Exhibition "The Bird-Cage"
Laufen Castle 1939-1945
With this exhibition, the City of Laufen commemorates the two camps housed in Laufen Castle eighty years after the end of the Second World War and the liberation from National Socialism.
The castle was used as an officers' camp (Oflag VII C) from 1939 to 1942 and as an internment camp (Ilag VII) from 1942 to 1945. Both camps were subordinate to the Wehrmacht.
The first prisoners of war were Polish officers who were transferred to other camps in the spring of 1940. Starting in May 1940, a large number of British prisoners of war arrived. They had defended France as part of the British Expeditionary Force and had been captured by the Germans. By September 1940, the camp housed 1,240 officers and 220 support staff. This number was reduced to 700 prisoners in the spring of 1941.
With the conversion of Oflag VII C into the internment camp Ilag VII in January 1942, the British prisoners of war previously housed in Laufen were transferred to other camps. Ilag VII served to house civilians deported from all over Europe: primarily British citizens from the Channel Islands, but also American nationals living in Europe who had become ‘enemy aliens’ as a result of the entry of the USA and numerous Latin American states into the war.
The number of prisoners in the internment camp also fluctuated considerably. The diary of the representative of the British internees, Ambrose Sherwill, records the constant arrival and departure of smaller and larger groups of deportees. Aid organizations such as the Red Cross and the International YMCA document, for example, that 419 Channel Islanders arrived in November 1942 and 211 Americans arrived a month later. When the closure of the Tittmoning Castle subcamp in May 1944 resulted in the addition of 309 Americans of Polish descent, bringing the number of internees to 941, the camp administration transferred 114 internees to Spittal an der Drau and released 125 sick and elderly British prisoners to Great Britain. On the day of liberation, May 4, 1945, there were 525 British and 162 American prisoners in Ilag VII.
The title "The Bird-Cage" originates from a book published in 1945, which contains texts, poems, and drawings by internees from Laufen created during 1944.
For the cover, Polish cartoonist Max Brandel drew the internees' representatives at the time: Ambrose Sherwill (left) and Herbert Gompertz (right) – both on a swing held by barbed wire. The drawing itself illustrates the irony that characterized camp life, despite all its challenges.
Image:
Title of ‘The Bird-Cage‘ (© Jersey Heritage).