Civilian Internment During The First World War: A European And Global History, 1914—1920 113757190X, 9781137571908, 9781137571915

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Abbreviations......Page 7
Glossary of Terms......Page 9
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 10
The Historical Specificity of First World War Internment......Page 15
Sources and the Question of Differentiation Between Civilian and Military Captivity......Page 22
The Structure of This Book......Page 25
Chapter 2: First World War Internment Across the Globe......Page 40
Germans and Austro-Hungarians......Page 44
The German and Habsburg Empires’ Response......Page 55
Ottoman Turkey, Bulgaria and the Balkans......Page 65
Chapter 3: Internment and War Governance in the First World War......Page 86
France......Page 90
Britain......Page 98
Germany......Page 107
Austria-Hungary......Page 111
War Governance, Camps and the Turkish Genocide Against the Ottoman Armenians, 1915–16......Page 121
Chapter 4: Imagining Internment: International Law, Social Order and National Community......Page 138
International Law and Perceptions of the ‘Other’: The View of Officials......Page 143
Reprisals and Punishments......Page 154
Internment and Social Control......Page 161
Internment and Ideas About ‘National Community’......Page 172
Chapter 5: Internment and International Activism: The Search for More Humane Alternatives......Page 192
Pre-war Precedents: Emily Hobhouse and the South African Camps......Page 195
The Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland......Page 198
The Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle and the ICRC......Page 204
Neutral Internment in Switzerland and the Netherlands......Page 213
Barbed-Wire Disease and the ‘Medicalisation’ of Internment......Page 220
Chapter 6: (Not) Ending Internment: The Years 1918–20......Page 247
Wartime Civilian Captivity in Russia from Tsar Nicholas II to Lenin......Page 251
Germany and Austria-Hungary......Page 259
Imperial Britain and Its Allies in Africa, Asia and the Atlantic Ocean......Page 268
France, Italy and the ‘Little Entente’ (Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia)......Page 276
The ‘Red Scare’: The Americas......Page 281
Chapter 7: Conclusion and Epilogue......Page 298
Germany......Page 322
Contemporary Government Publications......Page 323
Red Cross, Quaker and Medical Publications......Page 325
Eye-Witness and Documentary Accounts, Diaries, Memoirs and Other Printed Primary Sources......Page 326
Select List of Secondary Sources......Page 327
Unpublished Dissertations......Page 336
Novels......Page 337
Index......Page 338

Citation preview

Civilian Internment during the First World War A European and Global History, 1914–1920 Matthew Stibbe

Civilian Internment during the First World War

Matthew Stibbe

Civilian Internment during the First World War A European and Global History, 1914–1920

Matthew Stibbe Department of Humanities Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-57190-8    ISBN 978-1-137-57191-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57191-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Photo 12 / Contributor / GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Acknowledgements

It is a great pleasure to thank the many scholars and educators who have helped shape my work and ideas about internment through their own publications, their practical advice and assistance, their friendship and support and/or their schools-based, translation and public engagement activities. In particular, I would like to mention Su Barton, Arnd Bauerkämper, Anne Buckley, Daniela Luigia Caglioti, Brian Feltman, Simon Giuseppi, Tim Grady, Rosemary Hannay, Chris Hopkins, John Horne, Anja Huber, Christoph Jahr, Alison Jones (and the entire team at the Knockaloe Internment Camp and Patrick Visitor Centre), Heather Jones, André Keil, Bohdan Kordan, Rotem Kowner, Alan Kramer, Bernhard Lübbers, Stefan Manz, Kevin McDermott, Corinna Meiß, Clare Midgley, Mahon Murphy, Panikos Panayi, Tammy Proctor, Iris Rachamimov, Daniel Marc Segesser, Ingrid Sharp, Daniel Steinbach, Claudia Sternberg, David Stowe, Jens Thiel, Isabella von Treskow, Alexander Watson, Gertie and Paul Whitfield, Oliver Wilkinson and Neville Wylie. I am also indebted to Jeffrey Reznick and the staff at the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, who made me feel very welcome during my visit there on a Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship in April–May 2019. Finally, love as always to Sam, Nick and Hannah.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 First World War Internment Across the Globe 31 3 Internment and War Governance in the First World War 77 4 Imagining Internment: International Law, Social Order and National Community129 5 Internment and International Activism: The Search for More Humane Alternatives183 6 (Not) Ending Internment: The Years 1918–20239 7 Conclusion and Epilogue291 Bibliography315 Index331

