Macikai POW and GULAG Camps

After the region was annexed by Germany in 1939, the barracks became Stalag 331, a POW camp. Later, it was renamed Stalag 1C Heydekrug, later still, Stalag Luft VI Heydekrug. First, the camp was used to hold Polish prisoners of war. Since 1940, captive Belgians and French would be interned there as well. In 1943, British and Canadian air force non-commissioned officers were held prisoners at the camp. Later on, a shipment of American, Australian, and even New Zealand POWs was brought to the camp. Soviet soldiers were also imprisoned in the camp.[1]

According to US intelligence, at least 10,000 people could have been held at Macikai prior to the Soviet occupation. This number included a few Allied ace pilots.[3] It was the northern-most POW camp within the bounds of the German Reich.[4]

In October 1943, a group of British POWs organized a secret resistance movement in the camp.[5] In cooperation with the Polish resistance movement, they organized escapes of British POWs through the port cities of Gdynia and Gdańsk to neutral Sweden.[5] After an unsuccessful attempt by one English POW to escape on his own, the Gestapo discovered the British resistance and carried out arrests of its members.[5]

As the frontline drew near in 1944, the prisoners were transferred to other camps. Most of them were brought by train to Stalag XX-A in Toruń in German-occupied Poland. Nearly 900 men brought to Klaipėda were shipped by the commercial vessel Instenburg to the port of Świnoujście (then Swinemunde) near Szczecin bay; the journey was 60 hours long. After that, they took a train and had to walk the rest of the way to Stalag Luft IV near Tychowo in today's Poland. Some of the prisoners died or were killed along the way.[6] This march was one of the "Long Marches".[7]

Numerous remains of prisoners from the Nazi Germany’s POW camp were discovered buried under a road in Village Armalėnai, Šilutė district, in 2011. An archaeological survey was done in 2020 to exhume the remains of more than 1,200 people. The remains were then buried next to the old cemeteries of the Macikai camps.[8]

After the second Soviet occupation of Lithuania, the Soviets established in Macikai, the former German prisoner-of-war camp, the following:

1. German and Allied Prisoners-of-War Camp No. 184, which operated from 1945 to 1948. Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, Austrians, the Czech, the Dutch, Danes and people of other nationalities were imprisoned there. In 1946, the camp was reorganized and renamed as the treatment camp; the seriously ill and physically exhausted prisoners of war were brought there from all camps in Lithuania. During this period, approximately 500 people died there;[9]
2. The Gulag camp, which operated from 1945 to 1955. Civilians, political prisoners, priests, as well as women and children were imprisoned there.[10] Most prisoners were Lithuanians, Russians, Poles, and Belarusians. The Soviets would imprison people in the Gulag camp for 'counter- revolutionary crimes' (members of the resistance movement, partisan supporters, farmers having failed to pay obligations, and people having fled exile). Criminals were also held in the camp. In 1948–1955, approximately 450 people died in the camp.[11]

Political prisoners sentenced to 25 years of correctional work at the camp were held in a separate enclosed area. Even though official documents would often falsify the causes of prisoner deaths, it is a known fact that people would be executed by firing squad or exterminated in gas chambers; some of them would die from cold and hunger. The camp had a branch on Rusnė Island, which was founded in 1951 and held a population of around 200. In 1948 to 1955, nearly 450 people perished at the Macikai Gulag camp. Dead prisoners would be buried next to the camp. Currently, the cemetery is surrounded by a fence; however, there are no exact data as to how many people are actually buried there.[12]

The Gulag camp was closed on June 18, 1955. After that, efforts were made to tear down the prisoner cemetery. An irrigation project for the territory of the cemetery was drawn in 1955. Even though the irrigation was never completed, the remaining area of the cemetery is now smaller, because its western side had been washed and eroded by the River Šyša for an extended period of time, and its northern and eastern territory was used as pastures and tilled land. In the second half of the 20th century, residential buildings were erected on a portion of the cemetery.

Archaeological excavations of the mass graves of the Gulag camp in Macikai, discovered in 2020, will also be launched in the near future.