Henry Soderberg

Henry Söderberg (* 1916 ; † September 21, 1997 ) was a Swedish lawyer and one of seven foreigners who, on behalf of the YMCA, were allowed to visit the prisoner-of-war camps in the German Reich during the Second World War.

Life

Although there are many sources on the Internet that prove Söderberg's work for the benefit of foreign prisoners of war in the German Reich, there is hardly any biographical material about his life. The following information is taken from the biographical notes for his articles My Friend William Who Made Music Behind Barbed Wire & Grammophone recording German POW Camps .

Söderberg was a lawyer specializing in international aviation law. After the war, he worked for a year from 1945 to 1946 for the YMCA prisoner of war aid, now also in the aid of German prisoners of war in the Allied camps. From 1947 to 1966 Söderberg worked for the Swedish Aviation Authority and during this time was also the Swedish representative in the International Civil Aviation Organization for five years . From 1966 to 1981 he worked in several functions for Scandinavian Airlines and retired as their "Vice President".

He lived in Stockholm-Vällingby . His Swiss wife Claire worked from 1945 to 1948 for the "War Prisoners' Aid of the International YMCA" at its Geneva headquarters and in Germany.

Söderberg's closeness to aviation and its history formed the background for his book “Swedenborg's 1714 airplane. A machine to fly in the air ”, in which he dealt with an early invention by the Swedish scientist, mystic and theosophist Emanuel Swedenborg .

Henry Söderberg died in September 1997. The "US Air Force Academy" contains the "Söderberg collection 1935–1997", the description of which in the WorldCat provides the first clues about Söderberg's work in World War II:

“A collection of materials pertaining to the wartime service of Henry Söderberg, a Swedish national and volunteer with the International YMCA during World War II. Besides Söderberg's diaries, scrapbooks, and photos of various camps, Söderberg kept records of the prisoners he spoke with and noted how the YMCA was able to assist them with their personal requests. A listing of those prisoners and their home state or country details those efforts. Other significant items include an unpublished manuscript entitled 'The Sane Asylum' written by Jewish POW Alfred J. Bruch. He described camp life and personalities in Ilag VIII Z at Kreuzburg, from his arrival in 1940 until the camp was liberated in 1945. There are photos taken by Söderberg that illustrate part of that diary. There also is a series of linoleum prints from Ilag XVIII allegorically depicting the thoughts of a Jewish internee dreaming about the future state of Israel, a book of poetry from Stalag Luft VI, and copies of the publication 'Ceux du 1 A' that detail camp life in Stalag 1A and are considered unique in discussion of the Russian advance. "

Services

Söderberg's work in World War II is embedded in the work of the YMCA and its special status for the care of foreign prisoners of war in the German Reich.

→ Main article : YMCA / YMCA activities during World War II

He was one of the seven official YMCA delegates who were allowed to enter the prisoner-of-war camps in the German Reich and to establish contact there with both the camp authorities and the prisoners of war themselves. He describes his geographical area of ​​responsibility as follows: “I visited camps in eastern Germany and western Poland, an area in which more than a million allied prisoners were kept, British, American, French, Serbian, Italian, Polish, Belgian etc. There were also hundreds of thousands of Russian POWs in my region - without the possibility for us to assist. "

Henry Söderberg began his work in the summer of 1943 as the successor to the Swedish YMCA delegate Gunnar Jansson. His freedom of movement in Germany enabled him to get a detailed picture of the conditions under which the prisoners of war had to live. He visited the camps frequently, including the Stalag Luft and Oflag 64 in Schuben . From Oflag 64 there is an extensive sound archive with gramophone recordings, but it does not seem to be entirely certain whether these recordings were made by Söderberg. His great efforts “to procure and deliver items requested by the various compounds” are documented. As a result, each compound had a band and orchestra, a well-equipped library, and sports equipment to meet the different British and American national tastes. Chaplains also had the necessary religious items to enable them to hold regular services. In addition, many men were able to advance, and in a few cases, complete their formal education. "

What does not seem completely secure for Oflag 64, however, took place in the Kreuzburg camp (Upper Silesia) : music recordings in a prisoner of war camp. Before that - towards the end of 1943 - there had already been a broadcast on the Swedish Radio, which Söderberg's predecessor as YMCA delegate, Gunnar Jansson, brokered and which was based on Hilsley's compositions. Jansson had forwarded the scores from Kreuzburg to the radio, where they were arranged by his own composers and then played by Swedish musicians with the support of opera singers. Söderberg, who had met Hilsley (then still “Hildesheimer”) in the summer of 1943 before the radio broadcast, was surprised by his musical engagement in the camp and by his recognition and popularity among the camp inmates - “even the Germans admired him and came to his concerts ". So in 1944 there were new sound recordings.

