Members’ Area
An enormous number of POW camps were set up during the Great War, stretching from Japan in the far east to Morocco on the Atlantic corner of Africa, Nijni-Novgorod in central Russia to Denmark, France and the UK in the west.
The Grande Guerre database was created from the records of POWs collected by the Central Powers Prisoners of War Agency set up in Geneva on 24 August 1914 and from Russian POW information that was sent to the Danish Red Cross in Copenhagen. The Agency made record cards for each prisoner although, as you can imagine, in time of war this information was not necessarily clear or completely accurate, especially when you think of the language differences. The Agency also kept records of transfers between camps and of those who died in captivity – 400,000 pages of names! Family members would write to Geneva during the war asking for information about their relatives.
The Grande Guerre database
Tricia Entwistle, member 30, spent many, many hours extracting Entwistle POW records and deciphering the scrawled handwriting and unusual spelling found on many of these record cards.
The download link:
You can find more for yourself at the site she used. Go to our webpage, Resources/Military Links
Back to top
Members’ Area
