The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

In the years following World War II, a myth grew up around the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht. According to this myth, the Holocaust and Germany’s other crimes (to the extent that they took place at all) were the fault of Hitler, a small clique of yes-men around him, and his fanatical followers, especially the SS. In contrast, the Wehrmacht had fought honorably, under the leadership of men who only served Hitler grudgingly, men who certainly wanted nothing to do with genocide or war crimes and who resisted them when they could. German soldiers believed they were fighting to defend their fatherland and European civilization, so the myth goes, but Hitler tricked them into serving an evil regime. If they were guilty of anything, it was naivete.

This is not the place to offer a full account of how this myth came about. Suffice it to say that the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht” was the result of deliberate efforts on the part of former senior members of the Wehrmacht and sympathetic foreigners and that emerging cold war tensions provided a supportive environment on both sides of the iron curtain. The historical and legal communities have known the truth for decades, even going back to the Nuremberg trials in 1946. This is especially true in Germany, where scholars have uncovered and examined the Wehrmacht’s crimes comprehensively. Scholarship in the United States has been a bit slow to catch up, but most serious students of World War II and Holocaust history are aware of the facts. Still, the myth has proven amazingly resilient; it clings to life even today. It rears its ugly head on World War II websites, in behind-the-scenes debates over Wikipedia entries, in reenactors’ groups, and in popular books and magazines. It overlaps with Holocaust denial and minimalization, and it has connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements.

This volume of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos represents one more salvo in the battle against the myth. It contributes to the fight by describing the different sites for detention, persecution, forced labor, and murder that the Wehrmacht ran on its own. The human toll that those sites took was enormous; of the Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), for example, around 3.3 million—58 percent of the total—died in German captivity. Here, at the start, however, we wish to make clear that the sites under direct Wehrmacht control comprised only a fraction of the camps and other facilities with which it was involved. The main focus for this larger group of sites was labor: tens of thousands of them produced weapons, munitions, and equipment and served other important functions within the German war economy and German society. In the process, the forced labor sites also released millions of men for service at the front, so the Wehrmacht received a double benefit. Those sites included over 35,000 camps for foreign (non-Jewish) forced laborers, 1,050 ghettos in the occupied eastern territories, 1,900 forced labor camps for Jews, and 900 concentration camps and subcamps.¹ The Wehrmacht helped to create some of those sites, and it coordinated with the agencies, such as the Reich Labor Ministry, Organisation Todt, and the SS, that actually oversaw them. In some cases, the Wehrmacht also provided guards and put prisoners to work on military projects, such as airfield or shipyard expansion, or building defensive works. It also helped with the labor supply side: it rounded up millions of people and funneled them into the Third Reich’s labor system, including POWs that it released from POW status (contrary to accepted international law) so that they could be used for forced labor outside the protections of the Geneva Convention. All of this fit, of course, into the larger context of Wehrmacht crimes, from planning and launching a war of aggression to participating in the murder of millions of Jews, the handicapped, and other soldiers and civilians, outside of the camp system. As an institution, the Wehrmacht was anything but “clean.”

Briefly, this volume covers several types of camps and other facilities that the Wehrmacht ran directly. First and foremost, the POW camps: various kinds of collection points behind the front, and transit camps farther back, all of them mobile; main camps for enlisted men (Stalags) and for officers (Oflags); and some less numerous types. Rüdiger Overmans’s introduction provides an overview of that system. The Wehrmacht also set up a multitude of labor camps, detention camps, “concentration camps” (not part of the SS system), and civilian internment camps, especially in the east. It established a special set of labor camps for Jews in Tunisia, during the occupation of that country in 1942–1943. There were hundreds of Wehrmacht brothels scattered across occupied Europe, in which many women were forced to serve as sexual slaves for German soldiers. Finally, hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers, sailors, and airmen who violated regulations in one way or another had to serve time in Wehrmacht prisons and penal camps, where the cruelty of the conditions rivaled those of nearly any other camp type.

