Peat Bog Soldiers

The story

"Peat Bog Soldiers" (Die Moorsoldaten) is one of Europe's best-known protest songs. It was written, composed and first performed in 1933 by prisoners of the Nazi regime in Börgermoor, one of the Emsland camps near Papenburg in Lower Saxony, which held political opponents of the Third Reich; the site is now part of the commune of Surwold, and a documentation and information centre on the camps stands in Papenburg. In 1933 the Börgermoor camp held about 1,000 Socialist and Communist prisoners. Forbidden to sing the existing political songs, they wrote their own. The words were by Johann Esser, a miner, and Wolfgang Langhoff, an actor; the music was composed by Rudi Goguel and later adapted by Hanns Eisler and Ernst Busch, Eisler changing its rhythm into two-four time.

The song was first performed on 28 August 1933 at a "concentration camp circus" the prisoners staged, its name a pun on the Sarrasani circus. Goguel later described it: sixteen singers, most from a workers' choir of Solingen, marched in with spades on their shoulders, in the green police uniforms that served as prison clothes, with Goguel conducting with a broken spade handle. By the end of the second verse nearly all the thousands of prisoners present joined the chorus, and by the end even the SS guards and their officers were singing. At the close the singers drove their spades into the ground and marched out, leaving them standing in the peat like crosses.

The melody is slow and simple, like a soldiers' march, and deliberately repetitive, echoing the daily grind of hard labour. The original runs to six verses with refrains; most performances and translations use a shorter version that leaves out the second, third and fourth verses. The song was popular with German refugees in London in the 1930s, and the German volunteers of the International Brigades sang it as a marching song in the Spanish Civil War. Other nationalities soon took it up, and it appears in almost every anthology of Spanish Civil War songs.

It became a symbol of resistance in the Second World War and is sung in many European languages, and today by the peace movement. Paul Robeson recorded it on his album of anti-war and protest songs, Songs of Free Men; later versions include the Chad Mitchell Trio (1965, in English and German), the Dubliners (1970), Swan Arcade (1973) and the Irish folk band Lankum (2017).

What it says

A song of prisoners at forced labour in a Nazi camp, on their hardship and their hope of freedom; slow, heavy and steadfast.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.