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

The Wehrmacht formed Dulag 191 on March 22, 1941, and deployed it to Romania.¹ In the spring of 1942, the unit was located in Dnepropetrovsk (today Dnipro) (map 9f).² Beginning in July 1942, the camp was located in Ostrogozhsk (9d). In the fall of 1943, the camp was located in Zhashkov (today Zhashkiv) (9e).³ The camp received the field post number (Feldpostnummer) 32 768 between March 1 and September 7, 1942. The number was struck on December 6, 1944. Beginning in May 1941, the camp was under the authority of the German Military Mission in Romania (Deutsche Heeresmission Rumänien); as of May 1942, it was subordinate to the Seventeenth Army; as of June 1942, to the Second Army; and in 1943, to the Fourth Panzer Army.

While deployed in the occupied Soviet Union, the camp held Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). The conditions in the camp, especially while it was located in Ostrogozhsk, were the same as those in other camps for Soviet prisoners. Extremely meager and repulsive food, enormous overcrowding in a small area, lack of proper medical aid, and abuse by the German guards led to mass famine and disease, which in turn produced a high death rate. A former prisoner, Military Physician 3rd Rank Vasilii Mamchenko, said the following about conditions in the camp at Ostrogozhsk:

The Germans designated a brickyard for the purpose of housing the Russian POWs, although there were no buildings fit for habitation there. Prisoners were simply herded into the brick-drying shed, which had no windows and no ceiling. The prisoners were not given even a bit of straw for covering the floor. They slept on the bare ground. The sick and wounded found themselves in exactly the same circumstances. The infirmary had no medication and bandaging materials, despite the large number of POWs who fell ill. There were at least 200 patients in the infirmary at all times. From time to time a very small quantity of substitute bandages, made of paper, was handed out. The patients’ wounds festered, they became infested with maggots, and gas gangrene developed; there were frequent instances of tetanus. The camp routine was very cruel. The prisoners worked 10 to 12 hours per day, doing excavation work. They were fed balanda in the morning and evening: warm water with millet or rye flour, and only a few spoonfuls for each prisoner. Occasionally, as a sop, they cooked the flesh of a dead horse, whose carcass gave off a stench. The German camp doctor, Oberarzt Steinbach, said: “For Russian dogs, the quality of this meat is completely fine.” Without possessing qualifications as a surgeon, he practiced surgical operations on the prisoners and killed many. If wounded and sick POWs refused to work, they were beaten half to death…. When hungry soldiers stooped on the way to work in order to pick up from the road a beet or potato that had dropped from a cart, the Hungarian escorts shot them…. The mortality rate was 30 to 60 persons per day. They died of exhaustion, dysentery, typhus, [End Page 104] and neglected wounds. The total number of dead from the end of August to mid-January was approximately 8,000. ⁴

The camp was disbanded on August 27, 1944. ⁵