About

Our translation of the memoirs of a soldier from Alsace in the First World War¹ was published in 2014.We are the authors of the website dealing with the Stobsiade - the newspaper produced by the prisoners in Stobs Camp in the Scottish Borders during the First World War. We learned about the existence of the camp in Bando from an online lecture given by Dr Mahon Murphy as part of a series of lockdown lectures organised by the Stobs Camp Project in 2020. Professor Stefan Manz, who kindly involved us in the Stobs project, has continued to take an interest in our work on Bando.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Murphy for putting us in contact with the German House in Naruto. Mr. Dario Streich of the German House has been extremely helpful. He provided us with the scans and transcriptions of the newspapers, and assisted in explaining the occasional use of the Japanese language in the newspaper. The transcription of the original handwritten newspaper was completed in Japan in 2006. The newspaper was then translated into Japanese. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons we are unable to provide access to these transcriptions or the Japanese translations on this website, but we are grateful to the German House for providing us with the transcriptions for translation purposes.

Die Heimfahrt, the newspaper which was produced on the journey back to Germany is held by the Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien in Tokyo. Dr Torsten Weber of the DIJ has kindly helped in providing copies of some of the original documents. Mr. Karl-Heinz Oermann has helped significantly by transcribing the text which, like the Baracke was originally handwritten in Sütterlin script,a task which would have been impossible for us to achieve. The DIJ website contains further information about Bando (in German), including pictures and source material from the lectures given in the camp.

Mr Hans-Joachim Schmidt's website, has been an invaluable source of information (in German) about all aspects of life in Bando.

We encountered an additional problem when we found that some articles had been written in various dialects. We asked Mr Karl-Heinz Wüstner, who had previously helped us with the Stobsiade for assistance. He kindly contacted people familiar with some of these dialects. These people in turn kindly helped by providing translations into high German. We are also grateful to Dr Claas Riecken of the Nordfriisk Instituut, Bredstedt, who translated the two articles which had been written in Low German. All the translations into high German can be accessed here.

We would like to thank the German House and the DIJ for making their material available to us.

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David and Sheila Sutherland