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

The Wehrmacht established Stalag II B (map 4b) on September 15, 1939, in Hammerstein (today Czarne, Poland).¹ The camp was subordinated to the Commander of Prisoners of War in Defense District II (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen im Wehrkreis II).

The camp commandants were, in turn, Oberstleutnant von Bernuth and Oberst von Keppler. The Camp Officer [End Page 393] (Lageroffizier) was Hauptmann Springer, the counterintelligence (Abwehr) officer was Hauptmann Giesel, and the camp doctor was Hauptmann Wagner.

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Stalag II B at Hammerstein. Camp entrance, November 1942.

COURTESY OF ICRC.

The camp deployed on the grounds of a former military firing range and was divided into two parts: North Camp (Nordlager) and East Camp (Ostlager). North Camp held Polish, French, Belgian, Serbian, and American prisoners, while East Camp held Soviet and Italian prisoners. From October 1939 until the summer of 1940, the camp held Polish prisoners exclusively. Because there were no barracks as yet, they lived in tents, even in the winter of 1939–1940. The majority of those prisoners worked inside the camp, where they constructed barracks; some of the prisoners were located in work details (Arbeitskommandos) outside the boundaries of the camp.

By mid-1940, the Germans had moved most of the Polish prisoners to other camps (on December 31, 1940, 1,691 Polish prisoners remained) and, starting in May–June 1940, new prisoners arrived: French and Belgians first, followed by Serbs in April 1941. Among the French prisoners from the colonial forces (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Sudan, Madagascar, and Indochina), there was a high mortality rate, caused by the lack of warm clothing and by malnutrition. In November 1941, Stalag II B took over the former site of Stalag 315 (II F), about 1.5 kilometer (0.9 miles) away, as Ostlager. As of August 1943, the camp also held American prisoners, and, starting in September 1943, Italian prisoners as well.²

The table below lists the number of prisoners in the camp on the given dates and their distribution by nationality.³

The Polish prisoners, who were among the first to arrive in the camp, endured harsh conditions, including extremely sparse quarters and poor sanitary conditions. As former prisoner Jan Kwiatkowski noted: “The entire winter [1939–1940], we slept on straw, which became very muddy due to condensation. The rations were also bad and insufficient. These bad conditions caused many prisoners to become infected with dysentery, which, for many, ended in death.”⁴ Many of the Polish prisoners were transferred to the labor details, where conditions were little better; the Germans attempted to coerce them to “voluntarily” surrender their status as prisoners of war (POWs) and become civilian laborers, which would have allowed the Germans to ignore the provisions of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (1929). In November 1940, Jewish-Polish POWs from Stalag II B were sent to a forced labor camp for Jews at Biała Podlaska, where they were treated horribly and many died from hunger and disease. The survivors remained at Biała Podlaska until the camp in which they lived was closed on May 15, 1941; they were subsequently transferred to the Końskowola forced labor camp.

The treatment of the Western Allied prisoners was within the bounds of the Geneva Conventions; however, they too had to deal with harsh living conditions, albeit better than those experienced by the Polish POWs in 1939–1940. The men lived in small, damp, overcrowded rooms that left no room for storage or seating. They slept in triple bunk beds on mattresses filled with straw or wood shavings. International observers regarded these conditions as “primitive” and “dirty.”⁵ The barracks had electric lights and were heated; however, the electric current was often weak, and the heating was generally insufficient, due to inadequate supplies of coal for the barrack stoves. Thus, the barracks were often “extremely cold,” and many men suffered from frostbite in the winter.⁶

[End Page 394] Food in the camp generally gave the men enough nutrition to survive, but little more. American private first class Nicklas Betters, who was at Stalag II B in October and November 1943, reported that the daily ration was a fifth of a loaf of bread, a small amount of soup, and a small amount of margarine, with two ounces of meat twice a week and a small amount of sugar once a week.⁷ Reports from American prisoners repatriated to the United States in May 1944 indicated that rations remained similar in early 1944. They were given hot water for ersatz coffee or tea in the morning and a barley and turnip soup with black bread for lunch and dinner; they received a small piece of sausage and some margarine three times a week.⁸

Private Frank R. Trocino, who was an inmate at Hammer-stein from May through November 1944, stated that the food he was given was insufficient, consisting of ersatz coffee in the morning, a soup made with carrots or potatoes, a small portion of bread, and margarine or meat every three to four days.⁹ By the latter stages of the war, the American medical officers in the prison believed that the men were being fed less than 500 calories a day.¹⁰ The prisoners depended upon the parcels provided to them by the Red Cross for supplemental nutrition. Many men became weak and sick due to hunger, and some lost a considerable amount of weight.

Illnesses among the prisoners were treated at the camp hospital. This facility had sufficient beds and excellent heating and was highly regarded by international observers until late in the war.¹¹ By the end of the war, however, the sanitary conditions in the camp had deteriorated to the point where the medical facilities were considered by the American observers to be “totally inadequate.”¹² This situation was in no small part due to the arrival of 650 chronically ill men from Stalag III B and Stalag VI A, which placed enormous stress on the hospital resources.