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Abbreviations

AA AIPG AOK ARA AR(A)A BNV CEP CUP DORA FBI FEC FO GZNB HLKO ICRC ICTFY ICWPP IWW

Auswärtiges Amt – German Foreign Office Agence internationale des prisonniers de guerre – the ICRC’s international prisoner of war agency during the First World War, 1914–19 Armee Oberkommando – Army Supreme Command (Austria-Hungary) Aliens Restriction Act, 1914 (UK) Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act, 1919 (UK) Bund Neues Vaterland – New Fatherland League (Germany) Corpo Expedicionário Portugês – Portuguese Expeditionary Force (deployed to the Western Front in France, 1917–18) Committee of Union and Progress (Ottoman Turkey) Defence of the Realm Act (UK) Federal Bureau of Investigation (USA) Friends Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress, wartime charity run by the Society of Friends (UK) Foreign Office (UK) Gemeinsames Zentralnachweisbüro – central intelligence office of the AOK (Austria-Hungary) Haager Landkriegsordnung – Hague Convention on Land Warfare (Hague IV), 1907 International Committee of the Red Cross International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, mandated by the UN International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace Industrial Workers of the World ix

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ABBREVIATIONS

KÜA MI5 MPSB OberOst OHL SAWCDF SIP SPD STIs UN USPD WILPF WUA

ZABs

Kriegsüberwachungsamt – War Supervisory Office (Imperial Austria) The Security Service (UK) Metropolitan Police Special Branch (UK) Oberbefehlshaber der gesamten Deutschen Streitkräfte im Osten – Supreme Command of the German armies in the East Oberste Heeresleitung – Army Supreme Command (Germany – all fronts) South African Women and Children Distress Fund Serbian Independence Party (Hungary/Hungarian-­administered Croatia) Social Democratic Party (Germany) Sexually transmitted infections United Nations Independent Social Democratic Party (Germany) Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Das Werk des Unterausschusses – proceedings of the subcommittee on breaches of international law of the German Reichstag’s committee to investigate the causes and consequences of the world war, published in 1927 Zivil-Arbeiter-Bataillone – mobile battalions of forced civilian workers used by the German armies in occupied parts of France, Belgium and the East (Oberost)

Glossary of Terms

dépôt alternative French term for camp Etappengebiet army staging area (Germany) Heimkehrlager Reception camps set up in post-1917/18 Germany and Austria to house (and screen) prisoners of war and civilian internees returning from enemy captivity, as well as expellees or refugees of German heritage more generally. Often Heimkehrlager were simply wartime POW camps converted for new, post-war purposes mobilisables French term for military and naval reservists Reichsrat Imperial Austrian parliament Reichstag Imperial German parliament Reichswehr Official name for the German army between 1919 and 1935 Stadtvogtei Nickname given to the large criminal prison in the Moabit area of Berlin Unterkunftsdepartement ‘Quarters department’ of the Prussian Ministry of War, responsible, among other things, for the provisioning and administering of POW and civilian internment camps on the German home front (except in Bavaria)  zones des armées army staging area (France)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Between 1914 and 1920 at least 800,000 civilians were held as prisoners of war in internment camps in Europe, and some 50,000–100,000 in the rest of the world.1 Most were men of military age, detained on enemy soil at the outbreak of war to prevent them returning home to join their respective armies. However, the victims could include women, children and older men and deportees from occupied territories as well as enemy aliens arrested on the home fronts. Some belligerent states also interned their own nationals as ‘internal enemies’ under wartime emergency powers. Conditions and length of time spent in camps varied enormously. Some civilians were detained for the full duration of the conflict and beyond, whereas others spent only a matter of weeks or months in captivity, or were released early, under local amnesties or international exchange agreements. Others still were transferred into the half-way house of captivity in neutral countries such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, or were notionally released after ‘voluntarily’ agreeing to work for the captor state as ‘free’ labourers. Some experienced internment in one place of detention only, while others could find themselves being moved not only between camps, but across international borders, empires, continents and oceans. In the case of the British empire, as Panikos Panayi and Stefan Manz have recently shown, it is even possible to identify different internment ‘hubs’ or ‘hotspots’, including in Canada, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, India, Australasia and Great Britain itself.2 For France, the equivalent ‘hubs’ were in Tahiti, Indo-China, Madagascar, Dahomey, Morocco, © The Author(s) 2019 M. Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57191-5_1

