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

The Wehrmacht formed Dulag 231 on March 19, 1941, from Frontstalag 231.¹ It was first deployed in Poland in Defense District (Wehrkreis) XXI. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, it deployed to occupied Belarus. In July 1941, the camp was located in Volkovysk (map 4c); in August 1941, it was in Dokshytsy (9b); and in October and November 1941, it was in Viaz’ma (9c).

From December 1941 to April 1942, Dulag 231 was in Smolensk, but it was not used as a prisoner of war [POW] camp there. The camp commandant, Major Gutschmidt, was appointed commandant of one of the defensive sectors of the town of Smolensk on January 10, 1942, and he spent the following two months mainly preparing his sector and training the rear area soldiers in his sector to function as defensive forces.²

From April to June 1942, the camp was once again deployed at Viaz’ma.³ From July 1942 to the spring of 1944, the camp was located in Millerovo (9d), Volchansk (today Vovchansk) (9d), Poltava (9f), Kremenchug (9f), Charkow (Russian: Khar’kov; today Kharkiv, Ukraine) (9f), Kirovograd (today Kropyvnyts’kyi) (9f), and Pervomais’k (9g).⁴ The camp was disbanded on October 11, 1944 (although the order to disband it had been issued on August 27, 1944) and converted into AGSSt 57.⁵ Dulag 231 received field post number (Feldpostnummer) 21 260 between February 15 and July 30, 1942. The number was struck on December 4, 1944.

As of July 1, 1941, the camp was subordinate to Army Group Center (Heeresgruppe Mitte), and later to the Third Armored Army Rear Area Commander (Kommandant rückwärtiges Armeegebiet, Korück, 590). As of June 27, 1942, the camp was subordinate to Army Group B,⁶ specifically to the Second Army, II Hungarian Army Corps, Armeeabteilung Lanz (later, Armeeabteilung Kempf). As of August 16, 1943, it was subordinate to the German Eigth Army. In 1944, the camp was subordinate to the Commander of Prisoners of War in Operations Area II (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen im Operationsgebiet II).⁷

The camp commandant from December 1940 until the end of November 1941 was 57-year-old Major Hartwig von Stietencron (1884–1952) and, later, 65-year-old Major Johannes Gutschmidt (1876–1961). The names of additional commandants and other camp personnel are unknown.

Dulag 231 held Soviet POWs. Conditions in the camp were similar to those in other camps for Soviet POWs. [End Page 114] Overcrowding, malnutrition, exhaustion from forced labor, unsanitary conditions, and lack of proper medical care led to widespread starvation and disease, which produced a high mortality rate. Abuse by the German guards made the situation even worse. The first prisoners to arrive in the camp in Volkovysk, which was initially located in the former Red Army barracks, were given no food or water for several days, nor did they receive any form of medical care.

In the camp at Viaz’ma, where there were 27,000 prisoners at the end of October 1941 and 34,000 in early November 1941, the conditions were particularly inhumane. Every day, dozens of prisoners died in the camp. Driven to despair, the prisoners made attempts to escape en masse, only to be shot by the guards. The procedures in the camp aroused the indignation of even the Fourth Army Rear Area Commander (Korück 559), and the local military commandant. They complained to the Army Group Center Rear Area Commander (Befehlshaber des rückwärtigen Heeresgebietes Mitte, Berück Mitte) about the camp commandant, accusing him of poor leadership.⁸ The commander, General Max von Schenkendorff (1875–1943), inspected the camp at Viaz’ma on November 20, 1941, and was astonished by the mortality rate (4,000 deaths in November alone) and, in a conference on November 23, 1941, declared that he had given instructions for an investigation of the activity of the camp commandant, who was removed from his position and transferred to Dulag 203.⁹

As in other camps, the Germans screened the prisoners to separate out Jews, political commissars, and Communist Party members, who were then shot near the camp by the guards or Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD). Jewish-Soviet prisoner Lev Frankfurt witnessed such an execution soon after his arrival in the camp at the beginning of July 1941. He stated that the Jews and commissars were machine-gunned by the Germans in full sight of the other prisoners. Frankfurt, who was both a Jew and a political commissar, avoided the same fate only because he had, by coincidence, not been circumcised at birth (the method by which the Germans identified Jews), and he had lost his Army uniform shirt (which bore the identifying red star of the political commissars) and had been given a new one by a peasant family.¹⁰ These executions occurred every time a new transport of prisoners arrived in the camp. In November 1941, a selection operation (Aussonderung) conducted by Einsatzkommando 9 uncovered 117 Jews, who were subsequently shot.¹¹