Exhibit of the Month - Dec. '25
02.12.2025
As the exhibit of the month of December 2025, we present to you two wooden boxes which we have received as a loan from the Stalag 326 (VI K) Senne memorial site and which are exhibited in the Military History Collection (MGS).
Wooden crates were exchanged for food, the prohibition of which was forbidden by high punishments?
Our task is to remember this terrible time!
In this context, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Heinz-Helmut Dreimann from Detmold. Mr. Dreimann has also decided to keep alive the memory of the so-called "Displaced People." For example, he has combed through numerous archives to research what became of these people and where they found their new homes.
The forced laborers and prisoners of war produced various works of art in their free time, if one can even call it that, in order to exchange them with the population for food.
Those who were "lucky" were assigned to work in agriculture and received the bare necessities there; all the others suffered from hunger in addition to backbreaking labor.
Former Soviet prisoners of war drew comparisons to Auschwitz. What Auschwitz was for the Jews, Stukenbrock was for us.
Stalag 326 was not an extermination camp in the sense of the SS concentration camps; the main camps were under the control of the Wehrmacht. Nevertheless, countless people died of hunger, disease, and violence. The Soviet prisoners of war, in particular, had to live in catastrophic conditions.