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Tunisia and Algeria, Corsica and along parts of the French Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts.3 The diversity of internees’ experiences is a matter of established historical record. It has been further brought to light through an impressive body of academic scholarship on the First World War camp phenomenon that began in the 1990s and has recently been showcased at a major international workshop held at the German Historical Institute London.4 Some civilian prisoners of war were well supported by their home governments and families; others were not. Some camps had a high turnover of prisoners; others had a relatively stable population. Some were located in highly visible places, including in big cities, or close to important communications networks, such as major railway lines; others were established in remote areas, away from the public gaze. Islands, whether populated or not, were often favoured places for camps—as seen in the case of the Isle of Man (British Isles); Corsica (France); Sardinia (Italy); Fort Verdala (Malta); Terceira in the Azores (Portugal); Skyros (Greece); Stonecutters Island (Hong Kong); St John’s Island (Singapore); Tahiti (French Polynesia); Motuihe Island and Somes Island (New Zealand); Rottnest Island and Torrens Island (Australia); Taboga Island (Panama); and Ellis Island (New York). In the worst-case scenarios, internees might be held temporarily on abandoned prison ships or hulks, a practice going back to the early nineteenth century and briefly revived in Britain and Germany in the early months of the war.5 This book is indebted to much of the previous literature on this subject, but at the same time, it claims to break important new ground in the sense that it is the first scholarly attempt to write a European and global history of First World War internment. It combines the (slightly) more familiar cases of Imperial Britain, Imperial Germany and the United States with hitherto virtually unknown instances of civilian captivity in other parts of Europe and the wider world, including, most notably, the French, ­Austro-­Hungarian, Ottoman and Portuguese empires as well as the Balkan nations, Bolshevik Russia, Brazil, parts of Central America, Siam and, in 1919, nationalist China. It also offers the first in-depth analysis of international activism in relation to internment, in other words of programmes designed to raise knowledge and awareness of the effects of civilian internment on individuals and families, to mitigate these effects through concerted action across political borders and/or to outlaw prison camps for non-combatants altogether. And, again for the first time, it incorporates a