In some respects, all those facilities differed markedly from one another. They appear together in this volume for two reasons. Most obviously, the Wehrmacht ran them all, and that is the organizing principle for the volume. That fact would be unimportant, however, if the sites in this volume did not arise from, and reflect, certain fundamental principles that linked them with each other and with the sites in all the other volumes of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Irrespective of the motivations and actions of individual soldiers, the Wehrmacht as an institution, in pursuit of a war of conquest, adopted a spectrum of policies and measures that ranged from internationally accepted, to criminal, to [End Page XXI] genocidal. This was possible because concepts such as “obedience,” “military honor,” “military necessity,” and “total war,” in combination with broad prejudices that were common in German society at the time, all of which were central parts of Nazi propaganda, resonated with soldiers struggling with the stresses of war. So, when it came to the treatment it meted out to Soviet and Italian soldiers, to women in brothels, to Jews, and to its own soldiers, the Wehrmacht reflected a set of values and beliefs that linked it with National Socialism. That fact goes to the heart of the “clean Wehrmacht” myth.

The state of research on the various types of Wehrmacht facilities is generally poor, for reasons that are complicated. To some extent, the German government’s attitude toward the victim groups has been significant. Despite the horrendous conditions in many of the sites, despite the mind-boggling death rates and terrible suffering in them, German officials have argued that POWs, former Wehrmacht soldiers, and the women who served in the brothels were not legally entitled to restitution. (Only in 2015 did the German parliament agree to symbolic payments to former Soviet POWs, of whom an estimated 4,000 remained alive at that time.) The lack of official interest meant that government money did not go to support research on these victim groups. Broader societal attitudes and corresponding scholarly interests also helped to draw researchers in other directions until relatively recently. Then there is the problem with sources. In many cases, documentation is simply lacking. For all the millions of pages of German records that do exist, vast troves of documents either did not survive the war, were destroyed later, or simply have not been uncovered.

This is not to say that no one has studied these sites at all. Some noteworthy scholarship has emerged over the years. This includes works by Gianfranco Mattiello and Wolfgang Vogt (Deutsche Kriegsgefangenen- und Internierten-Einrichtungen 1939–1945. Handbuch und Katalog); Czesław Pilichowski (Obozy hitlerowskie na ziemiach polskich 1939–1945. Informator encyklopedyczny); and Georg Tessin (Verbände und Truppen der deutschen Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939–1945), among others.² We are also especially grateful for the recent work by our coeditors, Rüdiger Overmans and Wolfgang Vogt, which they refer to as the Kerndatensätze (core records): the dates of establishment and dissolution, and, where applicable, the field post numbers, for nearly every POW camp.

Because of the general state of research, and despite the work that scholars before us did, this volume is less complete than we would like it to be. We have entries for all the main POW camps, but many of those entries are mere skeletons, to which we have been able to add little or no flesh. Similarly, the entries for the Tunisian work camps for Jews are quite short. We are certain that we are missing many hundreds of labor and detention camps, especially in the east, for which we could not find any records, and we were also unable to uncover any meaningful amount of documentation for individual brothels; as a result, these facilities are covered in single broad essays.

One type of camp deserves special mention in this context: the POW subcamps. When we began work on this volume, we assumed that we would cover those sites with individual entries, as we had the concentration camp sub-camps in Volume 1. The standard we applied in that volume was this: if the prisoners lived at a site, as opposed to marching out to it and back daily, then that site would count as a subcamp. That standard proved impractical in this volume, however, for two reasons. First, there was almost no documentation on the subcamps (or labor detachments, Arbeitskommandos, as they were often called). Second, the numbers were astronomical. For much of the war, most POWs were not in the main POW camps; they were scattered all over Germany and occupied Europe, performing labor. Because of the lack of documentation, we cannot pin the figures down, but, if one limits the coverage to camps with a minimum size of 100 prisoners and a minimum duration of one month, there were tens of thousands of them. There is simply no way for us to cover them all. Some of them come up in the main camp essays, and occasionally we can cite a figure for the number of subcamps under a certain main camp on a certain date, but that is all we can do. With regard to this, we wish to emphasize that, while we are certain of the existence of the camps that this volume describes, the absence of a particular location or unit in this volume does not constitute proof that no such camp existed.

All the caveats notwithstanding, we believe this volume represents a significant contribution to the field. It is the only one of its kind, in which readers in the English-speaking world can find information on the kinds of facilities it covers. We hope that this volume proves as useful as the first three and that future researchers will be able to build on the foundation we have provided, by finding more information about individual sites and, perhaps, by using geographic and other information in databases and graphic representations to explore the topic in new ways.