Stalag IIIC Alt Drewitz Cemetery

The German P.O.W. Camp in Alt Drewitz (at present Kostrzyn-Drzewice) functioned in 1939–1945 (since 1940 as Stalag III C). It comprised one of the most important center of the German Nazi forced stay during World War II. It was a territory of the unprecedented sample of breaking of the Hague and Copenhagen conventions from 1907 and 1929, respectively. The camp was destined for privates and N.C.O.'s. The prisoners of war of various nationalities were interned here: Czech, Polish, Belgian, French, Dutch, English, Yugoslavian, Greek, Russian, Italian and American. More than 70 thousand P.O.W.'s stayed there during the camp's functioning. In October 1939 there came approximately 7 thousand Polish soldiers. In September 1944 some several hundred of Warsaw Uprising fighters were imprisoned here.

The Stalag III C had more than 30 branches, where prisoners of war were used to execute different kinds of work for the German economy, such as war industry, drainage works, country estates, individual farms, motorways and railways' construction, etc. The living conditions in the camp were inhuman, they were breaking all resolutions of the international conventions. The camp lacked the elementary social and living conditions. The prisoners of war were converted into forced laborers and pressed into forced labor like slave slaves. The camp in Alt Drewitz comprised an inhuman example of P.O.W.'s treating during World War II. The prisoners were starved, nagged and beaten. There were a lot of examples of persecution, humiliation, lynch and public executions. As a result of the Nazi terror as well as the camp, conditions almost 12 thousand people died, most of them French and Soviet prisoners of war. The Stalag III C cemetery was tidied up in 1962.