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

The Wehrmacht established Stalag III C (map 4b) on June 12, 1940, in Alt-Drewitz (today Drzewice, Poland), in Defense District (Wehrkreis) III.¹ Apparently, the Germans used Polish prisoners of war (POWs) to construct the camp, but it is unclear whether they were part of a work detail (Arbeitskommando) or an established camp. The camp was subordinate to the Commander of Prisoners of War in Defense District III (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen im Wehrkreis III).

Stalag III C held Polish, French, Serbian (as of May 1941), Soviet (as of September 1941), Italian, British, American (as of September 1944), and Belgian prisoners. The maximum number of prisoners was close to 40,000.² In February 1941, the camp held 19,393 French prisoners, and on July 1, 1941, there were 21,295 prisoners (18,808 French, 2,467 Serbs, and 20 Poles). Beginning in 1942, the number of Serbian prisoners decreased: on June 1, 1942, there were 1,253 Serbs; on October 1, 1943, there were 849; and on October 1, 1944, there were 753. There were 5,923 Soviet prisoners in the camp on April 1, 1942, and 13,455 on October 1, 1942. Starting in the fall of 1943, the camp also held Italian military internees (14,578 on October 1, 1943). On October 1, 1944, the camp had a prisoner population of 31,303: 16,013 French, 1,001 British, 8 Belgians, 1 Pole, 753 Serbs, 10,958 Soviets, 1,449

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Stalag III C at Alt-Drewitz. Camp kitchen, October 1940.

COURTESY OF ICRC.

Italians, and 1,120 Americans.³ On December 1, 1944, the camp contained 38,017 prisoners: 2,036 Americans, 631 Belgians, 1,416 British, 17,568 French, 1,046 Italians, 2 Poles, 1,591 Serbs, and 13,727 Soviets. The majority of the prisoners were in labor detachments.

The Western Allied prisoners were treated decently and the conditions in their camp were generally in keeping with the main provisions of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (1929). However, in late 1944 and early 1945, their situation deteriorated rapidly, as Germany’s fortunes sank. The treatment of Soviet POWs, by contrast, was inhumane from the outset. A former Soviet prisoner, Il’ia Erenburg, recalled:

In December 1941 I was taken to Germany to the town of Küstrin, to Camp III C, where they hung badge number 15624 on my chest and sent me to the so-called Lazarett [sick quarters], located inside the camp and fenced off from the other blocks with two rows of barbed wire. In the Lazarett there were eight barracks: two barracks for servicing the infirmary and six for housing the patients, each one holding 250 men. They put me in Barracks C, where men with infectious diseases and wounded men were placed together. No medical aid was provided. They experimented on us. They injected preparations of some kind into the muscle on the left side of the chest and into the vein. Every week we gave two or three test tubes of blood apiece, and once a week they drew a cup of blood from us. During my time [End Page 408] in the Lazarett, I endured typhoid fever and typhus. Cold (closing the windows was forbidden, and every day the floor got damp) and hunger (in the morning they gave us acorn coffee, and for dinner “soup” consisting of unwashed rutabagas in water) reigned in the Lazarett. The bread ration was one tinned loaf per 12 persons per day. At night, two German guards behaved with brutality. For farfetched infractions, they beat sick prisoners whom they singled out for punishment, and in the morning the orderlies carried out the dead bodies. With the objective of further increasing the already-high mortality rate in the Lazarett, they equipped a special room where “prisoners being punished” who were still alive were frozen to death. The mortality rate in the Lazarett was very high. Finally, in March 1942 the discharge of invalids who had “convalesced,” or more simply put, who had survived, was begun. On our left arm they tattooed a number corresponding to the chest badge, and we joined the camp’s Arbeitskommandos. I was assigned to work in the bathhouse. The bathhouse served as a decontamination station for newly arriving prisoners, and it always handled both the prisoners who constantly lived in the camp and the labor details that were attached to the camp, made up of prisoners who worked in factories and plants and on farms. I was supposed to operate the shower room, with disinfection/decontamination following. The shower room and the room for disinfection treatment were in a small building, in which for 16 to 18 hours a day, sometimes even 24 hours a day, it was necessary to breathe the heavy steam that came from the filthy bodies and acrid disinfectant solutions. In addition, I, like the other bathhouse workers, was forbidden to leave my workplace for the duration of the whole shift, and even forbidden to enter into conversation with prisoners who did not work in the bathhouse. And thus I worked until September 1944. In September 1944 they arrested me and my fellow worker for having entered into an unlawful conversation with prisoners who had come from the punishment barracks, and we were sent to a rock quarry that was located near Berlin, in the village of Rüdersdorf. Few were able to withstand this punishment and survive. With a pick, I had to break off boulders from the cliff, reduce them to fragments, load them onto a trolley with a capacity of 0.75 cubic meters (26.5 cubic feet), and take the trolley to the lift. Our quota was 35 trolleys per two men per shift. For failure to meet the quota, we were punished, beaten with canes. By the end of November 1944, reduced to the point of complete exhaustion, I ought to have died. But two men saved me. A Russian POW, Dr. Georgii Fedorovich Siniakov, who had started working in the infirmary, and a German interpreter, Corporal Helmut Tschacher. Thanks to them, I was taken back to the camp and put in a separate cubicle for TB patients, which the German personnel tried to avoid. All this became possible because the situation at the front lines had changed by the end of 1944, and some leniency was shown to us prisoners. For example, the first Russian doctors, drawn from among the prisoners, made an appearance, and the Germans started increasing the bread ration to one tinned loaf per six men per day, and other things. In March 1945 I escaped and joined the forward units of the Soviet Army.⁴

As a result of the inhumane conditions, there was a high mortality rate among the Soviet POWs. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), around 12,000 Soviet prisoners perished; however, casualty figures from the ChGK are often significantly exaggerated and should be viewed accordingly.⁵ In 1941 and 1942, a Gestapo team from Frankfurt an der Oder regularly conducted screenings of the Soviet prisoners to separate out “undesirables,” such as Communists and Jews, who were then sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were usually executed upon arrival.⁶ For example, on October 8, 1941, 25 prisoners from the camp were taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and executed.⁷

On March 12, 1945, the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Prior to the arrival of Soviet troops, the Germans tried to evacuate the prisoners to the west. At this time, several dozen American prisoners were killed by Soviet soldiers who did not realize that they were POWs, rather than enemy combatants.⁸