Stalag VIII-B was most recently a German Army administered POW camp during World War II, later renumbered Stalag-344, located near the village of Lamsdorf (now Łambinowice) in Silesia.

It was recommissioned in 1939 to house Polish prisoners from the German invasion of Poland, which started World War II in September 1939.

Later during the war, approximately 100,000 prisoners from Australia, Belgium, British India, British Palestine, Canada, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, the United States and Yugoslavia passed through this camp.

Polish army personnel being repatriated from POW camps were also processed through Łambinowice and sometimes held there as prisoners for several months.

About 1000-1500 German prisoners died in the camp due to maltreatment and deprivation: malnutrition, lack of medicine and acts of violence and terror by the Soviet guards.

The others served as treatment blocks with operating theaters, X-ray and laboratory facilities, as well as kitchens, a morgue, and accommodations for the medical staff.

The lazarett was headed by a German officer with the title Oberst Arzt ("Colonel Doctor"), but the staff were entirely POWs.

In January 1945, as the Soviet armies advanced into Germany, many of the prisoners were sent on notorious forced marches, westward in groups of 200 to 300.

[1] Arbeitskommandos were set up to house lower ranks that were working in the coal mines, quarries, factories and on railways.

Most POWs were put to work in machine shops making pipes and repairing chemical plant equipment.

Sergeant Charles Coward even managed to pass intelligence about the atrocities occurring at Monowitz through letters to the British War Office.

Three days earlier, the inmates of Monowitz had been sent on their own death march to Gleiwitz near the Czech border where they boarded trains to Buchenwald in Germany and Mauthausen in Austria.

Everyone to whom I spoke gave the same story - the people in the city of Auschwitz, the SS men, concentration camp inmates, foreign workers - everyone said that thousands of people were being gassed and cremated at Auschwitz, and that the inmates who worked with us and who were unable to continue working because of their physical condition and were suddenly missing, had been sent to the gas chambers.

[5]In 1998, Arthur Dodd, a former British POW from Camp E715, published Spectator In Hell, a book about his time imprisoned at Monowitz.