Heer Soldbuch – Uffz (Dr) Burchard – Stammlarger VI F Bocholt – Guard of the Camp – Iron Cross Second Class April 1945! (SOLD)
Soldbuch Issued to Dr Hans Burchard, who had a doctorate in Mathematics.
He would serve at Stalag VI F in Bocholt right to the wars end, winning the Iron Cross Second Class in April 1945 for: Bravery in the face of the enemy! An interesting and unusual entry for combat in the last stages of the war. Also nice to note is the fact that in the picture on the Soldbuch of Burchard, he is wearing a nice shoulder board displaying his unit.
Interesting fact about the camp was that during the Market Garden (Holland 1944) operation the camp was evacuated as it was too close to the frontline.
Beginning at the end of 1939, prisoners of war from Poland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France and Senegal arrived at the camp, which was presumably set up in 1940 as “Stalag VI F” for prisoner-of-war crew ranks and NCOs. According to the Geneva POW of 1929, captured soldiers of the team ranks could be used by the detaining power for all kinds of work except in the armaments industry. This manpower reservoir was of considerable importance for the war economy, especially since the employment ban in the armaments industry was hardly observed during the course of the war. The camp was a central facility for supplying heavy industry with labor. The prisoners of war, including Russians since 1941, were used for labor service as far as the Ruhr area. On November 20, 1941, the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) designated main camp VI F as a “general mining reception camp”.
The camp (with the exception of the camp section for the Soviet prisoners of war) was viewed by the Red Cross in 1940 as “one of the best camps” and in 1943 as “relatively bearable”. In 1941 the camp was considerably enlarged with emergency barracks. In total, far more than 1,736 Soviet prisoners of war died in the separate “Russian camp” from starvation, violence and typhus. They found their final resting place in nameless graves in a separate cemetery on Vardingholter Strasse in Bocholt. It was only recently that the names of 1,333 deceased could be clarified.
There is many references and links to the camp online, and would be worthy of further research.