Polish letters from the pre and post-war years and from during the war, taking Rhineland-Palatinate as an example

Letters as testimonies of Polish life in the region
 

These memories of Poles in Germany from the period of the Second World War but also from the post-war years and in the years before war broke out, which are still preserved in German households to this day, include private letters written by Poles in German and in Polish. Three groups can be identified in relation to the given periods:

The first group includes letters written in German by Poles who corresponded with Germans before the war – within the context of seasonal labour migration to Germany – to sort out their stays so that they could work in their households and on the land. Just how many of these letters still exist today is completely unknown and is hard to estimate. Either way, they are valuable sources because they give an insight into the personal exchange between Germans and Poles at a micro level; an exchange that was still possible and still done until shortly before the outbreak of the war.

The second group relates to letters written in Polish from the time of the Second World War that Poles under German occupation wrote to their family members who had to do forced labour in Germany. How many of these letters still exist is also completely unknown. The fact that these letters were written, censored and ultimately then delivered is at first glance not unusual. What is remarkable, however, is that such letters have been preserved in Germany because, for them to have survived, the Pole to whom they were addressed, if they survived the war, must have left these letters behind after the war in the agricultural operation or household in which they had to work, instead of taking them with them or destroying them. Then, the people who lived in the house must have intentionally saved these sources, which typically they were not even able to read, or at least they did not get rid of them. The reasons why such sources have been preserved will certainly differ and, of course, we can speculate. It could be, for example, that they just were not important to the Poles or to the Germans so that they eventually forgot that they existed at all. Perhaps in some cases, there was also an interest in knowing at some stage what was in the letters, or the need to preserve a memory of a person who one had possibly seen each day for years, with whom one had worked, who one had also really liked.

The third group was created in the first years after the war and involves letters that were written in the German language by former Polish forced labourers, now displaced persons, who were staying in occupied post-war Germany, and were addressed to those people for whom they had had to work during the war. This third group, therefore, marks the start of extensive decade-long correspondence between Poles and Germans, who had known each other from the war years.

So while letters from the first and third group were written by Poles to Germans before and after the war, the second group involves letters that Poles wrote to each other - sanctioned by the Nazi regime. It should also be noted that, in the groups named, only one half of the correspondence exists. To be able to evaluate the entire correspondence, it would be of great value if the letters that the German employers wrote to Poland before the war, the letters that the Polish forced labourers wrote to their families during the war, and the letters from Germans that they in turn wrote after the war to Poles that had previously had to work for them, could be found. It would generally be interesting to evaluate these kinds of letters that were sent from Germany to Poland. This would require extensive research, not just in Poland.

Below, the three groups mentioned are presented by way of example based on the letters that survived from the Rhine-Hesse rural communities of Mauchenheim (which historically belonged to the Palatinate), Gabsheim and Sprendlingen.