The Königsbrück POW Camp, Music in Captivity

 

It looks like a military band playing a typical outdoor concert.

The soldiers are all in uniform led by bandleader
wielding a baton as long as a sword.

But it's not really a band
as the only wind instruments
are a clarinet and a flute

and the rest are string instruments.
Their uniforms are an odd mix of regimental dress.

And slippers are rarely included in an army kit.

The men also sit on stout rustic stools
with crude wooden music stands.
Not really military issue.

A closer look shows that the violins
are simple wooden boxes made roughly like folk instruments,
and the drummer has only a tambourine and triangle.
They couldn't make enough noise
for a platoon to march to
much less a regiment.

The group also has a cellist,
rarely seen in a military marching band.
but his instrument is strangely made, too,
with a flat angular shape and a simple headstock for the string pegs
instead of a cello's traditional curves and carved scroll box.
There is also a guitarist which is also an uncommon instrument
to find in any orchestra or concert band.
His instrument is more shapely than the violins or cello
but its wooden top has a very coarse grain.

The men wear French Army uniforms
of the Great War of 1914-18.

But instead of defending their homeland
they are hundreds of miles from the battle lines
playing music in a place they never expected to be.

They were captives,
French soldiers held in a German prisoner of war camp
located in Königsbrück, Saxony, Germany.

It was a quiet place
far removed from the constant terror
that tormented their comrades
on the Western Front.

Here the men were confined but safe

with a lot of time to pursue other avocations 
that most soldiers never dreamed of in this violent age.

In Königsbrück one of these popular recreations for soldiers was music. 

There was a lot of it.

The full postcard photo shows 12 French soldiers with musical instruments seated on a flat dirt plaza in the shade of some trees. It could almost be a park in Paris. But the caption gives a different location: Gefangenen Lager Königsbrück Musik Kapelle ~  Prisoner of War Königsbrück Music Band. The men wear an assortment of different coats and tunics, but they all have the French army field cap. Their collar and cap badges have a mix of different regimental numbers with the addition of a white paper sticker signifying their prison barrack's number. 

The back of the postcard has a lengthy message in German with a handwritten date of 3 October 1915, about 14 months since the beginning of the war in August 1914. On this same date the commander of the French Army, General Joffre, abandoned his attempt at a breakthrough in Champagne, ordering the local commanders to fight a battle of attrition, which was terminated on 6 November. The  offensive had only advanced the French line for about 2.5 mi (4 km) at a cost of ±100,000 French and British casualties. The French attack in Champagne used 35 divisions against 16 German divisions and its artillery fired 2,842,400 field artillery shells and 577,700 heavy shells, which, at that time, exhausted the French stock of ammunition.

The photographer was Carl Schmidt of Königsbrück, and his studio produced thousands of photos of the prison camp. Most were used by the prisoners or their German guards. 

Königsbrück was one of 176 similar camps set up by the Imperial German Army, 96 camps for enlisted and non-commissioned officers and 80 separate camps for officers. The camp at Königsbrück was chosen because, conveniently, there was already an army training base there, just outside the town. The camp received its first prisoners, about 1,000 French soldiers from the Western Front, on 27 August 1914. Soon afterward several thousand Russian soldiers from the Eastern Front arrived. The German military command quickly realized that success in war created a new problem. They would need a much larger prison system, so a new expanded camp for common rank soldiers was hastily constructed in Königsbrück. 

Two months later at the end of October 1914, the Königsbrück POW camp housed 14,535 enlisted men and noncommissioned officers. All were secured by a guard detail of around 1,800 German soldiers. By 1916 the camp was divided into four sections: a French camp with 4,000 prisoners; a Russian camp with 8,000; a Serb camp with 3,000; and a smaller Italian camp of just a few hundred. The last two nationalities were prisoners taken in action against the forces of Austria-Hungary, Germany's ally. 

Several years ago when I first discovered postcard photos of soldier orchestras from WW1 prisoner of war camps, I was intrigued by how many camps developed music and theater programs for their captive audience of soldiers. My collection now has hundreds of these postcards which depict the ways the men entertained themselves after they had been removed from the battlefield. In 1914 none of the nations at war ever expected it to continue beyond a few months, but after the initial battle lines settled into a stationary conflict, the logistics of maintaining prisoner-of-war camps became a major challenge that had not been included in war planning. By November 1918 when the war ended Germany had around 2.5 million men confined in prison camps. 

