History of a song: "The Moorsoldaten" - from concentration camp song to world hit

The guards from the SS did not have to toil to exhaustion in the peat. In the concentration camp Börgermoor in the wilderness of the Emslandes they had good food and alcohol, their boredom they expelled sometimes with beating orgies against the detainees. But the SS people also felt deported, and they sought variety. Therefore, the camp administration approved an event inspired by the inmate spokesmen: On Sunday, August 27, 1933, a group of prisoners were allowed to appear on the roll call.

They called themselves "Circus Konzentrazani".

It was a colorful revue, compiled by inmate Wolfgang Langhoff. The then 31-year-old, previously a youthful hero at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, was a member of the Communist Party and led an anti-fascist agit-prop group. Therefore, the Nazis had badly mistreated him and abducted to Börgermoor.

There Langhoff formed of acrobatic talents, musicians and former members of workers' singing clubs a program through which a "director Konzentrazani" led with cardboard cylinder and whip. The audience of around 900 prisoners and the guards were amused by clowns, club swingers and a "moor ballet" of the five thickest prisoners.

Choir rehearsal in the washroom of a concentration camp barracks

For the show finale Langhoff had commissioned an all appealing song. Johann Esser, a miner from the Ruhr Valley and a worker's writer, wrote the text, Langhoff extended it by a striking chorus. Rudi Goguel, 25, an employee from Strasbourg with musical talent, set the text to music. His four-part choir set was practiced by the prison chorus in the washroom of a barrack.

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The premiere experienced the song "The Moorsoldaten" after the last circus number. Sixteen choir members marched through the ring in their green prisoner uniforms with shouldered spades and sang "We are the bog soldiers and walk with the spade into the moor". Already after the second stanza the prisoners began to hum along the catchy chorus. "And in the last stanzas," recounted the composer Goguel, "the SS people also sang peacefully with us, apparently because they felt themselves addressed as moor soldier."

For the text provided with verses such as:

"Wherever the eye blurts
Moor and heath only around.
Vogelsang does not quiz,
Oak trees stand bare and crooked. "

Or:

"Homeward, homeward everyone craves,
to the parents, wife and child.
Some breasts sigh a sigh,
because we are trapped here. "

Such perceptions and thoughts did not only concern the prisoners. In his book "The Moor Soldiers" Langhoff also wrote about the isolated situation of the security guards and quoted a fellow inmate: "The SS men think we are subhumans, but if they now see how we hold together, then one or the other, who is just as proletarian as we are, asking if the way they treat us is the right one. "

"Come on, sing, Börgermoorlied!"

Immediately, the camp commander banned the Moorsoldaten-Lied - according to Langhoff already two days after the circus revue. Maybe the last stanza bothered him:

"But there are no complaints for us,
It can not be winter forever.
Once we will gladly say:
Home, you are mine again. "

In addition, it was said in the last chorus: "Then drag the bogs no longer with the spade into the moor" - and that sounded like rebellious. But the song did not stop. While working in the moor, the guards repeatedly called on the inmates: "Come on, sing, Börgermoorlied!" At the objection that was forbidden, they answered: "Nonsense, I'm ordering out here."

The concentration camp Börgermoor was one of the first concentration camps and was part of a chain of 15 Emsland camps, in which a total of around 80,000 concentration camp inmates and later well over 100,000 prisoners of war were imprisoned. The Nazis had already established it in June 1933. Half a year earlier, they had come to power and quickly abolished democracy in the following months, switching the judiciary and the media alike, declared the NSDAP the only party and arrested a large number of political opponents.

With Hanns Eisler in the USA

In the Emsland camps, the prisoners had to drain peat under pristine conditions. Up to 30,000 people died, mostly from fatigue and illness from hard work or as a result of physical abuse. The most famous inmate of the moor camp was Carl von Ossietzky. The journalist, pacifist and Nobel Peace Prize winner was from 1934 in Esterwegen concentration camp, two years later was discharged severely ill and died in 1937 from the consequences of tuberculosis.

Meanwhile, the "Moorsoldaten" song spread throughout Germany, because Borgermoor prisoners brought text and melody when they were transferred to other camps and detention centers. They did not come with written words and notes, but with the song in their heads. A released inmate met composer Hanns Eisler and singer and actor Ernst Busch in London; both had emigrated from Germany in 1933. Because the ex-inmate could not sing the melody properly and played back unmusically, Eisler invented a separate version on the piano. It is still played and sung (to be heard here) as the Eisler adaptation of the KZ song.

Eisler took the Moorsoldaten song into American exile. There, the African-American singer, actor and political activist Paul Robeson made "The Peat-Bog Soldiers" popular on events and a 1942 record. Later folk singer Pete Seeger recorded a beautiful version as a soloist with banjo accompaniment. Seeger as well as Robeson sang text passages in German.

International anthem of anti-fascists

The Moorsoldaten were translated into many European languages ​​in the course of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. After a coup of the fascist General Franco, supported by Hitler Germany, volunteers from many countries came to the aid of the legitimate republican government and fought against Franco's troops.

To provide moral support to these "international brigades", Paul Robeson and Ernst Busch, popular as the "Barricades Tauber", came to Spain for performances. Always the two sang the "bogs" who became more and more famous. Soon Spaniards learned the song "Los Soldados del Pantano", Frenchmen sang "Le Chant du Börgermoor" and Dutchman "De Moerbrigade".

Thus, the Börgermoorlied became the international anti-fascist anthem. In the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc it belonged to the state-mandated cultural canon. In the West, primarily politically left-oriented artists took their repertoire, such as Hannes Wader.

That the sad song from the concentration camp was even more widespread, is because the "Moorsoldaten" more like a all appealing folk song than a classic socialist fight song. Much like "Bella ciao": This tune sang Italian rice pickers already some 100 years ago, with the text of partisans it became a resistance song against the fascists - and then made a remix of the French DJ Florent Hudel "Bella ciao", just popular through a spanish series, to the surprise summer hit 2018.

"An idyll compared to Auschwitz"

Of the "Moorsoldaten" there are also numerous modern versions, for example, from the electropop band wave: globe, the folk group The Dubliners and the rock bands Reservoir Dogs and Die Toten Hosen. "The song radiates in the first place no political opinion," explained wave: globe. It is "more a symbol that in times of great need for man no reason for resignation is given".

Jazz musicians tempted the melody changing between minor and major. So the Radio Jazz Group Stuttgart recorded with Wolfgang Dauner and Albert Mangelsdorff "The Moorsoldaten" as an instrumental number, as well as the Cologne saxophone Mafia. The French saxophonist Raphael Imbert brought to his recording a singer.

Wolfgang Langhoff, inspirer and spokesman of the song, went to Switzerland after being released from the concentration camp in 1934. There he wrote "Die Moorsoldaten", the first report about concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The book was published in 1935 and was immediately translated into several languages; Lion Feuchtwanger wrote the foreword for the US edition.

Langhoff also told in his book the strange story of the "circus Konzentrazani". Later he wrote, "Börgermoor with all his suffering 1933/34" was "an idyll", "compared to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the torture chambers and hunger ditches of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald or Mauthausen ten years later". After returning from Swiss emigration, Langhoff was director of the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin. He died in 1966.