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

The Wehrmacht established Stalag 349 on April 10, 1941, in Defense District (Wehrkreis) IX. From September 1941 until October 1943, the camp was located in Uman’ (map 9e), in the USSR.¹ Beginning on August 16, 1941, the camp was subordinate to the Commander of Prisoners of War (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen) in the Generalgouvernement of Poland. As of August 22, 1941, the camp was temporarily under the authority of the Commander of Prisoners of War with the Commander of the Army Group South Rear Area (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen beim Befehlshaber des Heeresgebiets Süd).² Effective on October 20, 1941, the camp was subordinate to the Commander of Prisoners of War with the Armed Forces Commander Ukraine (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen beim Wehrmachtbefehlshaber Ukraine).³ On March 19, 1943, the camp was once again subordinate to the Commander of Prisoners of War with the Commander of the Army Group South Rear Area.⁴ Stalag 349 received field post number (Feldpostnummer) 47 316 between July 30, 1941, and February 28, 1942. The number was struck on January 20, 1944.

The camp commandant was Major der Reserve Hans Koch (1880–1948). The counterintelligence (Abwehr) officer was Hauptmann der Reserve Otto Dyroff. The camp was guarded (as of November 1942) by the 1st Company of the 783rd Reserve Battalion (Landesschützenbataillon).⁵

Stalag 349 held Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). The camp population varied from a minimum of 7,187 prisoners in February 1942 to a maximum of 16,184 in October 1942.⁶ The camp occupied the site of a poultry farm. Barbed wire surrounded the campgrounds, and metal mesh divided the interior into sections, although it was possible to move freely between the sections. Guard towers with machine guns, flanked by antitank weapons and mortars, were located around the perimeter of the farm. The camp also included a clay pit located near the farm, part of a brickyard, which had open-sided sheds for drying the bricks. The prisoners jumped into the pit in search of water.⁷ Over the course of six years, clay had been extracted from the pit to make bricks and tiles. By the summer of 1941, the area of this pit was more than 10 hectares (24.7 acres). The depth of the pit was 6–15 meters (about 20–50 feet). The Germans surrounded the pit with two rows of barbed wire and built 11 watchtowers. The deepest spot in the pit was also surrounded with barbed wire; Communists and Jews were held in this area.⁸ The local residents’ name for the camp, the “Uman’ pit,” was derived from this area.

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Stalag 349 at Uman’. A German guard sitting on the end of a 20mm gun platform watches over 50,000 Soviet POWs, August 1941.

USHMM, COURTESY OF NARA, WS #91098.

The conditions in the camp were similar to those in other camps for Soviet POWs. Overcrowding, malnutrition, disease, and deliberate abuse by the guards led to a high mortality rate. For example, in November and December 1941, 948 of the 2,317 men in Infirmary (Revier) No. 3 died.⁹ Former Oberleutnant Erwin Bingel, commander of the 2nd Company of the 783rd Reserve Battalion, gave the following testimony regarding the conditions in Stalag 349 on December 27, 1945, during a preliminary Soviet investigation of German war crimes in the camp:

In one of my reports I made a statement concerning the regime inside the prisoner-of-war camp at Uman…. This camp was guarded by a company of our subsection of the 783rd Battalion, and I was therefore familiar with everything which occurred in the camp. It was the task of this battalion to guard the prisoners of war and to control the highways and railroads…. This camp was calculated to hold, under normal conditions, from 6,000 to 7,000 men; at that time, however, it housed 74,000 men…. The regime in that camp was definitely peculiar. The existing conditions gave one the impression that the camp commander, Captain Becker, was quite unable [End Page 350] to handle and feed so large a number of men. There were two kitchens in the camp, although they could hardly be called kitchens. Iron barrels had been placed on stone and concrete floors, and the food for the prisoners was prepared in these barrels. But the kitchens, even if operating for 24 hours on end, could only prepare food for approximately 2,000 people daily. The usual diet for the prisoner was very insufficient. The daily ration for six men consisted of one loaf of bread which, again, could scarcely be described as bread. Disturbances frequently arose during the distribution of the hot food, for the prisoners—and there were 70,000 of them in the camp—struggled to get at the victuals. In cases like these the guards resorted to clubs—a usual procedure in the camp, I obtained the general impression that in all the camps the club was inevitably the foundation of all things.¹⁰

On February 26, 1946, at the International Military Tribunal in Nürnberg, former prisoner Eugene Kivelisha corroborated Bingel’s statements:

There were about 15,000 to 20,000 wounded in Uman Camp where I found myself on the second day after my arrival in Tarnovka. They were all lying in the open, dressed in their summer uniforms, and a great many of them were incapable of moving. Food and water were supplied to them in the same way as to the other captives in the camp. There they lay, without any medical attention, their dust-covered dressings soaked in blood, often in pus. Dressings, surgical instruments, equipment for an operating theater just did not exist in the camp at Uman’…. Almost all the captives in the camp were kept in the open air. The food was extremely bad. In the grounds of the Uman’ Camp, where I spent 8 days, twice a day a few fires would be lit out of doors and a thin pea soup was cooked in vats over these fires. There was no special routine for distributing food to the prisoners of war, and the boiled soup would then be set down amongst the whole mass of people. No control whatsoever was exercised over the distribution. The starving prisoners rushed up in the hope of obtaining even a minute portion of this thin, unsalted soup, cooked without fat and served without bread. Disorder and crowding arose. The German guards, all armed with clubs as well as with rifles and automatic guns, beat up all the prisoners of war within range of their blows for the purpose of maintaining order. The Germans would often intentionally set down a small barrel of soup among a great number of people, and once again, to restore order, they would beat up the absolutely innocent people with laughter, oaths, insults, and threats.¹¹

As in other camps, the prisoners were screened to separate out Jews and Communists, who were then shot by the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) or camp guards. For example, on October 8, 1941, the 304th Police Battalion, commanded by Police Major Kurt Deckert, shot 600 Jewish prisoners from the camp, along with 5,400 Jewish civilians from Uman’.¹² The total number of prisoners who died in the camp is unknown. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), more than 15,000 prisoners of war died in Stalag 349; however, casualty figures from the ChGK are often significantly exaggerated and should be viewed accordingly. Stalag 349 was dissolved on October 4, 1943.