Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

64 Philip Baker on his website, www.Lamsdorf.com , wrote about the history of Stalag VIIIB “Stalag VIIIB was a large, German prisoner of war camp, later to be renamed Stalag 344. It is located in Poland near the small town of Lamsdorf (now called Lambinowice) in what was then known as Upper Silesia... The camp initially occupied barracks built to house British and French prisoners in the First World War, but there had also been a prison camp there during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. In 1939 the camp housed Polish prisoners from the German 1939 offensive. Later, more than 100,000 prisoners from Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Greece, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the United States of America passed through this camp. In 1943, the Lamsdorf camp was split up, and many of the prisoners (and Arbeitskommandos) were transferred to two new base camps, Stalag VIII-C Sagan and Stalag VIII-D Teschen. The base camp at Lamsdorf was re-numbered Stalag 344. The Soviet Army reached the camp on March 17, 1945. Later the Lamsdorf camp was used by the Soviets to house Germans, both prisoners of war and civilians. Polish army personnel being repatriated from POW camps were also processed through Lamsdorf and sometimes held there as prisoners for several months. Some were later released, others sent to Gulags in Siberia”.