Stalag X-B was a World War II German prisoner-of-war camp located near Sandbostel in Lower Saxony in north-western Germany.

[citation needed] In August 1939, a commission of Heeresbauamt Bremen (military construction department) decided to create a Mannschafts-Stammlager (POW camp) for the local Wehrkreis X.

Once it began operating, the camp was divided into several sub-camps:[1] At first, prisoners were housed in tents, but from spring 1940 inmates constructed masonry huts.

In addition, there was a hospital (Reservelazarett X-B) and a punishment work camp of two huts inside the moor.

[1] From the fall of 1941, sections of the camp were cleared or moved to make room for Soviet prisoners taken during "Operation Barbarossa".

At the top were British and American POWs, generally treated correctly according to the Geneva Convention and receiving numerous aid packages from the International Red Cross.

Italians, who came here after September 1943, were deemed traitors by both the German guards and the other prisoners and were at the low end of the hierarchy.

[4] In August 1944, all POW camps were removed from Wehrmacht control and were assigned to Heinrich Himmler's Schutzstaffel (SS).

[1] They were housed in the former Marlag and guarded well but otherwise left to their own devices: they received no medical help despite rampant diseases, sanitary conditions were dire and the inmates went virtually without food.

On 20 April, most of the SS members guarding that section of Stalag X-B marched out of the camp with several hundred prisoners.

[5] The camp was liberated on 29 April 1945 by the British Armed Forces of XXX Corps following fighting with the German 15th Panzergrenadier-Division.

The first contained allied prisoners in unsatisfactory conditions, but generally in compliance with the International Red Cross Convention.

In the third section were around 8,000 civilian prisoners in appalling conditions, described in the Army medical history as "utterly horrifying"; "everywhere the dead and dying sprawled amid the slime of human excrement.

Like at Bergen-Belsen, despite the best efforts of the British, hundreds of inmates died every day immediately following the liberation as a result of starvation, typhus and other diseases.

[7] Other, more serviceable, huts were used by the British to house imprisoned Nazis and SS members, who were awaiting trial.

[9] As early as 8 July 1945, the British military authorities established one of nine civilian internment camps in a part of the former Stalag X-B.

Internees were not charged with individual crimes but with membership in a criminal organisation, as defined by the Nuremberg trials.

[10] In March 1948, the Justice Department of the State of Lower Saxony established the Strafgefängnis Lager Sandbostel at the site of the Stalag.

This prison soon housed around 600 male inmates, imprisoned for periods between two months and two years, mostly for property-related crimes, in six large huts.

[11] Beginning in 1952, parts of the camp were used as an emergency reception centre for refugees from Communist East Germany or GDR.

The Ministry of Defence for a while considered building a barracks at the site, but eventually chose Seedorf as the location.

Its inscription had read "Hier ruhen 46.000 russische Soldaten und Offiziere, zu Tode gequält in der Nazigefangenschaft" ("Here lie 46,000 Russian soldiers and officers, tortured to death in Nazi imprisonment").

Only around 170 individual graves of POWs from Poland, Yugoslavia or of unknown nationality remain in the graveyard at Sandbostel.