“During the summer of 1944 the Germans permitted me to make gramophone recordings in Ilag VIII / Z 1 Kreuzburg, Upper Silesia. This was a part of a YMCA drive to raise money in the home countries for the work in Germany. The Hildesheimer music got a prominent place in my series of recordings. Therefore and luckily, today - more than half a century after the end of the war - we can still listen to William's live music inside the barbed wire played on instruments sent from the YMCA Considering the conditions under which the records were made - no stuios! - whith primitive equipment, faltering elöectric current and instruments somewhat badly knocked about - the camp atmosphere can be brought back in a moving way. "

Of the seven YMCA delegates who were allowed to enter the POW camps, only two were able to make music recordings: Henry Söderberg and his colleague Erik Berg, who was in charge of the South German prison camps. The aim, as already indicated in the above quotation, was to use the music recordings in the prisoners' home countries to collect funds for their support, since the resources of the aid organizations dwindled as the war continued. The YMCA was given permission to take pictures in early 1944 - against the resistance of the Gestapo, but with the support of the Army and Air Force command. "One of the German arguments in favor of the project was also that it would be good for the outside world to know that the German Military Custodians were not so inhuman and cruel as was reported daily by the foreign press. (This was at a time when the news had started to leak about the atrocities committed in concenbtration camps - areas to which neither the Red Cross nor the YMCA had access.) “However, recordings with and among prisoners from Germans conquered or occupied were prohibited Areas.

As early as the summer of 1943, the technical equipment for the recordings was delivered by the Swiss company Thorens to Sagan near the “Stalag Luft”. However, it took Söderberg and Berg a long time to familiarize themselves with the technology that was unfamiliar to them. In a further step, the bearings had to be determined and selected that were suitable for recordings.

“In my case I got German permission from two big English camps, Stalag VIII A in Görlitz and XXI D in Poznan; Also from the commandants of Stalag Luft III in Sagan and Oflag 64 in Szubin (bozh with American officers). In addition I was also free to record in Ilag VIII / Z in Kreuzburg - the camp in which William Hildesheimer was a POW. My charcoal droven Opel car was loaded with the recording equipment - and off I drove, a little bit tense and nervous about this new undertaking. "

Söderberg reports of a consistently open-minded atmosphere during the recordings in the camps. He received support from the prisoners as well as from their German guards. But one problem ran through the whole undertaking: “Electricity came and went.” Recordings had to be interrupted and continued on another day, and if the power supply worked, the acoustic conditions, which were usually very inadequate for sound recordings, still had to be dealt with . The greater the joy when the recordings were completed and everyone involved could listen to them again together:

“When the recordings days came to an end - and this happened in all camps - the whole POW community with the German guards all around gathered in order to listen to their achievments. They were all really proud of it - even the German commandants. And what a pleasant change it had been for the POWs in the daily boring routines behind the Wires! "

Söderberg had permission for the sound recordings, but he could not dispose of them directly. Every recording was checked by the Gestapo, and it took several months for the recordings to reach Stockholm and Geneva, from where they were sent on to London and New York. Radio programs based on the camp recordings were not possible until the beginning of 1945, but at that time they failed to serve their real purpose, to support the camp inmates, because by this time the Red Army had already advanced so far west that the camps supervised by Söderberg were evacuated and whose inmates were forced on long marches to other parts of Germany. The records now got a different meaning: they documented the work of the YMCA during the war, which had to be continued for many years to support the refugees and displaced persons .

Söderberg himself also took part in the evacuation marches:

“During the last hectic and chaotic weeks of the war I suddenly found myself among the crew of the former Silesian Kreuzburg camp, now far deep down in the Austrian Alps in the town of Spittal an the border to Italy! Here I met William [Hilsley] again. I became a voluntary inmate in his camp. I could stay inside the camp and witness its liberation by the 8th British Army during the first week of May 1945. Those days were exciting - to say the least. But William and his music-making friends, in spite of the chaos and unrest all around, continued to play and sing for us. They were a constant source of inspiration and encouragement to their fellow prisoners in the midst of a dissolving world on the verge of recreation. I said good-bye to William and his internment friends in Rome in the middle of May, then thinking we should never meet again. The ex-prisoners were soon repatriated to their home countries. "

Söderberg and Hilsley met again in 1992 in Stockholm.

