Welcome to a Stammlager VIIA

16th August 1941: British troops begin to fill up Moosburg, Stalag 7A, a large camp already familair to French POWS, soon to be familiar to American POWs

Thousands of French were already in Moosburg before the Australians, British, and New Zealanders arrived in 1941. “Les morts vivants” / the living dead, a drawing by the imprisoned French artist J. Bertrand.

Doug Palmer had been with a Heavy Anti-Aircraft battery when he was left behind on Crete at the beginning of June, along with nearly 5,000 other British, Australian and New Zealand troops, and forced to surrender. He endured the slow, filthy journey by rail from Greece to Germany with little more than potato soup - "it went through you like a dose of salts" - to sustain him. There was some respite when they reached Germany in mid-August:

Our eventual destination was Mooseburg, Stalag 7A, near Munich where already there were hundreds of P.O.W.s, Frenchmen, Yugoslavs and Serbians. It was a large camp and about a hundred men were put into a hut.

The sign outside Stammlager 7A, commonly known as ‘Moosburg’.

We were safely in the net, with high wire all round, lookout towers at each corner and guard dogs patrolling the perimeter. We settled down fairly comfortably in our huts with two tier beds and mattresses filled with straw, quite a luxury after the nightmare journey from Greece.

‘We were given our gefangenen number and photographed; then we were deloused and all our hair removed. We knew what it felt and looked like to be convicts, but wondered what we had done to deserve the treatment, and how long it would have to last.’

One of the watchtowers and the wire fence at Moosburg.