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

The Wehrmacht created Stalag 326 (map 4a) on April 21, 1941, in Defense District (Wehrkreis) VI, initially as a Frontstalag (starting in May 1941, it became a Stalag).¹ The camp was located near the villages of Eselheide and Senne, 7 kilo-meters (4.3 miles) from the Hövelhof railroad station [End Page 318] (township of Stukenbrock, Nordrhein-Westfalen) and not far from the towns of Paderborn and Bielefeld. Because it was located in Defense District VI, it was also known as Stalag VI K. The Wehrmacht built the camp to hold Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). Not far away, to the southwest of the camp for Soviet prisoners, there was a separate compound for Polish, French, Yugoslav, Italian, Belgian, and Dutch POWs, which opened in 1942.

The camp commandant initially was Major von Padberg; on September 4, 1942, Oberst Eiler replaced him. Toward the end of the war, Oberst Berend took over. The counterintelligence (Abwehr) officer in the camp was Hauptmann Wendt.

The unit received field post number (Feldpostnummer) 21 006 between February 16 and July 18, 1941. The number was struck between February 15 and July 30, 1942, since by then the camp’s status as a fixed camp in Germany was firm (field post numbers were for mobile units in the army’s area of operations).

The first Soviet POWs arrived on July 10, 1941. By the end of July 1941, there were already about 12,000 Soviet prisoners in the camp.² These first arrivals experienced horrific conditions. Although the camp sat in the middle of Germany, there was no housing: the prisoner compound consisted of nothing more than an expanse of ground, lightly forested with pine trees, with barbed wire surrounding it. The prisoners had to live outdoors, sleeping on the bare ground. They were unprotected from wind, rain, and, as the autumn and winter came on, cold. Most of them did not even have an overcoat. In the daytime, it was still possible to somehow endure the bad weather, but at night the prisoners froze. In desperation, the prisoners cut down the pine trees and constructed shelters made of branches. When the trees ran out, the men dug burrows, using plates, spoons, or their bare hands. Living in such dugouts ended tragically for many, because at night, when there was rain, the sand often caved in onto the unfortunate men, burying them alive. In any case, such shelters did little to ward off the piercing dampness and cold. The camp administration did provide a limited number of tents but not nearly enough to house all the prisoners. Latrines, too, were in extremely short supply, and these few did not meet the simplest requirements.

Not until the winter of 1941–1942 did barracks construction begin, with the prisoners themselves providing the labor. Thus, over time, the prisoners got roofs over their heads, but on the whole their situation improved only slightly. Each barracks was intended for 140 prisoners, but, in reality, 400, 500, or 600 lived in each, and the roofs leaked. The prisoners did not receive any bedding, and instead slept on hard wooden plank beds in two or three tiers or on the earthen floor. Straw served as a floor covering. The barracks were dark, damp, and, in fall and winter, cold as well, as they were poorly heated. For each small stove, known as a burzhuika, two briquettes of coal were allocated for a 24-hour period, and even that amount was not provided every day. Such housing conditions did little to reduce the prisoners’ horrendous mortality rate. Some prisoners simply froze to death in the barracks.

During the entire period of the camp’s existence, no repair work was done on the barracks. There were no toilets in the barracks. The water situation, too, was dreadful. Hand pumps were indeed placed in every block, but the water came from the surface stratum, and it was muddy, with an unpleasant odor and taste. Drinking it was dangerous, as it caused intestinal illnesses, but there was no other water for the prisoners, although on the other side of the wire, in the German camp, there was plumbing with a clean water supply.

