PRISONERS OF WAR.

The phenomenon of prisoners of war (POWs) is thoroughly part of the twentieth century, an era of wars and prison camps. In Europe, some six to eight million prisoners were held captive during the First World War, and some eighteen million during the Second World War. The extent of captivity reflects the mass character of total war, which led to the instrumentalization of the captive. At the same time there arose a body of law pertaining to the prisoner's legal status. Nevertheless, POWs have long remained occluded in history. Imprisonment of captured soldiers bears the stamp of defeat, and societies at war have a hard time acknowledging those of their own who were defeated. This helps account for substantial variation in the way that prisoners have been treated by democratic and totalitarian regimes.

THE PRISONER OF WAR: A FACT
OF MODERN WARFARE

Until 1899, despite the Lieber Code on the treatment of prisoners of war, written in 1863 during the U.S. Civil War, and the 1880 Oxford manual, The Laws of War on Land, soldiers captured in battle had no legal status, and their treatment at the hands of the enemy could be arbitrary. In reaction to European conflicts such as the bloody Battle of Solferino in 1859, the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–1871, and the Boer War, which began in 1899, an International Peace Conference took place at The Hague in the same year, initially defining captivity in war as a state of those soldiers who are protected once they agree not to take up arms against their captors. Another conference at The Hague in 1907 proposed a new version of these early regulations. From now on, prisoners of war had to be treated with humanity; they were to receive the same housing and food rations as the troops of the captor; they could be released in exchange for a promise not to further participate in the conflict; in addition, noncommissioned officers and soldiers could be put to work provided it were unrelated to the actual conflict. POWs were also to be freed as soon as practicable after cessation of hostilities. However, it should be noted that these regulations applied only if all belligerents officially adhered to the treaty.

The First World War marked a turning point in the history of prisoners of war. Seventy million soldiers bore arms in a conflict that lasted four years, in a mobilization of such magnitude that it effaced traditional boundaries such as the front and the rear, even the distinction between soldier and civilian. In this totalized conflict, POWs were forced to work, enabling their captors to exploit their economic value. Utilization of this workforce was justified, moreover, as a legitimate reprisal for violations first committed by the enemy. The same logic also justified minimal rations and various disciplinary measures. France, for example, aligned rations for its German prisoners with those accorded French POWs in German hands, while punishments included withholding mail, restriction of food, or imprisonment.

The magnitude of the conflict took the military by surprise, and soon there was a lack of adequate housing, poor hygiene, and deficient medical care. In Germany, some four thousand POWs had died by the spring of 1915. Bilateral agreements between governments underscored the limitations of the Hague treaties conventions, which had envisaged only a brief war. In July 1917, for example, a German-British agreement stipulated norms for housing prisoners. Another dealt with enforcement of discipline and the framework of prisoner exchanges.

Conditions of detention were affected by ideas about race or benefits that might accrue to the detaining power. For example, in Russia authorities ran separate camps. There were relatively privileged "first circle" camps reserved for POWs of Slavic origin—the future supporters of pan-Slavism—and a second category of camps in Siberia for German POWs. Liberation and repatriation were

conceived along similar lines. Control over German POWs in French hands was used to exert pressure on Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles (1919). The increasing mobilization of various countries and the ferocity of the conflict lay behind different mortality rates among prisoners of war. In Germany, for example, the death rate among British POWs was 3.5 percent, for Russians, 5.4–6.5 percent, but for the Romanian soldiers, 29 percent.

All these issues made it clear that some of the rules devised at the 1907 Hague Convention needed revision. Advances emerged from the Geneva Conference of 27 July 1929. One new convention provided rules for the treatment of POWs, an addition to the 1907 Hague regulation, which forbade reprisals and stated that prisoners must be kept away from battle. The conditions of camps were to be improved; the intellectual and religious needs of POWs had to be met; prisoners also had to have the right to send and receive letters and packages. The convention specified regulation of prisoner's work, and indicated appropriate punishments, especially after escape attempts. Information bureaus were to be established in each country together with a Central Agency of Information. Finally, the clause that stipulated all belligerents must be party to the treaty was abandoned.

The Second World War was a major challenge to these attempts at humanizing imprisonment in

wartime. Although on the western front captivity during the Second World War continued along the lines that had characterized the earlier conflict, this war turned out to be longer and deployed even more troops. Some German POWs, for example, endured six years of conflict and then ten years of incarceration in the Soviet Union. Blitzkrieg warfare enabled Nazi authorities to imprison a very high number of captives in record time: 1.8 million French taken prisoner during May–June 1940; 5.16 million Soviets during Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. These statistics help explain why living conditions for many prisoners of war were barely human. Millions would later face problems of repatriation long after the war was over.

