Architecture

1916 · List1025 — Siberia Petrograd et al. 1916. First Edition. Various documents and letters most legal format roughly 200 pages in total with three publications and several newspapers on the subject and thirteen hand drawn architectural plans for a new camp at Omsk measuring between 25 x 17 and 13 x 8 inches. During World War One a staggering number of prisoners - roughly 2.4 of the five million in total who were sent to the Eastern Front - ended up as prisoners of war in Russia. Of that number roughly two million were from Austria-Hungary. Though often neglected by historians due to the attention given to the Russian Civil War and the atrocities of World War Two the subject has drawn increased historical interest with the historian Gerald H. Davis and others calling attention to its importance in the 1980s. Davis and others have written on the relationship between the large prisoner population and the dissolution of their nations as well as the abhorrent conditions many were forced to endure partially due to hierarchical structure of treatment due to differing attitudes by their Russian hosts toward different nations and ethnicities and partially due to the lack of appropriate infrastructure and resources to support such a large prisoner population. <br /> <br /> Offered here are the papers of Herbert H.D. Pierce the Special Aide to Embassador George T. Marye in Petrograd containing a substantial amount of firsthand accounts of prison conditions from the early years of the war as well as a striking series of manuscript architectural plans for a new prison camp that was built in Omsk. Pierce a diplomat who was most famously involved with a case involving seal fishing in the Berings Strait was appointed as a Special Aide out of his retirement and served until his death in 1916. It is possible that he was assigned the task of dealing with the prisoner of war situation as nearly all of his papers that we recovered from his estate from this period deal with the subject. Pierce was involved specifically with the disbursal of relief funds received from the German and Austro-Hungarian governments that were to be disbursed to their citizens. <br /> <br /> The highlight of the collection is a series of hand drawn architectural plans for a series of POW camp structures in Omsk bearing the signature of a N. Alexandrow architect. It is unclear what Pierce's exact relationship was to this project. The plans are translated into English in ink. Of particular interest are the separate officers' barracks plans as one of the violations of POW laws in Russia was the varying levels of treatment given to different prisoners in particular in their recognition of German and Austro-Hungarian ranking officers. There were twenty-eight prison camps in Omsk this one is not identified specifically. The Siberian camps often held up to 35000 prisoners this one shows plans for 10000. There were 128 camps in the Moscow region where camps typically housed 2000-5000 prisoners. The conditions of the camps were generally abysmal with camp capacities routinely exceeded by roughly 50-100%. Frequent disease outbreaks killed thousands of prisoners during the conflict in Omsk Novo-Nikolaevsk Sretensk and Totskoe specifically. <br /> <br /> The group includes letters written to Marye describing conditions in the camps as well as reports of the Americans' own observations in Siberia Moscow and elsewhere. Most are in English though several original documents in German are included. Also included are Pierce's working copies of the Second Hague Convention guidelines of 1907 Order 697 of the War Department that established the regulations regarding prisoners of war in 1914 and a copy of the agreement made between Germany and Russia in August of 1914 which allowed for all women and all men over 45 years and younger than 17 to leave the country unheeded. Some of the letters document violations of this agreement for example a fifty-five year old Austrian man writing to the embassy stating that he had been detained. The authorship of some of the reports is often unclear - one report is credited to "A Russian Lady" another from Krasnaya-Ratchka near Khabaraovsk is an uncredited 18 page description of prisoner conditions. One uncredited report nineteen pages long on the conditions of prisoners in the Moscow Circuit may have been written by Pierce himself and is addressed to Marye. Another 44 page report on Siberian prison conditions is uncredited and likely produced by the embassy itself. A portion - perhaps 25% or so - of the reports are incomplete or unclear in origin though there is much to glean from them regardless. <br /> <br /> Also included are three printed publications. The first is entitled Rapport du Conseiller Prive E.G. Chinkevitch Membre du Comte special de secours aux prisonniers de guerre sur la visite des camps des prissoniers Austro-Hongrois dans l'arrondissement militair d'Omsk printed in 1915. OCLC locates a single copy in France. The report outlines the observed conditions and includes twenty-six photographs of prisoners. The second is a forty-three page report addressed to James Gerard the American ambassador in Berlin by an unidentified author which outlines the prisoner of war conditions in England written in February of 1915. The third is a scarce map of Russian prisoner of war camps printed by L. Friederichsen in Hamburg in 1915 entitled Karte vom Europäischen und Asiatischen Russland mit Angabe der hauptsächlichsten Orte in denen sich Kriegsgefangene und zurückgehaltene Zivilpersonen befinden sowie mit Bestimmungen über den Postverkehr nach diesen Orten. The map shows locations of prison camps throughout the Russian Empire and also shows the mail routes. It is in fine condition overall and we locate six copies in OCLC. <br /> <br /> Overall a scarce survival of primary source material on a somewhat overlooked but important period in Russian history with relevance to diplomatic historians as well worthy of further study. <br /> <br /> Works cited: <br /> <br /> Grekov N. V.: Germanskie i avstriiskie plennye v Sibiri 1914-1917 German and Austrian prisoners in Siberia 1914-1917 in: Vibe P. P. ed.: Nemtsy. Rossiia. Sibir' Germans. Russia. Siberia Omsk 1997 p. 159.<br /> <br /> Nachtigal Reinhard: Seuchen unter militärischer Aufsicht in Rußland. Das Lager Tockoe als Beispiel für die Behandlung der Kriegsgefangenen 1915/16 in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 48/3 2000 pp. 367-368; Brändström Kriegsgefangenen 1922 pp. 41-48.<br /> <br /> Nachtigal Reinhard; Radauer Lena: Prisoners of War Russian Empire. In: 1914-1918 Online. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/prisoners_of_war_russian_empire Accessed 5/21. unknown books