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medical history dimension into its analysis of how contemporaries constructed and imagined internment in political and broader cultural terms. Its starting point is a dissatisfaction with existing work on the internment phenomenon. In spite of its many valuable contributions and achievements, the current scholarship tends to see (belligerent) nation-­ states and empires as the only possible actors in the staging of wartime civilian captivity, thereby excluding other potentially important domestic and international players, including lower-level officials with their own local political agendas, neutral governments and diplomats, Red Cross workers, anti-internment activists and legal or medical experts. Another noticeable historiographical trend has been a pre-occupation with the internal life of the internees and the formation of ‘prison camp communities’ behind the barbed wire, following the model set by former internee John Davidson Ketchum’s 1965 socio-psychological study of the British camp at Ruhleben near Berlin.6 Interpretations of internment as a form of militarist oppression and/or state-sponsored violence against alien minorities and occupied populations in wartime are often at the heart of this type of academic investigation, as too is an understandable quest to give a voice to internees themselves.7 It relies quite heavily on the fact that for some internment camps, particularly those on the Western European, North American, Japanese and Australasian home fronts, a considerable amount of historical material in the form of ego-documents (memoirs, diaries, camp newspapers, works of art and so on) has survived.8 This has allowed us to see camps as ‘liminal spaces’ in which ‘time stood still’ and new forms of sociability, creativity, self-expression, resistance, (‘respectable’) home-making and (‘transgressive’) public performance became possible.9 Yet although it has produced some very rich findings, including in the field of memory and cultural heritage, this historiography can also fall into the trap of seeking to explain the internment phenomenon by reference to internal forces only, while ignoring the views of external decision-makers, actors and observers. In particular it is in danger of overlooking the connections—imagined and real—between the physical borders of the camp or Lager and the broader socio-economic, political, geographical, gendered and racial boundaries and hierarchies that all those caught up in the war—whether as rulers or ruled, combatants and non-combatants— encountered. Future US President Herbert Hoover, for instance, was not alone in referring to northern France and Belgium as ‘in every respect… like a vast concentration camp’.10 Internees often felt like bargaining coun-

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ters in diplomatic negotiations, or as the ‘main victims’ of wartime food shortages, arbitrary police interference in private life and official indifference to suffering, but so too did populations in blockaded, occupied or colonised countries. Aerial bombing, another novel form of warfare, left nobody—not even children—feeling safe in their own houses, schools or workplaces.11 More particularly, a central thesis of this book, and a key part of its claim to originality and significance, is that we have to re-imagine First World War internment as a story about population movement as well as borders, and about the relationship between the two. Internment in the years 1914–20 was a migration-led process, even though, paradoxically, it also stemmed in a more immediate sense from wartime ‘state-of-siege’ mentalities and an inward-looking desire to draw down the hatches. In this sense, it was inextricably bound up with questions of power, and with global forms of racism and gendered violence as well as local and national manifestations of intolerance. Above all it was a political phenomenon involving the involuntary relocation of ‘suspect’ or ‘alien’ populations.12 At the same time, it had certain parallels with the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of civilian workers from Asia to work behind the lines on the western front, and equally with the new wave of ‘military migration’ as 1.2 million Indians were recruited into the British army and 607,256 non-­ Europeans, mainly Africans, into the French armies.13 All of these processes hinged around what by 1914 had become important transnational and international questions of the rights, obligations and boundaries of citizenship; the legal status of foreigners and non-citizens; state surveillance of ‘suspect’ groups and individuals; the formation of new subjectivities and fresh ways of ‘belonging’ or ‘not belonging’ and the desirability or otherwise of stricter forms of passport and migration controls within a newly emerging, twentieth-century world order.14 None of this means that this book regards consideration of national or imperial frameworks to be obsolete. Often they were crucial in shaping the time, manner and place in which internment measures were enacted and staged, and in co-creating the transnational and international networks that sustained the camp phenomenon at global level.15 The central place of nation-states and empires in the international system as it then existed is also indispensable in explaining the many overlapping convergences and divergences between different internment practices across Europe and the wider world. What it does mean, however, is that the national and the imperial have to be seen in a global context, and their entanglement with,

