The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #14088   Message #1264708
Posted By: Abby Sale
05-Sep-04 - 11:24 AM
Thread Name: Origins: Peat Bog Soldiers
Subject: RE: Help: Peat Bog Soldiers
gargoyle:

Ok, ok. I'll listen to the program.   First I'll post the "happy?" file entry for it. That, because it's close (anyway) to facts and it reads nicely, if slightly unlikely. It's somewhat at odds with Susanne's quote of 30 years earlier. No matter. Also because the date given for the "performance" is Sept 3rd, making it a song for this week.

Then I'll listen and maybe change the file. Maybe won't change it. This is folklore, after all.


When the nazis came to power in Germany they immediately began arresting left-wing politicos and sympathizers. The first to be imprisoned in the new camps were communists and socialists. According to John McDonnell's Songs of Struggle and Protest: The song was written by an unnamed prisoner in the Börgermoor Camp near the Dutch frontier. Its German name "Die Moorsoldaten" first appeared in 1935 in a book of the same name written by Wolfgang Langhoss.

Fritz Selbmann in "Neue Deutschland" April 17, 1965 wrote: "On the 3rd of September 1941, 70 prisoners lie in the bunks of a barrack room in a German concentration camp. They hear the shots outside, 465 on this particular night, and every shot kills a comrade, a brother, a communist. Every shot bores into their own hearts. they lie awake counting the shots, clenching their fists, trying not to cry out. Then something beautiful and terrible happens . . . in the farthest corner of the room a comrade begins to hum softly. The song is the "Peat-bog Soldiers." Slowly, one by one, the others take up the tune and by the fourth line, 70 prisoners, all political, almost all communists, are singing this hymn of defiance."