Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

German Heer 1935-1945.

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sirjahn
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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by sirjahn »

I'll give the Stadtarchiv a shot. I lived in Frankfurt back in the late 70s too bad I wasn't looking for this information then.
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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by sirjahn »

Rise, Rise from the dead post pile. :)

Okay finally got through a number of forum searches and came up with an old thread which directly relates to my search for the POW guards on the Rennes Military Hospital (aka Frontstalag 221 W, Stalag 221, EPS Rennes). I see that on post dated 7 March 2006 there is a listing of LS units in France dated July 1943 which lists certain LS Battalions as POW guards. In this post the author references Tessin as the source of this information. It has one of my LS Battalions of interest in Rennes, number 907, as a POW guard unit. So does anyone have any info about the 907 LS Battalion or information from Tessin regarding this unit?

I have tried to locate the doctor using phone books in Frankfurt to no avail. I am now trying a German POW locator site as several of the E&E reports indicated that Oberstabsarzt Enzinger may have been captured as he fled Rennes.
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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by Lorenz »

Landesschützen-Btl. 907
Formed 1 April 1940 in the West by renaming Landesschützen-Btl. VII./XVIII, which was formed on mobilization 26 August 1939 in Lienz and Ldssch. companies 17., 25., 26. And 28./XVIII.
Employment: 1939-40 with the field army in the West; 8 August 1940 reassigned to Militär Befehlshaber Frankreich with duty in the Sedan area; 1941 moved to Poitiers and then to Bordeaux; 1943 moved to Rennes; 1944 destroyed in France and disbanded.

[Source: Tessin, Georg. Verbände und Truppen der deutschen Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939-1945. Dreizehnter Band. Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1976. P.113.]

The only places you will find the day-to-day details on these obscure POW camp guard units is in the U.S. and U.N. war crimes records, and perhaps in the Rennes city archive.

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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by sirjahn »

Did Tessin have any mission or organizational details about the 907? I have been to the Rennes archives before but I didn't notice any German documents in there. But I could have been looking in the wrong spot as my focus was getting architectural drawings of the building that became the POW Hospital.
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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by Lorenz »

No, everything from Tessin is there. He got what little he provided from the Frontnachweiser lists. These small battalion-size and smaller units rarely if ever have documents that survived the war. There are a number of scholarly books and articles in German on the handling of P/Ws where you might find some generalized mission statements. But as I suggested earlier, most of this literature is war crimes related. There are acres and acres of archival documentation out there on the Dulags, Oflags, Stalags, Marinelags, KZLs, ALs, etc.³ You just have to go to NARA WashDC and the ITS Arolsen and wade through it.

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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by sirjahn »

Where in NARA would this be located? I have done some searching there but nothing in the indices point to German unit organization for LS Battalions. I stumbled across a Georgian Battalion organization under Misc once but that was sheer luck.
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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by Lorenz »

Well, with this back-and-forth exchange I think things are starting to get a little more focused. Can we assume that by "German unit organization for LS Battalions" you mean the TO&E, which in German is Kriegsstärkenachweisung (KStN)? If so, then these did survive the war for most types of units and are available at BA-MA Freiburg. They provide the prescribed organization and personnel allowances for each unit type. Equipment allowances by unit type are prescribed by another set of tables called a Kriegsausrüstungsnachweisung (KAN). These are not at NARA WashDC or available on microfilm. You would probably have to e-mail BA-MA and tell them exactly what you want so they can identify it for reproduction by their media reproduction jobber, Selke & Co. or Selke GmbH (not sure whether Selke is a company or a corporation). The KStN for a Landesschützen-Bataillon des Heeres is probably 4-6 pages, while the KAN for the same is longer, maybe up to 15 or 20 pages. Remember, these will tell you absolutely nothing about LS-Btl. 907 except how it was organized, number and rank of personnel in each component and what type and quantity of weapons and other equipment it was authorized.

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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by sirjahn »

Well I hired a researcher at the Bundesarchiv last year and he didn't come up with anything like that. I was a little more focused in that effort for finding the medical unit that would have provided the doctors but also had him looking for organizational information on the hospital/guards/doctors. I got some validation about the LS battalions that were present and some stuff on German medical units that were present in Rennes (none of which had anyone on the roster with names close to my German administrators). Most of the other LS organization data was for railroad security or engineering.

So is there a special handshake needed to unlock these KANs so I could get my researcher looking in the right place?
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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by Lorenz »

No secret handshake needed. Since this has not been going well for you, I think you should PM one of our long-time members here, Piet Duits. He is absolutely the most knowledgeable researcher I know on the esoteric subject of WWII Heer KStNs and KANs and owns copies of many of them. But remember: August is holiday/vacation month for Europeans so give him a chance to reply. If you don't hear from him by the end of the month, rattle his cage again.

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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

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Thanks I'll give him a shout.
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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by sirjahn »

Okay I went a roundabout way to the German POW and Displaced Persons organization and got a hit. Oberstabsarzt Doctor Ernst Enzinger, born April 13 1896, in Thierhaupten near Neuburg on the Donau, Wife Minna, war address Euerdorf by Hammelburg. First recorded unit was 231 Division-Nachschubfuehrer Staff September 1939, next recorded position was Frontstalag 221 in 1943 first in Bordeaux then in July 1944 Rennes. So he was not part of the LS organization guarding the Allied POWs.

I am going back to the POW organization (Deutsche Dienstelle) to see if they can provide where and when captured and if he was sent to the US or stayed in ETO as a POW.
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Re: Looking for information on POW Camp Guards Rennes France

Post by sirjahn »

Okay found a KStN for a PW camp for 30,000 which has a medical section which could have been the source for the German doctors at the PW Hospital in Rennes. It seems to make sense that the PW Hospital had a lower ranking doctor in charge at first (Stabsarzt Lumpp) and then when he got over his head with the flood of wounded Allied PWs that Oberstabsarzt Enzinger stepped in.

But this doesn't get me any closer on the German guards themselves which were apparently provided by LS 907.

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