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and relative importance vis-a-vis other spatial levels—the regional, the local, the transnational and the international—placed under greater scrutiny. In terms of methodology, this book also takes up Heinz-Gerhard Haupt’s and Jürgen Kocka’s call for new academic approaches that ‘better combine comparative and entanglement history’ in order to create joined­up global histories (or what Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard refer to as histoires connectées).16 Comparison of different national and imperial systems is necessary; it will be argued, precisely in order to understand the rich diversity of entanglements that internment brought forth throughout Europe and the wider world—including cross-overs in how the very meaning of concepts like empire, nationhood and national belonging was altered and redefined through the staging of internment, repatriation and relief measures at local, regional, transnational and international levels. However, this does not mean that this book should be seen first and foremost as a comparative study of nations and empires at war. Rather the object of investigation is the internment phenomenon itself, seen here for the first time as an important aspect of the First World War as a global conflict encompassing new forms of international negotiation and activism, and new transnational ways of thinking about the politics of citizenship, migration and border control, medicine, humanitarianism and international law. As regards content, the book expands empirical knowledge in other ways too, including the involvement of neutral powers and international observers in monitoring camps and mitigating the negative effects of internment and in overseeing the tortured process of post-war repatriation and expulsions. It also applies new conceptual thinking by drawing on insights from the broader body of theoretical work on writing global histories. In particular, it follows Sebastian Conrad in regarding the term ‘global’ not as denoting a closed object of study, and still less as a claim to totality, but rather as a perspective, a way of looking at historical events, processes or human experiences.17 More particularly, the ‘point of departure’ for any global history investigation is the growing ‘inter-­ ­ connectedness of the world, which can be traced back over many centuries’,18 and not just the late nineteenth-century ideal of the nation-state with stable, controllable borders, which was merely the western ‘ideal’, rather than a Europe-­wide or universal reality, in 1914. This ‘inter-connectedness’ can be experienced at the macro-historical level. For instance, the move to ‘total war’ had important implications not only for domestic but for worldwide movements of raw materials, finished goods and ­peoples during European and global conflicts from the late eighteenth century

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onwards.19 Yet it can also be seen at a micro-historical level. To achieve a ‘globalisation’ of European history requires what Jörn Leonhard refers to as a ‘dual process of historiographical provincialisation’, namely, the provincialisation of Europe as a(n imagined and shared) geographical space and ‘the internal provincialisation of particular European cases through the productive deconstruction of national narratives’.20 Internment practices, for instance, were not just shaped by the requirements of European ‘grand strategy’ (große Politik) and decisions about resources made at governmental, national or imperial level, but could also reflect the views and cultural assumptions of military commanders and officials operating on the ground in particular locations.21 Or, to quote Conrad again, ‘The most compelling questions often crop up at points of intersection between global processes and their local manifestations’.22 That said, the book also recognises that at the international level, internment was largely determined by the European imperial powers and their military, political and economic objectives (including, after 1917, by America, a quasi-European and imperial power in its own right, and Bolshevik Russia, the world’s first self-proclaimed ‘anti-imperialist’ state). The perspective taken is therefore largely a Euro-centric one. This does not mean that instances of internment in non-European and non-US settings are any less significant. Nor should it be read as a more general refutation of recent attempts to de-centre Europe in historical accounts of the First World War or the making of the modern world more generally, for instance, by focusing on China, India or Africa.23 Rather, it means that from a global perspective, the practice of internment was both front-­ loaded and end-loaded with European concepts about nationality, race, empire, gender, citizenship, neutrality and law in a manner that profoundly shaped policy through a multitude of largely asymmetric interactions, convergences and divergences in and between non-European as well as European settings. Or, to follow C.A. Bayly’s pithy formulation, the object of this book is not to reinvent the case for ‘Western exceptionalism’ but rather to ‘[re]consider…Europe in the context of the rest’.24

The Historical Specificity of First World War Internment Internment might be conventionally understood as ‘indefinite detention without charge or trial’ and as an administrative tool used by modern governments at times of national or imperial ‘emergency’ when public safety

