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Background history
The POW’s personal card belongs to a group of specific memorabilia connected with prisoners-of-war in the years of World War II. Still, up to our times there have not been too many of them preserved, mainly due to their frequent usage by the German camp administration during the war, and also because of the low quality of the paper which was used to draw them up. The German camp authorities were well-known for being very scrupulous about making record of the data concerning POWs who were directed to oflags and stalags. The lists prepared by WASt (Deutsche Dienststelle für die Benachrichtigung der nächsten Angehörigen von Gefallenen der ehemaligen deutschen Wehrmacht) [Wehrmacht Information Bureau in charge of War Losses and POWs] and the personal cards assigned to POWs by camp administration served the purpose of registration. Together they formed a peculiar database on POWs. The latter were indispensable in order to effectively and easily find an individual POW who was being looked for, e.g., by the German Red Cross. Each card contained the most important information about the POW: his name, surname, place and date of birth, military data (unit, rank, place and time of being taken captive). Additionally, on the cards, there was inserted also information necessary for the German authorities, like, among others, place and date of relocating the POW between individual camps, his offences and disciplinary punishment. The card was a kind of POW’s identity card, becoming the document to certify his stay in captivity. Each POW’s personal card is an extremely precious document allowing fairly exactly to establish the vicissitudes of the given POW during World War II.
Prepared by: Bartosz Janczak
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Personal card of a POW in the Wehrmacht captivity
Source of acquisition
The item comes from the private collection of this POW’s family.
Description of the item
A personal card drawn up on a standardized double-paged form 29cm long and 25cm wide. On the front page there are basic data about the prisoner-of-war, with his photograph; on the reverse side – information about his stay in the German captivity.
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