Polish Forced Labour (Zwangsarbeiter/Fremdarbeiter) collection

[StefanM]

Recently seen for sale, a "P" patch in a style I have not seen before with letter "P" and border printed onto yellow cloth rather than printing two colours, purple and yellow, on white cloth. Not sure what to make of it? Maybe a "fake" or a new period variant that saves on printing process?

[A.J. Zawadzki]

Interesting and unfamiliar variant. One would think that if it were genuine we might have seen one or more of them crop up by now. Are you certain that it’s printed onto the backing rather than actually embroidered on? It appears to be the latter, although my eyesight is no longer what it used to be.

Cheers,
Tony

[StefanM]

Hi Tony....nothing wrong with your eyes definitely something wrong with mine though...! I'm going to blame a bout of "man-flu" as an excuse

I do have an embroidered type "P" patch already in my collection. It is dimensionally correct embroidered onto yellow felt type cloth.




So maybe I have overlooked another unusual variant....?

[StefanM]

Polish forced workers outside their barrack block. Painted above the doorway is "Haus Marienbad".



So the location could be Mariánské Lázně or in German Marienbad a spa town in the Karlovy Vary Region of the Czech Republic which in 1938 was relegated to Germany and known as Sudetenland.

Or it could be a humourous take on the fact that Marienbad was one of the top European health spas so life in the barrack was like living in a health spa.

[StefanM]

Two new correspondence postcards.

Top: Card dated 30 January 1945 from a forced labourer and sent from railway rolling stock repair plant in Frankfurt to a "Gemeinschaftslager" camp in Cottbus, Brandenburg.



Lower: Card dated 15 September 1943 from forced labourer working on a farm. The postcard was sent from the village of Rossow, Brandenburg, Germany to Warsaw, Generalgouvernment (former Poland).

[StefanM]

Arbeitsbuch for a Polish farm labourer or agricultural worker dated 1944.

[StefanM]

Had the young lady on his arm been German, this Polish forced worker would have risked arrest and a death sentence, and the woman sentenced to a harsh term in a concentration camp after being humiliated in her local community by having a placard hung around her neck relating to Rassenschande - a racial defilement crime.

[StefanM]

PRIVATE PHOTOS OF FORCED LABOURERS

At first sight, the motifs of these photos are somehow confusing. They show forced labourers in what look like private everyday situations. At the same time, important aspects of these persons’ daily lives – work, violence, resistance, escape – are not recorded in the photos.

The deported children, adolescents, women and men wanted to distil a bit of normality for themselves as a means of escaping from the role of the disenfranchised assigned them by the Nazis. For the most part, the pictures therefore show the experiences the forced labourers wanted to remember. What is more, with these photos they often attempted to paint a positive picture of forced labour deployment and the related living conditions to allay the fears and worries of their loved ones back home.



According to the racist regulations enforced by the Germans, Polish workers – like their Soviet colleagues – were strictly prohibited from owning cameras. Often it was the Western European or Czech forced labourers – persons permitted to keep cameras – who therefore photographed the Poles and Russians. In other cases, German photographers earned money with photos of Eastern European workers. Former forced laborers in Berlin, for example, remember that in many public places German photographers offered to take pictures of foreign workers for a fee. Many of the photos were also taken in German photo studios and printed as postcards to be sent home by the forced laborers to their families as a reassuring sign of life. Finally, there were also many cases in which Polish or Soviet nationals owned cameras secretly.

Exhibition Forced Labour

[dastier]

Thank you for posting the link to the web site.

[StefanM]

A new addition

A collection of documents including pre-war, forced labour, post war DP camps and later US emigration ephemera to same person.



War relief services N.C.W.C (National Catholic Welfare Conference) button badge and card.

War Relief Services, N.C.W.C. began its work in Germany in 1945 when it brought in 1,000,000 pounds of food, clothing and medicine for distribution to displaced persons and went on to ship and distribute more than 5,000,000 pounds of such aid.





The unused letter "P" patches were carefully wrapped in wax paper inside the wallet hence their original new-like appearance.