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

The Wehrmacht established Dulag 220 on July 18, 1941, from Frontstalag 220.¹ On August 1, 1941, the unit was redesignated as Dulag 220 z.b.V. (zur besonderen Verwendung: “for special employment”) and was deployed to Gomel’ (map 9c).² In 1943, the camp was located in the village of Shui (9c). The order to disband the camp was dated September 25, 1943, but records indicate that it was still in operation as late as November 15. Dulag 220 received the field post number (Feldpostnummer) 01 813 between January 27 and July 14, 1942. The number was struck on December 17, 1943.

While deployed in the USSR, the camp was subordinate to the Fourth Army Rear Area Commander (Kommandant rückwärtiges Armeegebiet, Korück, 559), to Security Brigade (Sicherungsbrigade) 203, and to the Prisoner of War District Command J (Kriegsgefangenen-Bezirks-Kommandant J). The camp commandant was Oberstleutnant Schmidt; the adjutant was Hauptmann Both.

Dulag 220 held Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). In Gomel’, the camp held 8,500 POWs at the beginning of September 1941, of whom 3,000 slept under a roof and 5,000 stayed out in the open. Two thousand five hundred of the prisoners were employed as forced laborers. Only 30 soldiers guarded the camp.³ Those who lived inside were only marginally better off than those outside. The camp was located on the grounds of a former cavalry barracks. Prisoners were housed in the stables, which had no doors, no panes in the windows, and no heat. In these stables, the prisoners slept on bare plank beds, side by side.

The prisoners were fed a soup (balanda) made of chaff and flour dust from buckwheat husks, and 140 grams (5 ounces) of bread baked from the same flour twice a day. From time to time the soup was made from rotten, frozen, unpeeled potatoes with the addition of horse bones and the flesh of unborn foals and calves taken from the wombs of animals that had been killed. No medical aid was provided to the prisoners, although a “hospital” was set up in the camp for the sake of appearance. The leather shoes of all the prisoners were taken away from them and many suffered from frostbite during the winter. Both sick and healthy prisoners were used for forced labor, building fortifications around the town and repairing the railroad tracks. Prisoners who lagged along the way or collapsed from exhaustion while at work were shot or stabbed with bayonets by the escorts.⁴ Malnutrition and disease were widespread, leading to a high mortality rate. In November 1941, an average of 350 people died per day,⁵ and, in early December 1941, the death rate reached 400 a day. On some days it was as high as 700.⁶ At that time there were 12,857 prisoners in the camp, of whom 5,000 were working as forced laborers.⁷ During the deployment in Gomel’, the headquarters of Dulag 220 was also used, at least in the spring of 1942, for fighting against partisans.

In 1943, the camp was located in the village of Shui. A former POW, Evgenii Belousov, recalled his stay in the camp at Shui:

On March 23 [1943], we reached the village of Shui, at the edge of which was located a camp for prisoners of war. The camp was surrounded by 2 rows of barbed wire, with towers at the corners. On the gates of the camp was written “Dulag-220.” Behind the barbed wire were 2 barracks, in which POWs were housed. There was also a barracks standing off to one side, which contained a bath with a place for drying clothes, a washbasin, and a medical unit with beds for the sick and wounded. Next to the gates stood a house for the guards and the camp commandant. In the camp there was a square where all the POWs could be lined up. Here, every day, they all were counted and taken away to work. In the commandant’s office, all those who had arrived were recorded in a register: last name, first name, patronymic, military rank, unit number, place of residence. The officers were immediately sorted out and sent to another camp. In the barracks, which had been knocked together from boards, were solid plank beds in two tiers, made of round, small logs. On top of them was some straw. If a prisoner had no clothes, or if his clothes were tattered, they gave him used German army clothing. The prisoners were forced to work every day, with the exception of Saturday and Sunday. They worked in the forest, felled birch trees, sawed them into rough chunks, and split the big ones. The meter-long chunks were piled up in stacks and burned to make charcoal, which was sent to Germany. I worked in this camp until June 10, 1943. Then some of us, including me, were sent to the town of El’nia.⁸