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

The Wehrmacht established Stalag VI D (map 4a) on September 30, 1939, in Dortmund, in Defense District (Wehrkreis) VI.¹ The camp was subordinate to the Commander of Prisoners of War in Defense District VI (Kommandeur der Kriegsgefangenen im Wehrkreis VI).

The five camp commandants of Stalag VI D were officers from World War I. Their average age was 53. They were Oberstleutnant Kurt Vilmar (b. 1882), from September 29, 1939, to April 14, 1940; Oberst Wilhelm Eck (b. 1870), from April 15, 1940, to June 21, 1942; Oberstleutnant Otto Rotenberg (b. 1883), from June 22, 1942, to March 31, 1943; Oberst Erich Steiniger (b. 1889), from April 1, 1943, to September 24, 1944; and Oberst Ernst Schmidt-Vogelsang (b. 1894) from November 15, 1944, to the end of March 1945.² The prisoners were guarded by personnel from Reserve Battalion (Landesschützenbataillon) 468. It was composed of older men and men who were only partially fit for military service, and it was subordinate to the 406th Division z.b.V. from the summer of 1940.³ In January 1940, 350 members of the battalion were quartered in the Catholic Church School and 250 more were quartered in the Vereinshaus Hospice in the city center of Dortmund.

The first prisoners in Stalag VI D were Polish prisoners of war (POWs) whom the Germans captured in the campaign in Poland in September 1939. In 1940, French, Belgian, and British prisoners arrived at the camp. In April 1941, Serbs joined the population. In August 1941, the first Soviet prisoners arrived. Finally, in the fall of 1943, Italian military prisoners were brought to the camp. On October 1, 1944, there were 62,125 POWs in the camp, including 24,162 French, 664 Belgians, 473 Poles, 1,427 Serbs, 30,926 Soviets, and 4,473 Italians.⁴ The maximum prisoner population in the camp was 77,700.⁵

From September 1939 to August 1941, Stalag VI D was located in the largest multipurpose hall in the Ruhr area, the Westfalenhalle. The interior room covered an area of almost 10,000 square meters (108,000 square feet). In the first two years of the war, the number of prisoners quartered in the hall varied from about 3,000 to 5,000. In June 1940, the army began to expand Stalag VI D into the neighboring property of the former Volkspark. Gradually, wooden barracks were constructed there, in which a core workforce of about 10,000 prisoners lived. Eventually, the barracks covered an area of about 17 hectares (42 acres).

For most of the prisoners, Stalag VI D was essentially a transit camp. The State Labor Office of Westfalen (Landesarbeitsamt Westfalen), located in Dortmund, was responsible for their distribution to various employers. In Dortmund alone, there were approximately 300 labor details (Arbeitskommandos) that Stalag VI D supervised. Almost every industrial concern, colliery, private business, farm, and craftsman, as well as the city and regional governments, employed POW forced laborers from Stalag VI D. The largest employers of prisoners from Stalag VI D built their own camps near their plants, in which their laborers lived. These included the Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks AG, Hoesch AG, and Dortmund-Hörder Hüttenverein in Dortmund. Other employers of POWs included the Zollern Colliery, Minister [End Page 431] Achenbach, Hansa/Westhausen, Minister Stein, and Fürst Hardenberg. The city of Dortmund used POW labor to clean up bombing debris after Allied air raids from September 1944 to March 1945.⁶ The prisoners who were not immediately sent to a labor detail made up the permanent camp population. They were mainly enlisted men, with only a few officers among them. They worked on maintaining the infrastructure of the camp; as doctors, nurses, or barbers; in the German soldiers’ canteen; or in the prisoners’ kitchen.

The treatment of the Western prisoners by the German administrators and guards was proper, and conditions for these prisoners were generally satisfactory and in keeping with the provisions of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (1929). However, the treatment of the Soviet prisoners was inhumane and violated the standards established by the Geneva Convention. They faced overcrowding, malnutrition, and disease, which led to a high mortality rate. The Germans conducted selections of the newly arrived Soviet prisoners to separate out “undesirables” (such as Jews and political commissars) who were sent to the nearest concentration camp for execution.⁷ Exact figures for the number of deaths in Stalag VI D are not available. It is assumed that more than 6,000 prisoners died as a result of abuse, hunger, sickness, exhaustion, and Allied bombings. Reports of POW killings are scarce. However, some isolated incidents of shootings of Soviet prisoners (in uncertain circumstances) are known.⁸

