Price: £19.99
During the First World War hundreds of thousands of German faced incarceration in hundreds of camps on the British mainland. This is the first book to be published on these German prisoners, almost a century after the conflict. This account concentrates on both the bureaucratic decision to inroduce internment and the consequences of this government policy for individual lives.
The book covers the three different types of male internees who found themselves behind barbed wire in Britain between 1914 abd 1919: civilians already present in the country in August 1914; civilians brought to Britain from all over the world; and combatants, primarily soldiers from the Western Front, but also naval personnel and a few members of zepplin crews, whose vessels fell to earth. Using a vast range of contemporary British and German sources, including both the official records and the accounts of numerous internees, this volume traces life experiences through initial arrest and capture, to life behind barbed wire, to return to a defeated Gemany or the remnants of German community in Britain. The study questions the necessity of incarcerating hundreds of thousands of men but places this decision into wider developments in British and European society, bureaucracy and minority persecution.
This fascinating volume will prove essential reading for anyone interested in the history of prisoners of war in the First World War and will also appeal to scholars and students of early twentieth-century Europe and the human consequences of war.
Panikos Panayi is Professor of European History at De Montfort University.