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Holocaust & German Persecutions
Lot 577:
Very scarce set of postcards and letters sent by Polish POW. There are some postcards sent by the Polish prisoner of war with the logo of the Red Cross central agency for international prisoners of war in Genevre. There’s also a very rare letter with envelope sent from KL Bergen Belsen the less known like concentration camp in KL Niederhagen. Postcards and letters are dated from 1944 onwards.During April and May 1943 most of prisoners of Niederhagen were transferred to KZ-Bergen-BelsenIn February 1943, Germany"s Foreign Ministry proposed that Jews with ?foreign contacts? should be available for exchange with German prisoners in Allied captivity instead of being sent to extermination camps. Therefore, in April of that year Himmler ordered 10,000 Austauschjuden (Exchange Jews) sent to an Assembly Camp. For this purpose the SS took over part of the POW camp Stalag XIC in Bergen-Belsen, located near Celle in Germany. With this move the Aufenhaltslager Bergen-Belsen was established, and until autumn of 1944 about 6,000 Jews with foreign connections were collected there.Initially in the camp, the conditions for the Jewish prisoners were better than in other KZ because former inmates were at liberty to divulge their conditions upon gaining their freedom. In spite of the name ? Aufenhaltslager ? the camp belonged to the same organisation as the other KZ. In addition to Jews, the camp also held other types of prisoners. From mid 1944 on, the conditions for the prisoners in the camp grew even worse. The more transports that arrived, the worse the catastrophic situation became. The crowded and partly unheated barracks lacked internal facilities. Often prisoners lay on the floor. At the end of November 1944 there were still only 15,000 prisoners in total in Bergen-Belsen, but by the end of April 1945 the number had risen to 60,000****IMPORTANT! We ship this article from our office in Europe***
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