Ober Ost - Communication With Locals

Communication With Locals

There were a great many problems with communication with indigenous persons within the Ober Ost. Among the upper class locals the soldiers could get by with French or German and in large villages the Jewish population would speak German or Yiddish, "which the Germans would somehow comprehend". In the rural areas and amongst peasant populations soldiers had to rely on interpreters who spoke Latvian, Russian or both. These language problems were not helped by the thinly stretched administrations, which would sometimes number 100 men in an area as large as Rhode Island. The clergy were at times relied upon to spread messages to the masses, since this was an effective way of spreading a message to people who speak a different language. A young officer-administrator named Vagts relates that he listened (through a translator) to a sermon by a priest who tells his congregation to stay off highways after nightfall, hand in firearms and not to have anything to do with Bolshevist agents, exactly as Vagts had told him to do earlier.