / German Czech people. In the
hands of their Russian liberators things still remained complicated, and life and territory in turmoil.
I hoped to have had more access to photographic material in the museum. Sebastian said that progress is being made and that there should be an on line resource eventually.
Did Roland and Hugh meet?
Dad certainly had a wound to his hand, and also had continuing jaundice when he got home to Britain. Some he may have had treatment from Roland?
Also they were both lovers of football.........
Advertisement
Tot: 0.762s; Tpl: 0.048s; cc: 12; qc: 55; dbt: 0.0806s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.2mb