Though the highest authority of Nazi Germany was the Oberster Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht (Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces), Adolf Hitler himself, every man captured by the Germans became a prisoner of war under the blanket control of Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the High Command of the German Armed Forces, head of which was Chef des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht General Wilhelm Keitel.1
Subordinate to the OKW were the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), army; Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine (OKM), navy; and Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (OKL), air force, each with its own High Command.
Immediately subordinate to Keitel was General Hermann Reinecke, head of Der Allgemeines Wehrmachtsamt (AWA, Armed Forces General Office), within which was the Abteilung Kriegsgefangenenwesen im OKW (Prisoner-of-War Section within the OKW). It was this department, headed by Generalmajor Hans von Grävenitz, that was responsible for POWs for most of the Second World War.
After the fall of France in June 1940 over 44,000 British soldiers, a handful of RAF personnel, an estimated 1.9 million Frenchmen, and several thousand Poles, Dutch, Belgians and Norwegians became prisoners of the Germans. As most of these were soldiers, they were kept in hastily-prepared camps under the control of the OKH. For want of any Luftwaffe accommodation the few RAF POWs, some of whom had been captured as early as September 1939, were shoved in with the army types.
For the purposes of administration, the German Reich was divided into Wehrkreise (military defence districts), nineteen of which had been created by June 1944, which were administered from strategically-important centres such as Dresden (Wehrkreis IV) or Breslau (Wehrkreis VIII). The German army’s POW camps took their number from that of the Wehrkreis in which they were located, the first camp to be opened in a particular Wehrkreis being given the letter ‘A’ followed by B, C etc. For example, the camps in Wehrkreis IV were Oflag IVA (Hohnstein), Oflag IVB (Königstein), Oflag IVC (Colditz), and so on.
It was thanks to the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarschall2 Hermann Göring, however, that Allied aircrew would eventually find their way to camps under Luftwaffe control, the Luftwaffe regarding themselves as being more civilised than their army counterparts. These Luftwaffe camps were simply numbered in the order in which they were opened, irrespective of the Wehrkreis in which they happened to be located.
When the war began in September 1939, the Luftwaffe had no long-term plans for the reception, interrogation, and subsequent disposal of captured enemy aircrew, and it was not until 15 December 1939 that a Durchgangslager der Luftwaffe (Air Force transit camp; Dulag Luft for short) was opened at a former agricultural school at Oberursel, a few kilometres north west of Frankfurt-am-Main. The few RAF and French Armée de l’Air POWs in those early days were housed in a two-storey farmhouse. By the spring of 1940, the camp comprised solitary-confinement cells and a small, separate transit camp from which, after interrogation, aircrew were sent to a permanent POW camp.
The Oberursel site continued to expand as the numbers of POWs grew but, eventually, so great was the number of captured Allied airmen POWs passing through it that on 10 September 1943 the transit camp was relocated to the Palmengarten und Botanischer Garten in the heart of Frankfurt. Less than a mile from Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof (main railway station), a legitimate bombing target, inevitably stray bombs fell on this transit camp. Despite diplomatic protests, it was not until the end of May 1944 that a third transit camp was opened, at Wetzlar on the Lahn river, some sixty-five kilometres to the north of Frankfurt. Interrogations continued to be held at Oberursel until the end of the war, the place being called Auswertungsstelle West, literally Interrogation place West, to distinguish it from a similar one on the Eastern Front.
It was not until the beginning of July 1940 that the first permanent Luftwaffe POW camp was opened – Stammlager der Luftwaffe (Air Force Camp) at Barth-Vogelsang on the Baltic coast. It became Stalag Luft I (Barth), or simply Luft 1, when Stalag Luft II (Litzmannstadt) opened on the Eastern Front in 1941 (whither a very few RAF POWs were temporarily sent in 1941).
Having persuaded Hitler that the OKL should have control of airmen prisoners, Göring decided that the Luftwaffe would build its own camps for Allied airmen POWs. Furthermore, these camps would be run entirely by Luftwaffe personnel and would be administered by the Territorial Administrative HQ of the Luftwaffe (Luftgaukommando). Except for the camps’ Kommandants, who were appointed by Göring, the staffs of each camp would be appointed by Oberst Ernst Walde, Chef der Kriegsgefangenen der Luftwaffe, who, as head of the Luftwaffe’s POW organisation, had full responsibility for the establishment and administration of its camps.
