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

The Wehrmacht established Stalag 339 on April 10, 1941, in Defense District (Wehrkreis) IX.¹ From October 1941 to March 1943, the camp was deployed in the village of Darnitsa, near Kiev (map 9e); the camp was also referred to as Prisoner of War Camp Kiev-East (Kriegsgefangenenlager Kiew-Ost) during this time. From April until August 1943, the camp was located in Berdichev (today Berdychiv, Ukraine) (9e). In August 1943, the camp in Berdichev was disbanded, and its headquarters was redeployed in September 1943 to Trieste (6). From February 1944 on, the camp was located in Mantua (6); on May 24, 1944, it was redesignated Dulag 339.² Stalag 339 received field post number (Feldpostnummer) 46 895 between July 30, 1941, and February 28, 1942. The number was struck on September 8, 1942, then reissued on October 5, 1943, and finally struck on June 5, 1944.

As of August 22, 1941, the camp was under the authority of the Commander of Prisoners of War with the Armed Forces Commander Ukraine (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen beim Wehrmachtbefehlshaber Ukraine). Beginning on September 23, 1943, it was subordinate to Army Group (Heeresgruppe) B, and then, as of November 21, 1943, to Army Group (Heeresgruppe) C.³

Stalag 339 held Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). The camp reached a maximum population of 14,906 prisoners in September 1942.⁴ The camp was located in a former Red Army barracks on the outskirts of Darnitsa, on the left bank of the Dnieper River, 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from Kiev, where the railroad lines linking Kiev with Moscow and Khar’kov converge. It was located in a wooded area near the crossing of the Kiev highway and the railroad lines, bounded on the north and east by a dense forest. The camp was very large, about 1.5 kilometers by 1 kilometer (0.9 miles by 0.6 miles). The entire camp area was enclosed with three or four rows of barbed wire, 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) tall. A similar network of wire partitioned the camp into several sections. The perimeter of the camp was guarded by armed German sentries with dogs, while the guards inside the camp were Ukrainian policemen.

The statements of numerous witnesses, eyewitnesses, and former POWs indicate that unrestrained and arbitrary cruelty prevailed in the camp. The work regimen, tortures, complete deprivation of food for extended periods, exposure to the elements, and other unhealthy conditions led to severe exhaustion, widespread disease, and a high mortality rate. As Jewish-Soviet prisoner Ilia Furmanov recalls, the prisoners [End Page 335] slept on long bunks, which resembled shelves and were so crowded that the men had to lie back-to-back down the entire length of the bunks.⁵ They were fed one can of a thin soup called balanda, which consisted of little more than water with bits of sweet onion, twice a day; the terrible quality of the food caused widespread gastrointestinal illnesses. Although some prisoners who had watches, rings, or other valuables were able to use them to purchase additional food from the guards, some other prisoners became so desperately hungry that they resorted to eating the flesh of their dead comrades.

A subcamp was located on the grounds of a former automotive repair workshop. Barbed wire surrounded this camp and divided it into sections of various sizes. A small building comprised the “infirmary” for the prisoners, which provided no medical aid of any kind. The sick and wounded suffered terribly: their wounds were not dressed, what dressings had already been applied became soaked with pus, and the wounds were often infested by maggots. The mortality rate in the subcamp was high.⁶

The former POW Aleksandr Shugai, who was in the camp for an entire year, beginning on January 18, 1942, described the conditions as follows:

Personally, upon arrival at the camp I was confined in a separate barracks. In the same barracks with me were 3,000 POWs. Over the course of a five-day stay in this barracks, the POWs received nothing to eat, and during this time 300 to 500 persons died of cold and starvation right before my eyes. Then, after five days had elapsed, the POWs were separated—the Russians separately and the Ukrainians separately. As a Russian, I remained in the barracks among the Russians, and after the sorting, over the course of three days, the Russians again received no food, and as a result about 500 POWs died of starvation.

After eight days, on the ninth day I and all the prisoners who were in the barracks with me were released into the general camp, and only on day nine did we get something to eat: a thin soup known as balanda, which was made from millet bran and beet and potato peelings. This food was in a watery state, and they distributed it in half-liter portions to each prisoner once a day. There were instances when this food was not given out to all the POWs, but in order of sequence, by barracks, so that for two days and more one had to go without anything to eat at all. But if one of the prisoners, while at work, got potatoes for himself and brought them into camp—and to boil the potatoes, a fire had to be lit—then the fascist butchers, once they spotted the fire, without any warning would toss grenades into the fire, and as a result of this, dozens of people would die.

I also saw how, during the distribution of food to the POWs, a group of fascist butchers used to gather near the kitchen and brutally beat the POWs, especially those individuals whom they suspected of being a commanding officer or a political worker. They beat them with rubber sticks, rifle butts, iron rods, and the like. I can’t tell you the names of these butchers, because I have no idea what they are. The POWs, from drinking the above-mentioned balanda, developed en masse dysentery and other gastrointestinal ailments, which contributed to the large mortality rate.

