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

This special camp¹ (Sonderlager) existed from early 1942 until the end of 1944. The camp was deployed in a forest roughly 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) from the town of Wustrau (about 51.5 kilometers [32 miles] northwest of Berlin) (map 4b). In terms of administration, the camp was subordinate to the commander of Defense District (Wehrkreis) III, but it had a special relationship with the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ostministerium).

The prisoners in the camp were Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) whom the Germans had specially selected in POW camps as potential collaborators. In the camp, the administration evaluated the prisoners’ suitability for training as propagandists and various kinds of administrative personnel in organizations created by the Ostministerium in occupied Soviet territory and in Germany itself. The prisoners the Germans chose for testing were people who on the whole were educated—who had university degrees or some university education—and who were senior officers in the Red Army. The prisoners in the camp were mainly natives of the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, and they were divided up into blocks on the basis of national affiliation. Each block consisted of several groups, with 15–20 prisoners in each group. In all, there were as many as 500 prisoners in the camp at a time.

The evaluation, as a rule, took two to six months. The testing took place in the course of lessons, which were held twice a week for four hours per day. During the lessons, the prisoners had to lead discussions and ask questions on the topic under study for the purpose of revealing, in this way, individuals who had a negative attitude toward Nazi Germany. The prisoners also were divided up according to their progress, into Groups А and В. The more capable prisoners were placed in the former group, while those who were insufficiently reliable and were not making progress were put into the latter group.

Free time, when no lessons were under way, was devoted to independent studies, excursions, sports, and work around the camp.² The prisoners were under guard and did not have the right to go outside the confines of the camp grounds without a pass.

A participant in the selection committee, V. D. Poremskii, recalls the following regarding the selection procedure: “The selection was based on several categories—from 0 to 5. People with an intellectual level below 3 were of no interest. On the whole, we selected people with scores from 3 to 4.5. Someone who scored 5, was talented, and was capable of doing a great many things but was not selected either. It was dangerous. Del’vig [the head of the selection committee] characterized such people in this way: ‘cunning, clever, and may be an agent.’ We didn’t take a risk with such people, we moved them to the 0 category on our lists.” The POWs who passed the test were taken to the training camp site at Wustrau (Ausbildungslager, Wustrau), which was located 1 kilometer from Sonderlager Wustrau. In the training camp, people who had passed the test no longer had POW status. “They were given civilian clothes and lived relatively freely. After some time they were allowed to travel freely to Berlin, go to restaurants, see the city, and the like; that is, we created conditions that would allow an individual to feel that he was a free, equal inhabitant, as the Nazis said, of the future territory to be ruled by Adolf Hitler. And we retrained them along those very lines.”³