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

The Wehrmacht established Stalag 301 on April 30, 1941, in Stablack, in Defense District (Wehrkreis) I (map 4c). From July 17 until August 21, 1941, the camp was located in Schieratz (map 5), and from August 21 until September 22, 1941, in Lublin. In late September 1941, the camp was transferred to Kovel’ (map 9e), and in August 1942, it was relocated to Slavuta (map 9e). In November 1942, it moved from Slavuta to Shepetovka (map 9e), where it remained until the end of 1943. The camp had one subcamp (Zweiglager), which was established at Slavuta in late September 1941; in November 1942, the subcamp was transferred to Zaslav (today Iziaslav, Ukraine) (9e). The date of the camp’s dissolution is uncertain; it was still in operation on August 19, 1944.¹ While located in Kovel’, Slavuta, and Shepetovka, the camp was subordinate to the Commander of Prisoners of War with the Armed Forces Commander Ukraine (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen beim Wehrmachtbefehlshaber Ukraine).

The camp commandant, beginning on May 2, 1941, was Oberstleutnant Walther Otto. He was followed by Oberstleutnant Dr. Wiegand from October 10, 1941; Oberst Lüders, from January 24, 1943; and, finally, Oberst Helmut von Uechtritz, from April 6, 1943, to July 25, 1944. The deputy camp commandants were Major Dr. Friedrich Voigt and Hauptmann Johannes Papke. They were replaced by Oberstleutnant Fritz Meurer on September 21, 1943. From March 17, 1944, until July 25, 1944, the position was filled by Oberstleutnant Paul Pini. The counterintelligence (Abwehr) officers were Hauptmann Karl Flick (who died on June 26, 1942) and Hauptmann Dr. Emil Pfau. The camp officer (Lageroffizier) was Hauptmann Friedrich Pohlenk as of December 11, 1941. As of November 1942, the camp was guarded by Company 3 of the 568th Reserve Battalion (Landesschützenbataillon).

Stalag 301 held Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). The maximum population of the camp was 33,139 in October 1942.² Approximately 12,000 prisoners are reported to have died at the camp in Kovel’ from starvation, disease, and being shot.³

The Slavuta subcamp, also known as the major hospital (Gross-Lazarett) Slawuta offers a glimpse into the horrors that the Wehrmacht inflicted upon Soviet POWs.⁴ The camp consisted of a barbed-wire enclosure containing 10 three-story stone buildings, located about 1.5 to 2 kilometers (0.9 to 1.2 miles) southeast of Slavuta. In six of the blocks, the Germans kept prisoners with wounds or illnesses. Three other blocks held prisoners to be shipped out or who were in work details.

There was constant turnover at the hospital, as prisoners died and new transports arrived. Many prisoners were dead upon arrival, because of the treatment that the transport guards meted out to them, on top of their medical conditions. A. I. Daniliuk, operator of a water tower located on the grounds of the former military camp, reported to the Investigative Commission that he saw “20 to 25 corpses tossed out of each car of an arriving train, and 800 to 900 corpses were left lying on the railroad branch line.” Generally, the camp guards greeted groups of POWs at the gates of the hospital with blows from rifle butts and rubber truncheons, and then confiscated the new arrivals’ leather footwear, warm clothing, and personal belongings.⁵

In the hospital, the prisoners lived in horribly overcrowded conditions. Many had to stand, closely pressed together; weary and exhausted, many fell to the floor and died. The German doctors often placed people suffering from typhus, tuberculosis, and dysentery with people who had minor and serious wounds, in the same block and the same ward. A. A. Kryshtop, a former POW and a Soviet physician, testified that “in a single block, there were people with typhus and tuberculosis, and the number of sick reached 1,800, while under normal conditions no more than 400 persons could have been placed there.”⁶ The rooms were not cleaned. The patients remained for months on end in the underwear they were wearing when they were taken prisoner. They slept without any covering. Many were half-clothed or completely naked. The premises were unheated, and the primitive stoves made by the POWs themselves fell to pieces. No elementary medical processing of those entering the hospital was conducted. All these factors contributed to the spread of infectious diseases. In the hospital, no water was available for washing or even for drinking. As a result of the unsanitary conditions, lice infestation in the hospital assumed enormous proportions.