The French prisoners carried out daily gymnastic exercises to maintain physical fitness and regularly played football. For cultural activities, the prisoners had a library, an orchestra, and a theater group.⁹ There were no labor details as such in the camp itself. The prisoners were strictly forbidden from having social contacts with German civilians, although they were allowed relative freedom of movement within the camp.¹⁰ Illegal contacts occurred, though, such as under-the-table exchanges of goods between prisoners and civilians.¹¹

Beginning in the winter of 1943, there were illegal resistance groups among the prisoners. The resistance groups united prisoners of various nationalities, namely French, Serbian, Belgian, Soviet, and Italian; even some Germans were persuaded to support the resistance. Their activities included, among others, the distribution of leaflets. The purposes of these leaflets included providing information about the war on the eastern front, counteracting German propaganda, calling for acts of sabotage in industrial concerns, and establishing ground rules for conducting illegal activities. The infirmary of Stalag VI D functioned as the center from which the resistance groups in the various labor details could be organized and controlled.¹² A testimony to the organized labor resistance is the paper “Friends on the Ruhr and Rhine,” which was published by the Soviet prisoners and distributed by German resistance groups.¹³ This example also demonstrates that there were solidarity actions between the prisoners and civilians.

In view of the extremely difficult living conditions experienced by the Soviet prisoners, in particular, as well as the Italian military prisoners, it is unsurprising that many prisoners attempted to flee from Stalag VI D. However, very few of these attempts were successful; most of the escapees were thwarted or killed.¹⁴ One hundred and six prisoners attempted to flee from the main camp at Stalag VI D in February 1942; in March 1942, this number climbed to 383.¹⁵ Since the number of prisoners in the main camp at this time was only 1,632, the number of prisoners who attempted to escape increased from 6.5 percent to 23.5 percent; that is, almost every fourth prisoner attempted to escape.¹⁶

Many of the flights from the labor details occurred with the support of civilian forced laborers and also with the help of German laborers. At times, civilian laborers provided the POWs with tickets (sometimes traded for chocolate or cigarettes) or allowed them to use their passports, or even provided them with money. In addition, Germans traded primarily with French prisoners for chocolate, cigarettes, and preserves from the prisoners’ food parcels, which were provided by the International Red Cross. Through “this black market of goods in short supply,” the prisoners supported their escapes, along with the cooperation of shopkeepers who ignored the prohibition for POWs to possess German money.¹⁷ One should note that Soviet POWs generally did not have these options, however.

Among the French prisoners in Stalag VI D was the well-known French writer Robert Merle, who went on to win the highest French literary honor, the Prix Goncourt, in 1949. After the German invasion of France in May 1940, he was brought to Dortmund and forced to work in a factory. With the support of laborers who opposed the Nazi regime, he was able to learn German. However, his escape attempt failed, and he spent three years in German captivity.¹⁸

On the night of May 22–23, 1944, the Westfalenhalle—which, since January 1943, was once again used as an event hall—was bombed, and the neighboring barracks were severely damaged. Another bombing on February 20–21, 1945, completely destroyed the camp. Some of the prisoners remained, totally in shock as a result of the bombardment, while others used the chaotic situation as an opportunity to escape; an unknown number of prisoners were killed. On April 3, 1945, the prisoners from Stalag VI D were transferred to Stalag VI A in Hemer, where tents had been erected for them after the destruction of the main camp; however, the camp command personnel remained at Dortmund.¹⁹ The prisoners were liberated shortly after their arrival at Stalag VI A, on April 14, 1945.

The first criminal proceedings connected with Stalag VI D, regarding the Aussonderung (“weeding out”) of Soviet POWs of Jewish ancestry and other so-called undesirables by the Gestapo office in Münster, were undertaken by the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg in 1965 and 1966. The witnesses in this case stated that there had been no Aussonderungen in Stalag VI D.²⁰ In January 1992, [End Page 432] two former Wehrmacht soldiers were prosecuted for the murder of prisoners in March 1945. Since there was no information about the accused available in Ludwigsburg, the matter was passed on to the Central Office of the State of Nordrhein-Westfalen for the Processing of Criminal Proceedings for National Socialist Mass Crimes at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Dortmund. It opened an investigation of a captain and a sergeant in the camp for murder or aiding and abetting murder, because they had built neither air-raid shelters nor ditches for the prisoners. In addition, they had forbidden the prisoners to leave the barracks during the air raids, causing the deaths of about 245 men. The investigation was closed in November 1992 because the perpetrators could not be found.²¹