The Second World War aggravated issues that had plagued prisoners during the 1914–1918 conflict. The "total war" launched by the Nazis obliged them to create a workforce composed of prisoners, first Western Europeans, then Eastern Europeans, primarily Slavs. They thus muddied the distinction between captive soldiers and other groups such as civilian prisoners and forced labor; together, by 1945, prisoners comprised one-third of the labor force in Germany.

In spite of the numbers, the conventions of POW captivity at times functioned better in this war than in the 1914–1918 conflict. The International Red Cross made more than eleven thousand visits to camps; and it was, for example, thanks to their military status that French and British Jewish soldiers were saved from extermination. This paradox derived from the Nazis' racial interpretation of the conventions. While POW status was by and large applied, the Nazis brutally mistreated prisoners belonging to the so-called inferior races. They refused to apply the POW conventions to Polish prisoners (whose country they declared had ceased to exist) or to countries that had not ratified the 1929 accords, such as Romania; thus, some 63.7 percent of Romanian POWs died in captivity. Soviet prisoners of war were systematically starved to death by the hundreds of thousands; some estimates put these deaths in the millions. These were violations of international law that the tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946 would incorporate as one of the four central elements in the war crimes indictment.

The end of the Second World War marked the start of the third and last mass captivity in Europe; these prisoners of war were almost exclusively German, though Italian prisoners were scattered throughout Eastern Europe too. Detaining powers were the former enemies of the Nazi regime, most of which had endured a devastating German occupation. This postwar captivity was marked by a sense of righteous vengeance, inflicting on German troops the same treatment and humiliations suffered by those they had occupied.

Postwar imprisonment began in the same poor and improvised conditions from which civilian populations also suffered. German POWs were designated as the "Disarmed Enemy Force" by the U.S. Army and "Surrendered Enemy Personnel" by the British. This distinction enabled those countries to avoid strict application of the 1929 Geneva Convention; there were fifty-six thousand deaths recorded in U.S. captivity, most of them detained in six Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps). French authorities were not able to properly feed and house their German POWs. They justified detention by using German POWs for reconstruction, stretching to the limits rules of using prisoners as laborers. In the Soviet Union, German POWs worked to rebuild the socialist fatherland, especially in the gulag, where a quarter of them died.

In 1949 a third Geneva Convention took into account lessons learned from the war. It completed the earlier 1929 conventions and acknowledged the impossibility of distinguishing between civilians and combatants. From now on prisoners of war were defined as "all who have fallen into the power of the enemy." This convention extends the range of the humanitarian law and determines the roles and responsibilities of the detaining power. The latest additional protocols, added in 1977, attempted to update and adapt the conventions to new kinds of conflicts such as civil wars and guerrilla insurgencies. It considerably extended the categories of individuals having the right to POW status.

The recent European conflict in former Yugoslavia (1990–1995) pushed the convention to its limit and tested conventional wisdom and practice. The number of POWs was indeed limited; according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Serbs detained from 35,000 to 70,000 individuals in 135 camps in January 1993. But the ambiguous nature of the conflict—civil war or a war between nations—the "logic of criminalization," and the policy of ethnic cleansing led to a situation in which an entire nation's population was held hostage. Respect for the Geneva Conventions was hard to enforce. This war presented a backward step in the regulation of captives during wartime, a return to the premodern era.

Law governing prisoners of war developed slowly, and only in some cases did practice and codes of behavior coincide. But this has led to a paradoxical situation in which POWs get more protection than civilian detainees. In the cautious legal formulations of the conventions, military imperatives take into account the interests of captives, but the conventions do not resolve the legal and moral issue of whether it is fair to feed detainees while civilian populations starve. The evolution

of the law has favored a principle of reciprocity in the absence of inspections and sanctions. It generated either a dynamic of escalation and retaliation leading to reprisals, as with the Soviet Union, or a dynamic of neutrality such as existed between Germany and the United States. This mechanism tends to consider POWs not from a military perspective as disarmed fighters but, rather, only as representatives of the enemy nation, thus becoming part of the enemy garrison to be defeated.

DEFINING A CULTURE OF CAPTIVITY

Captivity may be said to take place in four stages:

Capture, during conflict or after surrender. The seizure of weapons and personal items helped to define the status of victors and vanquished.

Arrival in transit camps. Prisoners were then transferred to base camps that held tens of thousands of prisoners, then finally to smaller camps. There followed enrollment and distribution of clothing distinctively marked in order to make the captive immediately recognizable. The camp was an enclosure whose space is limited by barbed wire and by its guards. Prisoners were affected by the military character of the camp (roll calls, searches, coexistence of national directorate and POW executive). Acculturation to this environment was all the more difficult in that POWs often changed camps.

