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

The Wehrmacht established FStGA 17 on March 20, 1943, in Armed Forces Prison (Wehrmachtgefängnis, WG) Anklam through the commander of Defense District (Wehrkreis) II.¹ The Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH) deployed the unit to the eastern front with Army Group South (Heeresgruppe Süd). Convicts from the front and rear areas of Army Group South were transferred to FStGA 17; if they could not be sent directly to the unit, they were transferred primarily via Wartime Armed Forces Prison (Kriegswehrmachtgefängnis, KWG) Dubno and its subordinate Reception Center (Auffangstelle) Kiev.

The Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) guidelines of April 14 and 15, 1942—which were expanded by the General for Special Tasks responsible for the FStGAs at the OKH on October 28, based on the initial experiences with the FStGAs—dictated the organization and strength of the unit, the selection of the prisoners, and the prisoners’ treatment and deployment. These guidelines are discussed in detail in FStGA 1.

A report written by Karl Baumgardt indicates that these guidelines were implemented in an especially harsh manner in FStGA 17. Baumgardt, whose death sentence for desertion was commuted to a prison sentence, was among the first prisoners who were sent from Anklam with FStGA 17 to Sukha Kam’ianka, near Izium in the Donbass region. He recalled that, while the unit was deployed there, “we mostly had to dig trenches, lay out barbed-wire barriers, clear mines, and haul wounded out of the forward area, for long periods of time and in dangerous areas.” It is likely that recovering soldiers’ corpses was the primary task, because his report continues: “Occasionally I only had an arm, the thigh, and sometimes only the head of a grunt in my tent tarp.”² As for the FStGA’s own losses, he writes: “Many of us [were killed] in the mine clearing teams.”³

The guards frequently got drunk and vented their rage on the prisoners. Baumgardt remembered that “if we hadn’t excavated enough of the fire trench in front, then they flailed on us with a rifle butt. A couple times my legs got really swollen from rifle butt hits.”⁴ The prisoners were often unable to complete their work due to exhaustion and insufficient food rations. Baumgardt recalled that the prisoners were badly malnourished, leading them to resort to desperate means: “At the front they occasionally court-martialed and shot some [prisoners] for stealing bread. We were definitely hungry…. Sometimes I hungrily grabbed bread from the pockets of Russians or our [dead] soldiers who had been lying there, bloated, for several days. It literally tasted like corpses. We chowed down on it.”⁵ As a result, the prisoners were frequently affected by diarrheal diseases. While the field prisoners deployed in the north operated in fiercely cold weather, torturous thirst was common in the southern section of the front. Baumgardt reported that he had not only “shaved and washed”⁶ with his own urine but also drunk it. As the Red Army conducted an offensive in the south in the late summer of 1943, Baumgardt was able to escape from FStGA 17 and allowed himself to be taken prisoner by the Soviets.

During that offensive, FStGA 17 withdrew to Krivoi Rog (today Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine). There, it received the order to create a second reception center. Aviator Werner Klein (b. May 5, 1920), who had arrived in a replacement transport from WG Glatz (today Kłodzko, Poland) to FStGA 17 on December 8, 1943, took part in this operation. According to the statements Klein made in an interrogation on May 2, 1944, the workday amounted to around nine hours (not including the time it took to distribute and collect work implements and march to and from the work site), with a half-hour lunch break. Afterward, some prisoners were forced to exercise “a half hour in full pack” while wearing gas masks as punishment for various infractions. Such infractions included a prisoner picking up “cigarette butts or pieces of bread off the ground on the march out or in”⁷ or missing an article of clothing or equipment in the weekly roll call—even if it had been stolen. For most prisoners, however, the workday ended around 4:00 p.m. This work period was presumably due to the early sunset in winter. Klein also experienced the same torturous hunger and appalling living conditions that Baumgardt reported.

As a general precept, the military corrections system sought “the easiest, most frugal lodging in solitary or collective imprisonment.”⁸ Collective imprisonment was particularly sought during field imprisonment. FStGA 17 came across a collective farm (kolkhoz) around the beginning of 1944 that was secured by barbed wire and posts. Klein’s company was locked in a stable. He indicated that he “could [only] wash once a day,” done after working “in a pond 300 meters [984 feet] away from the lodging.” Due to the “insufficient personal hygiene,” he and other prisoners eventually reached a “moral and physical low,” which led to the spread of vermin—which brought the “appearance of infectious diseases amongst the prisoners.” With this, “the greater part of the prisoners [refrained from] reporting a sickness” out of fear because, in the event that the unit doctor wrote that the internee was not sick, they ran the risk “of being punished with tougher internment” conditions by the company commander,⁹ which meant an additional decrease to their already hunger-inducing rations.

The combination of hunger, sickness, and poor hygiene culminated in disgusting lodging conditions. Werner Klein stated:

At 6 p.m. was inspection by the officer on duty, and after he left the billets were closed. At 8 p.m. was a communal visit to the latrine and following that was lights out. To relieve ourselves in the middle of the night we used a sawed-through gas tank, but it was not big enough to accommodate the needs of all the prisoners. And so nearly every night this tank overflowed and the urine spilled on the ground, spreading an unpleasant smell. For want of sufficient [End Page 630] rations and out of hunger bordering on madness, we all ate whatever was in reach, regardless of whether it was corncobs, red turnips, or potato peelings. In doing so we all got worse diarrhea, which … was particularly problematic in the middle of the night. Since it was forbidden to use the urinal—that is, the gas tank—during the night for solid waste, and since we also feared more punishment, many of the prisoners were so weak-willed that they relieved themselves in underwear, tissues, or a shirt and then threw it away.¹⁰

Despite the horrible conditions, Baumgardt gave a positive description of the relations among the prisoners in 1943: “We did not give each other any trouble. The camaraderie was good. We were in agreement: we wanted nothing to do with Hitler.”¹¹ By contrast, Klein reported of a progressive demoralization of the prisoners, including “scuffles” during ration distribution and “cases of theft among comrades.” These thefts “increased from day to day” and included bread as well as pieces of clothing and equipment. To escape these conditions, he fled the unit along with Aviator Willi Lehwalder (b. June 6, 1915) on February 12, 1944. Both were recaptured later that month and were sentenced to death for desertion on June 8, 1944. At the end of 1944, both were imprisoned in WG Anklam. It is unknown whether their death sentences were carried out.

The counterintelligence (Abwehr) daily report of the Sixth Army of July 15, 1944, recorded two other escape attempts: “In the area of Sserpeni [today Şerpeni, Moldova], two members of FStGA 17 escaped on July 13. There is suspicion that they defected.”¹² FStGA 17 was wiped out in August 1944 during a major Soviet offensive (the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive) that destroyed Army Group South Ukraine.¹³ The unit was not reformed. The German Red Cross lists 360 men missing from FStGA 17, the highest number of missing reported from any FStGA.¹⁴

Aside from those handed down against Werner Klein and Willi Lehwalder, only three other death sentences are known to have been given to members of FStGA 17. On January 5, 1944, Eugen Hoffmann was sentenced to death for desertion by the court of the Local Command (Standortkommandantur) in Rostov. The sentence was carried out on May 26.¹⁵ Four days prior, on May 22, Fritz Keller was beheaded in Brandenburg-Görden Prison after he was sentenced to death on April 6 by the court of the Kriegsmarine in Berlin for subversion of fighting power (Wehrkraftzersetzung).¹⁶ Josef Weidenkopf (b. October 6, 1922) was sentenced to death for desertion by the court of the 320th Infantry Division on July 19, 1944. Although his sentence was confirmed on September 30, it was later commuted to a 10-year prison sentence.¹⁷