The FSB declassified archives about the detention of Soviet prisoners in the Stalag-1A camp
The FSB has declassified archives about the conditions of detention of Soviet prisoners in the largest Stalag-1A camp in East Prussia during the Second World War. This is reported by RIA News.
The concentration camp, which existed in 1939-1945, was located in the village of Shtablak, a few kilometers from the city of Preussisch-Eylau (now Bagrationovsk, Kaliningrad region).
Among the documents from the archives of the FSB Directorate for the Kaliningrad Region is a copy of a special message compiled by the military counterintelligence department “Smersh” classified “top secret”.
It says that the camp held about 30 thousand prisoners of war, mostly from the nearby Red Army. They were strictly forbidden to move around the camp; every case of Russian prisoners leaving the site was regarded as an escape and was severely punished.
The food was extremely poor; 200-250 grams of surrogate bread with added sawdust and one liter of hot liquid made from rutabaga were provided per day. Because of this, the prisoners were exhausted to the limit and took a desperate step: they broke into the camp’s food warehouses, after which reprisals followed.
Soviet prisoners were housed in extremely crowded conditions; in a barracks designed for one hundred people there could be up to 500, in an unsanitary condition. Because of this, epidemics of typhus, tuberculosis, and dysentery broke out; medical care was not provided; moreover, the camp administration contributed to the spread of infections by placing sick and healthy people in the same room.
In July, Russia for the first time published the full text of a statement by the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, about plans for the genocide of the Slavs. This was reported by the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO).
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