Stalag XI-B Fallingbostel

Stalag XI-B was established in September 1939 in huts east of Fallingbostel, Lower Saxony, built two years earlier as worker accommodation for the nearby Westlager barracks complex; it was administered by the Wehrmacht, guarded by Landesschützen-Bataillon 461. Its first prisoners were Poles, followed by French and Belgians, and by mid-1944 some 93,000 POWs of many nationalities — Polish, French, Belgian, Soviet, British, Yugoslav, American, Canadian, and others — were registered at the camp, the majority held in dispersed Arbeitskommandos. In September 1944 Stalag 357, previously located at Toruń in German-occupied Poland, was relocated to the adjacent former Stalag XI-D site and used primarily to house British and Commonwealth prisoners, including a large contingent of RAF NCO aircrew transferred from Stalag Luft VI; Warrant Officer James “Dixie” Deans RAF, the respected Man of Confidence for RAF prisoners, served in that role at the Fallingbostel camp. November 1944 brought several thousand British paratroopers captured at Arnhem, under the imposing authority of RSM John C. Lord of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment, who imposed strict military discipline on the overcrowded huts — each designed for 150 men but holding 400. In April 1945 approximately 12,000 British POWs were force-marched westward ahead of the Allied advance, during which a column was mistakenly attacked by RAF Typhoons, killing around sixty men; those who remained at the camp, together with the returning columns, were liberated on 16 April 1945 by B Squadron, 11th Hussars and the Reconnaissance Troop of the 8th Hussars of the 7th Armoured Division. After the war the site served briefly as an internment camp for Nazi Party members before being demolished; the sole surviving structure is the delousing hut, and a memorial to thirteen nations’ prisoners stands at the site.