In addition, I’ll state this too: at the Darnitsa camp, there was at all times a Gestapo detachment, whose members herded all the POWs out of the barracks every day and made them sit on the ground and take off their headgear. They made some POWs take off their overcoats, too, and in this way they later discerned the Red Army commanders and political workers, as well as individuals of Jewish nationality. Every day they selected 100 to 150 people and sent them into a separate barracks. There, by means of torture and beatings, they found out more and ultimately exposed individuals in the categories I mentioned previously, and then SS men came to the camp from Kiev and shot these prisoners. There were frequent instances when gendarmes came to the camp from Kiev, and with their weapons out, they would walk through the barracks and shoot individual POWs there in the barracks without any grounds, without any reason for suspicion at all.

I also saw prisoners, several dozen at a time, taken from the camp and shot in the pine woods near the camp. During the time I was in the camp, between 1,000 and 1,500 people were shot, primarily commanding officers, political workers, members of the [Communist Party], and Komsomol members.

From conversations with POWs who were in the camp with me, I know that 60,000 to 70,000 prisoners died in the Darnitsa camp. For burying the dead, a group of between 25 and 30 persons was always selected, and they were specially made to sing songs, in particular the Soviet song “Katiusha.” They forced them to sing on the way to the pits and back, and those who refused to sing were denied food and in addition were subjected to beatings and other tortures.⁷

Shugai added that the Germans singled out Jewish officers and female prisoners for especially sadistic forms of torture and humiliation, which were carried out in sight of the other prisoners. According to the statements of Grigorii Peresada, who worked in the camp as a stoker,

the Soviet POWs managed to get for themselves various kinds of carrion to eat (dead horses, dogs, cats, and the like), and in addition they gathered bones and other refuse from the garbage pits, and all this they cooked in pots and ate, and they managed [End Page 336] to do it even though they knew they would be beaten for it. There were repeated instances when POWs who remained alive cut off the arms, legs, and even other body parts of prisoners who had starved to death and used all this as food for themselves, managing all this in great fear and with beatings as a result.⁸

Gustav Getroi, a Jew from Lwów who entered the camp as early as October 1941 and, as a former doctor, was assigned to the infirmary, recalled that

over the course of a month, I personally, as well as the wounded POWs who were in the infirmary, received food rations once a day, consisting of soup made of frozen beets. I, as the physician, and the wounded POWs received no other foodstuffs. Then they began making balanda, which was prepared from unpeeled potatoes, which, moreover, were not washed and were put into the cauldron along with the soil. Into these potatoes was stirred a little flour of some sort, and the balanda prepared in this way was distributed to be eaten once a day, and only every other day besides; that is, one day they gave out the soup made from frozen beets, and the next day, the balanda.

From eating such food, the Soviet POWs in the infirmary became weakened, and as a result they died at an enormous rate, 100 to 120 per day. In addition, the wounded POWs in the infirmary were completely naked, with no shirts and underpants; they wrapped themselves up only with quilts, and no footwear of any kind was issued for their feet. At the same time, they put wounded POWs onto the bare floor in the infirmary, with no sheets and pillows of any kind. The situation that was created for wounded POWs in the way described above continued from October 10, 1941, to March 1942 and gave rise to widespread infestation with lice, and as a result of the cold temperatures, hunger, and lice, a typhus epidemic broke out.

In the period from December 1941 to March 1942 alone, 50,000 to 60,000 persons died in the infirmary and in the camp for Soviet POWs. All this is known to me personally from statistics that were specially kept in the infirmary. In the infirmary itself, as many as 20,000 POWs died. The dead were buried in pits, each holding 500 to 1,000 corpses, that were dug near the infirmary, about 30 to 50 meters [98 to 164 feet] from it. As an eyewitness, I can personally point out all these sites. I also personally witnessed one of the Nazi butchers’ methods of atrocious humiliation of wounded POWs in the infirmary, which was practiced there at the order of the head doctor at the camp: physical exercise. Despite exhaustion from hunger and fatigue from wounds, all the POWs, even those who could barely walk, were compelled to do physical exercise. All this, however, was nothing more than a means of definitively exhausting the patients, which accelerated and increased the death rate of the POWs.⁹

Systematic shootings increased the number of victims in the camp. In late 1943, the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) discovered four 72 square meter (775 square feet) mass graves and one 36 square meter (338 square feet) grave in the pine forest north of the camp. According to the testimonies of witnesses and eyewitnesses, these pits contained the bodies of more than 500 Jewish prisoners and about 1,500 Red Army officers, political commissars, and other “undesirables,” whom the Germans separated from the other prisoners and shot between October 1941 to March 1942.¹⁰ Ilia Furmanov, who managed to hide his religious affiliation and thus avoid the same fate, recalls that other groups of prisoners were also included in these shooting operations; many Muslim prisoners, including Tatars and men from the Central Asian republics, were shot along with the Jews because they were also circumcised.¹¹

The ChGK concluded that more than 68,000 persons had perished in the camp at Darnitsa, based on forensic examination of the exhumed corpses and the number of bodies found in the mass graves and the surrounding areas.¹² However, the figures reported by the ChGK have proven in many cases to be greatly exaggerated and should thus be viewed accordingly.