Life In a Unique Nazi POW Camp

By Duane Schultz On July 28, 2018, at the Doubletree Hilton Hotel near Dulles Airport, outside Washington, D.C., Mariusz Winiecki, a 42-year-old Polish professor, told an audience of Americans about his experiences growing up in the small town of Szubin, 150 miles southeast of Warsaw. Everyone in the audience knew where Szubin was and what it had been during World War II – a Nazi POW camp. Szubin had been the site of Oflag 64 (an abbreviation of the German term Offizierslager, meaning “Officers’ Camp”). Formerly a boys’ school, it consisted of a large, white, three-story stucco house surrounded by newly-built wooden, brick, and stucco barracks to house the American POWs. The quarters for the Kriegies, as they called themselves (short for Kriegesgefanganen or “war prisoner”), were among the best to be found in any German POW camp. High-ranking American officers lived four to a room in the main building; each room had its own toilet and sink, rare items in any prisoner-of-war camp. The rest of the officers lived in the barracks. Lieutenant Brooks Kleber, captured at Normandy, recalled, “We lived in dormitories. We were not overcrowded. We had cubicles made out of beds and lockers. Our mattresses were stuffed with straw, which was tolerable.” Lieutenant Sidney Thal spoke about the camp at age 95 in 2008. He remembered, “We were never abused. We were never mistreated. We operated, acted and reacted solely by the Geneva Convention as much as we could, and s