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

The Wehrmacht established Stalag XX B on December 16, 1939, on the outskirts of the city of Willenberg, Kreis Marienburg (today Wielbark, Gmina Malbork, Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland) (map 4c). The camp administration was situated in [End Page 495] the wooden barracks on what is today Piastowska Street between building number 3 and the bridge over the Młynówka River. Oberst Bollman held the position of camp commandant.¹

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Stalag XX B at Willenberg. General view of the camp, 1942.

COURTESY OF ICRC.

This was a camp for noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and rank-and-file soldiers of various nationalities. It also served as an Oflag for officers, several of whom had been interned at Stalag XX B, because there was no officers’ camp in Kreis Marienburg.

The camp was enclosed by a triple fence of barbed wire as well as additional impediments. Prisoners were quartered in barracks that contained wooden bunk beds. The other barracks contained clothing stockrooms, the kitchen, and the bathhouse. Stalag XX B was composed of the main camp and several large subcamps as well as many small groups of prisoners who were put to work in the nearby villages doing forced labor on farms and in factories. The average daily prisoner population was approximately 10,000–15,000 at the main camp, 300 at the Focke-Wulf factory in Königsdorf (today Malbork-Królewo), 1,300 at the Gdingen (today Gdynia) shipyard, and approximately 600 at Danzig-Stolzenberg (today Gdańsk-Chełm).

Until June 1940, the camp only held Polish prisoners. From 1942 to 1944, mainly Western European prisoners were interned at the camp. According to an inspection report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), on November 23, 1940, the camp housed 14,000 prisoners, two-thirds of whom were French. About 550 Belgians were also registered at the camp. Four hundred work detachments (Arbeitskommandos) were under the camp command at that point. The inspection report was mainly positive, and any shortcomings were to be remedied when the camp construction was completed. The report emphasized that the food was good and “complied with the prisoners’ tastes as much as possible.” The report stated that there were shortages of clothing, especially underwear.²

On February 28, 1941, the camp housed 14,118 prisoners, including 8,597 French (5 officers), 5,197 British (2 officers), and 316 Belgians. Another inspection by the ICRC on September 19, 1941, showed that there were 18,592 prisoners (British, French, and Belgian) at Marienburg alone. The different figures are probably because some prisoners had been moved to other divisions and work detachments, of which there were 650 at the time. Some of the detachments did not return to the home camp.³ Stalag XX B, therefore, began to take on the nature of a transit camp, which was clearly stressed in the inspection report. The conclusions drawn from the inspection were less satisfactory this time. Both the camp spokesman and the camp doctor stated that “Stalag XX B is a bad camp.” Cited among the contributing factors was a lack of British uniforms for 50 percent of British prisoners and no protective clothing; overwork and maltreatment; poor footwear; inadequate showers and disinfection facilities; and insufficient beds, as well as the imprisonment of NCOs for refusing to work, irregular remittance of soldiers’ pay, and the lack of cultural opportunities.⁴

The prisoners were joined by Serbian and Soviet POWs in 1942, and by Italians beginning in the autumn of 1943. On June 1, 1942, the camp prisoner population was 23,010 (8,238 French, 9,541 British, 288 Belgian, 1,108 Serbian, and 3,835 Soviet). The ICRC inspection report of May 1, 1942, lists a much smaller population of 9,729, of whom 1,576 prisoners were in the camp itself. The number of work details was 704. The inspection conclusions were not entirely optimistic. The report states that “many things have improved since our last visit to the camp, especially in the work details, where cases of prisoner maltreatment are now very rare. They are very grateful to us for that. We have no stipulations as to the distribution of mass packages, food and clothing, for which the camp advocates are entirely responsible. We have no new stipulations in the camp itself.”⁵

The summary stated that “the accommodation of prisoners in the camp leaves a lot to be desired. The barracks are overcrowded, old and poorly ventilated and lit. The sanitary facilities are inadequate, especially latrines and the camp infirmary. There is still a shortage of showers in the camp, causing recurrent lice infestations. There is no prosthetic section in the infirmary and the dental procedures still leave much to be desired. On the other hand the camp advocate’s work is going well.”⁶

A year later, on October 1, 1943, the camp population again increased to 27,529 prisoners, most of them British, French, Soviet, Italian, and Serbian. The largest population was recorded on July 1, 1944, at 32,477, including 10,577 French, 9,324 British, 6,081 Italian, and 5,708 Soviet prisoners. Also interned in the camp were groups of several hundred Belgians and Serbs, and two Poles. The prisoner population dropped to 31,151 at the beginning of 1945.⁷ Evacuation of the camp began on January 20, 1945. The POWs and other prisoners had to walk approximately 700 kilometers (435 miles).

We also have some insight as to conditions at the Marienburg camp from the recollections of British and Belgian [End Page 496] prisoners of war (Lance-Corporal Igor H. S. Lipscombe) and Robert Duchesne (chief camp advocate) and the inspections of the parent camp by the ICRC in Geneva, conducted on November 22–23, 1940, September 19, 1941, and May 1, 1942.