By July 1941, when Stalag Luft I was full of both officers and NCOs, the Luftwaffe was, once again, obliged to purge non-officer newcomers to an army-run camp, this time Stalag VIIIB (Lamsdorf) and also, at the end of that year, to Stalag VIIA (Moosburg). But as the war continued and more and more prisoners of war fell into their hands, neither the army, nor the navy, nor the air force was ever able to provide sufficient accommodation for them all.
Stalag Luft III (Sagan) opened in March 1942, but it is not clear precisely when Stalag Luft IV (Beninia?) or V (Gröditz) opened. Again, they appear to have been used for POWs captured on the Eastern Front, but it is reasonable to assume that they were first used some time between the opening of Stalag Luft III and of Stalag Luft VI (Heydekrug), first opened in June 1943. When the Luftwaffe re-opened old cavalry barracks at Gross Tychow in May 1944 for captured US airmen it became Stalag Luft IV, presumably after the original camp of that number had been closed for whatever reason. Some 350 Americans, resident there by 25 May 1944, would be joined two months later by half of the POWs from Stalag Luft VI (evacuated in July 1944).3
The Allies’ first intimation that there was to be another camp for aircrew came on 29 April 1944 when the German Foreign Office in Berlin informed the Swiss Legation there that ‘Kriegsgefangenenlager 7 Der Luftwaffe (Stalag Luft 7)’ had been opened ‘at Bankau near Kreuzburg, Upper Silesia’. There was, however, no, repeat no, information regarding its inmates.
The Lufwaffe, employing its own workforce, had begun the construction of the new camp in the spring of 1944, approximately sixty-five kilometres or so east of Breslau (Wroclaw) in a sandy field some 200 metres from a forest. More particularly it was three kilometres from Bankau railway station, one kilometre west of the village of Bankau (now Baków), and seven kilometres east of Kreuzburg (Kluczbork), just off the main Kreuzburg-Rosenberg (Olesno) road.
The new camp was required following the capture of hundreds of Allied aircrew during the first quarter of 1944 – 1,300 RAF Bomber Command aircrew alone during this period, and a further 865 in the second quarter. In addition, hundreds of USAAF aircrew, mostly from the Eighth Air Force flying bombers from East Anglia, England, were taken prisoner.4 The majority of these men were sent to an already crowded Stalag Luft VI (Heydekrug). By May 1944, new arrivals were living in a large tent.
Needing, therefore, to provide further accommodation for airmen POWs the Luftwaffe, somewhat optimistically as events were to show, chose to build the new camp, Luft 7, almost directly in the centre of what, in January 1945, would become a massive Soviet offensive.
During its brief life, Luft 7 would be visited on a number of occasions by Albert A. Kadler (a Swiss citizen acting on behalf of the British and US Protecting Power), by the International Red Cross Committee (IRCC) (also from Switzerland), and by Henry Soderberg of the YMCA (see page 233). Visiting the new campsite on 26 May 1944, representatives of the IRCC noted not only that it was not finished but also an absence of prisoners, hardly surprising as the first POWs would not arrive until 6 June 1944.
Albert Kadler, on his second visit, noted on 15 June 1944 that ‘the site itself is well-chosen, pleasant and affords excellent views. It is intended to divide the camp into four self-contained compounds; at present the prisoners of war are accommodated in small huts on a piece of ground which is to form one of the said compounds.’ When full, the camp was ‘designed to hold from 4 to 5,000 prisoners of war’.
Kadler also noted that, on the day of his visit, there were ‘107 British prisoners of war, all RAF personnel (non-commissioned officers)’. ‘All RAF’ was not strictly true, for among the POWs were two NCOs of the SAS and a petty officer of the Fleet Air Arm.
The German word for a group of military men is Trupp (troop in English), and they applied this word to a batch of prisoners. Although the camp was far from complete, the first Trupp arrived at Luft 7 on 6 June 1944, eleven days after the first Red Cross visit. Trupp 2 followed a week later, with Truppen being admitted at regular intervals thereafter. Trupp 57 was possibly the last to arrive, possibly on 6 January 1945, when POW numbers 1311-1358 were issued. Although a few more POWs arrived at Luft 7 after that date there appears to be no record of any Trupp number for them. With the threat of a Soviet offensive looming, it would appear that the keeping of accurate records at Luft 7 was given a lower priority. In any event the camp was to be evacuated on 19 January 1945.
Note that throughout this book all airmen are RAF unless otherwise stated.