Camp XIII

Wietmarschen

The justice administration had Camp XIII Wietmarschen completed in May 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 occupied the camp, some barracks were dismantled in the summer of 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 completed in May 1939. It was no longer occupied by prisoners before the start 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 subcamp to the main prisoner of war camp VI C Bathorn. In 1939, it was a transit camp for Polish and Western European prisoners of war. From 1941, it was occupied by 2,700 Soviet prisoners of war.

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. In the Wietmarschen camp alone, 151 prisoners of war died of tuberculosis in January 1944.

After cultivation work was discontinued in 1941, the German leadership increasingly deployed the prisoners of war in agriculture and in commercial businesses, especially in peat, clay and brickworks.

The prisoners of war who died in the Wietmarschen camp were buried in the cemetery in Dalum until around August 1944. Today, around 150 unknown prisoners of war have their final resting place at the Füchtenfeld war cemetery (Camp Wietmarschen).