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(or the ruling system) is supposedly imperilled by internal armed rebellion, a major health epidemic or economic crisis, a series of terrorist outrages, or imminent invasion by a hostile power.25 More subjectively, it might be imagined or experienced as a form of ‘non-judicial punishment’ inflicted on individuals or communities who have been placed beyond the full protections of habeas corpus laws, not because they are judged to be at risk of harming themselves, but because they are seen to pose a threat to a political system, region, people or state ‘under siege’, often on the basis of their nationality or religion, or their tendency to move around and failure to lead a settled existence. In time of war or violent civil conflict, the imagined threat is first and foremost to military preparedness and security of the armed forces. In time of peace—as responses to the recent refugee crises and periodic spikes in economic migration in the Middle East, Africa, Central America and Europe demonstrate—‘immigration detention’, whether on home soil or via ‘extra-territorialisation’ of visa controls and asylum claims, might also be adopted by governments as a politically expedient means of ‘protecting’ (or appearing to protect) borders, and by extension jobs, wages, state finances, good relations with neighbouring countries, or more vaguely, indigenous cultural ‘identity’.26 A key contention of this book is that the First World War marks the major turning point in the rise of the internment camp as a twentieth-­ century global phenomenon, particularly when it comes to geographical reach and political significance. However, it does not claim that wartime internment, and the impulses behind it, were entirely a novelty of the post-1914 period. Incarceration of civilians had already featured, albeit on a much smaller and more limited scale, in a number of previous conflicts. Hostility towards enemy aliens was evident in the French revolutionary wars of 1792–1802, for instance, with foreign nationals resident in the capital, Paris, being ‘placed under surveillance’ as early as May 1792 and special ‘watch committees’ (comités de surveillance) being established throughout the country in March 1793 as a prelude to the order issued by the National Convention on 16 October 1793 for the ‘arrest of all enemy aliens other than women married to French men not suspected of ­counter-­revolutionary activities’.27 The new, revolutionary theory of armed conflict, which redefined war as the combined military and political mobilisation of the ‘nation-in-arms’ in service to the republic, thus emerged gradually after 1789. By late 1793, it had made ‘defence of the French nation’ and its ‘natural borders’ an absolute goal, necessitating complete control over all foreigners (men, women and children) residing

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within those wider borders, and not just within the confines of the capital.28 The technology necessary for the creation of fenced-off camps with watch towers and guard posts had yet to be invented, but the political stimulus for mass internment of enemy aliens was already beginning to materialise. ‘Internal enemies’ such as priests could also be threatened with deportation to French Guiana or far-flung French colonial islands from the mid- to late 1790s, an early form of what Dan Stone calls—in the slightly different contexts of Britain’s deportation of surviving Aborigines in Tasmania to Flinders island in 1830 and the implementation of the Indian Removal Act in the United States in the same year—‘open-air’ internment. Huge numbers died on the treacherous journeys that such forms of ‘removal’ entailed.29 Under Napoleon, meanwhile, all foreigners of enemy nationality were declared, by their very existence, to be adversaries of the French empire under a decree issued in November 1805. This made them liable to be treated as prisoners of war—whether they were soldiers, members of crew on battle ships, merchant sailors or businessmen and traders.30 His chief and most permanent foe, the British, incarcerated up to 1557 French civilians between 1803 and 1814, most of them apprehended on the high seas, along with some 70,000 French soldiers, sailors and merchant mariners. The conditions they were held in—land prisons in places like Dartmoor, Portchester, Perth and Norman Cross, or ‘hulks’ (decommissioned ships) in Portsmouth, Plymouth and Chatham—were anything but ‘open-air’, although officers, as opposed to men in the lower ranks, could apply for and receive ‘parole’.31 Enemy aliens were also subject to executive controls in the United States under the 1798 Enemy Alien Statute, which was passed by Congress at a time of anticipated conflict with France, and first invoked during the war with Britain in 1812 (before being resurrected in 1917). It allowed the President to order a variety of restrictions on the freedom of British subjects, including the power to order their detention without right of judicial review.32 Following on from this, even Napoleon’s banishment to Elba in 1814–15, and then to the much more remote South Atlantic island of St Helena after the ‘hundred days’ in 1815, might be seen as a form of internment within the parameters of what was thinkable and do-able at the time. Mass internment as a means of conducting war on land only became technically possible and strategically worthwhile, however, with the invention of barbed wire in 1867, a new, cheap and secure way of holding large numbers of people in one place without the need for building prisons in