Former POW Maksim Ermakov recalled after the war: “In the barracks, one’s breath was taken away by the unbearable odor of feces and decomposing corpses. At the entrance there stood a mobile commode made from a barrel with the top cut off, filled to overflowing with feces. Many of the wounded and sick could not get up because of exhaustion; they suffered from urinary incontinence, profuse dysentery, diarrhea related to a lack of protein, and swelling of the face and extremities. The unclean matter ran down from the upper plank beds to the lower ones.”⁷

The daily rations consisted of balanda—a watery soup made from rotten, unpeeled potatoes, bran, and foxtail millet—and 250–300 grams (8.8–10.6 ounces) of ersatz bread, made partly of sawdust. Sometimes a “menu” of this kind included carrion: dead horses picked up from all over the region, but even this food was given out on an irregular basis in 1941 and 1942. There were times when, for five or six days, wounded POWs received no food at all. There were also [End Page 282] instances when the German guards, for amusement, threw beets and rotten potatoes into a crowd of POWs, and, when the POWs went for the food, the Germans and the Ukrainian police shot at them. Starvation reduced the prisoners to such a state that there were instances, confirmed by eyewitnesses, of cannibalism and use of rats as food.⁸

The bread substitute was baked with special flour sent from Germany. Forensic examination established “that the ‘flour’ consisted of chaff with a minute amount of flour, evidently formed from grains that accidentally fell into straw during threshing. Consumption of the ‘bread’ made from this flour resulted in starvation and alimentary dystrophy in the forms of cachexia and dropsy (starvation edema), and contributed to the spread of serious gastrointestinal diseases, usually fatal, among the Soviet POWs.”⁹

Although the camp at Slavuta officially was called a Gross-Lazarett and its staff included a substantial number of medical personnel, the sick and wounded prisoners did not receive even basic medical care. No medications were issued to the sick and injured. Wounds were not treated surgically and not bandaged. Wounded limbs with bone damage were not immobilized. Even for the gravely wounded, no care was arranged. P. A. Molchanova, a former female POW and medical orderly, reported that “the large numbers of sick and wounded, concentrated in quarters next to us behind a partition made of boards, received no medical care of any kind. From their ward, day and night, we heard continuous prayers for help, pleas for someone to give them even a drop of water. The powerful stench of the festering and neglected wounds penetrated through the chinks between the boards.”¹⁰

The guards exacerbated the terrible conditions. They beat the prisoners as they went to work and while distributing the rations to them. For the slightest infraction of the rules, the Germans would place sick and wounded men in bare concrete punishment cells and deny them water; many of the prisoners died there. As another form of punishment, exhausted prisoners had to run around the barracks; those who could not keep up were beaten senseless. Guards murdered prisoners for sheer amusement or for minor infractions.

The camp administration forced the sick and wounded POWs to do backbreaking physical labor despite their extreme exhaustion and weakness. The POWs carried heavy loads and moved the corpses of Soviet citizens who had died. POWs who were tired and dropped from exhaustion were killed on the spot by the guards. The route to and from work, according to Slavuta’s Catholic priest, Father Milevskii, was marked with little grave mounds, like milestones.¹¹ According to Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) materials, about 150,000 POWs perished in the camp in Slavuta between 1941 and 1943.¹² However, casualty figures from the ChGK are often substantially exaggerated and should be viewed accordingly.

Despite the strictest measures on the part of the Germans, Soviet POWs managed individual and group escapes from the hospital, finding refuge in the homes of the local population of Slavuta and the surrounding localities. As a result, on January 15, 1942, the Regional Commissar (Gebietskommissar) in Shepetovka, Regierungsrat Dr. Worbs, whose district included the town of Slavuta, issued a special directive warning the population that “for giving aid of any kind whatsoever to ‘outsiders,’ that is, to escaped POWs, the guilty will be shot. If those directly guilty are not found, then 10 hostages will be shot in each instance.” The district authority of Slavuta, in turn, declared that “all prisoners of war who have voluntarily left the hospital are declared to be outside the law and are subject to being shot wherever they may be discovered.”¹³ POWs who escaped and were caught, as well as the citizens who had given them aid, were arrested by the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian police, beaten, and shot.¹⁴

From the second half of June until early August 1942, the camp in Slavuta was also used as a center for formation of Cossack military units. As a result of an order dated June 18, 1942, all POWs who were Cossacks by origin and regarded themselves as such had to be sent to Slavuta. By the end of the month, 5,826 prisoners had already been concentrated here, taken from various camps in the Ukraine (Vinnitsa, Kovel’, Darnitsa, Belaia Tserkov’, and others), and a decision was made to form a Cossack corps and set up a corresponding headquarters. As there was an acute shortage of senior and midlevel command personnel among the Cossacks, they began selecting former Red Army commanders for Cossack units, men who were not Cossacks. As a result, the Ataman Count Platov 1st Cossack Officer Cadet School was opened at the formation headquarters. In addition, there was a school for noncommission officers. The Cossack personnel were used primarily to form the 1st Ataman Regiment under the command of Oberstleutnant Freiherr von Wolff and a special half-squadron of Cossacks (polusotnia) intended to perform special tasks in the Soviet rear area. After testing of the increased fresh forces, formation of the 2nd Leibkosaken-Regiment and the 3rd Regiment of Don Cossacks began, followed by formation of the 4th and 5th Regiments of Kuban Cossacks and the 6th and 7th Combined Cossack Regiments. On August 6, 1942, the Cossack units that had been formed were transferred from the camp in Slavuta to Shepetovka to barracks specially set aside for them due to an outbreak of typhus at Slavuta.¹⁵