page_title: Stalag X-B
section_title: Liberation
hierarchical_section_title: Stalag X-B / Liberation
caption_attribution_description: English: Letter from 1945 about the handover of Sandbostel POW camp Stalag X B, exhibit at Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg
context_page_description: Stalag X-B was a World War II German Prisoner-of-war camp located near Sandbostel in Lower Saxony in north-western Germany. Between 1939 and 1945 several hundred thousand POWs of 55 nations passed through the camp. Due to the bad conditions in which they were housed, thousands died there of hunger, disease, or were killed by the guards. Estimates of the number of dead range from 8,000 to 50,000.
context_section_description: The camp was liberated on 29 April 1945 by the British Armed Forces of XXX Corps following fighting with the German 15th Panzergrenadier-Division. The camp commandant, however, realizing that the end of the war was close, had already agreed to hand over control of the camp to the prisoners, led by the French Colonel Marcel Albert. On 21 April, the same day that the officer ordered to take control of the camp complained to his superiors about conditions there (see picture), two prisoners carried the call for assistance from the camp to the Guards Armoured Division at Zeven. Two armoured units were sent to Sandbostel but fighting delayed their arrival until 29 April.
  The British discovered around 15,000 surviving POWs in the camp, as well as around 8,000 KZ-inmates.
  The camp was divided into three sections when liberated. The first contained allied prisoners in unsatisfactory conditions, but generally in compliance with the International Red Cross Convention. Soviet prisoners, without the Convention's protection, were in substantially worse conditions. In the third section were around 8,000 civilian prisoners in appalling conditions, described in the Army medical history as "utterly horrifying"; "everywhere the dead and dying sprawled amid the slime of human excrement." According to members of the British forces present at the liberation, conditions were so bad, they referred to the Stalag as "Little Belsen" in a reference to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
  The commander of the British Forces in north-western Germany, General Brian Horrocks, was called in and ordered local German civilians and medical orderlies to help with the clean-up, and to bury the numerous dead bodies. Like at Bergen-Belsen, despite the best efforts of the British, hundreds of inmates died every day immediately following the liberation as a result of starvation, typhus and other diseases. Estimates of the total number of people who died here in 1939-45 range between 8,000 and 50,000. There is evidence of at least 5,162 dead. Claims of up to 46,000 killed Soviets alone were made by the Soviet Union but are considered to be exaggerated.
  Inmates were cleaned and transferred to an improvised hospital outside the camp and thence to convalescence camps. The former Marlag was burned between 16 and 25 May to prevent a typhus epidemic and the last 350 patients left the hospital on 3 June.
  Other, more serviceable, huts were used by the British to house imprisoned Nazis and SS members, who were awaiting trial.
caption: Letter dated 21 April 1945 about the handover of the camp, exhibited at Neuengamme concentration camp.
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