Sandbostel POW camp

Sandbostel POW camp memorial - darkometer rating : 7 - A former Nazi WWII camp for POW s, later overflow concentration camp , in fact one of the most significant such sites in northern Germany . What the much better-known Bergen-Belsen camp memorial site lacks, Sandbostel still has: namely surviving original structures, especally the wooden barracks, which are currently being carefully refurbished. There's a modern musem now too, as well as a couple of new exhibitions in some of the more recently restored buildings. More improvements are planned. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Sandbostel is a pretty desolate and isolated location, back then surrounded by boggy plains with little infrastructure – in the middle of nowhere, as it were. In other words: an ideal location for a POW/ concentration camp . Initially, the camp was set up as "Stalag X B", and was at first a tented camp for POW s from Poland , France , Belgium , and, increasingly from 1941/42, the Soviet Union . All in all, however, inmates from over 70 different nations passed through Sandbostel. Tents were soon replaced by buildings, both of stone and wooden barracks – in the end there were a total of 150 buildings lined up on either side of the central camp road. Up to 70,000 prisoners were crammed together at any one time in the camp (which had originally been planned for 10,000). Conditions were predictably atrocious. The death rate was, naturally, particularly high towards the end of WWII when the camp was overcrowded, supplies were running out and the camp was also used, just like Bergen-Belsen , as an "overflow" camp for the inmates "evacuated" from concentration camps further east, e.g. from satellite camps of Neuengamme .