The prisoners’ diet was very poor and low in caloric value. The 150–200 grams (5.3–7 ounces) of Ersatzbrot, or “substitute bread,” that the prisoners received was not nutritional. The bread consisted of dry scraps of sugar beets with an admixture of sawdust. In addition to such “bread,” the POWs were issued a coffee substitute and balanda—a watery soup that was difficult to eat, in part because of its characteristic stench. The balanda was prepared from unpeeled, half-rotten potatoes and fodder beets or only from rutabagas. Sometimes the rutabagas were mixed with cabbage or carrots. The rutabagas and potatoes were poorly washed and were cut up with an axe in a trough, as for livestock, and therefore the balanda always contained refuse, straw, and dirt. As early as July 1941, this “soup” was being brought in large barrels, each able to hold 20 liters (21 quarts) for 20 men. But the barrels were never filled up, so the prisoners never got more than 0.7 liter (1.5 pints) apiece. The daily ration totaled 800–850 calories. At the same time, the prisoners worked from early in the morning until late in the evening. The first prisoners, to keep from starving to death, ate tree bark, leaves, and grass, until those substitutes were all gone.

In the summer of 1941, there were not enough field kitchens to prepare the meager food for the multitude of prisoners. The prisoners themselves were forced to see to it that they had hot food. No tableware and cutlery were provided for the POWs, so these items became very valuable property, the loss of which threatened to result in death. The prisoners themselves made spoons and knives and carried them at all times, in the chest pockets of their high-collared tunics. Those who had helmets often remade them into cooking pots.

These inhumane living conditions, together with the diseases they promoted, were the main cause of the high death rate among the prisoners. Dysentery, typhus, and tuberculosis carried off thousands, as did simple starvation, exhaustion, and exposure to the elements.

The camp became very crowded again as of mid-1942, when new trains began arriving with Red Army servicemen captured during the German summer offensive. From June through August 1942, the number of prisoners increased from 3,000 to 21,000. The camp leadership placed the new POWs either in vacant spots in the barracks or in the tents. The increase in the number of prisoners was also connected with the fact that in the fall of 1942 the camp began to perform the function of a central reception camp for Soviet POWs who were to work in the mining industry of the Ruhrgebiet. Thus, the camp also acquired, in addition, the character of a sorting and distribution camp. From it, prisoners were sent to other [End Page 319] camps, most often to Stalag VI A in Hemer. The following table gives an idea of the prisoner population in 1941–1942:³

In the following years, especially in 1944, the number of prisoners in the camp increased even more. The rise in the prisoner population was explained by the fact that as of August 1944, POWs from camps in the east, which the Germans had closed, began arriving at Stalag 326. The highest number of Soviet prisoners in the camp was recorded on September 1, 1944: 31,638. In the following period, until January 1945, the number of prisoners fluctuated between 26,982 and 24,327.⁴ Altogether, by March 1, 1945, around 308,000 Soviet POWs had passed through the camp.⁵

In 1942–1943, as construction of barracks and other buildings went forward, the camp gradually took on a more regular form. A main street divided the camp, which was rectangular in shape, into two halves along a central axis. The camp consisted of four parts: the “German camp” (Deutsches Lager), which was the administrative sector; the so-called forward camp (Vorlager); the main camp; and the tent camp (Zeltlager).

The Vorlager contained the infirmary, workshop barracks (sewing workshop, locksmith’s shop, shoemaker’s shop, and an electrical repair shop), bathhouse, laundry, kitchen, warehouse, disinfection area, and a prison with solitary cells and punishment cells. The Vorlager also included six dormitory barracks for national minorities (Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Ukrainians, and others), who, in accordance with instructions, were supposed to be quartered separately from the bulk of Russian POWs.

In the main camp, the construction of which was not completed until 1944, were 54 barracks and eight other large buildings. Each group of 3 barracks was separated from the others by additional barbed wire and constituted a single block. In all, there were 18 blocks. Each block had massive doors, which were closed at night, while Russian and Ukrainian police guarded them in the daytime. The blocks were arranged in parallel: nine on one side, nine on the other. Some served special purposes. Block 16, for example, was a penal block, in which lived, for the most part, prisoners who had tried to escape or had come into conflict with the police. Block 3 held Soviet officers, whom the Germans isolated from the other prisoners. Block 9 was the counterintelligence block: in it, “selections” were conducted among Soviet POWs who were subject to being shipped to concentration camps. The remaining 15 blocks were eventually transformed into a transit camp (Durchgangslager, Dulag), where prisoners, in quarantine and having recovered their ability to work, were sorted, registered, and sent to other camps.

