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

The Wehrmacht established Stalag 304 (maps 2, 4e, and 6) based on Stalag IV C on April 8, 1941, in Defense District (Wehrkreis) IV, in Wistritz (today Bystrice, Czech Republic) near the city of Teplitz-Schönau (today Teplice, Czech Republic). It deployed to a site southeast of the village of Zeithain, about 46 kilometers (29 miles) northwest of Dresden. From September 12, 1941, onward, the camp was designated Stalag 304 (IV H).¹ From the start, the Germans intended to use this camp to confine Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). The camp was subordinate to the Commander of Prisoners of War in Defense District IV (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen im Wehrkreis IV).

The first camp commandant was Major Moritz (April 12–May 14, 1941). The next commandant, until January 29, 1942, was Oberstleutnant Alfred Wörlen. The camp adjutant was Captain Karl Zerbes. As of October 10, 1941, the camp staff included 20 officers, 18 civilian officials, 69 noncommissioned officers, and 149 enlisted men.

The first Soviet POWs arrived in the camp in July 1941. The following table lists the number of Soviet prisoners the camp held over the course of fourteen months.²

The prisoners arrived at the camp via a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) march from their disembarkation point at Bahnhof Jacobsthal. In the first months, the prisoners lived outdoors, without barracks or tents to house them. The camp territory was an open field surrounded by a double barbed wire fence. The prisoners made their own dugouts to protect themselves from the bad weather. The construction of barracks, latrines, [End Page 286] kitchens, and wells began only when a sufficient number of prisoners became available for such work in the late summer and early fall—and only after the prisoners had built barracks for the guards, as well as other administrative buildings. The lack of wells and resulting water shortage forced the prisoners to drink water from puddles. The water supply situation contributed to a dysentery epidemic, as well as other diseases such as typhus and typhoid, in addition to numerous deaths caused directly by thirst.

The prisoners were also badly undernourished, as the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) had little interest in feeding Soviet POWs adequately in this early period. Those men who were working received only 1,300 calories a day, while those who were not working received even less food, around 1,000 calories a day. The prisoners’ rations consisted of ersatz coffee or tea in the morning, a thin soup of beets and (occasionally) potatoes at lunch, and about a third of a kilo-gram (11.5 ounces) of so-called Russian bread (Russenbrot), consisting of rye grist, sugar beet pulp, and straw meal, in the evening. These meager rations led the starving, emaciated prisoners to eat anything they could find, including grass, leaves, and poisonous mushrooms. By the winter of 1941, many of the men were too weak to even feed themselves, and death from starvation became commonplace.

A dysentery epidemic began soon after the arrival of the first prisoners in the camp in July 1941. In addition to the shortage of clean water, the lack of proper hygienic facilities and latrines promoted the spread of the disease, which infected as much as 20 percent of the camp’s population between July and October 1941. Though the incidence of dysentery decreased with the arrival of winter, approximately a quarter of the cases of illness among the prisoners during the winter of 1941–1942 were due to dysentery.

The cramped conditions in the camp also contributed to an outbreak of typhus, which began in the late fall of 1941 and reached its peak during the winter. Despite the fact that the camp, unlike many camps for Soviet POWs, had delousing facilities, their capacity was inadequate to deal with the population of the overcrowded camp. Furthermore, the fact that the men were unable to launder their clothing allowed lice to continue to spread. Even the camp’s guards were not immune to the deadly disease spread by lice; as many as a quarter of the guards died of typhus that winter. The Germans placed the camp under quarantine from December 1941 until March 1942, because of the epidemic: the prisoners were sealed in. In total, about 7,000 prisoners died during that period, out of the 10,700 who were present at the start.³

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Stalag 304 (IV H) at Zeithain. Soviet POWs in the camp, date/source unknown.

By the time the OKW ordered the deployment of Russian POWs for forced labor on October 31, 1941, only a few of the prisoners at Zeithain were fit to work; most were too weakened by disease and starvation to perform manual labor. Those who were able to work were sent to unload goods at Bahnhof Jacobsthal and the camp’s supply areas, do excavation work near the camp, assist in the warehouses at the nearby munitions depot, dig graves and bury dead bodies, and work on nearby farms.

In the fall of 1941 and winter of 1941–1942, a group of three men from the Dresden Gestapostelle conducted a selection, or “culling” (Aussonderung), of “undesirable” prisoners in the camp: “known functionaries of the [Soviet] State and Party,” all political commissars and their deputies, and Jews. This team selected and sent no fewer than 1,000 prisoners to the Buchenwald concentration camp through Stalag IV B. The Germans murdered the prisoners immediately upon arrival, using the so-called neck-shot installation (Genickschussanlage); the corpses were burned in the crematorium afterward.⁴

As of September 1, 1942, the Zeithain site became a sub-camp (Zweiglager) of Stalag IV B Mühlberg, with the designation Stalag IV B/Z. Stalag 304 moved to Loewen (2) in Belgium, with about 10,000 Soviet prisoners. From September 8, 1942, it was subordinate to the Military Commander in Belgium and Northern France (Militärbefehlshaber Belgien und Nordfrankreich).⁵ Right up to the liberation of Belgium in 1944, the commandant’s office in Loewen managed work teams of Soviet POWs who were engaged in the coal industry in the area. Details of conditions in the camp during this period have not come to light. [End Page 287]

On September 1, 1943, the camp held 9,931 Soviet POWs, including 111 officers, and 7 Serbian POWs; 9,033 prisoners were used for labor. On April 1, 1944, there were 10,327 Soviet POWs in the camp, including 17 officers; 10,250 were used for labor. On May 1, 1944, there were 10,301 POWs, and on June 1, 1944, there were 9,873 Soviet POWs (9,798 of whom performed labor) and 184 Belgian officers. On July 1, 1944, there were 7,016 Soviet POWs (6,929 of whom performed labor).⁶ In 1945, the camp deployed to Trieste, Italy.⁷

Because of its complicated history of moves and redesignations, Stalag 304 had a correspondingly complicated series of field post numbers (Feldpostnummern). The number 05 975 was assigned between May 1 and October 19, 1942, and struck between October 20, 1942, and January 9, 1943; 25 741 was both assigned and struck between July 31, 1942, and February 9, 1943; the longest-lasting number, 43 406 E, was assigned between October 20, 1942, and January 9, 1943, and struck on March 20, 1945; 07 667 was assigned on October 10, 1944, and struck on February 12, 1945.

The Chorun Commission, which studied the camp’s history and the experiences of its prisoners estimated a death toll of 33,000 Soviet prisoners based on the number of bodies found in mass graves. The camp’s death register only included the names of around 24,500 prisoners; however, the death toll could conceivably be as high as 40,000, as it is possible that many prisoners who died between mid-1942 and the end of 1943 were cremated, rather than buried in mass graves.