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24th February 1933
Gleiwitz

'Head Study' in watercolour and coloured pencil (on Mi.P199I)

Postal Stationery Mi. P199I (0.22mm thickness)- President Ebert 6 Rpf imprint in olive green from Gleiwitz to Leipzig. Card first issued in 1932. Ref: 24.02.1933

The sitter in the 'Kopf-Studie' is most likely a Polish policeman (with Polish eagle cap badge), although more information on the specific uniform is required.


 


Example from another Mi. P199I postcard illustrating panel dividing line that has been drawn poorly. Ref: 22.03.1933


 

Gleiwitz

 

From Wikipedia:


On 9th June 1933, Gliwice was the site of the first conference of the Nazi anti-Polish organization Bund Deutscher Osten in Upper Silesia. In a secret Sicherheitsdienst report from 1934, Gliwice was named one of the main centers of the Polish movement in western Upper Silesia. Polish activists were increasingly persecuted starting in 1937.


An attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz on 31st August 1939, staged by the German secret police, served as a pretext, devised by Reinhard Heydrich under orders from Hitler, for Nazi Germany to invade Poland, which marked the start of the Second World War.


Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, on 4th September 1939, the Einsatzgruppe I entered the city to commit atrocities against Poles. After the invasion of Poland, the assets of local Polish banks were confiscated by Germany. The Germans formed a Kampfgruppe unit in the city. It was also the cremation site of many of around 750 Poles murdered in Katowice in September 1939. During the war, the Germans operated a Nazi prison in the city, and established numerous forced labour camps, including a Polenlager camp solely for Poles, a camp solely for Jews, a penal 'education' camp, a subcamp of the prison in Strzelce Opolskie, and six subcamps of the Stalag VIII-B/344 prisoner of war camp. From July 1944 to January 1945, Gliwice was the location of four subcamps of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In the largest subcamp, whose prisoners were mainly Poles, Jews and Russians, nearly 100 either died of hunger, mistreatment and exhaustion or were murdered. During the evacuation of another subcamp, the Germans burned alive or shot 55 prisoners who were unable to walk. There are two mass graves of the victims of the early 1945 death march from Auschwitz in the city, both commemorated with monuments.


On 24th January 1945, Gliwice was occupied by the Red Army as part of their Allied Occupation Zone. Under borders changes dictated by the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference, Gliwice fell inside Poland's new borders after Germany's defeat in the war. It was incorporated into Poland's Silesian Voivodeship on 18 March 1945, after almost 300 years of being outside of Polish rule. The Germans were displaced to the new borders of Germany. Some of Poles that were from the Polish Kresy (Eastern Borderlands), that were incorporated by Soviet Union, settled in Gliwice.


 

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