Qualla: Stalag III-A

Stalag III-A: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Max-78, CC BY-SA 3.0. There are two kinds of grave at Luckenwalde. Prisoners who died here and were not Soviet citizens were buried individually, with military honours, each under his own marker in the camp cemetery. Soviet prisoners were buried anonymously, in mass graves. Nothing about that difference was accidental, and nothing about it was a wartime improvisation. It was policy, applied from the top, and it is the clearest single fact about Stalag III-A: the same camp, the same guards, the same fences, and two entirely separate ideas about whose life was subject to any rules at all. Between four and five thousand men died here. The great majority of them were Soviet.

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Image: Max-78 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stalag III-A: Built Before There Was a War

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. Planning for the camp began before Germany invaded Poland, which is to say before there were any prisoners to hold. It was laid out for 10,000 men, the largest camp in the Third Military District, and it was regarded as a model for others. The first Polish prisoners arrived in mi...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Stalag III-A: Ten Nations, Two Standards

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Naturparkverein Fläming e.V., CC BY-SA 2.5. On paper the camp ran to the Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations, and delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross inspected it regularly. Soviet prisoners were excluded from all of it, on the argument that the USSR had never signed the Geneva Convention. Tha...

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Image: Naturparkverein Fläming e.V. | CC BY-SA 2.5

Stalag III-A: The Winter of 1941/42

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Max-78, CC0. Typhus went through the camp that winter and killed somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 Soviet prisoners. Typhus spreads through lice, and lice spread through cold, crowding, thin clothing and no means of washing - which is to say the epidemic was a consequence of the conditions ra...

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Image: Max-78 | CC0

Stalag III-A: The Camp Was Mostly Somewhere Else

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was AlterVista at German Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. No more than 8,000 men were ever held at the main camp at once. Everyone else was out working. Stalag III-A administered more than a thousand Arbeitskommandos - work detachments - scattered across the whole state of Brandenburg, cutting timber and labouring in industry. The camp ...

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Image: The original uploader was AlterVista at German Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stalag III-A: 22 April 1945, and After

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Borges wiki, CC BY-SA 4.0. As the Red Army approached, the guards left. The prisoners were still there when Soviet troops reached the camp on 22 April 1945, and the men who walked out included Stefan Grzybowski, later rector of the Jagiellonian University, and the Polish priest and resistance member Józef ...

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Image: Borges wiki | CC BY-SA 4.0