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

The Wehrmacht established Stalag 340 on April 15, 1941, in Defense District (Wehrkreis) X. From August 1941 to the beginning of 1944, the camp was located in Dünaburg (today Daugavpils, Latvia) (map 9b). Beginning in November 1942, the camp had a subcamp (Zweiglager) in Rositten (today Rēzekne, Latvia).¹ Beginning on July 25, 1941, the camp was subordinated to the Commander of Prisoners of War in the General District Latvia (Kommander der Kriegsgefangenen Lettland) and the Prisoner of War District Commandant H (Kriegsgefangenen-Bezirkskommandant H), which was subsequently subordinated to the Commander of Prisoners of War with the Armed Forces Commander Ostland (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen beim Wehrmachtsbefehlshaber Ostland). From November 20, 1943, until its dissolution, the camp was under the authority of the Commander of Prisoners of War in Operations Area IV (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen im Operationsgebiet IV).

Stalag 340 received field post number (Feldpostnummer) 10 622 between February 1 and July 11, 1941. The number was struck on August 26, 1943, renewed on January 21, 1944, and struck again for good on April 29, 1944.

The camp commandant was Major Hoeffner, and his deputy was Hauptmann Hugo Meyer, who was later replaced by Hauptmann Missin. The camp adjutant, until December 1942, was Hauptmann Martens, who was replaced by Hauptmann Daniel. As of November 1942, the camp was guarded by the 2nd Company of the 876th Reserve Battalion (Landesschützenbataillon); the guard force also included Latvian police. The subcamp in Rositten was guarded by the 2nd Company of the 981st Reserve Battalion.²

Stalag 340 held Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), including both enlisted men and officers. At first, the prisoners were held in the powder magazines of an old fortress in Dünaburg. In the fall of 1941, when the number of prisoners grew, they were forced to live outdoors on the grounds of the fortress.

The prisoners spent part of the winter of 1941–1942 in holes they dug in the ground, which sheltered them from neither the cold nor the snow. Finally, in early 1942, barracks were built on the esplanade of the fortress. The central camp comprised 125 barracks. Subcamps were located in the former depot at the Daugavpils-2 station, in old stables on Aglonas and Vilianu Streets, on Vidus Street, in the buildings of a pot factory, and at other sites.³

Many prisoners died en route to the camp from hunger, thirst, or exposure to the heat or cold. For example, a railroad watchman named S. Iu. Orbidan told the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) after the liberation of the town in 1944 that

in July 1941, the first special train with Soviet POWs reached the small junction at kilometer 214. A second train arrived right after the first. In each car, there were 70 to 80 people. The cars were tightly closed. When the cars were opened, the POWs greedily gulped the air with open mouths. When getting out of the cars, many of them collapsed from exhaustion. Right there, next to my linesman’s cabin, the Germans shot those who couldn’t walk. Out of each train, they tossed 400 to 500 corpses. The prisoners said that for 5 or 6 days, on the journey, they had been given neither food nor water.

Another witness, T. K. Usenko, told the commission that “in November 1941, I was on duty at the Most station as a switch-man and saw them drive a train consisting of more than 30 cars up to kilometer 217. As it turned out, there was not one person alive in the cars. No fewer than 1,500 dead people were unloaded from this train; they all were dressed only in underwear. The corpses lay around for about a week near the tracks.”⁴

Even after the barracks were in place, the conditions in the camp were inhumane. The barracks were not heated and the roof tiles rotted, allowing rainwater to leak through. The inmates were malnourished, subjected to torture and humiliation, and forced to perform hard labor. Epidemics were common in the camp because of the unhygienic conditions and lack of proper medical care. In the winter of 1941–1942, during a typhus epidemic, the mortality rate in the camp reached 900 men per day. To combat the epidemic, the camp leadership resorted to mass shootings: if three to four prisoners in one barrack fell ill, the Germans would shoot the entire population of that barrack.⁵

According to German statistics, the camp held 15,595 prisoners in June 1942 (after many thousands had died during the preceding winter or been transported to Germany for forced labor), and there were 886 prisoners doing agricultural labor outside the camp limits.⁶ Typhus epidemics recurred throughout 1942; for example, on August 5, 1942, 1,594 cases of typhus were recorded in the camp.⁷

The camp was well guarded and laid out so that escape was very difficult. Escape attempts were carried out only during [End Page 338] work outside the camp, with only a few of these attempts succeeding. Many prisoners who survived owed their lives to a prisoner named A. Gibradze, a Red Army surgeon. While working in the camp infirmary, he eased the suffering of the wounded, and he also delayed information about those who had died in order to obtain three or four additional days of rations for them to supplement the diets of the weakest prisoners. His operating room was also the meeting place for the resistance movement in the camp, which organized escape attempts. As in other camps for Soviet POWs, new arrivals were screened to separate out Jews and Communists, who were then shot near the camp by the guards or Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst).⁸

The date of the camp’s dissolution is unknown; it was still in operation as of April 14, 1944, but must have been disbanded or evacuated before July 27, 1944, when the Red Army liberated the city. A ChGK investigation in late 1944 established that more than 124,000 prisoners died in Stalag 340; however, casualty figures from the ChGK are often significantly exaggerated and should be viewed accordingly.⁹