Camp X

Fullen

Camp X Fullen was initially set up as a concentration camp in 1934, but was then handed over to the Reichsarbeitsdienst (= Reich Labour Service). After the departure of the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the judiciary took over the camp in 1938 to house 1,000 prisoners and deploy them in moorland cultivation.

In contrast to the other newly established prison camps, whose prisoners were partly withdrawn in 1938 for the construction of fortifications on the 'Westwall' (= western bulwark), the Fullen camp remained in place. It was occupied by 1,200 prisoners in September 1938 and 800 in October.

The prisoners were people who had been persecuted by the Nazi regime on political, racial, social or religious grounds. In addition, there was a much larger group of prisoners who had been convicted of criminal offenses.

After the start of the war in September 1939, the Wehrmacht High Command took over the camp as a prisoner of war camp and assigned it as a branch camp to the VI B Neu Versen POW camp for initially Polish and later French prisoners of war. After the beginning of the campaign of conquest against the Soviet Union, the number of prisoners of war increased significantly. In September 1941, 1,700 Soviet soldiers were held in Fullen. From autumn 1943, Italian military internees were sent to the camp, which functioned as a military hospital without the appropriate equipment.

Like the prisoners of justice, the prisoners of war were used for moorland cultivation until 1941, and later increasingly in agriculture and commercial businesses. The hard labor, poor hygienic conditions and inadequate nutrition led to exhaustion and the spread of disease. The Soviet prisoners of war in particular were treated ruthlessly due to National Socialist racial ideology.

In addition to 137 known dead, mainly from the Soviet Union, around 1,500 unknown Soviet prisoners of war rest at the Fullen war cemetery.