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Stalag 326 (VI K) at Senne. View of the POW camp in Germany at liberation, April 1945.

USHMM, COURTESY OF NARA, WS #73454.

The entire camp, with the exception of the German camp, was fenced in by a thick, double row of barbed wire 3 meters (almost 10 feet) tall. In addition, between the rows was heaped a spiral of barbed wire, and along the entire perimeter of the fence was stretched more wire in a single line. At each corner and in the center of the camp there were guard towers. The camp was guarded day and night. The guard battalion on duty was armed with heavy machine guns. At night the camp was illuminated. Around the perimeter, soldiers from the guard force were on patrol, with one soldier every 100 meters (328 feet). The outer fence was electrically charged.

In the German camp were the commandant’s office, the guards’ barracks, and administrative and other facilities related to running the camp (clinic and hospital, counterintelligence section, food warehouse, laundry, post office, office with the card index of POWs, workforce deployment section, dining hall, and so on). The German personnel stayed outside the main camp; any contact with POWs outside of official duties was forbidden.

The guard force for the camp and work teams consisted of older soldiers (between 40 and 60 years of age), who were [End Page 320] members of reserve battalions (Landesschützenbataillone). These were soldiers who, because of their age or state of health, could not be called to the front. Among them were men who had recovered after being wounded and young soldiers who were already unfit for frontline service. The camp headquarters personnel, including the commandant, were even older; they included men who had fought in World War I.

The tent camp was an area measuring 400 by 100 meters (1,312 by 328 feet); it was located next to the main camp and served predominantly for housing prisoners who were to go through registration, examination, and disinfection and then go on to work in industry, mostly in mining. Great changes in the tent camp took place between August 1944 and March 1945: 10 barracks appeared, significantly larger in size than ordinary barracks. They were built for POWs who were being evacuated from camps in the east.

A group of no more than 1,200 prisoners occupied key positions within the camp. They included shoemakers, tailors, auto mechanics, locksmiths, electricians, clerks in the card index section, doctors, doctor’s assistants, and medical orderlies. There was also a group of musicians, singers, and dancers, whom the Germans selected from the prisoner population. This group traveled around to other camps and gave concerts. The musicians simultaneously performed the function of informers. They took an interest in the prisoners’ mood and conversations.⁶ For the purpose of maintaining order in the camp, the commandant’s office created an auxiliary police force, composed for the most part of Ukrainian prisoners. Its members wore a special black uniform and were better fed than the other prisoners.

Starting in August 1941, the Münster Gestapo command conducted selections of “undesirable” prisoners (Jews and Communists) in the camp. The prisoners who were selected were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp for execution. Some data indicate that 5,000–6,000 prisoners went to Buchenwald, of whom more than 1,000 were shot, while the others were used for forced labor.⁷ According to other data, 4,556 prisoners were taken to Buchenwald.⁸

American troops from the 2nd Armored Division liberated Stalag 326 on April 2, 1945; that evening, they turned it over to the 30th Infantry Division. On the day of its liberation, the camp held 9,000 prisoners, including 1,500 in the infirmary. The report of the US Army officer in charge gives a figure of 7,690 prisoners as of April 3.⁹

In postwar research on the history of the camp, different figures are given for the number of dead: 15,000, 30,000, 36,800, 40,000, 45,000, and finally, according to British sources, 70,000.¹⁰ In the lists of names of prisoners who died between July 1941 and August 1945, 17,158 individuals are recorded.¹¹ Not all of them, however, are likely to have been victims from that camp. An analysis of the lists of dead prisoners buried at Forellkrug allows us to compile the table below, showing the distribution of deceased prisoners by month and year for the period of 1941–1945: