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

This special camp (Sonderlager) existed from February 1942 until March 1943. The camp was deployed near the Wuhlheide railroad station, a little more than 10 kilometers (6 miles) southeast of the center of Berlin (map 4b). At the end of February 1943, the Germans disbanded the camp, and all the camp personnel were transferred to the newly created Sonderlager Dabendorf.

Administratively, the camp was subordinate to the commander of Defense District (Wehrkreis) III, but, in connection with its own special purpose, it was subordinate to the Armed Forces High Command, Armed Forces Propaganda Branch (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Abteilung Wehrmacht Propaganda), Section IV, which was in charge of foreign propaganda.

The camp held Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), former Red Army officers, whom the Germans specially selected in POW camps as potential collaborators. In the camp, the Germans evaluated the prisoners for training and use as propagandists in POW camps and for units of the Russian Army of Liberation and the Eastern Battalion (Ostbataillone) of the Wehrmacht. Prisoners selected by the Germans for testing and training were regarded as POWs, as before, were kept behind barbed wire, were guarded by German sentries, and received POW rations, albeit in more generous quantities than most of their compatriots in other camps. Besides the German guards, there was a Russian order guard within the camp, subordinate to the Russian commandant, former colonel G. I. Antonov. In the camp, the administration subjected the prisoners to systematic and goal-oriented ideological sessions in the Nazi spirit, for the purpose of turning the prisoners into determined opponents of the Bolshevist regime. The prisoners also were used to perform various types of labor inside and outside the camp.¹

The camp commandant was former Rittmeister Weissbeck of the army of Austria-Hungary, and the head of training was Sonderführer Baron von der Ropp. The instructors were mainly former generals and officers of the Red Army.

Among the prisoners in the camp was the former chief of staff of the Thirty-Second Army, Colonel Nikolai Bushmanov, who had been captured as early as October 1941. Bushmanov was used as an instructor, but he also created an underground anti-Nazi organization in the camp. By the summer of 1943, when Bushmanov was already in the Sonderlager Dabendorf, this organization turned into an international underground organization by the name of the “Berlin Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks),” which did active work all over Germany. The organization, through Soviet POWs and forced laborers (Ostarbeiter), engaged in sabotage and diversion in German factories.²