E95

Maybe I could contribute to your exhibits and documents adding some information that I have not found on your site yet.

This information concerns section – a working group of British POWs (known by the local population as “Englische Flieger” – “English airmen”), located in the village Sklené (then Glassdörfl, a small village in the mountains) in the northernmost region of Moravia – near the small town of Hanušovice (Hannsdorf) which is listed on your website as a place of working party E95 (and in addition a nearby village Vlaské (Blaschke) – E373).

Other places from the Moravian region you have mentioned nowhere – all other workplaces are in either Polish or Czech Silesia. Anyway, administratively in those days, all places belonged to the “Third Reich” – the North-moravian part to the so-called “Sudetenland”, Silesian (both Polish and Czech) to Prussia, without internal borders. But workplaces in Moravia are the exception. To the localization of these places see attached maps.

The attached photos come from the inheritance of my mother Milada (1924-2004), and I discovered it only a year ago. However, since my childhood (I was born in 1950 and Sklené is my birthplace) I have heard from my mother about the POWs in Glassdörfl, but I’m not sure whether there were just accommodated in the textile factory area or they worked in this weaving plant (one possibility is that they worked as E95 or E373 in other locations listed on your site).

My mother came from a Czech-German family and stayed in Sklené at the end of the war, when she returned from Brno, where her family fled after the German occupation of the borderland (after the Munich agreement), but, anyway, the Bohemia-Moravia German Protectorate came just a few months later. My grandfather (Czech) was imprisoned for some time, but the brother of my grandmother (of German nationality) had died, already in 1940, as a political prisoner in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Mother returned to her grandmother to Sklené before the end of the war, when front approached Brno. And so she met for a short time a group of British POWs accommodated in said textile factory, where her grandmother also worked. At that time she also received the attached photograph with signatures on its backside.

Above all from her grandmother telling, my mother later told me further information about POWs, especially Soviet, often transported through the railway station in Hanušovice, and about appalling conditions of their imprisonment, hunger, disease and abuse (my great-grandmother sometimes tried to pass them, very carefully, some foods).

h POWs disappeared from Glassdörfl sometimes in late April 1945 (a death march?). I have not got more or more detailed information, but it is possible that you will get some, or you will find contact with relatives, with help of attached photos and especially the signatures on the backside (also stamped “Fotoaufnahme genehmigt – Dieser Prüfvermerk gilt nicht für schriftliche Mitteilungen” – “Photographing approved – This permits is not valid for written correspondence”.)

Jaroslav Spáčil

Šumperk, Czechia