Qualla: Stalag VIII-A

Stalag VIII-A: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Radler59, CC BY-SA 4.0. Roughly four hundred men crowded into Barrack 27 on the evening of 15 January 1941 - prisoners of war and German guards sitting together in a wooden hut that doubled as the camp theatre, in cold hard enough to stiffen fingers. Four Frenchmen took their places: Olivier Messiaen at a piano, Jean le Boulaire with a violin, Henri Akoka with a clarinet, Étienne Pasquier with a cello. What they played had been written inside the wire, and it was about the end of time. Messiaen said afterwards that he had never been listened to with so much attention and understanding.

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Image: Radler59 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stalag VIII-A: The Guard Who Brought Pencils

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Meetingpointmusicmessiaen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Messiaen was thirty-one, a medical auxiliary in the French army, and already a composer of standing when he was captured in June 1940. He had met Pasquier and Akoka the year before in a military orchestra at Verdun; while the three of them waited to be shipped east, Akoka sight-r...

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Image: Meetingpointmusicmessiaen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stalag VIII-A: Quatuor pour la fin du temps

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Badinguet 42, CC BY-SA 4.0. The title comes from the angel of Revelation who swears that there shall be time no longer, and Messiaen meant it musically as well as theologically: the piece dissolves regular metre, stretching some movements almost to stillness. There are stories attached to that premiere that...

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Image: Badinguet 42 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stalag VIII-A: Before There Was Music

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arkadiusz Kucharski "Arski", CC BY-SA 3.0. The camp existed before the composers arrived, and its first prisoners are the ones most easily forgotten. Stalag VIII-A was established on 26 August 1939 - days before Germany invaded Poland - on an eighteen-hectare field converted from a Hitler Youth site, and formally named on...

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Image: Arkadiusz Kucharski "Arski" | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stalag VIII-A: Forty-Seven Thousand

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Radler59, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the Battle of France, Belgian and French troops arrived in numbers the camp could not absorb, and through the middle of 1940 many of them lived in tents. A separate compound went up for Soviet prisoners in 1941 - men held under conditions the German army applied to no one e...

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Image: Radler59 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stalag VIII-A: Meetingpoint

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was User: (WT-shared) Fluglotse2000 at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 1.0. On 14 February 1945 the Americans and British were marched west ahead of the Soviet advance, and the evacuation ground on until May, on foot, with every vehicle reserved for military use; the long winter marches killed men the camp had not. Soviet troops freed the last prisoners ...

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Image: Original uploader was User: (WT-shared) Fluglotse2000 at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 1.0