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

The Chief of Prisoners of War in the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) created Oflag 79 (map 4a) with the order OKW/Chef Kriegsgefangenen no. 2003/44, dated April 29, 1944, from the staff of [End Page 225] Oflag VIII F.¹ The camp was deployed in Querum, about 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) northeast of the city center of Braunschweig, in Defense District (Wehrkreis) XI. The camp functioned until April 12, 1945, when American troops liberated it. The camp was under the authority of the Commander of Prisoners of War in Defense District XI (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen im Wehrkreis XI).

Oflag 79 held British officers and their orderlies, some of them captured during the abortive airborne attack on Arnhem. The camp was located in the former barracks of a German parachute regiment. The table below shows the number of prisoners in the camp in 1944:²

The conditions in the camp were generally satisfactory but grew worse as the war went on. At one point, an errant American bombing raid, apparently aimed at the neighboring Hermann Göring aircraft works, hit the camp. None of the prisoners was killed, but the camp kitchen was destroyed, and thereafter the quality of the food decreased markedly. Lieutenant Edmund Scrivener, who arrived in the fall of 1944, wrote:

The rations dealt out to us from our captors were a bare minimum; a few boiled potatoes a day and a small piece of black bread once a week. And once a week was enough; it tasted awful. However, [we received] a Red Cross parcel every week, which [was] about the size of a shoe box and contained all sorts of goodies like cigarettes, corned beef, dried milk, spam which made life bearable. But it couldn’t last.

By Christmas the country was in such a state that no trains from Switzerland, or lorries from Sweden could get through, and soon the number of parcels dwindled first to one a fortnight, then to one a month, and finally stopped completely. Life was no longer a joke and some astonishing trading went on.³