- Marlag und Milag Nord
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Marlag und Milag Nord was a German Prisoner-of-war camp in Military District X, located near Westertimke, Germany.
There were over 5,000 Allied Merchant seamen captured by the German forces during World War II. Some 4,500 of these mariners were held at the Merchant Navy Internment camp at Westertimke, near Bremen, Germany.
Milag (for Marine Internierten Lager), was first created as one of two compounds inside Sandbostel Stalag X-B, Concentration camp, south of Bremervörde, Germany, for the purpose of housing captured Merchant seamen. An adjoining compound, Marlag (for Marine Lager) was for captured Royal Navy personnel.
Between the Autumn of 1941 and the Spring of 1942 the occupants of these compounds were transferred to Marlag und Milag Nord, two separate but adjacent camps at Westertimke, 20 kilometres away. It is this virtually self-contained Merchant Navy POW camp that was referred to by the Merchant Seamen as MILAG, their previous compound in the concentration camp being generally known just as Sandbostel or Stalag X-B.
Then-RNVR officer Lt. David James was a prisoner at Marlag in 1943 and escaped twice, the second time successfully. His account of his 11 months in (and out of) the camp was published in the US under the title Escaper's Progress and in the UK as Prisoner's Progress (William Blackwood 1947). A review at the time described the work as "one of the better escape books."
On 27 January 1945 Allied POWs from Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Poland were force marched in sub-zero temperatures hundreds of miles westwards towards their destination of Spremberg in Germany. At Spremberg they were loaded onto cattle trains, seventy to a truck without windows. One of their destinations was Marlag Nord, where they arrived after a three day journey to Bremen. The Red Cross had already condemned Marlag Nord as unfit and unsanitary.[1]
The camp was liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division on 2 May 1945.
In 1946 Marlag was used as a location for the Basil Dearden movie The Captive Heart as the camp had remained largely intact since the end of the war the previous year.
See also
- Laws of war
- Prisoner of war
- Prisoner-of-war camp
- List of German WWII POW camps
- The March (1945)
References
External links
Categories:- World War II prisoner of war camps
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