With so many captive soldiers, there was only limited work that they could be used for, and then only the enlisted men, not officers. The camps retained internal order using each captive army's military rules and language. But how could a camp prevent boredom, the tedious malaise of every prison? International postal service was disrupted because of closed borders but agreements were soon reached that allowed prisoners' mail to follow a circuitous route through neutral countries like Switzerland. Postcards were already a popular and easy method of  communication so photos like the one of the Königsbrück band were produced for both domestic post and enemy prisoner mail. 

In the first years of the war, the United States was also neutral before it finally joined the allies in April 1917. It also had a very large German-American population. American aid societies like the Red Cross and YMCA worked to provide prison camps on both sides of the war with book libraries and, surprisingly, musical instruments. In this era before radio and recorded music a band or orchestra was considered vital to manage the morale and spirits of imprisoned soldiers. However the handmade instruments suggest that at the beginning of the war the Königsbrück prisoners found a way to make their own musical instruments even before the YMCA provided assistance. 

In this photo an ensemble of 23 soldiers, all string players, pose for Carl Schmidt's camera. Nearly all are holding a mandolin, with just a few violinists and a cellist to add variety. The caption reads: Gefangenen Lager Königsbrück Franzosen Kapelle ~ Königsbrück Prisoner of War Camp French Band. Most of the instruments have the same folk style construction. The cello has the classic body shape but it is flat, not arched, and the peg head is plainly made. It may be the same instrument as in the first photo but the player is a different man

Making a violin, much less a cello, requires a number of sharp tools like saws, planes, chisels, drills, etc. plus some descent timber, too, not to mention gut strings and horsehair for the bow. A mandolin is similar to a violin but has doubled strings. How were these instruments acquired? While it's possible the instruments were donated or purchased from a German woodworker in Königsbrück, I think it is more likely that a fellow soldier with the special skills of a luthier constructed these instruments. The wood probably came from boxes or was salvaged from piles of kindling around camp. The horse hair for the bows was likely easy to find in a rural community like this. But where did the tools come from?

Like the previous postcard, this one was sent by a German soldier, most likely a guard, using free military post on 8 September 1915. On that same evening in September, four German Navy Zeppelins flew across the English Channel on a bombing raid of London. Two of the airships turned back because of engine trouble, while another got lost and instead attacked a petrol plant at Skinningrove, Yorkshire that caused little damage. However the fourth zeppelin reached London, where it released a 300-kg (661-lb) bomb, the largest yet dropped on Britain, which killed 22 people and inflicted the most damage by a single airship or airplane bombing raid throughout all of World War I.

 

Of course music doesn't have to be played in large groups. The men interned in the Königsbrück camp also formed smaller ensembles. This private photo has a quartet of a French sailor and three soldiers seated on a park bench and playing a mandolin, a trumpet, an accordion, and a violin. They look like friends but the photo may have been staged as propaganda to demonstrate the pleasant conditions in the camp. Unlike in the other ensembles the string instruments are properly made. The violinist looks very competent, even professional, in his stance. The trumpet has rotary valves which would not be the favored design in France where piston valves were used on brass instruments.

This postcard was never mailed but has the same printed form on the back used by Carl Schmidt's photography studio for the Königsbrück camp.

This next POW ensemble from Königsbrück is an octet of string players, except for one trumpet player in the back who may be the same man pictured on the park bench. The other instruments are violins, a cello, a double bass, and possibly a viola. The men are seated very close together on a small stage framed by curtains and a painted backdrop. Written in ink is a caption: "Baracken lager – Lauenstein – Orchestre." The name may refer to a nickname for the barrack as Lauenstein, Germany is about 250 miles east of Königsbrück. 

The octet's instruments all look to be of traditional construction. The men appear to be quite serious about their music and except for the uniforms they could easily be professional musicians performing in a theater. I wish I knew how they found instruments during wartime. Did they have help from their German captors? And what about sheet music? Any skilled musician could make arrangements for the camp's eclectic mix of instruments, but they would still need blank music paper, another commodity that would have been in short supply or rationed. 