Labor. Between 70 and 95 percent of European POWs during the two world wars were drafted into forced labor commandos. In theory, conditions of work for prisoners were to be identical to civilian labor of a similar kind, seeking to avoid competition with indigenous workers. POWs' attitude toward work ranged from the "River Kwai syndrome" that pushed prisoners to the limit, to the method of "slow in the morning and not too fast at night." POWs worked in all sectors, from agriculture to industry to mine-clearance. Exceptionally, a POW might become a free civilian worker, a procedure initiated by the Vichy government in wartime France in the 1940s. Although POW productivity was inferior, the prisoners represented an irreplaceable labor force and productive resource.

Liberation and demobilization. These ended both the experience of military service and of captivity, which from the beginning had an uncertain outcome.

The social side of POW life, an exclusively masculine environment in the twentieth century, was organized around principles of solidarity and exclusion. Comradeship in captivity was not an extension of the comradeship of war. It was based on utilitarian solidarity (protection against theft, acquisition of supplies) and organized in concentric circles (of acquaintances, persons from the same village or the same region) or by barracks, reinforced by discussion, nourished by rumors (about rations, escape, imminent liberation, and so on). Over time there developed a "language of the camps" (for example, in post-1945 POW camps in France, "Franzmann" for French or nixcompris = not understood).

To kill time, POWs enjoyed simple pastimes (cards and simple crafts), more elaborate activities (sports, orchestras, theater), and even religious observance. However, not all POWs succeeded in overcoming the Stacheldrahtkranheit (barbed wire disease) that could and did culminate in despair and at times suicide.

Daily life in camps and on detachment details was organized around basic preoccupations:

Nourishment and strategies for maximizing it (using tobacco as a form of exchange).

Mail and the maintenance of links with the home front. Prisoners receiving packages could overcome feelings of alienation and abandonment. However, it did not fulfill the need for kindness and affection among the prisoners. The absence of any feminine presence at times fostered homoerotic or homosexual ties.

Escape. This occupied a special place in the culture of captivity. It showed the prisoner's attachment to his patriotic cause and a willful desire to end captivity. In the Second World War, there were thirty-five thousand successful escapes among English and American prisoners of war from German camps.

RETURN

A prisoner's welcome upon returning home rarely matched his hopes. The nation's recognition of his sacrifice was not extended to combatants whose status remained ambiguous and who had appeared at times as traitors. To obtain their rights, soldiers organized associations, such as the Volksbund zum Schutz der deutschen Kriegs und Zivilgefangenen in Germany in 1918. In France, only in 1922 was the honor "died for France" accorded POWs.

In the early twenty-first century, veterans associations welcome former POWs, who foster remembrance of both war and captivity. French and German POWs have worked on a rapprochement through sister cities arrangements and associations. Despite this institutional framework, it is unclear whether former POWs intend or are able to transmit their memories to succeeding generations. And it is uncertain to what extent prisoners of the wars of the twentieth century will in future remain a group apart from their comrades who avoided captivity.

See alsoConcentration Camps; Forced Labor; Hague Convention; Nuremberg War Crimes Trials; Occupation, Military; Operation Barbarossa; Red Cross; War Crimes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cochet, François. Soldats sans armes: La captivité de guerre: Une approche culturelle. Brussels and Paris, 1998.

Djurovic, Gradimir. The Central Tracing Agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Geneva, 1986.

Fishman, Sarah. We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945. New Haven, Conn., 1991.

Gammon, Victor F. Not All Glory!: True Accounts of RAF Airmen Taken Prisoner in Europe, 1939–1945. London, 1996.

Jackson, Robert. The Prisoners, 1914–18. New York, 1989.

Lindstrom, Hildegard Schmidt. Child Prisoner of War. As told to Hazel Proctor. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1998.

Maschke, Erich, ed. Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges. 22 vols. Munich, 1962–1974.

Moore, Bob, and Kent Federowich, eds. Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II. Washington, D.C., 1996.

Overmans, Rüdiger. In der Hand des Feindes. Kriegsgefangenschaft bon Antike bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1999.

Rachamimov, Alon. POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front. Oxford, U.K., 2002.

Speed, Richard B. Prisoners, Diplomats, and the Great War: A Study in the Diplomacy of Captivity. New York, 1990.

Vance, Jonathan F., ed. Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment. Santa Barbara, Calif., 2000.

Vourkoutiotis, Vasilis. Prisoners of War and the German High Command: The British and American Experience. Houndmills, U.K., 2003.

Fabien ThÉofilakis