Maribor. Maribor. Maribor. The name was embedded in my brain long before I ever set foot in the city. I knew of it because of all I’d read about WWII and the Holocaust. I’d seen it referenced in other concentration and workcamps camps I’d visited. And yet Stalag XVIII-D was very difficult to find.
I had similar trouble when in Latvia, trying to find the Salaspils Memorial outside of Riga. No one seemed to know anything about it. In fairness, they tried. Those we asked made phone calls. They asked colleagues. They told us there was nothing to see but they gave us an address. The museum, they said, was closed. Funded by Russia, money had been diverted when Ukraine became their focus. Now, it’s open only for groups, and by appointment.
Visiting what once was Stalag XVIII-D (306) was one of the main reasons we’d come to Maribor. I was very disappointed. But I still wanted to go there. To see it. To pay my respects in a way.
I have a morbid fascination with concentration camps and work camps. I am afraid that the world will forget what happened during the Holocaust and WWII. Stalag XVIII-D (Did you Stalag is short for Stammlager?) was chiefly a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Western Allies and Soviet soldiers. Established in June 1941 in a suburb of the city, it was housed in what had once been an army barracks and a grain depot. It operated until October 1942. Seventeen months.
The prisoner cohort comprised French, British, Greeks, Australians, New Zealanders, and Yugoslavs. After Operation Barbarossa, another section was established – this one solely to house soldiers from the Red Army, which explains Russia’s funding of the museum.
Unlike the Allies, they didn’t benefit from the Geneva Convention because Russia hadn’t signed it. They fared much worse. Much, much worse – many died from typhus, deliberate malnutrition, and exhaustion. [I make a conscious effort not to use the word ‘starving’ in everyday speech; now ‘dead tired’ has a whole new connotation.]
The images in this video are harrowing. I watched without sound as I don’t speak Slovenian. It’s sobering stuff.
Thousands of Soviet POWs died, many of whom are buried in a mass grave in Pobrežje Cemetery. And while they were in a living hell, POWs under the Geneva Convention were treated much, much better. I’ve seen photos of British POWs playing tennis and rugby. By all accounts, the Western Allies had access to theatre, newspapers, and books, and could move outside the camp itself.
The story of the Soviet prisoners was severely different and tragic. Unprotected by the humanitarian organisations, the Red Army prisoners were forced to live in a barricaded, guarded, and wired camp complex whose purpose was the destruction of its inmates. They arrived in Maribor in overcrowded, sealed cattle wagons of freight trains. Upon arrival, they were starving and freezing; their physical condition was poor. Many died during transport or on arrival. They were beaten, shamed, mocked, tortured, shot, and deliberately subjected to psychophysical exhaustion (intentional starvation, malnutrition, diseases and labour work) in the camp.
When finding workers became an issue, the camp was disbanded, and replaced by labour camps. From these camps, the POWs did their bit for German industry building railways, canals, bridges, etc. They were treated better and, for the most part, stopped dying.
I came across an interesting article on the half-million American Jews who fought in Europe. About 9000 were captured and as Jewish POWs, life had to have been even more uncertain.
In 1944, two prisoners – an Australian bank clerk by the name of Ralph Churches, aka The Crow and an English jazz pianist by the name of Les Laws – organised what has become known as The Crow’s Flight. More than 90 prisoners escaped with the help of Slovenian resistance.
Neil Churches, Ralph’s son, offers a 20-day walking tour retracing the steps of these lads from the camps to freedom. And he’s written a book – The Greatest Escape. Churches Snr also wrote of his experience in A Hundred Miles as the Crow Flies. Theirs is a fascinating story.
Today, the warehouse sits opposite what was the command post of the Knights of Malta. It’s surrounded by residential houses. I wonder if they know what once happened there? Are they interested? Is anyone interested? We had three separate conversations in Maribor trying to find out more about the place and each conversation involved the unasked question – Why? Why are you so interested? Why do you want to see what is, to all intent and purpose, a warehouse?
The warehouse, as I mentioned, is now a museum. What was the Russian Camp is now home to The Museum of the Stalag XVIII-D Nazi Concentration Camp and the Maribor (Slovenia) International Research Centre for WWII, a joint initiative between the Republic of Slovenia and the Russian Federation, “in hopes of preserving historical truths concerning the Allied efforts to combat the Nazi and fascist aggressors of WWII and the heinous crimes committed in their name”.
Eighty years after the first train arrived in Maribor carrying POWs (30 September 2021), The Train of Memory project was launched. I was so disappointed we couldn’t see inside. I plan to write to them asking if I can tag on to any tour groups they have coming up.
A witness to one such transport of the dead in 1941 was the British von D. Allan Slocomb, who was a prisoner of war in Stalag XVIII D (306) in Maribor from the summer of 1941 to January 1943.
“One day, a train from Ukraine arrived at the camp, which was next to the railway station. When the doors of the carriages opened, we saw only the corpses of Soviet soldiers who had died of starvation and disease on the way from Ukraine. The German guards the British and Austrian prisoners of war did not want to touch me, even though we were still weak and weak, we volunteered to bury them. We took the bodies, actually skeletons, to the city cemetery. We put three of them in one box , which was carried to the edge of the mass grave by two emics each. Next to the grave, the German guards put on protective clothing and gloves and picked up everything that could still be of value, even the gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. Then they threw the bodies into a pit and buried it in. The mass grave was in a civilian cemetery.
Many years ago I heard that Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Hitler, but Hitler got all the press. Timothy Snyder’s book Hitler or Stalin: Who Killed More says no. Hitler’s 11 million is still a record. They were gruesome times that could well be making their return.
Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives.
In war, we lose sight of the individual in the masses. We forget that every Russian or Ukrainian or Israeli or Palestinian or X soldier is a son or daughter, father or mother, niece or nephew, husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend. They’re human, often fighting because they have to for a cause they don’t fully understand. We forget this.
PS. The Netflix mini-series All the light we cannot see is a good reminder.
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