Kennkarte, Arbeitsbuch and DP Cards in Polish Family Research
Not every Polish family in Britain arrived through the army. Tens of thousands came after 1945 from the displaced persons camps of Germany and Austria: former forced labourers, concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war, recruited as European Volunteer Workers or joining relatives already here. The papers they kept are German: a grey Kennkarte, an Arbeitsbuch or Arbeitskarte, a camp release certificate, a displaced persons registration card. Each of these documents names the person, records a date and place of birth and fixes them at a precise point in the war.
This guide explains what the main German wartime documents are, what each one records, where the matching official files survive today, and how a document kept in a British home leads to the Arolsen Archives, the Polish state archives and the family’s home parish.
The Kennkarte
The Kennkarte was the German identity card. In the General Government, the part of occupied Poland not annexed to the Reich, it was issued to residents aged fifteen and over between 1941 and 1943. The colour and a letter code recorded how the authorities classified the holder: grey for Poles, yellow for Jews and Roma, blue for Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, Georgians and the so-called Goralenvolk. The card carries a photograph, fingerprints, the holder’s name, date and place of birth, occupation, address and religion, and the issuing office and date. The application file behind it, where it survives, can list the whole household.
For a family in Britain the Kennkarte matters because it was issued in Poland, before deportation to Germany, and records the place of birth and the address in the Polish spelling. Application files and card indexes for some towns survive in the Polish state archives and in the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).
The Arbeitsbuch and Arbeitskarte
Workers in the Reich carried an Arbeitsbuch, a work book recording each employer, the place and dates of employment and the kind of work. Poles taken to Germany as forced labourers from the General Government were issued an Arbeitskarte, a work card from the German labour office that employed them, with a photograph, the holder’s name and year of birth, the issuing office, the date and a card number. The IPN in Warsaw holds a collection of these cards for Polish workers, catalogued by name, with the issuing office and date, for example cards issued in Magdeburg and Zweibrucken in 1943.
The employer and the place named in a work document are the key to the next record: the registration of foreigners kept by German local authorities, the employer’s own lists, and the files of the labour offices, much of which is now gathered in the Arolsen Archives.
Displaced persons documents, 1945 to 1951
After liberation, former forced labourers and prisoners were registered by the Allied military authorities and then by UNRRA and the International Refugee Organisation in displaced persons camps. The registration card, the DP identity card and the camp’s own papers record the person’s name, birth, nationality, the camp and the route of arrival. Families who came to Britain under the European Volunteer Workers schemes of 1946 to 1949, or later as dependants, often kept the IRO travel document and the British work permit. Our guide to European Volunteer Workers covers the British side of that story and the displaced persons guide the camps themselves.
The Arolsen Archives
The Arolsen Archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany, formerly the International Tracing Service, hold the largest collection of documents on the victims of Nazi persecution: concentration camp records, the registration cards and questionnaires of forced labourers, the displaced persons files of the post-war years, and the correspondence of the tracing service itself. Millions of documents are searchable online by name, and the archive answers family inquiries free of charge through its online form, sending copies of the documents found with explanatory notes. The archive states that it limits research to ten named people per inquirer per quarter; check the current conditions on its website before applying.
A typical result for a Polish forced labourer is a set of registration cards from the town where he or she worked, an entry in an employer’s list, a DP registration and, if the person emigrated, the IRO file that records the destination. The DP file is often the document that names the family members who travelled together and the Polish town the person gave as home.
What each document gives you
- Kennkarte: name, date and place of birth, address in Poland, religion, photograph; the pre-war identity in Polish spelling.
- Arbeitsbuch or Arbeitskarte: the employer, the town and the dates in Germany; the way into the Arolsen Archives and German local records.
- Camp or prison release certificate: the camp, the prisoner number and the date; the way into camp registers and the IPN files.
- DP registration or identity card: the camp, the nationality claimed and the family members; the way into the IRO files and the British arrival records.
A worked example
An illustrative case, not a client file. A family in Leicester keeps a grey Kennkarte issued in Radom in 1942 to a man born in 1922, and an Arbeitskarte from a labour office in Hanover dated 1943. The Kennkarte gives the village of birth in the Radom district and the address of the family home. The Hanover card leads to an Arolsen inquiry, which returns his registration as a foreign worker in Hanover, a DP registration in a camp in Lower Saxony in 1945 and an IRO file recording his departure for Britain as a European Volunteer Worker in 1947. The village of birth leads to the parish register for his baptism and his parents’ marriage, and the address to the pre-war residence register of the commune.
From the German document to the Polish parish
German and Allied officials recorded Polish places as they heard them, and labourers sometimes gave a district town instead of a village or changed a date of birth to avoid a transport. The Polish registers settle these questions. Our guide to finding a birth entry in Poland explains how to locate the right register, and our family history research service follows a person from the document in your drawer through the Arolsen Archives, the IPN and the Polish state archives to the parish and the earlier generations, with an English-language report and copies where the archives allow. Where the person was a prisoner of war rather than a civilian labourer, our POW records guide applies.