Academic literature on the topic 'Prisons, Germany: Prussia'

In 1939-1945, the Nazi invaders organized over 1300 prisons and jails in the occupied territory of Poland. The institutions were instrumental to the policy of extermination the Polish nation which was among the aims of the invasion. Prisons and jails were places where Polish people were isolated, tortured and slaughtered. Inmates were transported to places of mass execution and to concentration camps; during evacuation in January l945, route columns were sent on ,,death marches”. The prisons where such genocidal practices were particularly intense are still present in Polish historical consciousness as places of torture and martyrdom. A symbol of this kind is the Pawiak prison in Warsaw where the Nazi confined over 100 thousand persons; 37 thousand were put before a firing squad, slaughtered, or tortured to death, and 60 thousand were sent to concentration camps. The Pawiak prison was also the site of the inmates' incessant struggle for freedom, survival, and preservation of dignity. In their struggle, the prisoners were assisted in a variety of ways by many Polish members of the staff compulsorily employed by the Nazi out of necessity especially during the first months of occupation. The assistance was both material and spiritual. The Staff would hand over to inmates articles such as food, drugs, cigarettes etc., and to confined priests - the Host. The Polish prison staff smuggled messages, contacted the prisoners' families, disclosed informers, warned against the Gestapo and helped to escape. Their acts resulted from patriotic, humanitarian and religious values. Attitudes of a considerable proportion of Polish prison staff who sabotaged the rulings of Nazi administration helped to accomplish intelligence operations started in prisons as early as the autumn of 1939 by underground independance organizations. In December 1939, Warsaw District Headquarters of Siuïba Zwycikstwu Polski [Service to Poland’s Victory, SZP] recruited three prison guard officers who were ordered to organize intelligence divisions in each of the Warsaw prisons. In the Pawiak prison, the structure continued to operate till July 1944; it based on the work of Polish staff duty prisoners, and a group of outside liaisons. Participation of the prison staff in intelligence operations undertaken by independence organizations broadened the notion of prison conspiracy, adding to it a variety of actions directly related to struggle against the invaders. Symbols similar to the Pawiak prison were also other institutions in Nazi-occupied Poland and in Polish territories included in the Reich. On the local scale, the prisons were symbols of particular torment of their inmates and of underground involvement of the Polish staff. The actual possibility of forming a prison conspiracy in Nazi-occupied territories depended on many factors. This was related to differences in the functioning of prisons systems in different regions. Individual administrative districts in territories included into the Reich differed in this respect from the occupied regions and from the eastern borderland of Poland, Nazi-occupied since 1941. The basic factor that determined the nature and intensity of underground activities was the size of Polish staff and their individual motivation resulting from the system of values professed. In territories included into the Reich, the prison system subordinated to Ministry of Justice controlled 142 formerly Polish prison institutions. Their arrangement in individul administrative districts was as follows: Warta Land - 49, Gdansk and West Prussia - 28, Silesia - 12, East Prussia - 6, and Białystok - 4. Among those taken over by Nazi invaders, the largest in respect of inmate population were the prisons in Sieradz (capacity of 1,146), Rawicz (1,075), Wronki (1,016), Koronowo (562), Poznań (464), and Łódź(420). Some of the prisons were taken over together with their inmates and Polish prison staff who were ordered to work on. This corresponded with the order that all inhabitants of invaded territories return to work on pain of severe sanctions, the death penalty included. The order applied also to prison staff who stayed on in their original place of residence or returned from evacuation or POW camps. Among those returning to work were guards who on the day of evacuation had been given secret orders to stay on and to take a job under occupation (Cracow, Wronki). In some localities, during the first weeks of occupation, there was a shortage of candidates for prison guards among both the Polish population and the local German community. The invaders thus had to hire German-speaking Poles with some knowledge of prisons, as e.g. court ushers. In November 1939, the process started of Polish staff being removed from prisons, in Warta Land in particular, and replaced with German guards brought in from the Reich, local Germans, and Poles who had signed the German nationality list. In 1943, the front situation becoming worse, some of the German prison staff were mobilized. Vacancies were filled with forcefully employed former Polish guards. Thus according to the changing staff conditions, also the possibilities of clandestine assistance to inmates changed. The possibility of intelligence operations in prisons in territories included into the Reich depended also on the functioning of independence organizations. The extent of repressions suffered by Polish people in those territories made it impossible to develop regular underground activities in prisons. In some prisons in the Gdansk and West Prussia district where Polish staff were left on the job (Grudziądz, Koronowo, Starogard Gdański), the guards immediately started helping prisoners: they contacted the families and smuggled packages, letters and messages. Most important was assistance in organizing escapes, saving persons from transports to concentration camps, putting them in the infirmary, or finding them a job in the prison. The Koronowo prison had special conditions for development of underground activity: throughout the period of occupation, its Staff included 44 Poles, 39 of them among the guards. Most guards became involved in various forms of assistance to prisoners; they cooperated with an inmate self-defense group and with an underground group of Koronowo women who rendered material assistance to