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

The Wehrmacht established Oflag 68 (map 4c) on April 8, 1941, in Defense District (Wehrkreis) VIII. On May 24, 1941, it was moved to Defense District I.¹ The camp was located in the village of Krzywólka, about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) northwest of Sudauen (today Suwałki, Poland).² On June 15, 1942, the camp was converted into Stalag I F Sudauen.³ Oflag 68 received the field post number (Feldpostnummer) 08 962 between February 1 and July 11, 1941. The number was struck between January 27 and July 14, 1942. The camp was subordinate to the Commander of Prisoners of War in Defense District I (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen im Wehrkreis I).

Oflag 68 held Soviet prisoners of war. Although the camp was formally classified as an Oflag (an officers’ camp), it actually functioned as a Stalag (enlisted men’s camp). The camp occupied an area of about 20 hectares (almost 50 acres). A barbed wire fence and guard towers were built to fortify the compound. When the first prisoners arrived, no barracks existed on the site, and the prisoners had to sleep in holes they dug in the ground; many prisoners died of exposure as a result. Barracks were not built in the camp until several months after it opened. The prisoners’ food rations were also insuffi-cient. They received about 200 grams (7 ounces) of bread and a liter (4 cups) of watery soup per day; with such minimal rations, starvation set in rapidly.⁴ Infectious diseases such as typhus and dysentery were also widespread in the camp. In addition to the terrible living conditions, the prisoners also suffered from deliberate abuse by the guards; for example, one witness recalled that a German soldier tasked with distributing bread to the prisoners repeatedly beat a man with his rifle butt for no reason.⁵

Witnesses reported that the population of the camp in the fall of 1941 was between 10,000 and 20,000, but malnutrition, disease, exposure, and exhaustion took a heavy toll on the prisoners and the population of the camp decreased drastically during the following winter. By February 1942, there were only 1,766 prisoners left in the camp.⁶

As in other camps, the Germans screened newly arrived prisoners to separate out “undesirables,” such as Jews and political commissars, who were then shot in the woods near the camp. The selections were conducted by personnel from the Sudauen Gestapo office and the executions were carried out by Schutzpolizei units.⁷ No official figures on the number of deaths in Oflag 68 are available from the ChGK or other sources, but it can be safely assumed based on reports from eyewitnesses (several of whom claimed to have seen bodies buried by the hundreds) and the above population statistics that thousands of prisoners died in the camp.