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

The Wehrmacht formed Dulag 131 on March 25, 1941, from Frontstalag 131. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the camp was deployed to Slonim and Baranovichi (both on map 9b). From September 1941 to August 1942, it was in Bobruisk (9b). In the following months it was deployed in various locations in Russia, including Komarichi and Unecha, and possibly also Klintsy (all 9c), before returning to Bobruisk at the end of September 1943. At the end of June 1944, Dulag 131 was caught up in the Soviet offensive against Army Group Center but managed to withdraw to East Prussia and then to Modlin (today Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, in Poland) (4c). On September 15, 1944, the Germans disbanded the camp and probably reorganized it as AGSSt 37.¹ The camp held field post number (Feldpostnummer) 31 444 (assigned between February 15 and July 30, 1942, and struck on September 22, 1944).

From 1941 to 1943, the camp operated under the authority of the 203rd and 231st Security Divisions (Sicherungsdivisionen) as well as the 252nd and 339th Infantry Divisions. The camp commandant for part of 1941 was Major Dr. August Egenolf Freiherr Roeder von Diersburg (1891–1968), the deputy commandant was Hauptmann Carl Languth, the adjutant was Hauptmann Pfenzig, and the counterintelligence (Abwehr) officer was Hauptmann Heinrich.

Dulag 131 held Soviet prisoners of war. On July 7, 1941, there were 6,700 prisoners in the camp; on July 24, 1941, there were 4,000; on August 6, 1941, 6,298; on August 26, 1941, 29,000; on September 16, 1941, 18,136; and on September 29, 1941, 15,050.² By November 1941, as many as 60,000 prisoners were crammed into the camp, exceeding its capacity several times over.³ Conditions in the camp were very poor, particularly in 1941. The prisoners were transported to the camp in open wagons, exposed to the elements, without food or water and as much as 20 percent of the prisoners in some transports died before they reached the camp. The prisoners slept in overcrowded, poorly ventilated barracks, which facilitated the spread of infectious disease. They were also severely malnourished. A November 20, 1941, report estimated that the prisoners received around 1,039 calories per day, well below the basic caloric needs of an adult man and below even the starvation rations prescribed by the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH). The same report indicated that the food situation in the camp was so dire that some prisoners had resorted to eating their dead comrades.⁴ Abuse by the German guards only exacerbated these problems. As in [End Page 83] other camps for Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), camp counterintelligence personnel and a local Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD) unit identified Jews and political commissars among the prisoners and executed them.⁵ By November 20, 1941, a total of 158,000 prisoners had passed through the camp and 14,777 prisoners had died of hunger or disease or had been killed. In one section of the camp, 430 prisoners died on the night of November 20, 1941, alone.⁶

On November 9, 1941, the Germans carried out a massacre of prisoners in Dulag 131. On that evening, a fire broke out in the barracks in the Bobruisk Fortress, in which there were 17,000 prisoners (in the camp as a whole, there were 60,000 prisoners). According to a statement by the camp’s counterintelligence officer, Hauptmann Heinrich, fires had been started at two different places, ostensibly by “terrorists,” so that a mass escape could take place. To block this escape, subunits of the 692nd Infantry Regiment of the 339th Infantry Division used machine-gun barrage fire on the prisoners, and as a result 1,700 prisoners were found dead in the square on the next morning. According to written statements by the former deputy camp commandant, Hauptmann Carl Languth, dated December 21, 1945, the fire in the attic of the barracks was set by the Germans themselves, at the order of Prisoner of War District Commandant K (Kriegsgefangenen-Bezirkskommandant K), Oberst Sturm, to simulate a rebellion and escape attempt. Ostensibly, only Languth and the camp commandant, Oberstleutnant Dr. August Egenolf Freiherr Roeder von Diersburg, knew that the fire had been set deliberately.⁷ In total, around 20,000 prisoners died of starvation or disease or were murdered while the camp was in Bobruisk.⁸

In 1968 and 1969, the Stuttgart public prosecutor’s office conducted an inquiry regarding former camp commandant von Diersburg and the former counterintelligence officer in the camp, Heinrich, but this investigation was inconclusive. Languth was tried in Minsk in January 1946 and sentenced to death; he was executed on January 30, 1946.