inmates and helped their families coming on permitted visits. They also helped to find shelter for escaped prisoners. The only Polish woman guard in the Fordon women’s prison was only employed in 1943. From the very start, she rendered material and moral assistance to political prisoners, and organized a local group who gathered food and drugs for the inmates. Most limited were the possibilities of assisting prisoners in the institutions of Warta Land. The conditions were favorable during the first months after the invasion only when the invaders were forced to employ Polish prison staff and the system of internal and external supervision and surveillance had not yet been introduced to the full. In this situation, Polish guards mainly assisted inmates materially and morally and served as liaisons between them and their families. For example, a guard in the Leszno prison smuggled farewell letters of hostages wainting for execution; another one in the Rawicz prison orsanized a contact station for prisoners’ families in his own apartment; and a guard in the Kościan prison help priests to say masses in secret. Later on when few Polish guards were still in service, they could only assist inmates on a limited scale and with extreme caution. But even in this situaion, they were still willing to help. During the first months after the invasion, a Polish clerk in the Kościan prison not only assisted the inmates but also documented Nazi crimes: among other things, he kept lists of the executed. In prisons of the Warta Land district involvement of Polish prison staff in underground intelligence was practically non-existent. This was due to a rapid replacement of Polish guards and to organizational difficulties encountered by the underground in that district. Favorable conditions could be found in the Wieluń prison which had a large group of pre-war Polish Staff throughout the period of Nazi occupation. Moreover, one of prison staff leaders, reserve oficer of the Polish Army, was sworn as agent of Sieradz and Wieluń Inspectorate of the underground Armed-Struggle Union - Home Army (ZWZ AK). In prisons taken over by the invaders in Silesia district, the Nazi administration created a climate of mistrust, suspicion and intimidation with respect to Polish staff temporarily left on the job. This limited and in some cases precluded the guards’ secret contacts with inmates and their families. A special role in prison conspiracy in Silesia was played by Emil Lipowczan, forcefully recruited to the police and delegated to work as guard in Gestapo remand prison in Mysłowice. Acting for patriotic, humanitarian and religious reasons, he rendered comprehensive material and spiritual assistance to prisoners. He reached their families and warned persons threatened with arrest. He was assisted in this work by his entire family. Starting from 1943, he worked for Home Army intelligence. Once the Nazi-Soviet war broke out in June 1943, the eastern territories of Poland - previously occupied by USSR – were taken over by Nazi administration. Extremely few Polish prison guards could actually be used by the new invaders as the staff had been pacified by NKVD in 1939-1941. For this reason, prisons of Białystok district were staffed with various persons; some of them were subsequently recruited by ZWZ AK intelligence. Many a time, ZWZ AK would also appoint its members to take a job in prisons and Gestapo remand prisons and to carry out information and intelligence tasks there while at the same time assisting detained AK soldiers. Such guards only rendered material and moral assistance to other prisoners with utmost caution as a side-activity which they pursued for humanitarian reasons. In Nazi-occupied Poland (Generalgouvernement), the conditions were entirely different and more favorable for prison conspiracy. Nearly all prisons, also those subordinated to security police (except the Montelupi prison in Cracow), had Polish staff throughout the occupation. Besides, operating in ihe neighborhood of individual institutions were numerous legal, semi-legal and illegal organizations assisting prisoners and their families. Through persons who stayed in touch with the inmates, SZP-ZWZ AK would penetrate prisons on regular basis. The prison staff (pre-war guards forcefully reassigned to the job) not only assisted the inmates but also became involved in intelligence work. Tasks of this kind were performed mainly by guards purposely sent to the prison by an independence organization. Prison conspiracy has a variety of organizational forms. In Tarnyw, there was an highly centralized prison section; Lublin, instead, had several active but independent small groups of guards and duty prisoners. In Cracow, Częstochowa (prison in Senacka Street), and in a few other smaller prisons, the structure was atomized and based on independent underground work of individual guards. The extent of assistance rendered to inmates and of intelligence tasks assigned often depended on the committal and personality of the head of AK prison section; this can be said e.g. of the prisons in Jasło, Pinczów and Rzeszów. Significant was also the contribution of intelligence officers who supervised the prisons sections e.g. in Biała Podlaska, Siedlce, Wiśnicz and Zamość. Added to Generalgouvernement in August 1941 was Galicia district. Polish guards were but a small group among the prison staff of that district; they were supervised by Germans, Ukrainians and other nationalities. In such conditions, the scope of assistance to inmates was extremely limited. Yet ZWZ AK intelligence officers would get in touch even with those few Polish guards and gain them over for cooperation. Prison conspiracy in Galicia and in the remaining eastern territories consisted first of all in individual guards’ committal and performance of tasks assigned by his superior intelligence officer. This form could be found in Lvov, Pińsk, and Równe. The Nazi prison administration mistrusted Polish staff who were submitted to everincreasing surveillance by the Germans and other nationalities, and also by few quislings among Polish guards and informers among the inmates. Yet neither persecution nor repression (arrests, executions, confinements to concentration camps) applied to Polish staff could reduce the extent of assistance to political prisoners or check intelligence work in prisons.