The postcard was sent to Michael Pineau of Courdemanche, a commune in the Sarthe department of the Pays de la Loire region in north-western France. The sender was Adrien Pineau, a soldier in the 90th Infantry Regiment. The red censor stamp has a date of 28 October 1918, just two weeks before an armistice was declared to end the war. Already the allied forces had prevailed over the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. And by this date the Hapsburg Empire was beginning to break up with the Austrian-Hungarian army retreating in Italy and new democratic governments in Czechoslovakia and Hungary rushing to establish new independent nations. In ten days Kaiser Wilhelm is forced to abdicate the German throne and flees to the Netherlands. 

It seems the soldiers confined to the Königsbrück camp had no shortage of talent as there was a vibrant theater there. I last wrote about some postcards from these productions in my story, The Königsbrück POW Camp, A Theatre of War, published in December 2023. Most of these shows seemed to include a small orchestra seated in front of the theater's small stage. In this photo an orchestra of ten musicians watch attentively to the action on stage where two French officers appear to question a woman while her maid and houseboy set (or clear) a meal. Music was often used in all kinds of theater works as an interlude between scene changes. Here the caption reads: Gefangenen Lager Königsbrück Teater.

Most of the prisoners in Königsbrück were Russian and that section of the camp had its own theater and orchestra. Here a group of seven musicians watch a play that looks like a romantic comedy involving a happy (or unhappy) couple, a judge or father, and an old crone. The play's title is written in Russian Cyrillic script on a poster in the center. The musicians are seated on the same rustic stools used in my first orchestra photo. We can't see their instruments by I believe they are all string instruments with at least two or more Russian balalaika, a triangular strummed instrument.

The back of this card has a long message in German, again likely sent by a German guard at the Königsbrück camp. I think it is dated 14 March (März) 1915, but German handwriting is quite challenging. ( Zs and umlauts are particularly difficult to spot.) Just four days before this date the Battle of Neuve Chapelle started in the Artois region of France. The British Army and the Indian Corps attacked a point on the German trenches and briefly captured a new position, but were repulsed a day latter and forced to retreat. The British sustained 12,892 casualties, ±7,000 British and ±4,200 Indian, while the Germans lost around 8,500–10,000 men over the full 11-day campaign.  

Several photos in my collection are of variety shows put on in the Königsbrück POW camp. In this photo there are 15 musicians in the orchestra and 24 performers in the cast. The two women on stage, and in the other theater photos too, are not women, of course, but men, a theatrical illusion that goes back to ancient times. To assign any sexuality/gender terms from our 21st century to these entertainers of 1914-18 is grossly incorrect and an injustice, I think, to the history of theatrical artists.

The orchestra is predominantly French but there are some Russian soldiers in it too, marked by their peaked caps. The instruments are mostly traditional made, but the guitar and cello/bass on the right are clearly made in a crude folk style. 

This photo was produced by Carl Schmidt's studio of Königsbrück, but was never posted.

This photo is captioned Gefangenenlager Königsbrück Serben and shows a string band of seven Serbian soldiers standing on the same sandy plaza as my first photo of the French orchestra. Their violins are all traditionally made and there is a double bass, too, played by the shortest musician. 

Though in July 1914 Germany declared war on Serbia in support of its ally Austria-Hungary it did not initially send troops there until October 1915 when a second campaign was launched under German command. At some point after that, thousands of captured Serbian soldiers were sent to the Königsbrück POW camp, a number that eventually reached around 3,000. They were housed in a separate section that probably had more connection to the Russian section, since their language also uses a Cyrillic alphabet. 

This card was sent by a French soldier named Georges Cretté of the 82nd Infantry to Mademoiselle Renee Piette of  Beauvais, a town in the Oise département of northern France, 75 kms (47 miles) north of Paris. 

In this next photo the same seven Serbian musicians are surrounded by their fellow Serbs. The caption reads Königsbrück Serbenlager. 

Serbian music was probably considered pretty exotic for the other French and Russian soldiers, not to mention the German guards at Königsbrück. Serbia like the other Balkan ethnic nations has a  folk music tradition that uses modal scales and asymmetric rhythms that are not part of central European musical culture. 

