The Prisoners of Königsbrück

They were probably the first to arrive.
Begrudging passengers on trains
where the language spoken on the trip out
was now a very different language on the return.

They were put to work digging in sandy soil
building their own camp.
It was hard work but at least 

construction was better than destruction. 

They were Russian and French soldiers,
captives of the war, 1914-1918,
and incarcerated at a German military prison camp
in Königsbrück, Saxony.

Map of the main prison camps in Germany and Austria
by Mrs. Pope-Hennessy, 1920
Source: Internet Archive

The first postcard image is of a train with Russian soldiers looking out the carriage windows  at a large block of German armed servicemen, probably a Saxony state police force, on the train platform. The caption reads:

Königsbrück - Ankunft gefangener Russen
~
Königsbrück - Arrival of captured Russians

The postcard was never posted but the back has an inscription curiously printed in red ink in French.

Arrivée des prisonniers Russes à Königsbrück
~
Arrival of Russian prisoners at Königsbrück

* * *

This next image shows a group of captured Russian soldiers destined for the POW camp at Königsbrück. The back of this half-tone printed postcard has the same caption:

Königsbrück - Ankunft gefangener Russen
~
Königsbrück - Arrival of captured Russians

The publisher is the same as on the train postcard: Verlag: Carl Schmidt, Königsbrück. I suspect that the photographs were taken by photographers on assignment from the German government's Information Office to produce propaganda postcards for German troops, though the French caption implies the cards could be used by the POWs too. This card was sent using the free-post available to the military during the war by a German soldier named Rainhard to a Fraulein Luise Vofs(?) in Hademarschen, a town in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany near the Kiel Canal. The postmark is obscured so there is no date.

* * *

The image of the men digging in the sand was cropped from another postcard captioned in German on the back:

Gefangene Franzosen bei der Arbeit
~
French Prisoners at work

This Kriefs-Postkarte – War Postcard was sent from Königsbrück to a German soldier's family on 25 February 1915. The rules for dealing with captive soldiers were very sketchy in 1914 and not entirely understood or accepted by the belligerent nations. Everyone expected this to be a short conflict, over by Christmas, so making practical arrangements for the hundreds of thousands of prisoners unexpectedly taken on both the Western and Eastern Fronts was sorely neglected by the German military and civil authorities. In general POWs were not supposed to be used for any labor that supported the war effort. As Europe was still a very class-structured society, officers were supposedly excluded from doing any work. Nonetheless, many soldiers were drafted into manual details for rough construction or agriculture.

* * *

This group of French soldiers appear as relaxed as if they were on the streets of Paris. But standing behind them are German soldiers guarding them as prisoners of war. I expect they are on a street in Königsbrück and like the Russians soldiers are about to march off from the train depot to the POW camp. The publisher is the same Carl Schmidt and on the back is a caption:

Königsbrück - Gefangene Franzosen
~
Königsbrück - French Prisoners

There is no postmark but at the top left in faded purple ink is a faint Königsbrück 11_30_14 written by a soldier to someone in Chemnitz, in Saxony. This early date in the war shows how quickly propaganda was mobilized by the Kaiser's government to reassure the German public that their troops were winning by showing images of the captured enemy. By my rough estimation the majority of postcards depicting POW camps were used by German soldiers, presumably those assigned to the camps or nearby. The next largest are postcards sent by French or Belgian soldiers from the POW camps. Surprisingly not many were sent by British POWs, or at least not many have survived to be sold online. And I have yet to see any that were sent by Russian soldiers. They were the ones who suffered the worst privations and were typically isolated from the French and British in separate camps.

The map showing the hundreds of POW camps in Germany and Austria came from a small gazetteer produced during the last stage of the war. It was compiled by Mrs. Pope-Hennessy to help families of British POWs understand the complex system of German military prison, several of which were for civilians interred as enemy foreigners in 1914. Page 7 describes the camp in Königsbrück – in Saxony. A camp wooden hutments situated on sandy soil amidst pine-woods a short distance from the town. Capacity, 15,000. 12th Army Corps (the German military force in charge.)

Map of the main prison camps in Germany and Austria
by Mrs. Pope-Hennessy, 1920
Source: Internet Archive

After just one month of war, in September 1914 the German army had captured over 200,000 enemy combatants - Russian, Belgian, French, and British as well as confining a large number of foreign civilians. By early 1915 their POW population had grown to 652,000, increasing to 1,625,000 by August 1916, and finally reaching 2,415,000 by the end of the war. Though the men were removed from the hazards of war they still endured hardship from poor food, ill health, and unsanitary conditions, not to mention the mental and emotional stress of being indefinitely confined away from their families and compatriots.

For reasons not entirely clear there are a lot of photo postcards of the Königsbrück POW camp. Perhaps because the town had a number of good photographers, or the camp allowed prisoners to use cameras, I'm not certain why. A few years ago in July 2014 I wrote about some of the postcards of the Königsbrück POW theatre in a story entitled Theatrical Ladies. There is still much more to write about the musical and artistic activities that the Königsbrück prisoners created to alleviate the boredom of captivity, so stay tuned for future posts on this POW camp. 

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
click the link for another side of the track.