The article highlights for the first time the material connected to the sound recordings of Ukrainians from WWI Prisoner-of War Camps in Germany, that were made during 1915-1918 years by the members of the Prussian Phonographic Commission which included Carl Stumpf (the head of the Commission), Georg Schünemann, Wilhelm Doegen among others. This article is a result of the author’s personal research conducted at the Berlin Phonogram Archive and explores the factographic documents that include the data about the sound recordings themselves, the history and process of the creation of the documents and their digital versions made a 100 years after the Prussian Phonographic Commission’s project has started. The research also presents the first results of the analysis of the repertoire recorded from Ukrainian prisoners-of WWI, specifically its culture and genre characteristics.

This article aims to consider not only sound recordings of speech samples as historical sources, but also the absence of words and the content hereof: silences in speech. Its focus are sound recordings made by prisoners in German camps during World War I, today kept in the Lautarchiv (Sound Archive) of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (http://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/). The World War I recordings comprise one of the archive’s three founding collections. The fi rst contains voice portraits of illustrious fi gures such as Kaiser Wilhelm II and Paul von Hindenburg, the recordings of which began during the war in connection with the autograph collection of Ludwig Darmstaedter. The second collection is made up of voice portraits of people who were not well-known or prominent individuals, but exemplary speakers of particular languages and dialects. Between 1915 and 1918, in German prisoner of war camps, the state-funded Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission (Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission) produced sound recordings of a range of languages, dialects and ethnic groups for the purposes of linguistic and musicological research.

