Oflag 79 Brunswick (Braunschweig-Querum)

Oflag 79 (Offizierslager 79, “Officers’ Camp 79”) was a Wehrmacht-administered prisoner-of-war camp for Allied officers, situated in a former German parachute-regiment barracks at Querum, on the northeastern outskirts of Braunschweig, close to both the Hanover–Berlin autobahn and the Hermann Göring aircraft-engine factory. It came into existence in its Braunschweig form in early May 1944 when the population of Oflag VIII-F, previously held at Mährisch Trübau in Czechoslovakia, was transferred to the site; an earlier cohort had arrived from Italian camps in December 1943, consisting mainly of British Commonwealth officers captured during the Battle of Crete and the North African campaign. By the Red Cross inspection of December 1944 the camp held roughly 4,800 people in total, including approximately 1,940 British and Allied officers and 251 Indian officers, making it one of the larger officer camps in Germany. On 24 August 1944 Allied aircraft struck the camp, killing three prisoners and seriously wounding fourteen, destroying a newly built theatre and putting the cookhouse out of use for some five months. Behind the wire a secret escape committee remained active throughout, and a clandestine lithographic printing press — assembled from broken shower tiles and improvised materials — produced around 1,200 escape maps between autumn 1944 and January 1945, when the operation was uncovered by the guards. The camp was liberated by the U.S. Ninth Army on 12 April 1945.