Red Cross Messages and Tracing Letters of the 1940s: A Research Guide
For most of the war a Polish soldier in Britain could not write home. The only way to reach a family under German or Soviet occupation was a Red Cross message: a printed form carrying at most twenty-five words, passed through Geneva and censored on both sides. Families kept the replies, and they also kept the letters from the Polish Red Cross and other tracing offices that told them, after 1945, what had happened to a brother, a son or a village.
These scraps of paper are records in their own right. The form names the sender and the addressee with their addresses, the stamps date the route, and the tracing letters often quote the file that answered the question. This guide explains how the message scheme worked, what the forms and letters contain, where the tracing files survive today and how they lead to the Polish family.
How the Red Cross message scheme worked
The International Committee of the Red Cross obtained the agreement of the belligerents in 1939 to a civilian message service, and by the end of 1940 the scheme was running between Britain and German-controlled Europe. In Britain the Civilian Message Section of the British Red Cross, set up in the autumn of 1939, turned enquiries into short messages on a standard form (Form 61 in the British series), limited at first to ten words and later to twenty-five. The forms went to Geneva, were forwarded by the German Red Cross to the addressee, and came back with a reply written on the reverse. A message commonly took weeks or months each way and carried the stamps of the British censor, the International Red Cross and the German Red Cross.
Polish soldiers in Scotland and England used the same scheme to reach parents and wives in the General Government and the annexed territories, and the families used it in reverse. Messages to the Soviet-occupied east were far harder to send, and after June 1941 impossible until the Polish embassy and its welfare delegates in the Soviet Union began their own tracing work.
What a message form records
- The sender and the addressee: full names and addresses on both sides, which for the Polish side means a pre-war address written by someone who knew it.
- The date of the message and of the reply: with the censor and Red Cross stamps, a timeline that places the family at an address on a known date, often the last date before deportation or resettlement.
- The twenty-five words: a birth, a death, a marriage, a move; short sentences that are sometimes the only record of a family event in those years.
- The reference numbers: the Red Cross file or enquiry number, which can still identify the original enquiry in the tracing archives.
The tracing services after 1945
When the war ended, the search for the missing passed to the national Red Cross societies and the Allied tracing bureaux. The Polish Red Cross Information and Tracing Office in Warsaw has worked continuously since 1919; during the war it compiled lists of the dead, wounded, sick and missing, and its delegations abroad from December 1939 built up a card index of Polish prisoners of war in German camps. The office’s own building was bombed on 23 September 1939 and set on fire during the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, so part of the wartime card index was lost; the post-war enquiry files, including those opened for relatives writing from Britain, are far more complete. A negative reply from the office does not mean that no record exists elsewhere.
The International Tracing Service, now the Arolsen Archives in Germany, inherited the Allied tracing bureaux’ files on forced labourers, camp prisoners and displaced persons, together with the correspondence of the service itself, and answers family inquiries free of charge. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva holds the archives of its Central Prisoners of War Agency, with cards for prisoners of war registered by the belligerents. A tracing letter in the family’s papers from any of these bodies names the file that answered the question, and that file can be asked for again today.
Reading the letters together with other records
A Red Cross message is strongest when it is read alongside the other papers a Polish family in Britain usually holds: the soldier’s service book, which gives his next of kin at enlistment; the marriage certificate, which gives his father’s name; and the naturalisation papers, which give the place of birth. The message supplies the missing piece in the middle, the address and the condition of the family in Poland during the war, and it often names a relative who later appears in the Polish Red Cross files or in the deportation records. Our guides to Polish prisoner of war records and to Soviet deportation records cover the two situations most often behind a wartime enquiry.
A worked example
An illustrative case, not a client file. A family in Glasgow keeps three Red Cross forms from 1942 and 1943 between their grandfather, then with the Polish forces in Scotland, and his mother at an address in a village near Rzeszow, and a 1947 letter from the Polish Red Cross reporting that his brother had died in a German camp in 1944. The forms give the mother’s address and show the family still at home in 1943. The 1947 letter gives the brother’s date of death and the camp. An inquiry to the Arolsen Archives returns the brother’s camp registration and his transport; the Polish Red Cross confirms the post-war enquiry file; the village address leads to the parish register for both brothers’ baptisms and the parents’ marriage.
From the message to the Polish records
The address on a Red Cross form is the most reliable Polish address most British families possess, written in Polish by a Pole. It leads directly to the parish, the commune’s residence register and the civil records of the district. Our military research service takes the names and addresses from the forms and letters, follows them through the Polish Red Cross, the Arolsen Archives, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Polish state archives, and confirms the family in the pre-war registers, with an English-language report, references and copies where the archives allow.