"Wherever the eye looks, moor and heath all around. Vogelsang does not refresh us, oak trees stand bare and crooked. We are the moor soldiers and move into the moor with spades. The camp is set up here in this desolate heath. Where we are free from every joy tucked behind barbed wire." The Song of the Moor Soldiers is one of the best-known musical testimonies of the resistance against National Socialism today.
Written in Börgermoor concentration camp
The song premiered on August 27, 1933 in the Börgermoor concentration camp near Papenburg in Emsland. Two prisoners, the miner Johann Esser and the director Wolfgang Langhoff, wrote the text together. Commercial clerk Rudi Goguel composed the music. The three men are convinced communists and belong to a number of political prisoners from the Rhine-Ruhr area who were deported to the camp shortly after the Nazis took power on January 30, 1933.
Reaction to the pogrom of the SS guards
Political prisoners in particular were held captive in the Börgermoor camp.In August 1933, under the leadership of Wolfgang Langhoff, the prisoners staged a cultural event entitled "Zirkus Konzentrazani". The occasion is the "Night of the Long Slats" - a nocturnal raid by SS men on a barracks during which numerous prisoners are injured. The performance with clown performances and music is intended to encourage fellow prisoners and "to publicly demonstrate our higher morality towards the SS," explained composer Goguel in a 1974 broadcast on East German radio.
Encrypted call to resistance
On August 27, inmates and guards gather for the performance. At the event, the song is the climax and last number, a sixteen-piece prisoner choir performs it. With its catchy melody, it immediately captivates the listener:"We noticed the effect it had from the very first verse," says Goguel. The text describes the harshness of everyday life in the camp, but refrains from direct accusations or revolutionary vocabulary. However, lines like "It can't be winter forever" or "One day we'll be happy to say:Home, you're mine again" are easy for the prisoners to decipher - as a call not to give up the resistance. "As early as the second verse, almost a thousand prisoners began to sing along to the refrain," recalls director and lyricist Langhoff in 1935.
A song goes underground around the world
Even the guards couldn't escape the pull of the song:"During the last verse, the SS men who had appeared with their commanders sang along with us in unison, apparently because they felt addressed as 'moor soldiers'," remembers Langhoff. But just two days after the premiere, the camp administration had the song banned. But then the spread of the Moorsoldatenlied can no longer be stopped:it quickly becomes known far beyond the borders of the Emsland through prisoners who have been released or who have been transferred to other camps. In Spain the international brigades sing it in the civil war of the democratic forces against the dictator Franco, in France it becomes the song of the resistance as Chant de Marais, the resistance movement against the German occupiers.
Dozens of versions of the bog soldier's song
The song became popular in the 1970s thanks to Hannes Wader's version. (archive image)The Song of the Moor Soldiers undergoes countless revisions and remains popular even after the Second World War. In the GDR it was part of the school curriculum, in the Federal Republic it became known in the 1970s primarily through a version by the singer-songwriter Hannes Wader. One of the most recent versions was written by the German punk band "Die Toten Hosen" in 2012. Their singer Campino describes the song as a "hymn against oppression and for persevering in brutal times".
Writers of the Börgermoorlied survived
The three authors of the resistance anthem persevered and survived the Nazi terror:Johann Esser was released from the concentration camp in 1934, but was arrested several times by the Nazis in the years that followed. After the war he works again as a miner and trade unionist in Moers. Wolfgang Langhoff was released from the Lichtenburg concentration camp in 1934 and fled to Switzerland. As early as 1935 he wrote a factual report in which he described his experiences in the concentration camp. He returns to Germany in 1945.
After his release, Rudi Goguel went underground again and was sentenced to ten years in prison. In 1944 he was sent first to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, then to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. In May 1945 he survived the sinking of the "Cap Arcona", in which more than 7,000 people, mostly evacuated concentration camp prisoners, lost their lives. After the war he lived first in southern Germany and later in East Berlin.
Tens of thousands dead in Emsland camps
It is estimated that more than 20,000 prisoners died in the 15 Emsland camps between 1933 and the end of the war. To this day it is not known how many prisoners died from the inhumane working conditions or were deliberately murdered. Up to 180,000 people were imprisoned in the camps - among other things for political, social, racist or religious reasons, later prisoners of war were added. The prisoners were used as forced laborers to drain the moors, cut peat and build roads, and after the start of the war also in the armaments industry and agriculture. Their fate and the history of the Moorsoldatenlied are now documented in a permanent exhibition in the Esterwegen Concentration Camp Memorial.