Within the camp, precautionary health measures were standard. While typhus was allowed to ravage Soviet POWs in the winter of 1941–1942, an outbreak in the American camp in February 1944 led to swift action. Sixty American POWs were placed in a quarantine zone to prevent the spread of an epidemic.¹³ The men were able to take a hot shower once a week. However, the open pit latrines in the camp were unsanitary. Furthermore, despite the Germans’ efforts to delouse the prisoners and their living quarters, lice and fleas remained in the barracks.

Western and Polish POWs were allowed to publish their own handwritten newspapers. For example, the Polish prisoners published a daily paper, Gazeta Ilustrowana, the Belgian prisoners had a monthly, L’Hirondelle, and the Americans had The Yanks and POW—Prisoner of War. A later edition of the American prisoner paper was called Barbs and Gripes (a play on the US soldiers’ paper, Stars and Stripes). They also received the English-language German propaganda newspaper for POWs, Okay, which was largely ignored. In 1944, a French-language nightly radio news program was broadcast in the camp.

Western, Polish, and Serbian prisoners also had access to other intellectual and recreational activities. There were libraries for each nationality with varying numbers of books in their respective languages; a German Red Cross representative noted in late May 1943 that the Belgians and French had significantly more books than did the Serbs.¹⁴ All prisoners also had access to sporting goods (provided by the YMCA) and facilities; common activities included football and table tennis. Most prisoners also had access to religious services. Early in their time in the camp, the Serbian prisoners had no priest who could conduct Orthodox mass for them and were thus without spiritual support.¹⁵ However, by 1943, priests of all nationalities were present in the camp, and Serbian Orthodox and French and Belgian Catholic and Protestant services were held in the camp every Sunday.

Most able-bodied prisoners were put to work in the work details. As of December 1944, there were 233 work commandos for American prisoners alone.¹⁶ Conditions in the work details varied greatly. In some cases, the men were given decent housing and good food; in others, they lived in pigsties and were fed very poorly. For example, American private Olin R. Sanders reported that in Kommando 1560 in Stolp, the prisoners were quartered in small houses with 11 men in one room; they only had one small washbasin.¹⁷ Private O. T. Morgan lived in a farm building while working at Kommando 1562 in Budow.¹⁸ William D. Zartman experienced even worse living conditions in his commando on a farm near Raffenburg, where the men lived in a cow barn and slept on piles of straw on the barn floor.¹⁹

Food supplies in the commandos were often no better than in the main camp. Zartman noted that he and the other prisoners in his commando did not receive food between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.; sometimes, they were not fed until as late as 10:00 p.m.²⁰ However, in some cases, the food provided represented a slight improvement over the normal rations. Private Sanders stated that he received ersatz coffee in the morning, potato soup and a quarter of a loaf of bread at lunch, and boiled potatoes in the evening with a quart of skim milk.²¹

Many men in the work details reported being abused by the Germans supervising them. Private Morgan, for example, was beaten with a rifle butt by Obergefreiter Herman Geise; Morgan believed that he had been beaten for no reason, and reported that Geise frequently abused his fellow POWs.²² Private Sanders reported that a German guard shot an American private and beat another with his rifle.²³ Even when they were not being deliberately abused, the men working in the commandos were nonetheless subjected to difficult working conditions. Zartman said that the men in his commando performed backbreaking agricultural labor for 14 hours a day, after walking between 5 and 6 kilometers (3.1–3.7 miles) from their quarters to their work site.²⁴

The treatment of the Soviet POWs, as in other camps, was inhumane. Not until late November and early December 1941 were the last of them resettled from dugouts into [End Page 395] unheated barracks with no windows or flooring. The prisoners were fed soup made from rutabagas and were given one tinned loaf of bread to share among 10 persons. Basic sanitary conditions were absent. Prisoners also lacked medical aid. All this led to a typhus epidemic, which lasted from November 1941 until March 1942. In this period, thousands of Soviet prisoners died in Ostlager. In the winter of 1941–1942, on some days as many as 200 prisoners died.

Only when the epidemic ceased to be an internal matter in Ostlager (when cases of typhus began to occur among the German personnel and the French and Belgian prisoners who worked at disinfection sites for Soviet prisoners) did the camp administration involve Polish doctors in the struggle against typhus. In April 1942, the camp administration finally wiped out the epidemic by shooting the remaining patients. The prisoners who survived the epidemic were put into the “sick battalion,” from which very few returned.

Surviving prisoners and newly arrived prisoners were used for slave labor in the numerous work details on farms, in the forestry industry, on the railroad, and in construction of the highway from Stettin to Danzig. In these detachments, many prisoners also died of malnutrition and inhumane treatment. In total, between 1941 and 1945, around 64,000 Soviet POWs are said to have perished in the camp.²⁵ On January 29, 1945, the prisoners in Stalag II B were evacuated to the west due to the approach of the Red Army, which liberated the camp on February 26, 1945.