Alfons Paoli Schwartz

Alfons Paoli Schwartz (* 1886 in Corsica , France ; † 20th century) was the last German prisoner of war of the First World War .

Life

Alfons Paoli Schwartz was born in Corsica on French soil, which is why his middle name was named after Pascal Paoli (1725-1807), the national hero of the Corsicans. However, his parents came from Alsace , where Schwartz grew up and later worked as a teacher.

Schwartz served in the German secret field police , i.e. the military counterintelligence , during the First World War and, because of his bilingualism (French and German), he had good contacts with French collaborators . Only after the end of hostilities ( Armistice of Compiègne on November 11, 1918) was Schwartz arrested in the French-occupied territory in Kehl before the Versailles Treaty came into force (June 28, 1919), accused of treason and deported by Alsatian judges to the French penal colony sentenced to Devil's Island ("Archipelago of the Damned") off the coast of French Guiana ( South America ).

After years of negotiations, Schwartz was finally released from captivity on April 4, 1932 and returned to Germany as the last German prisoner of war of the First World War. He was considered a symbolic figure and a martyr. After his release, his trail is lost. The files of the French secret service were brought to Germany after 1941 and to Moscow in 1945. There is a final reference to Schwartz. In the summer of 1935 "Agent 39" was supposedly active again. This time he spied for France.

literature

• Paul Coelestin Ettighoffer : From Devil's Island to Life. The tragic fate of the Alsatian Alfons Paoli Schwartz . 9th edition. Bertelsmann Verlag, Gütersloh 1942 (reprint of the Cologne edition 1932).
• English translation: The Island of the Doomed . Published by Hutchinson & Co., London 1933.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Total circulation 140,000