War is Hell. But what happens to captured soldiers after a battle is sometimes
much worse. When they weren’t shot immediately as part of ‘take no prisoners’ policies,
the POWs of World War II could be sent to some of the worst places imaginable. In this video,
we’re going to discuss the absolute worst camps and prisons an unlucky POW could end up in,
saving the most horrific for last.
Located in what is now picturesque Polish farmland, the Nazi POW camp Stalag 8F — sometimes
called Stalag 344 — was designated for Polish and Russian POWs. These were two ethnic groups
the Nazis considered to be subhuman, and Slavic peoples, in general, were seen as fit
only for slave labour by the Nazis. Their treatment as POWs in Stalag 8F reflects this.
The POWs waged a constant war of attrition against starvation. This was their biggest
killer — as desperately malnourished soldiers were highly prone to disease.
The unsanitary and cramped conditions provided a breeding ground for many diseases,
the worst being typhus and dysentery. In these conditions, death was everywhere. Of the roughly
200,000 Soviet and Polish POWs who passed through the camp during the war, around 42,000 died.
In other words, for every five POWs who set foot in the camp, at least one would die.
In 1945, when the USSR was taking more ground by the day, the POWs from Stalag 8F
began what was later called *The Death March*. The POWs were forced to walk across Germany, sometimes
without shoes and nearly always without food, to escape the tsunami of advancing Soviet troops.
Hundreds more died on the Death March, some simply dropping dead where they
stood from exhaustion and others freezing to death in their sleep.
While less brutal than other camps in this video, the sheer number of
deaths at Stalag 8F makes it one of the worst POW camps of the Second World War.
We're all aware of Japanese cruelty in World War II, especially towards their prisoners,
though one camp was worse than all others.
While holding fewer POWs than many other camps, the POW camp in Sandakan — on the
northern edge of Borneo — was the site of one of the worst atrocities of the war.
In August 1943, between 2,000 and 2,500 British and Australian POWs were detained in Sandakan
POW camp and forced to do manual labour. Their job was to turn an impenetrable jungle into an
operational military airfield. Conditions were deplorable: water for the POWs was filthy
and often made them sick, the food ration was only a handful of dirty rice per day,
beatings occurred regularly, and men died daily. But things only got worse.
By mid-1944, the war in the Pacific had turned in favour of the Allies,
and the Japanese were worried about losing access to Borneo’s vital oilfields, deploying hundreds of
additional troops to reinforce these positions. For the POWs of Sandakan, this was a nightmare,
as their meagre food ration virtually disappeared to feed the incoming soldiers.
The Allies successfully bombed the airstrip — rendering it unusable — several months later
in January 1945. To prevent them escaping into the arms the Allies — who were expected to land
any day — the Japanese marched the camp's British and Aussie POWs to an inland base in waves leaving
roughly every month. Those who were too sick to walk were left at Sandakan to starve. Along the
march, POWs were continuously shot for falling behind. By the time the marches had finished,
only 38 POWs of the original 2,500 were still alive. Too weak to work, they were all executed.
Sandakan was a death sentence for a POW, and the Australian government
still regards it as the worst atrocity ever carried out on Australian soldiers in war.
Another Nazi death camp, Stalag 6K or Stalag 326 was similar to the first Stalag of this video,
except it managed to be even worse. Housing mostly Poles and Russians,
but also Italians and French POWs, Stalag 326 was another camp in the broad
network of facilities designed to exterminate so-called "subhumans" through exhaustive work.
Camps like Stalag 326 used slave labour to produce many goods critical for the war effort,
like weapons and engine parts. This practice was encouraged by German Reich officials,
who naturally took a cut of the sizable profits.
The POWs of Stalag 326 were also rented out for farm work in the surrounding area,
making fat bank for their captors. Mass conscription of men for the military had
caused manpower shortages in the Reich, a shortage that POW slave labour was supposed to remedy.
Stalag 326 was liberated in 1945 by an American armoured unit.
They were shocked with the conditions they found, describing a “foul
[death-like] odor” around the camp's Russian POWs who were “completely demoralised.” Out of the
roughly 200,000 POWs — primarily Russian — who had passed through the camp, 65,000 perished there.
There was nearly nowhere worse to be in World War Two than onboard a Japanese Hell ship.
Mostly smaller freighters that had been hastily converted for human cargo, the Imperial Japanese
Navy shipped tens of thousands of captured allied POWs and Southeast Asian civilians to Japan,
China, and other parts of their empire. These POWs were destined to spend the rest of the
war as slave labourers and, sometimes, test subjects for demented medical experiments.
Life onboard an aptly named Hell Ship was unimaginable. Herded into tiny cargo
spaces below deck, POWs were crammed so tightly and with so little ventilation
that some died from lack of oxygen. Other common causes of death were dehydration, starvation,
and the ever-present disease. Dysentery was extremely common, and men were forced to
relieve themselves wherever they could, the deck quickly running slick with infectious excrement.
The conditions were so hellish it was not uncommon
for POWs to go insane. An environment of oppressive humidity, little oxygen,
and no water or food broke many men's minds. Desperate and deranged, some POWs would drink
urine or slit their veins open to drink their own blood, and sometimes the blood of others.
To round off an experience which the word "hellish" doesn't do justice,
many of these POWs never reached their destinations. The Japanese Navy
*refused* to mark POW transport ships in accordance with maritime law, meaning
that many were torpedoed by Allied submarines and aircraft hunting for Japanese troopships.
One Hell Ship, the *Suez Maru*, carried 548 sick POWs from slave labour camps in Malaysia.
She began to sink after being torpedoed by an American submarine. Most of the human
cargo drowned in the hold, but 250 POWs managed to escape. They swam to another Japanese ship which,
after picking up survivors from the Japanese crew, machine-gunned the water — murdering all 250 POWs.
Believe it or not, there was a fate worse than even a Japanese Hell Ship.
The only entry for the Allies in this video, we have the Soviet Gulags.
Whether they were toiling and starving in the jungles of South Asia or the weapons factories
of the German Reich, Allied POWs only had to endure captivity for a maximum of five years.
Axis POWs thrown into the black hole of the Soviet Gulags weren't
so lucky. Their war may have been over, but their suffering would go on for 11 more years.
To rebuild its occupied territories after the war, the USSR needed a resilient and expendable
workforce, which they found in the millions of Axis POWs they had captured during the war. Over
10,000 unlucky POWs — who were mostly Germans and Poles — remained in the hellish Gulags until 1953.
Another 9,200 had to toil in the gulags until 1956,
before being returned home. One of the worst of these Gulags was Vorkuta.
Located in Arctic Siberia, the inmates of Vorkuta Gulag mined for coal. This horrendous
work forced POWs and other prisoners deep underground without proper equipment. Starving,
weakened and working in the near total darkness and choking dust of a coal mine
meant accidents were frequent. Inadequate food and medicine meant that disease was also rife,
and when it compounded with the blistering cold of an Arctic winter, the death rate soared.
The end of Stalin’s reign of terror in 1953 saw records of the numbers of POWs and deaths
in the Gulags *mysteriously disappear*. Likely burned by Soviet officers looking
to hide their crimes from the new regime, many of the Vorkuta camp records also *conveniently*
vanished. We don’t know for sure how many POWs were murdered in each camp,
but we do know that at least 1.1 million Axis POWs went into Soviet captivity, and never returned.
From being executed in the jungles of Borneo to working 11 years after the war in a Soviet Gulag,
we've covered just five of the most hellish places an unlucky POW could be sent during
the Second World War. Though, do YOU agree with our assessment? Which one of these places do
YOU think is the worst? Can you think of any others? Let us know in the comments.