The 'SCI in Germany' Archives Collections (Volume 1)

by Heinz Gabathuler (Oct 29, 2017)

Even though a German branch of SCI has been founded only after World War II, with the help of British conscientious objectors from IVSP following the first Friedland refugee camp project (see my article from April 2016), SCI activities in Germany have started much earlier. Bertram Schröter, one of the oldest veterans of the movement in Germany, being active mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, has done an enormous job in compiling all available documents (and even transcribing some of them) from the branches pre-history in the 1920s until the mid-1970s.

So the object I am describing here is actually not an original document but a collection – the first (and actually the thinnest!) out of 38 volumes Bertram has compiled and have treated by a professional bookbinder, at his own expense, just for his own library, the branch secretariat in Bonn, and the International Archives. When I took over the Archives in 2012, around half of the volumes had already found their way to La Chaux-de-Fonds. When Bertram occasionally visited the Archives in the following years, driving with his car all the way from Flensburg at the Danish border down to Switzerland, he carried more and more volumes with him. At times I was even a bit concerned that this was never going to find an end... Most of the volumes carry the title Der SCI in Deutschland, teaching the reader that it was not just about the German branch (SCI Deutschland) but about all SCI activities on German territory, at the same time subtly reminding that SCI has always been one movement and not just a confederation of national organizations.

At my last visit to the Archives they gave me a parcel containing several books from Bertram’s personal library, covering subjects like the history of pacifism and quakers in Germany. In it was the very last, 39th volume of his Archives Collection: the Index. Much more interesting, however, is the first one: It reminds us that already in the first international voluntary service after World War I in the French village of Esnes, devastated by the German Imperial Army, three German activists had participated. In the services that took place later, in Switzerland, France, Wales, there were many more German participants, and their names are all known. In 1928 the Freideutscher Werkbund, apparently a Christian pacifist organization which could be called the German partner of SCI organized a first international workcamp on German territory – they were helping an alternative, Christian community in Hessen to build a swimming pool.

The volume contains transcriptions from a call for members SCI (then in German called Internationale Zivildienst-Vereinigung) in the newspaper of the German section of WRI (Die Friedensfront), as well as from a call for volunteers to the service in Safien, a Swiss mountain village devastated by a landslide in 1932. We find a report about a speech given by Pierre Ceresole in Berlin in November 1932 – less than three months before the Nazis’ accession to power. And we find facsimiles of reports the Gestapo (the Nazi-fascist political police) delivered from 1935 on about Otto Weis, one of the most remarkable figures among German SCI activists from the time before 1933. Weis was a former police officer himself who after World War I has become a quaker. He was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, as they suspected him to be a spy, helping political activists to escape to Switzerland. On the other hand, these reports also state that SCI did not exist anymore in Germany as the Nazis themselves had introduced an obligatory work service (Reichsarbeitsdienst), "taking away the breeding ground for this international organization"... So even though individual SCI activists had been victims of oppression by the regime – Otto Weis died in 1942, at age 74, from health problems he faced during imprisonment -, SCI itself had not been prosecuted. Its activities in Germany had simply ceased. The Christian community, however, where the first German workcamp had taken place, faced repression; their school was closed and later reopened in Liechtenstein, whereas other members found exile in England.

Heinz Gabathuler, International Archives Coordinator

Reference:

The whole series of SCI Germany Archives Collections have been catalogued under 11400 (index volume) to 11438. Volume 1 which contains all documents on German SCI activists and activities before 1933 has been given number 11401.