Söderberg used the recordings in the years 1946–1947 during a lengthy lecture tour through the USA. During this trip and afterwards, many copies of the recordings were made, supplemented by interviews, which former prisoners of war used. This also includes the sound recordings from Oflag 64. All of Söderberg's recordings were later transferred to tapes and are now in the library of the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs as the “Söderberg collection 1935–1997” . Some of the recordings were given to the "Iowa Gold Star Military Museum". In addition, Söderberg still had a large collection of recordings, by himself and Erik Berg, for which he was looking for permanent storage. This also included recordings from the Allied camps for German Wehrmacht members. His article in the appendix to Hilsley's memories ends with an outlook on the as yet unsecured “final resting place for gramophone records”: “I hope soon to find a resting place also for these German POW recotds.” Whether this wish until his death in the September 1997 or thereafter is not known; the brief description of the “Söderberg collection” does not provide any information.

Works

• Henry Söderberg: Över gränser, genome spärrar: Två år bland allierade krigsfångar i Tyskland. Stockholm, 1945. (Title translation: Across the borders, through the locks: Two years among Allied prisoners of war in Germany), evidence from the WorldCat.
• Henry Söderberg: Swedenborg's 1714 airplane. A machine to fly in the air. Swedenborg Foundation, New York, 1988, ISBN 0-87785-138-7 .
• Henry Söderberg: My Friend William Who Made Music Behind Barbed Wire & Grammophone recording German POW Camps. In: William Hilsley: Music behind the barbed wire. Diary of an interned musician 1940–1945. Ulrich Bornemann, Karlhans Kluncker, Rénald Ruiter (eds.), Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam 1999, ISBN 3-932981-48-0 , pp. 107-114.
• William Hilsley: Music behind the barbed wire. Diary of an interned musician 1940–1945. Ulrich Bornemann, Karlhans Kluncker, Rénald Ruiter (eds.), Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam 1999, ISBN 3-932981-48-0 .

literature

• J. Frank Diggs: The Welcome Swede. Vantage Press, New York 1988, ISBN 0-533-07818-0 . The book is not listed in WorldCat for any German library.

Web links

• Söderberg collection 1935–1997 in WorldCat
• Biographical notes about Henry Söderberg
• YMCA Documents on Söderberg's work are also documented on this page.
• YMCA representative Henry Söderberg
• Audio archive. Sound recordings from Oflag 64

Individual evidence

1. ↑ This date of death comes from the biographical notes on Henry Söderberg: My Friend William Who Made Music Behind Barbed Wire & Grammophone recording German POW Camps. In other sources, the year 1998 is also found as the year of death.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Henry Söderberg: My Friend William. Pp. 107-114.
3. ↑ Compare also the secondary literature on Swedenborg's inventions on the website of the Württemberg State Library.
4. ^ US Air Force Academy.
5. ^ Söderberg collection 1935–1997 in WorldCat.
6. ↑ The history of Stalag Luft has its own website on the "US Air Force Academy Library" page: The story of Stalag Luft III .
7. ↑ For the history of the Oflag 64 see Home of the Oflag 64 Association .
8. ↑ Recordings from Oflag 64 . The recordings ("These recordings are believed to have been made in June of 1944 by Swedish lawyer Henry Söderberg.") Can be played from the website.
9. ^ Söderberg's help for the camp inmates.
10. ↑ In contrast to the operators of the Oflag-64 website, who only believe that their recordings on tape come from Söderberg, Söderberg has no doubt that they are based on his recordings (Söderberg, p. 113).
11. ^ William Hilsley: Music behind the barbed wire. Pp. 56–57, especially note 66. Swedish newspaper reports on this broadcast can be found there on pp. 104–106. Also there, on pp. 110–114, Henry Söderberg gives a detailed look back at the genesis of the radio concert and the later recordings in the camp itself.
12. ↑ If "recordings" are mentioned here and in the following text, then it is always a question of 'gramophone recordings', that is to say, recordings, because tape recordings were not yet available at the time.
13. ↑ For the main camps see also the list of Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war camps .
14. ↑ Sound recordings from Oflag 64
15. ^ Söderberg collection.
16. ^ Iowa Gold Star Military Museum. ( Memento of the original from February 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.