German WWII Preliminary Record for POW Report for Leopold Bürkner- Bürkner was a German naval officer who served on torpedo boats in World War I. In the post-war period he served on a pocket battleship that patrolled the Spanish coast during the Spanish Civil War and then commanded a light cruiser. In 1938 he became head of the foreign liaison section of the Abwehr, the General Staff intelligence department. During World War II he rose to the rank of Vice Admiral.
The Dönitz government was arrested and dismissed by Allied troops in May of 1945 in Flensburg. Bürkner was imprisoned in Ansbach until June 25th, 1947. While in captivity he was one of the former high-ranking officers of the armed forces who assisted in creating 2,500 military history studies. During the Nuremberg Trials he was called as a witness for Alfred Jodl. After his release he became director of the German staff of the Dutch airline KLM in Frankfurt. From 1949 he acted at times as an adviser to the Foreign Office. He was later involved in the rearmament of West Germany. Bürkner died on July 15th, 1975 in Frankfurt, he was 81 years old.
Note: These are original vintage reprints of Prisoner of War Preliminary reports These are guaranteed as described. This paperwork would have been a prisoner “intake form”, with all of the individual’s personal details including the prisoner's name, fingerprints, place of birth, next of kin, date of capture, date of arrival, date of transfer, physical description, distinguishing marks, etc.
Copies of these would have been supplied to the different departments that needed access to this information. This is one of the vintage reprints that survived from the infamous Allied prisoner-of-war camp in the Palace Hotel of Mondorf-les-Bains, in Luxembourg, code named "Camp Ashcan". Each card is annotated "CCPWE #32", an abbreviation for the Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure #32. Operating from May to August 1945, it served as a processing station and interrogation center for the 86 most prominent surviving Nazi leaders prior to their trial in Nuremberg, including Hermann Göring and Karl Dönitz.