Camp XI

Groß Hesepe

The justice administration had camp XI Groß Hesepe completed in June 1938 for a total of 1,000 prisoners in order to expand the system of penal camps in the Emsland from seven to fifteen camps and to be able to use more prisoners for moorland cultivation.

Before the judiciary took over the camp, seven barracks were disassembled at the beginning of September 1938 and transported to the Palatinate, where prisoners were used for forced labor in the construction of fortifications on the ‘Westwall’ (= western bulwark). After the barracks were transported back, the reconstruction of the camp was not completed until May 1939. It was no longer occupied by prisoners until the beginning of the Second World War.

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 C Bathorn POW main camp. In 1939, it was a transit camp for Polish prisoners of war. From 1941, it was initially occupied by French prisoners of war and later by Soviet prisoners of war. From July 1944, the Wehrmacht held more than 2,000 Italian military internees in the camp.

The Soviet prisoners of war in particular suffered ruthless treatment due to Nazi racial ideology. The inadequate food and poor hygienic conditions in the overcrowded barracks claimed countless victims. After the cultivation work was discontinued in 1941, the German leadership increasingly deployed the prisoners of war in agriculture and in commercial businesses - above all in peat, clay and brickworks.