В статье рассмотрена история учреждений для военнопленных и интернированных периода Великой Отечественной войны на территории Коми АССР. Предметом исследования являются региональные и институциональные особенности формирования и функционирования учреждений военного плена и интернирования, а также состав и положение содержавшихся в них лиц. Методологическую основу исследования составили принципы историзма и системности научного анализа. На основе архивных документов раскрыты особенности транспортировки, лагерной инфраструктуры, режима, продовольственного снабжения и медицинского обслуживания, политической работы, трудового использования и репатриации. Автор приходит к выводу, что спецификой региона являлось формирование учреждений для военнопленных и интернированных в структуре исправительно-трудовых лагерей ГУЛАГа. Пребывание в лагерях и рабочих батальонах НКВД - МВД СССР, а также принудительное привлечение к труду стало своеобразной формой наказания для обезоруженных военнослужащих германской армии и гражданских немцев, интернированных на территории Восточной Пруссии в завершающий период Великой Отечественной войны. The article deals with the history of institutions for prisoners of war and internees during the Great Patriotic War on the territory of the Komi ASSR. The subject of the study is the regional and institutional features of the formation and functioning of institutions of military captivity and internment, as well as the composition and position of the persons held in them. The methodological basis of the study was the principles of historicism and systematic scientific analysis. Based on archival documents, the features of transportation, camp infrastructure, regime, food supply and medical care, political work, labor use and repatriation are revealed. The author comes to the conclusion that the specificity of the region was the formation of institutions for prisoners of war and internees in the structure of the GULAG forced labor camps. Staying in camps and work battalions of the NKVD - the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, as well as forced labor became a kind of punishment for disarmed servicemen of the German army and civilian Germans interned in East Prussia in the final period of World War II.

On 31 October 1943, a fifteen-person strong unit of the Home Army, under the command of Władysław Świacki “Sęp” (1900–1972), with intelligence support from Czesław Nalborski “Dzik” (1910–1992), was to carry out a successful strike to take out an SS execution squad commanded by Haupsturmführer Stammer in East Prussia, on the road between Lyck (Ełk) and the village of Neuendorf (Nowa Wieś Ełcka). The German squad was said to have carried out a mass execution of Italian prisoners of war, held at the camp in Bogusze. On 28 October 1989, an obelisk with a plaque commemorating this operation was unveiled in Nowa Wieś Ełcka. The spectacular strike is recorded in the documentation of the ZBoWiD (the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy), but has not been confirmed in any source unconnected to its supposed participants. The execution of the Italians, assassination of Stammer, and even the date of the operation (31 October 1943) were all contrived by a writer based in Białystok, Aleksander Omiljanowicz (1923–2005). The information board erected in 2017 presents a compilation of Świacki’s recollections, Omiljanowicz’s fiction, and selectively chosen historical facts. The monument in Nowa Wieś Ełcka is a troublesome legacy, as too are the heroic and martyrological stories of former Home Army members belonging to the ZBoWiD.

This article is a translation from Polish of the scientific work of the Polish historian of the Crimean Tatar origin Selim Chazbijewicz “Khan Jelaleddin and the Tatars at the Battle of Grunwald”. It examines the role of the Tatar cavalry and the significance of the Battle of Grunwald for Poland and Lithuania. The Tatars played a special role in the military history of Poland and Lithuania in the XII–XIV centuries. Their ubiquitous presence in wars and battles in Eastern Europe was well known to their contemporaries, who perfectly understood that without their military assistance, no belligerent side could claim victory over its opponents. Their decisive role in battles can be explained mainly by their use of nomadic light cavalry, which was practically invincible in those centuries. The Battle of Grunwald took place on July 15, 1410 during the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War. The union of the crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, headed by King Vladislav II Jagaila and Grand Duke Vytautas, finally defeated the German-Prussian knights of the Teutonic Order, headed by Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen. Most of the leaders of the Teutonic Knights were killed or taken prisoner. The Teutonic Order will never regain its former power again, the financial burden of war reparations caused internal conflicts and economic recession in the territories under their control. The battle altered the balance of power in Central and Eastern Europe and heralded the rise of the Polish-Lithuanian alliance as the dominant political and military power in the region.

Spis materiałów wspomnieniowych i pamiętnikarskich dotyczących więźniów obozów niemieckich oraz robotników przymusowych w Prusach Wschodnich znajdujących się w bibliotece Instytutu Północnego im. W. Kętrzyńskiego w Olsztynie został sporządzony na podstawie aktualnego katalogu biblioteki w oparciu o opracowanie Zbigniewa Frasa – Materiały pamiętnikarskie w zbiorach Ośrodka Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego, którego jest uzupełnieniem i rozszerzeniem o publikacje oraz materiały zgromadzone w dziale zbiorów specjalnych po 1985 roku. Celem niniejszego zestawienia tematycznego było przede wszystkim zebranie i uaktualnienie dokumentacji do obecnego stanu wiedzy, wyjaśnienie różnic między opracowaniem, katalogiem, a stanem faktycznym oraz poprawienie zauważonych błędów.

