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

The Kriegsmarine established Marlag Milag Sandbostel in Sandbostel, Niedersachsen, Germany (map 4a), about 43 kilometers (26.7 miles) northeast of Bremen, in February 1941. This camp is sometimes referred to as Marlag X B, because it was located in Defense District (Wehrkreis) X. It was located within the larger complex of the Sandbostel prisoner of war (POW) camp, one of the largest such camps in Germany, which included the enlisted men’s camp (Stalag X B), the officers’ camp (Oflag X B), and a civilian internment camp (Ilag). The Marlag-Milag was located across from the officers’ camp, in the southwest corner of the complex. The Marlag-Milag held British Royal Navy and Merchant Marine personnel captured during the naval battles in the North Sea and North Atlantic Ocean in 1940 and 1941, as well as some Royal Marines captured in France in 1940. Although the merchant mariners were technically civilians, the Germans treated them as POWs (as the British did with captured German merchant mariners).

The Marlag-Milag consisted of 18 residential barracks and 4 sanitary barracks, which contained the toilets and showers. It was separated from the other sections of the complex by a barbed wire fence; two rows of barbed wire along the western and southern perimeters separated it from the outside world.¹ The prisoners in the Marlag-Milag were strictly separated from those of other nationalities. As of November 21, 1941, there were 810 prisoners in the Marlag-Milag (out of a total of 38,129 in the entire Sandbostel complex).² Prisoners of other nationalities generally regarded the conditions in the Marlag-Milag to be much better than those in the other parts of the camp (one French prisoner referred to the British sailors as the “kings of the prison”) because of the fact that German prisoners were also being held by the United Kingdom. The sailors received Red Cross packages (one per man) every week, a luxury not afforded to the other prisoners, and were not expected to work, as the other prisoners were. They were allowed to keep their uniforms after being captured rather than being assigned prison uniforms.³ At the end of 1941, the sailors were transferred to the newly constructed Marlag-Milag Nord in Westertimke, about 13 kilometers (8 miles) to the southwest. After their departure, the former Marlag-Milag had several different uses, housing French prisoners who were awaiting repatriation and, later, Soviet POWs and interned Italian military personnel.⁴