Emslandlager XI - Gross Hesepe, Germany - WWII Prisoner of War Camps on Waymarking.com

Emslandlager ("Emsland camps") were a series of 15 moorland labor, punitive and POWs-camps, active from 1933 to 1945 and located in the districts of Emsland and Bentheim, Lower Saxony, Germany.
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"The Judiciary had the camp XI Gross Hesepe completed in June 1938 for a total of 1,000 prisoners to expand the system of the Emsland prison camp from seven to fifteen camps and to use more convicts for moorland cultivation.
Before the judiciary occupied the camp, at the beginning of September 1938, seven barracks were dismantled and transported to the Palatinate, where prisoners were used for forced labor in the construction of fortifications at the "Westwall". After the repatriation of the barracks, the reconstruction of the camp could not be completed until May 1939. It was no longer occupied before the beginning of the Second World War with prisoners.

After the beginning 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 prisoner-of-war camp VI C Bathorn. In 1939 it was a transit camp for Polish prisoners of war. From 1941 it was initially occupied by French and later Soviet prisoners of war. From July 1944, the Wehrmacht brought more than 2,000 Italian military internees into the camp.

In particular, the Soviet prisoners of war suffered due to the National Socialist racial ideology under a ruthless treatment. The inadequate nutrition and poor hygienic conditions in the overcrowded barracks claimed countless victims. After the cultivation work was discontinued in 1941, the German leadership increasingly used the prisoners of war in agriculture and in commercial enterprises - especially in peat and clay works as well as brickworks."
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