As Lipscombe recalled that “our toilets were no more than long deep ditches with crossed poles at each end and the middle, and our ‘urinals’ were large wooden barrels placed at several spots around the camp. They were situated so that the lights could shine on anyone using them in the night.” The ICRC camp inspection report from the autumn of 1940 stated that:

the wooden barracks are spacious and well furnished: tables and chairs have been arranged to provide a great deal of free space. The beds are three-level bunks. There is electricity everywhere. Heating will be provided via tile stoves. Some barracks have been built in the Polish manner, i.e., the packed-earth floor is about a meter [3 feet] below ground level outside. The roof is gabled and partially covered with turf. This type of construction nevertheless causes no discomfort; the area is very dry and sandy. In any case, those barracks will soon be closed and the occupants will be moved to new, more spacious barracks, which are under construction.⁸

In the autumn of 1941, the prisoner camp consisted of 36 wooden barracks. They were built around a broad athletic field 150 meters long and 80 meters wide (328 by 263 feet). The barracks could house 20–200 people. Some of them were crowded with prisoners. In May 1942, the camp consisted of approximately 38 wooden barracks, including 9 inhabited by French and Belgians. There were also eight earthen huts of a lesser quality than the wooden barracks; the huts housed many French prisoners.⁹

Each Christmas the prisoners were escorted in groups of 100 to the field hospital in Marienburg where their heads were shaved and their clothes were deloused in special ovens. One prisoner recalled that “we took a shower, then put on our still-hot clothing and marched back to the camp. That lasted all day from 6:00 in the morning until 8:00 in the evening. While we were gone from camp, the Germans searched our barracks and our things. When we came back, the food from the Red Cross packages, cigarettes and soap, etc., has disappeared, but of course nobody knew anything about it.” Bathrooms were later installed, consisting of wooden troughs with running water and a row of toilets with seats, and at the very end, the prisoners actually had their own washroom with a delousing facility and shower.

The assignment of prisoners to work detachments started at 6:00 a.m. They were put to work loading and unloading coal at the train station; others were sent to work at various places in northern Germany, and some went to local farms to harvest grain, potatoes, sugar beets, and rutabagas or to work at the sugar factory. The winters would be so severe that they had to use pickaxes to dig out sugar beets.

The camp population was checked twice a day, at 7:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. As one prisoner recalled:

Many times we were kept in the cold because someone was late or the Germans couldn’t account for someone. During the day there was one hot meal at noon, a ladle of rutabaga with potato soup (. . .). We received one loaf of black bread with five tablespoons of jam, some sour whey or slimy fish paste (which looked, smelled and tasted disgusting) to spread on the bread. Our beds stood in two rows on both sides along the entire barrack. Those who slept on the lower level had to fight with the rats that came in through the floorboards. We all suffered from insect bites so much that sometimes we fled our beds at night.¹⁰

The winters were frigid and the summers hot and arid. Before British prisoners arrived at the camp, French prisoners were already there and occupied the best barracks and found the best work in camp at the Stalag headquarters in Marienburg. At the end of 1943, approximately 200 Serbs were put in the camp and brought in typhoid fever. Several of them died. General delousing was begun in the barracks; the prisoners’ heads were shaved and their clothes were disinfected. A group of 100 Italians arrived at camp after the Serbs.

The evacuation of the main camp from Willenberg was conducted in the evening of January 20, 1945. A column made up of approximately 150 Belgians, French, British, Serbs, Italians, and Soviets was escorted by armed guards headed by the camp commandant himself. The column crossed the Nogat River, then the Vistula. The prisoners spent the first night on the other side of the Vistula River in a meadow at 19 degrees below 0 Celsius (−2° Fahrenheit). They spent the successive nights in barns. Duchesne recalled:

At the beginning, it was the few “Lebensgabens” and especially “Nescafes” that we took along with us that kept us alive. Later, with daily stages of 30 to 35 kilometers [18.6 to 21.8 miles], we had to make do with the official rations of a moldy loaf of bread every 10 days. Fortunately, the prisoners managed to cope: we milked cows and took eggs from under hens (to the morning screams of farmers), which was a valuable addition to our diet. There were also oats and rye, which was “ground” by turning the huge wheel of a machine in the barn all night. One day a lame horse was slaughtered and quartered, and its stringy meat was cut into pieces and boiled in water. The most beautiful day was when we encountered a column of the International Red Cross which has [End Page 497] been searching for us and distributed American packages to everyone. That day we were the richest people on earth.¹¹

Apart from a modest meal from the escorts, who gave them steamed potatoes every day, the prisoners got additional food at the farms they passed. After they had walked across almost all of northern Germany over six or seven weeks, the group reached the vicinity of Hamburg. The evacuation continued by railroad, and, on March 19, 1945, the prisoners reached Husum, a port on the North Sea in Schleswig-Holstein. From Husum they were transported to the camp in Schwerin-Nord near the Danish border. The Danish and Norwegian Red Cross took over the provisioning of the prisoners, along with their chief, advocate for Stalag I A, who supplied them with packages of rice.

The capitulation of May 8 occurred when the prisoners were in Schwerin-Nord. However, they only regained freedom on May 10, because until then they were guarded by armed Germans. The Belgians were grouped together in Sudderstappel, a North Sea port. They were then transported by trucks to Lüneburg and repatriated to Belgium on June 3, 1945.