Following Germany’s unification in 1871, Gdansk was a major municipal centre and a port on the Empire’s map, however it was well past its heyday. In the Gründerzeit, it could not reach as quick a pace of development as other cities of the Reich, and by the late 19th century it did not boast any university. The attempt to catch up on the substantial delay in creating modern public architecture in Gdansk was only made after the fortifications had been dismantled (1895–97). A triangular plot close to St James’s Gate was reserved for the purpose of education and science. It was there that a seat of the city archive and the building of the Secondary School of SS Peter and Paul (Oberrealschule St. Petri und Pauli) were raised. The third edifice was planned as the new home for the Gdansk Library. The precious book collection, whose core was formed by the collection bequeathed by Joannes Bernardinus Bonifacius d’Oria of Naples in 1596, was kept in a former Franciscan monastery, and later in St James’s Church. Attempts to raise a new building to house the collection in the 1820s as designed by Carl Samuel Held failed. Neither was the plan to erect the new library building as an extension of the Dungeon and Prison Gate Complex implemented. It was only Karl Kleefeld’s design from 1901–1902 planning to raise an impressive Gothic Revival complex that finally came to life. Completed in January 1905, the Library welcomed the first readers already on 16 February. Kleefeld designed the building’s mass on the L -plan layout with a truncated corner and wings. The main reading room boasted elegant, sumptuous, and coherent wooden furnishing, and the gallery’s centrepiece was a ledge decorated with 14 panels featuring bas -relief cartouches with the emblems of the cities of West Prussia. Differing in size, the edifices, were given red -brick elevations with plastered details and glazed green filling, with a sgraffito frieze on the reading room elevation between the ground and first floors. It was the Gdansk Renaissance that dominated in public buildings’ architecture of the city in the last quarter of the 19th century. The resumed popularity of Gothic Revival in its local forms in Gdansk public buildings’ architecture, such as those in the afore - -described Kleefeld’s designs, resulted undoubtedly from a rapid growth of research into historic structures, yet on the other hand it reflected the return to the local tradition (Heimatschutz), which could be observed in the architecture of the German Reich at the time. Judged in the context of an extremely modest programme of public projects in Gdansk of the period, the creation of the Bildungsdreick with the edifices of the archive, library, and secondary school is to be regarded as a major event in the history of creating public architecture of the city. As seen against other projects of the time in other Reich cities, the Gdansk City Library stood out neither with its scale, nor innovatory character of the layout solutions. What, however, makes it a special facility are architectural forms that reveal its contribution to the search for the expression of the local tradition. This kind of an archaeological approach to the past and a compilatory additive method of juxtaposing quotes from various buildings, which may have also arisen from the lack of talent of the architect, were undoubtedly in decline in the early 20th century.

This article assesses whether the repatriation of civilian prisoners of war, most of whom were East Prussian deportees, from Simbirsk to Germany between April and June of 1918, was carried out according to the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Simbirsk, which was home to more East Prussian deportees than any other internment site in Russia, is particularly well-suited for a case study of the repatriation of civilian prisoners from Russia during World War I because the correspondence and memoirs of those who were involved in the repatriation still exist and are accessible outside Russia. The article concludes that the repatriation of civilian prisoners of war interned in Simbirsk was not carried out according to the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk—at least not according to how the treaty was interpreted by the German and Russian governments—and identifies several reasons why this was the case. This case study may have policy implications for the current war in Ukraine, which has also been characterized by the deportation of civilians from Russian-occupied territory to Russia, although on a much larger scale. If the war in Ukraine ends in a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia, the repatriation of Ukrainian deportees will be an important part of that settlement. The article offers several recommendations for the Ukrainian officials who would be responsible for negotiating such a settlement to avoid chaotic evacuations similar to what happened in Simbirsk during World War I.

