P.O.W.’s AGENCY STILL SEEKING MISSING PERSONS

Greymouth Evening Star, 31 March 1950, Page 7

P.O.W.’s AGENCY STILL SEEKING MISSING PERSONS

GENEVA, Five years after the Armistice, the central Prisoners of War Agency is still hard at work in the Geneva headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In 1949, the agency received over 120,000 letters, sent out 134,000 and made 15,000 individual inquiries. Two-thirds of the letters received were from the German section. Many German citizens disappeared during the war, especially on the Eastern Front. Relatives turn to the agency in the hope that the International Committee will be able to trace their lost ones.

The German section also searches for displaced persons—Volksdeutsche —from Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia and Poland. It transmits family correspondence and official documents, and gives official notice of deaths. The agency’s Italian section confirms its work in practice to the identification of deceased members of the forces. Documentation available only in the agency’s files makes it possibly to carry through complicated inquiries undertaken on the request of the Italian authorities. In 1949, 12,000 communications were received by the Polish section, and 15,000 sent out, in an effort to trace civilian and military personnel scattered throughout the world. The Greek Civil War added another heavy task to the agency’s burden. Lists had to be drawn up of children transferred to other countries, search made for soldiers posted missing after fighting in Epirus and Macedonia, and messages forwarded. About 2,500 individual inquiries were made during the year. Thousands of searches were made in the files at the request of the Netherlands Red Cross for Dutch subjects, either labour conscripts or deported Jews, who had not returned home by the end of 1949, —Reuter,