Front Stalags 100-368
Cover sent to a captured French officer being held at Frontstalag 183-A in Chateaubriant. Ref: 03.07.1940
Frontstalag, Auflag & Armee-Gefangenensammelstelle
During the Second World War, both the High Command of the Wehrmacht and the High Command of the Army were responsible for prisoner of war issues. All POW camps in the Reich territory were under the control of the OKW, while the camps in the operational area were under the control of the Quartermaster General of the Army General Staff. The Luftwaffe prisoner of war camps were under the command of the Luftwaffe High Command, while those of the Navy were under the command of the Navy High Command.
There were different types of camps for different tasks:
Captured soldiers were disarmed and separated into soldiers and NCOs/crew. They were then taken by the fighting troops to prisoner-of-war reception camps (Auflag) or army prisoner-of-war collection centres (AGSST) set up just behind the front line. The POW collection centres were under the command of the commander of the rear army area (Korück) and were guarded by the army's field gendarmerie and guards. From the assembly centres, the prisoners of war were then sent to transit camps (Dulag) in the rear army area, which were the responsibility of the respective security division. There were also front camps (Frontstalag), where captured soldiers of all ranks were registered and sent to their destination after a short time. In the transit camps and front stalags, responsibility for the prisoners of war was then transferred to the OKH, which organised the onward transport to the officers' and enlisted men's camps in the Reich territory. This system had proved its worth in the first months of the war in Poland, France, Norway and the Balkans.
With the start of the Russian campaign, with its huge space gains in the first few months, this system reached its limits and beyond. Moreover, the war against Russia was planned from the outset as a war of extermination in which the rights of prisoners of war were massively curtailed. On the way to the transit camps and then to the main camps or officers' camps, thousands of Red Army soldiers were shot by the escorts. In many camps, the new arrivals were left to fend for themselves, forced to live in the open air or in burrows they had dug themselves, receiving too little food and little or no medical care. The daily rations were still relatively sufficient until September 1941, after which the military leaders cut the rations considerably.
The reasons for this were the unexpected lack of a lightning victory, the lack of supplies for their own army, which found too little food in the conquered territories, a lack of transport capacity and a general supply crisis, especially at the end of 1941, the impending winter and Hitler's initial ban on transporting Soviet prisoners into the Reich. Hermann Göring did not want to jeopardise the mood of the German population by failing to deliver grain and falsely claimed on 16th September 1941 that, in contrast to the rations for other prisoners, the Bolshevik prisoners were ‘not bound by any international obligations’: ‘Their rations can therefore only be based on the work they do for us.’ In fact, Article 82 of the Geneva Convention of 1929, which Germany had signed in 1934, also applied to enemy states that had not acceded to the treaty.
However, at the beginning of October 1941, Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner decreed: 'Non-labouring prisoners of war in the prison camps must starve to death. Working prisoners of war can also be fed from army stocks in individual cases.' This meant that the already weakened Red Army soldiers who were unable to work, whose numbers increased dramatically in the following months, no longer received enough daily food. The consequences were particularly evident in the main camps: from October 1941 to May 1942, up to two out of 3.7 million Soviet prisoners of war probably died, at least 850,000 of them in the care of the army before being transferred to the hinterland.
The individual prisoner of war camps were distributed among the military districts and were under the command of the respective commander or general of the prisoner of war system in the military district command. The latter was subordinate to the military district commander, who in turn was responsible to the commander of the Home and Reserve Army. The prisoners of war remained in the officers' camps (Oflag) and the prisoners of war camps (Stalag) until their final release.
There were two types of camp designation in the military districts: Normally, the camps were labelled with the Roman numeral for the military district and a consecutive letter. Stalag I-A, for example, was the first regular camp for men set up in military district I, while Oflag II C was the third regular camp for officers set up in military district II. There were also camps with Arabic numbers (e.g. Stalag 56), which could not be assigned to a fixed geographical location and which were often operated outside the military districts.
The Luftwaffe operated its own Stammlager-Luft (Stalag Luft), while the Kriegsmarine ran naval prisoner of war and naval internment camps (Marlag/ Milag).
A total of 107 prisoner-of-war construction and labour battalions (Kgf. Bau u. Arb. Btl) were set up to exploit the labour of the prisoners of war. These units were divided into companies, but mostly into prisoner-of-war labour detachments, and deployed in essential war industries, mining and agriculture. There were also 24 prisoner-of-war labour battalions, 31 prisoner-of-war construction battalions, 13 construction pioneer battalions, five dock worker detachments, six glazier battalions, eight roofing battalions, 34 air force construction battalions and 72 prisoner-of-war supply battalions.
The last facility through which the prisoner of war passed, if it came to that, was the repatriation camp (Heilag). However, transfer to a Heilag was not obligatory; many POWs were also released directly from the Stalag and sent home.
Prisoner-of-war staff camps (Stalag for short) were larger prisoner-of-war camps in which enlisted men and non-commissioned officers were housed and divided into labour detachments. Officers were housed in separate officers' camps (Oflag). The main camps served as transit stations for prisoners of war to work in the war economy, in external detachments, mines and industrial operations of all kinds.
Once these prisoners of war had become unfit for work in the factories as a result of poor treatment, overwork and hunger, they were sent back to the main camp, usually to the sanitary area there. Many of them, especially the Soviet prisoners of war, died as a result. Those who returned to work were often very weak. As there was a considerable labour shortage, some companies began to feed the prisoners of war sufficiently and treat them in such a way that their labour could be preserved and exploited further, while others did the same from the outset.
The main camps were numbered according to the military district using Roman numerals. The letter after the number designated the camp in ascending order. For example, Stammlager III-B in Fürstenberg (Oder) was the second Stammlager in the third defence district (WK III). Main camps outside the Reich territory had Arabic numerals. When these camps were relocated to the Reich territory, they were given the standard military district designation, but continued to have the Arabic numbers in brackets. Arabic numbers were also assigned to some Stalags within the Reich territory for reasons that are no longer comprehensible today.
A total of 222 Stalags were set up in the German Reich and in the territories occupied by Germany. The occupancy rate of the individual main camps could vary between 7,000 and over 70,000 prisoners of war. On 1st January 1944, over 2,200,000 prisoners of war were held in the main camps.
Source: lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de (2025)
Frontstalag camps, numbers 100 - 368
190 Charleville, France. With additional documentation from a former POW dated 07.05.1946. Ref: 6/27 - no date.
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