Stalag IX-B Bad Orb

Stalag IX-B was a Wehrmacht-run Mannschafts-Stammlager (enlisted men’s camp) established on 1 December 1939 at Wegscheideküppel, a wooded hill south-east of Bad Orb in Hesse, within Wehrmacht Defence District IX. It held non-commissioned soldiers and enlisted men — not officers, and not aircrew, who were held separately in the Luftwaffe-run Stalag Luft system — drawing prisoners from France, the Soviet Union, Belgium, Serbia, Slovakia, Italy and, in very small numbers, Great Britain (just 11 British prisoners were recorded at the September 1944 peak of 25,640). The camp became particularly notorious after the Battle of the Bulge, when nearly 4,700 American infantrymen arrived from December 1944 onwards and were crammed into grossly overcrowded, barely heated barracks; conditions described by the International Red Cross as showing “distress and famine in their most terrible forms.” A deeply shameful episode unfolded in February 1945 when approximately 130 Jewish-American prisoners were deliberately identified, segregated and transferred to a forced-labour subcamp at Berga am Elster, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention; a soldiers’ cemetery near the camp holds over 1,430 dead Soviet prisoners, who throughout the war had received no shelter and far less food than other nationalities. On 2 April 1945 a US task force — the 2nd Battalion, 114th Infantry Regiment of the 44th Infantry Division, supported by cavalry and tank destroyers — drove sixty kilometres through enemy-held territory to liberate roughly 3,400 remaining prisoners. The site was subsequently used to house German displaced persons until 1955, and since 1969 has operated as a school outdoor-education centre named Schullandheim Wegscheide.