ABSTRACT
In 1914, Hans Scharoun joined the millions of other young Germans who volunteered to serve their country, although he was not actually called up until the spring of 1915. He was initially assigned to the Queen Elisabeth Regiment in Schwerin, but was quickly recruited by his former architecture teacher, Paul Kruchen, to serve as a military architect in the reconstruction effort in East Prussia. Kruchen first tested his organizational and design approach in Cottbus, a city in Brandenburg south of Berlin, where POWs constructed barracks, baths, officers' quarters, service buildings, and a water tower, as well as an unusual and innovative feature that would soon become standard: spaces expressly designed to eliminate lice among the POWs. Photographs of the Cottbus camp unsurprisingly show rows of low-lying anonymous and utilitarian buildings. Scharoun's first major commission in military was the design and construction of the camp at Crossen, now Krosno Odrzanskie in Poland, of which a fair number of contemporary photographs survive.