The icy winds of the Baltic bite deep into the bones of barely-clothed prisoners of an unnamed war camp. The cold is unbearable in the frigid Prussian hinterlands, the chatter minimal, and everyone is huddling to survive. Amidst the stale air of death and starvation, small clouds of melodic choir powerfully pierce through the hushed chill: “Ari-rang, ar-ri-rang, ara-ri-yo...”1 From the bellies of a group of Koryo Saram, the Korean folk anthem wistfully winds its way through the barbed wires, straining to reach back home. In a curious, seeming oddity, ethnic Koreans, Koryoin, found themselves conscripted from the Far Eastern regions to fight for the Russian Empire thousands of miles away on the Eastern Front of World War I. During a particularly brutal beatdown at the Battle of Tannenberg, a lethal saber thrust into the heart of Russian Northwest forces, 4,000 ethnic Koreans2 were among the 90,000 Russian soldiers taken as prisoners of war. A small minority of these Koryo Saram, or Koryoin, would soon be afforded some warmth at Humboldt University, where German linguist Dr. Wilhelm Albert Döggen studied their language and music.

Abstract Reactionary governments in Germany after the failure of the 1848 Revolution regarded the axe and the block as vital instruments in the restoration of order. In Prussia the new Criminal Code, introduced in 1851, sought to carry out this restorative function while making a number of concessions to bourgeois opinion. The death penalty in particular was restricted to various kinds of homicide, and to treason. But this did not mean that the letter of the law was necessarily adhered to. For as part of the arsenal of restored, divinely-sanctioned monarchical authority, the Prussian King insisted on the royal prerogative of clemency. This was not new, of course, but had been wielded systematically since the eighteenth century, when the founding of prisons and penitentiaries had first provided a workable alternative to execution in the form of lifelong imprisonment. Every death sentence had to receive the formal approval of the monarch before it could be carried out. The Prussian King was advised on such cases by his judicial officials. In order to guide their recommendations in the light of the new provisions of the Criminal Code, and to maintain some kind of consistency, officials at the Prussian Ministry of Justice began keeping detailed notes and statistics on each capital case after the Criminal Code came into effect at the beginning of 1852. The notes offer a fascinating insight into the workings of the judicial-bureaucratic mind.

That morning, Jean and Maurice had heard the joyful calls of the bugles for the last time; and now they were on the march, heading for Germany among the herd of prisoners, preceded and brought up at the rear by platoons of Prussian soldiers, while...

Abstract In October 1906 Wilhelm Voigt, a petty criminal who had recently been released from prison, visited several used-clothes stores in Berlin in order to piece together the uniform of a captain in the Prussian army. Attired in it, he commandeered a squad of soldiers off the street and led them into the town hall of Köpenick, a suburban district of the capital, where he placed the mayor under military arrest and ordered the cashier to hand over nearly 4,000 Marks. Then he fled with the loot. The incident created a worldwide sensation. It subsequently provided the material for a famous play — and a movie adaptation — from the pen of Carl Zuckmayer; and to this day, the adventures of this ‘Captain of Köpenick’ stand as a symbol of the slavish deference to the military uniform that reigned in Imperial Germany.

Abstract Was Prussia a state bound by the rule of law? Events in Marpingen caused many to doubt it. After the village schoolteacher Andre had been summarily transferred to Tholey, Father Schneider wrote to a clerical friend in Trier asking for legal advice on the situation. The reply was that an action of this kind was impermissible without formal disciplinary proceedings—’but in Russia everything is possible’. The equating of Prussia and Russia gives an indication of Catholic bitterness over Marpingen. A friend of Neureuter’s from Zwolle wrote in the following terms, in a letter that ironically enough was seized by the authorities, having arrived shortly after the parish priest had been taken into custody: ‘Are you ill or in prison; for anything is possible—silence is golden in Germany, even if elsewhere the problem is lead. Moreover, private letters should not be sniffed at by everyone and in Prussia-Germany only the cabinet of the chancellor is private.’ The actions of the state in Marpingen worried many beyond the ranks of Catholics, from the Frankfurter Zeitung on the left to the Kreuz-Zeitung on the right. For the latter, the dubious role played by Meerscheidt-Htillessem and the treatment of the visionary children were ‘weak points that the government might well find it difficult to defend’. Police measures had been an inappropriate choice of weapon, and the government might regret its methods if ‘absolutely tangible and convincing evidence’ of deliberate deception and criminal actions could not be produced.