The card was sent by a German soldier but without a date.

Perhaps the most unexpected musician see in the Königsbrück POW camp was a bagpiper. In this case a Serbian piper accompanied by two  E-flat clarinetists play while a ring of Serb soldiers dance around them. The high treble clarinets are typical piccolo instruments found in many brass bands around the world but they would not have been common in German bands. I think they must have come with the musicians when they were captured. Likewise the bagpipes are very unusual to see. Though it's a simple folk instrument with a single drone and chanter, the Serbian pipes are very different from the Scottish highland pipes, or the German Dudelsack, or the dozens of other European bagpipes. 

In this photo the Serbian piper is playing alone in the midst of other Serbian and Russian soldiers. It has recently rained and the camp street has turned into sandy mud. Carl Schmidt numbered this photo #654. 

This photo was numbered  #653 and shows a different pose of the same piper. This postcard was sent by Alfred Gigout, a Sergeant of the 153rd Infantry Regiment, to his wife Madame Gigout of Manonville, a commune in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department in north-eastern France. What did she think when she saw this photo? 

When the captured Serbian soldiers were sent to Königsbrück they arrived with a large number of sick men, mainly suffering typhus, which required them to be quarantined. Contagious disease was the worst calamity that any prison could experience but it was especially onerous for a POW camp which had limited resources. In Königsbrück 176 Serbs died from typhus and were buried in a cemetery there. 

In September 1918 a monument to the fallen Serb soldiers was erected in the cemetery. It was made in stone and carved by sculptor Edmund Delphaut, a French adjutant of the 153rd Infantry Regiment. I wrote about this impressive statue in my August 2021 story Monument to the Fallen, Königsbrück 1918. 

In this clip from a photo of the Serb monument, the artist Delphaut is looking up at his statue. I believe the other man next to him, looking at the camera, is Alfred Gigout. During the four years  he was confined to the prison camp, Alfred regularly sent photos of Königsbrück's camp life to his wife . Many of these postcards are now in my collection and have inspired me to tell the story of this remarkable place.

If you Google "Königsbrück Germany" the first image that pops up is of this same monument to the fallen Serb soldier of World War One. It is all that remains of the German prisoner of war camp of 1914–18. After the war most of the remains of soldiers buried there were disinterred and taken back to their native lands. The barracks and grounds of the Königsbrück prison camp were taken over for other military use.  Eventually after the Second World War and then the division of Germany in the Cold War the land reverted to a forest and it is now preserved as a park watched over by a brave Serbian soldier. 

That monument bears witness to a terrible time of war. Yet it is also an example of a uniquely peaceful endeavor made by soldiers who put their skills and talents toward producing art, music and theater. So far I have far more questions than answers but the photo collection I have acquired of the Königsbrück POW camp shows that it was a place where culture thrived and was shared across multiple foreign languages and traditions. How that happened and why was it recorded by Carl Schmidt's camera is still a mystery but I think it is a story worth telling.  

The chapter to this series will be about the art work produced by the soldiers in the Königsbrück prisoner of war camp. Stay tuned, as the Serbian bagpiper will return. 

Here are links to my other stories on this POW camp.
The Königsbrück POW Camp, A Theatre of War,
The Königsbrück POW Camp, Soldiers at Ease
Monument to the Fallen, Königsbrück 1918
Art in a Time of War
The Prisoners of Königsbrück

I can't resist including a video
about Serbian bagpipes.
Here is a short one from
the YouTube channel of Vladan Radisavljevic 
who has compiled a large collection of vintage photos
of Serbian, and maybe Croatian, bagpipers to the sound of the bagpipes.
My impression is that there are two types of Serbian bagpipes.
One has a short chanter with a high pitch sound,
and the other is longer with a lower pitch
and an upturned bell like the one played by the Serbian soldier.

Even for a bagpipe, the Serbian pipes make a very jarring noise
that is possibly one of the most teeth-grinding sounds you will ever hear.
Its constant drone and dissonant noodling reeds

are so annoying that it could start another war
if you had to listen to it every day.

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where making a piece of cake

and a case for Peace
require two different recipes.