Zwartberg Camp

Forced labour underground

The camp was built in June 1942 on the orders of the German Heeres Unterkunft Verwaltung 101: nineteen wooden huts, meant to hold 1,400 Soviet prisoners of war. The timber merchant De Coene of Kortrijk was requisitioned to supply the huts, which the occupier then made available to the Genk colliery managements free of charge; the collieries in turn supplied free coal for the sleeping quarters and the kitchen stoves.

The first civilian labour convoy to Limburg also included workers allocated to Zwartberg. Jean Put dates that convoy of 1,496 Ostarbeiter to 25 June 1942 and gives 257 of them to Zwartberg, while the local memorial study dates it to July 1942. Regional camp rules permitted music and radio but restricted contact with the Belgian population. Many deportees were young, ill or injured, and poorly suited to heavy mine work. The local memorial study records seven civilian forced workers dying of tuberculosis at Zwartberg between 1942 and 1944.

The 1942 arrivals did not all go straight behind wire. A local account records 257 workers reaching Zwartberg on 24 July 1942 and lodging in empty houses on IJzerstraat, with 197 housed in the barracks camp behind the church on 28 July. On 21 July a first convoy of people judged unfit had already been sent back towards Germany, 56 of them from Zwartberg. When the first Soviet prisoners of war reached Genk on 3 September 1942 the barracks camps were taken over by the Wehrmacht as Stalag 304, and the Ostarbeiter at Zwartberg were moved to the Waterschei camp so that the two groups were kept apart.

Jean Put’s tables give the recorded strength of the Zwartberg camp as 1,138 at the end of 1942, 1,373 at the end of 1943 and 1,386 in August 1944, in a provincial total that reached 6,852. From September 1942 these were prisoners of war rather than civilians.

Deaths in the camp

The heritage account states that 1,400 Soviet citizens were held at Zwartberg and that 36 of them died in the camp between October 1942 and the end of February 1945. Jean Put’s list of deaths by camp gives 35 for Zwartberg. The two figures are close but not identical and neither is a Ukrainian subtotal. Seventy-three of the men who died in the Genk mining camps are buried in a plot of honour on the municipal cemetery, the youngest aged seventeen and the oldest fifty-one.

Different populations, different regimes

After liberation the buildings were used successively for arrested collaborators, American military personnel and German prisoners of war. Belgian military supervision governed the German prisoner camp from 1945 to 1947. As prisoners left, huts became lodging for contracted workers, including Italians and men arriving from displaced-persons camps in Germany.

The heritage account is precise about the sequence. Collaborators arrested after the liberation of Genk on 14 September 1944 were held at Zwartberg and Waterschei until December 1944; at the end of January 1945 both camps and the primary school beside Sint-Albertuskerk were occupied by officers and men of the American air force. From May 1945 to 1947 Zwartberg was a German prisoner-of-war camp under the regional command of the Limburg prison camps, Bataljon Limburg 1, with new huts of the Belgian Adrian and Elite types built among the surviving German ones. The regime relaxed from October 1946, when German prisoners could be put to work in farming or in forestry cutting pit props, and the men were released in small numbers between 1 May and 1 November 1947. In 1947 the colliery appointed managers from its own staff to run the huts as lodgings for contract workers, chiefly Slavic men from the displaced-persons camps in liberated Germany and Italians.

Ukrainian life beyond the barracks

Postwar Ukrainian community organisation extended across the Genk mining districts. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic parish history identifies early communities in Zwartberg, Winterslag and Waterschei around 1949–1950. Clergy travelled between them, initially by bicycle, and services used local churches. This was a wider community network rather than an institution confined to the barracks.

The parish’s account describes families maintaining language and religious traditions through lessons, worship and cultural gatherings. It also records continued emigration overseas, which gradually reduced the number of Ukrainians in the district. The fuller 2016 version adds that Redemptorist fathers founded these first congregations, that mass was said in turn in the parish church at Zwartberg and in the churches at Waterschei and Zolder, and that the number of parish centres was eventually cut to three, of which Zwartberg was not one.

Demolition and remembrance

The camp was cleared and demolished at the end of 1956.

On 14 September 2018 a commemorative panel was unveiled at the former site. A lecture and illustrated brochure accompanied the event. The heritage grant supported the panel and printing, making the wartime presence of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners part of the neighbourhood’s public history.