Stalag VIII-B
Stalag VIII-B was a German Army prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, later renumbered Stalag-344, located near the village of Lamsdorf (now Łambinowice) in Silesia. The camp initially occupied barracks built to house British and French prisoners in World War I. At this same location there had been a prisoner camp during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Timeline In the 1860s, the Prussian Army established a training area for artillery at a wooded area near Lamsdorf, a small village connected by rail to Opole and Nysa. During the Franco-Prussian War, a camp for French prisoners of war was established here, which housed some 3000 French POW's. During the First World War, a much larger POW camp was established here with some 90,000 soldiers of various nationalities interned here. After the treaty of Versailles, the camp was closed down. It was reopened 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