The January 1945 offensive by the Soviet army swept the Germans out of the lands along the Bóbr, which returned to the Motherland (some historians called this compensation for the Eastern Borderlands, which the Big Three handed over to the Soviet state after the war).
Just before this, German forces evacuated the prisoner-of-war camps in Zgorzelec, Żagań and Świętoszów westward; before the evacuation, they brought in prisoner-of-war labor detachments.
There is no doubt that, amid the chaos prevailing in the German rear, a few prisoner-of-war labor detachments must have remained, such as the aforementioned detachment consisting of French soldiers. We know of another, non-evacuated detachment consisting of British soldiers. They were housed and employed in the village of Wierzbowa near Gromadka, in a large hall—the village community center—enclosed with barbed wire. Today, P. Stanisław Paluszek lives there with his family. The barbed-wire fence and washbasins with taps located in the courtyard remained there for many years after the war. The fate of this detachment is unknown. A few weeks after Wierzbowa was occupied by the Red Army, they were taken away in Soviet vehicles in an unknown direction. German villagers told Polish settlers—military colonists—that the Red Army soldiers could not communicate with the British soldiers and wanted to treat them as some kind of formation collaborating with the Germans. Hence the concern for the fate of the British. Let us hope that they returned to their family homes.
Prisoners in the labor detachments fell ill and died as a result of slave-like working conditions and poor nutrition. It is suspected that they were executed for some offenses.
Gromadka Germans who remained in these lands until the mid-1950s spoke of the execution of Polish prisoners of war.
The District Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Wrocław was informed of this. The County Citizens' Militia Headquarters was ordered to conduct an investigation into the matter. The investigation was never completed. The inexorably passing time erased all traces: those in human memory as well as the material traces.
Many Polish soldiers—prisoners of war from labor detachments located in the Bolesławiec area—settled in our town or in villages of Bolesławiec County. Some did not stay here long: they returned to their family homes. Let us therefore mention only two men from the “Arbeitskommando” detachments located in Bolesławiec County, who settled here permanently in the summer of 1945 and died here. They were deserving pioneers of our town (today this word is unknown! The first Lower Silesian daily newspaper was called “Pionier,” and numerous commercial cooperatives also bore that name), who, together with the first repatriates arriving from Drohobych in the summer of 1945, were the first to undertake the arduous work of clearing the town of rubble and then contributing to its development. They were the late Józef Damian and Stanisław Wasilewski, who was mayor of Bolesławiec for some time. The son of the late Józef Damian is entered in the Bolesławiec birth register under number 1. Let us also note, to bring the dark years of the Second World War to a close, before a Polish soldier from the army arrived here with a weapon in his hand, that there were two subcamps in Bolesławiec—subsidiary camps of the Gross Rosen extermination camp in Rogoźnica—which had existed since 1940.
The number of prisoners held in these subsidiary camps is unknown. One of the subcamps was called “Komando Bunzlau 1” and was located at the “Hubert Land – Holzbau” plant, a woodworking facility where wooden gliders for airborne units were manufactured. Prisoners were employed in production. Poles were among them as well. Today, “Metalplast” is located in the large glider-production halls—hangars (Staroszkolna Street). A commemorative boulder honoring the memory of the prisoners has been placed by the entrance gate. The second subcamp of the Gross Rosen concentration camp, called “Russenlager-Concordia Wesser F/Ugzeug Werk Bunzlau,” was a camp consisting of Russian prisoners employed at the “Concordia” aircraft plants. Today, the “Sława” plant is located in these buildings (Orla Street).