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After 39 days of operation of the transit camp Dulag VIII B, by a decision of the Third Reich authorities, it was transformed into a permanent camp for privates and non-commissioned officers - Stalag VIII B Lamsdorf. This event took place on 4 October 1939, exactly 83 years ago.

From the start of Dulag VIII B (26 August 1939), there came through the camp about 43,000 Poles, mostly soldiers of the Polish Army, but also civilians, among whom was Father Maximilian Kolbe. On the other hand, in Stalag VIII B, until the end of the war, there were held prisoners-of-war of various armies fighting the Germans, mainly the British, hence the camp was colloquially dubbed the Britenlager (“British”). There has been very little preserved of the original camp infrastructure: fire water tanks, fragments of huts, storehouses and the Chestnut Alley, along which POWs were led into the camp. In the middle of 1943, the nearby Stalag 318/VIII F Lamsdorf (Russenlager) was subordinated to it, and later on – also Stalag VIII D Teschen. At the end of 1943, the Lamsdorf complex was renamed Stalag 344, retaining the name until the end of the War and during the time when, at the beginning of October, another group of Polish soldiers, the Warsaw insurgents, was brought to the camp,

There were about 300 thousand prisoners-of-war in total from dozens of nations from all over the world who came through the Lamsdorf POW camps during the years of Second World War. January 1945 saw the evacuation of the POWs. Detachments of the Red Army entered the area of the camps on 17 and 18 March 1945.