Emslandlager XIII Wietmarschen - Füchtenfeld, Germany
Posted by: dreamhummie
N 52° 33.635 E 007° 07.065
32U E 372408 N 5825054
Location of former POW Camp "Emslandlager XIII" at Breslauer Strasse in Füchtenfeld, Germany.
Waymark Code: WM10FAQ
Location: Niedersachsen, Germany
Date Posted: 04/28/2019
Views: 4
Traces of the camp are no longer available. At the former camp site there is a war cemetery with the graves of 150 unknown dead, mostly Soviet prisoners of war. (See Waymark: (
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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 XIII Wietmarschen completed in May 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 prisoners for moorland cultivation.
Before the judiciary occupied the camp, some barracks were mined in the summer of 1938 and transported to the Palatinate, where convicts were used for forced labor in the construction of fortifications at the "Westwall". After the repatriation of the barracks, the reconstruction of the camp in May 1939 could be completed. 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 and Western European prisoners of war. From 1941 it was occupied by 2,700 Soviet prisoners of war.
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. In January 1944 alone in the Wietmarschen camp 151 prisoners of war died of tuberculosis.
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.
The prisoners of war who died in the Wietmarschen camp were buried in the cemetery in Dalum until about August 1944. On the war cemetery Füchtenfeld (camp Wietmarschen) rest today about 150 unknown prisoners of war."
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