prisoners-of-war

prisoners-of-war (POW). The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 declared that in modern warfare fighting men who laid down their arms were to be decently treated; the Geneva Convention of 1929 spelled out the details. This last convention was signed and ratified by all the principal warring powers but two. The Japanese signed, but did not ratify; the USSR did not sign at all, for in Stalinist theory no soldier in the Red Army would ever surrender.

Under the Geneva Convention, POW were to be removed promptly from the battle area; if wounded, they were to be given adequate medical care; and they were to be housed and fed no worse than garrison troops of the capturing power. Under interrogation, they were entitled to refuse all information except their name and rank, or their service number. They could practise any religion and they could correspond with their families and friends; if they escaped, they were to undergo no worse punishment on recapture than a month's solitary confinement. The International Red Cross committee was to be allowed to inspect the permanent camps in which they were held.

By a long-standing convention among the world's officer class, capture had meant dishonour, but by the mid-twentieth century the changes and chances of war, particularly air war, were such that it might happen to anybody, and the aura of disgrace did not cling so tightly. What no one had foreseen was the scale of the impending problem.

So completely did the Polish and French armies collapse in 1939 and 1940 during the Polish campaign and the fall of France that the Germans found themselves with more than 2 million prisoners-of-war on their hands. As the war progressed, they lost more than 4.5 million men as prisoners themselves; and so false, in this respect at any rate, was Stalinist myth that they captured nearly 5 million members of the Red Army. The British Expeditionary Force left more than 50,000 prisoners behind after Dunkirk, and British Empire forces also endured heavy losses in prisoners in the Western Desert and Balkan campaigns. The Italians' losses were not small, either; a famous message from the Coldstream Guards in the Western Desert on 9 December 1940 reported that they had had no time to count their prisoners yet, but held ‘about five acres of officers and two hundred acres of other ranks’. Some 10,000 aircrew of RAF's Bomber Command survived the destruction of their aircraft to become POW.

Prisoners' fates varied very widely, according to time, place, and nationality. A few units—the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front was notorious in this respect—had a rule not to take any prisoners at all. In a few areas of Germany, aircrew who parachuted safely to earth were liable to be lynched by infuriated mobs. American and British POW formed the opinion that the Italians made much less agreeable gaolers than the Germans did; on the other hand, the Germans treated captured Soviet personnel abominably: about five-sixths of the soldiers of the Red Army who were taken prisoner did not survive the war. As the Soviet government had not signed the Geneva Convention, the Germans held that they were not bound by its terms; and they forgot their own obligations under the Hague Conventions (which had been instigated by the last tsar of Russia) and the dictates of common humanity. These men were hardly given food or shelter at all; their officers were, with few exceptions, shot after interrogation, and the rest were left prey to lice and typhus. Those who got the chance volunteered to join General Vlasov's renegade army—anything to escape from the pit they were in. German policy in this respect was dictated by Nazi racial myth, which held that Anglo-Saxons were Aryans—therefore worthy of respect—while Slavs were only a superior form of cattle.

On a battlefield, POW were of interest to the intelligence officer of the battalion that had captured them, and might be subjected to a brisk interrogation by him, aimed at discovering the unit to which they belonged and anything that was to be found out about the enemy's immediate intentions. They might well be interrogated again, at more leisure, in some rear area. The Luftwaffe established a Durchgangslager (transit camp) at Oberursel near Frankfurt-am-Main through which they passed all the aircrew they captured, pumping them as ingeniously as they could for information about air force order of battle. The British had a similar institution at Cockfosters in north London.

Once clear of interrogation, officer POW had nothing to do but wait for the war to end; unless, as many of them did, they plotted to escape. Only one German managed to escape from England back to Germany, and he had to go round by Canada (where he jumped off a train) and the then still neutral USA. A total of more than 33,000 British, Commonwealth, and American fighting men managed escapes or evasions the other way (see MI9).

Those officers who made themselves extra obnoxious to the Germans by escaping repeatedly were liable to be sent, on recapture, to the medieval fortress-castle of Colditz in Saxony, although even from Colditz it was not impossible for a few extra brave and extra lucky men to escape.

The Geneva Convention forbade work of any kind for officer prisoners and NCO (non-commissioned officer) prisoners were only supposed to do supervisory work. Private soldiers could be made to work (they were to be paid for it, after the war), provided they were not given any tasks of military importance—a rule everyone often found it convenient to forget. For instance, Italian POW in the UK were mostly used as farm workers, thus saving shipping space by reducing the need for food imports. An American prisoner who thought he was being overworked, contrary to the convention, for 14 hours a day seven days a week, complained to his guard who tapped his own rifle and remarked, ‘Here is my Geneva Convention.’

The prisoner's worst enemy was usually boredom. Those who were not so intent on escape that they could think of nothing else might spend their time on amateur dramatics, or on educating each other. Food was an incessant preoccupation, particularly in the last winter of the war. Up to then, the Red Cross had provided British and American prisoners, at least, with food and comfort parcels which supplemented their often meagre rations. When Himmler took over command of the German Replacement Army, and therewith of POW camps, in the autumn of 1944, the supply of parcels dried up.

With the help of Red Cross food and cigarettes, prisoners were often able to get on much closer terms with their guards than Himmler would have approved; it was sometimes possible to bribe or browbeat or blackmail a guard into providing equipment, and even passes, indispensable for a successful escape.

In the closing months of the war in Europe, the Germans tried to move their prisoners about, to keep them out of the way of the advancing armies; this meant that several thousand British and American prisoners were liberated by the Red Army rather than by compatriots. They were all sent out, eventually, through Odessa, but their presence in Soviet hands was a brake on Allied diplomats at the Potsdam conference (see TERMINAL). Stalin insisted on having all the surviving Red Army prisoners back, and all were sent off for a spell in the GUlag, as a punishment for having been captured.

In South-East Asia, entirely different conditions applied. The Japanese had built up earlier in the century an almost universal conviction that surrender was the unspeakable disgrace, for a fighting man; until very late in the war, hardly any of their troops surrendered unwounded. Consequently they despised the 80,000-odd troops whom they took prisoner after the fall of Singapore, as well as the captured Dutch inhabitants of the Netherlands East Indies, and made no attempts to treat them humanely. They were given the minimum of food and shelter to sustain life and were worked hard as well. In particular, work gangs of POW were set down under ferocious guard to construct the Burma–Thailand railway, through jungle and mountain; about 12,000 of them died while they laboured at this task. See also Cowra prison camp, forced labour, internment, Oflag, and Stalag.

M. R. D. Foot