The Hidden City

"Anyone who approaches the camp in the evening, which is surrounded on three sides by the Mecklenburg forest, will actually get the impression from the flood of light from the arc lamps, which shine far and wide over the wide camp streets, as if a large city had been pounded out of the ground here." It must have been a strange sight for journalist Albert Wacker when he visited a prisoner of war camp west of Parchim in February 1915 for a planned report. The camp was set up in October 1914 on the former cavalry parade ground on the western outskirts of the city. At the beginning almost 400 prisoners are accommodated in tents. According to a report published in the "Hamburger Fremdenblatt" in March 1915, when Wacker was in the camp, 8,000 Allied soldiers were already living there - French, Belgians, Russians and Belgian civilian prisoners.

Raised from the ground

Their numbers increased rapidly as the Germans advanced to the Marne during the first months of the war, capturing numerous enemy troops and internning civilians. The Allied prisoners - including colonial troops - are taken to the hinterland and distributed to various German camps. With a capacity for up to 25,000 prisoners, the camp near Parchim is one of the largest German camps in World War I. At peak times, up to 15,000 Allied soldiers live here in around 250 wooden barracks, while the town of Parchim only has 9,000 inhabitants.

Technically, the camp is up to date:It has electric light, while Parchim was not connected until 1922. There are kitchens in the camp where each nationality can prepare their own food. Workshops are available to the prisoners in which they can do handicraft work and earn something with it. They get rooms that they use as a church and synagogue. The captured soldiers engage in sports and perform plays. They set up a music band and a choir. Sound recordings were made of the latter, which are now in the Sound Archives of the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Forced labor and cabin fever

But the prisoners also have to do forced labor in logging, in agriculture and in nearby businesses. A part is also distributed to work camps in Schleswig-Holstein and modern-day Denmark, where they have to cut peat and do other heavy work. The Parchimer local historian and author Gerhard Schmidt ("The big city next to the small city") found this out on the basis of prisoner postcards.

Many prisoners suffer from homesickness, depression and illness, or from their injuries sustained in combat. A total of 1,400 soldiers die and are buried in the cemetery set up opposite the camp at the end of 1914. Some prisoners form a committee and collect donations for a memorial for the deceased, which they design themselves. In June 1916 it was inaugurated in the presence of Russian, Serbian, French and Belgian prisoners and German officers. 735 Russian Tsarist soldiers are still lying there today. The Western Allies exhumed their dead in the 1920s and brought them home.

The red fright of the citizens

Almost two years after the end of the First World War, the last prisoners of war left the camp near Parchim in September 1920. Around 10,000 Red Army soldiers are then interned here - some with their families. Pushed to East Prussia during the Polish-Soviet War, they had previously been disarmed by the Germans and brought to the Reich. The presence of the Bolsheviks provoked protests from the bourgeois population of Parchim. Shortly after the November Revolution of 1918, she feared that the local communists would join forces with the internees and thus endanger civil order.

Since the conditions in the camp - compared to the war years - have deteriorated significantly, the Red Army soldiers and their relatives suffer from the cold and hunger. Diseases such as typhus and spotted fever break out. A total of around 1,200 people die during this time. After an agreement with Soviet Russia, the survivors were able to return to their homeland until July 1921. In the autumn of 1921, the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin bought the existing wooden barracks to use them as material for building settlements.

Once a warehouse, now an airport

Today, apart from a few exhibits in the city museum, only the monument of honor in the prison cemetery reminds us of this little-known episode in Mecklenburg history. On the site of the former prisoner of war and internee camp there is now a huge, little-used area - Schwerin-Parchim Airport. The Chinese investor Jonathan Pang has been trying to set up an international air hub there for years.