Red Cross Records for WWI Prisoners of War

rsowa — Sun Sep 14, 2014 4:54 pm

Author: rsowa

Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 4:54 pm

I am not sure how useful this is for genealogy purposes, but it is a valuable resource anyway. http://grandeguerre.icrc.org/

During the First World War, 8 million soldiers fighting on the front and 2 million civilians, mainly those living abroad in enemy countries or areas under enemy occupation, were taken prisoner and interned in camps for several years.

On 21 August 1914, the The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) established the International Prisoners of War Agency in Geneva, to which the warring States submitted, more or less regularly, lists of prisoners. The Agency received 400,000 pages of documents: lists of prisoners’ names and records of capture, of transfers between camps and of deaths in detention.

For each name listed, the Agency made out an index card. The cards were then classified by nationality and the detainee’s military or civilian status and filed alphabetically in 29 different card indexes. These indexes also contain inquiry cards, drawn up on the basis of data taken from the thousands of written requests for information submitted daily by relatives of the missing, which the Agency indexed before destroying the correspondence.

Those index cards and reports have now been digitized and are available for searching.

Richard

PolishOrigins(TM) Forum

Red Cross Records for WWI Prisoners of War