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

The Wehrmacht established Dulag 339 on April 25, 1944, from the staff of Stalags 337 and 339. The camp was located in Mantua (map 6).¹ The camp commandant, Menz, noted that the “appellation of Stalag [was] wrongly given to the camp,” since it was in effect, if not in title, a Dulag.² Both Stalag 337 and 339 functioned as assembly points for troops captured in their respective regions of Italy. In the spring of 1944, the Germans merged the camps in Mantua to form Dulag 339.³ The unit received the field post number (Feldpostnummer) 46 895 on June 5, 1944. The camp was under the control of the Prisoner of War District Command K (Kriegsgefangenen-Bezirkskommandant K).

Dulag 339 was located on the outskirts of Mantua, near the shores of Lake Inferiore. It occupied a group of buildings that had previously been used as garages and repair shops for Italian artillery. When it first opened, the conditions were primitive. Few dormitories had been created, beds were hastily constructed of wooden planks, latrines were adequate in number but unsanitary, and there was no kitchen. All food at that time was brought in from the town twice daily. Work was underway on a new section across town intended for Allied prisoners of war (POWs).

By November 1944, substantial changes had taken place within the camp. Four buildings had been fully converted to use. Two were dedicated dormitories with separate rooms for officers. Though the officers’ rooms had stove heaters, the main facilities had no heat but were otherwise well ventilated. Another building served as a storeroom, and the last contained workshops for the carpenters and tailors as well as showers and receiving rooms for new prisoner arrivals. The buildings surrounded a central courtyard that the prisoners used for recreation. In the center of the courtyard, a new kitchen had been erected, and its cellar served as an air-raid shelter with a capacity of up to 500.

The camp had an overall capacity of nearly 2,000 at its peak, though the prisoner count rarely exceeded 500. The principal purpose of the camp was to hold Allied POWs and Italian partisans prior to their relocation to permanent camps in Germany. In the fall of 1943, an estimated 50–100 British, 100–200 Italian partisans, and a collection of Americans, French, Greeks, and Yugoslavs passed through the camp each week. Generally, prisoners were only held at the camp for a matter of days before undergoing transport to Germany. Two to three convoys of 200 prisoners each typically emptied the Dulag every month. By November 1944, the camp had been repurposed primarily to hold Allied POWs, the only such camp in Italy.⁴

The camp was not created to hold prisoners for long periods. At times, particularly toward the later months of the war in northern Italy, communications and transportation delays created supply problems within the camp. In November 1944, several hundred men had been in the camp for more than three weeks owing to air raids and close fighting; the camp had recently been hit in an Allied air raid, killing one [End Page 118] prisoner. At the same time, Red Cross shipments had not arrived for over a month because of bombardments. This created a crisis in the overcrowded and undersupplied camp.

The date on which the camp was closed is unknown. It was still open as of March 1, 1945, but must have been closed on or before April 25, when the Allies captured Mantua.