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remote locations or hiring huge battalions of guards. This came at roughly the same time as the expansion of the railways and the development of the steam ship, both of which speeded up prisoner transport and made covering long distances easier33; and the appearance of the world’s first automatic fire-arms with recoil loading mechanisms, including the Maxim gun which could shoot 600 rounds per minute.34 ‘In the late nineteenth century’, as John W.  Klooster notes, ‘the range of canned goods and their availability and variety increased greatly’. This meant that ‘low cost, high-­ calorie foods’ could be delivered in large quantities to millions of captives as well as military men fighting on land or at sea, taking up less storage space and having a longer shelf-life than fresh produce.35 Searchlights with powerful beams were first deployed to great effect during night-time combat operations conducted by both sides in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05 and had the obvious potential to be adapted for use in purpose-­ built military and civilian prison camps, should the need arise.36 Yet for all these technological advances, until 1914 confinement behind barbed-wire enclosures as a method of ‘controlling’ unwanted or enemy populations was in practice only used in colonial contexts, or in campaigns waged against indigenous peoples, as in the case of the rapid westward expansion of the American frontier at the expense of the Chiricahua and other western Apache peoples in the 1870s and 1880s.37 In post-1815 European wars, enemy civilians were usually left unmolested by the belligerent states, the most important exception being first the retention, and then the forced removal of over 40,000 Germans from the Paris region in late August 1870. This event took place in what Daniela Caglioti describes as an atmosphere of suspicion against foreigners ‘resembling that of 1792– 3’ following the sudden advance of Prussian military forces into north-­ eastern France.38 Even then, the expulsion order was temporary and affected two départements only (Paris and the department of the Seine). German civilians were permitted to re-settle in the French capital in large numbers in the 1870s and 1880s, and there was no retaliation at all against French civilians on the Prussian side, whether during or after the war, except in the case of Alsace-Lorrainers who refused to accept German nationality by 1 October 1872.39 In short, in the Franco-Prussian war as in most other European non-colonial conflicts of the nineteenth century, extra-judicial detention for anything more than a few weeks, and for any other reason than maintenance of security and public order in face of threatened foreign invasion, was restricted to reservists or mobilisables.40

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This was also the assumption made by the framers of the 1899 and 1907 Hague conventions.41 Internment in the sense of confinement behind guarded barbed-wire enclosures is conventionally understood to have been first used in three successive military conflicts far away from Europe: in Cuba, during the war of independence against Spain in 1896–97; in the Philippines, in the years following the Spanish-American war of 1898 and subsequent American occupation; and in South Africa, during the Anglo-Boer war of 1899– 1902.42 Particular interest has been shown in the holding—amid large-­ scale death and famine—of tens of thousands of Boer women and children in British ‘concentration camps’ following the burning down of settler farmsteads in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Since 1900, this has become an episode of much importance to gendered narratives of Afrikaner national martyrdom, as well as to feminist and anti-militarist campaigners across the world.43 Some 116,000 white Boers were held behind barbed wire. Less well known is the internment of almost as many black South Africans during the same campaign, although it has now been demonstrated that this was a crucial part of the Boer War experience44; and the fact that several thousand white male prisoners of war were transported to British-ruled India, St Helena, Ceylon and Bermuda as part of the UK’s strategy for controlling the rebellious Boer population.45 Broader links have also been made between the Cuban, Philippine and South African internment episodes, and other forms of colonial violence from the late 1860s onwards that also involved forced removals, deportations to ‘concentration camps’ or quarantining of rebellious subject populations and destitute communities considered at risk of spreading famine or disease.46 In the late 1890s, US critics of Spanish policy in Cuba were already referring to the ‘concentration’ of peasants from rebel-held areas into over-full and entirely inadequately-resourced camps as ‘a policy of extermination’.47 The most notorious episode of all was the German military campaign against the Herero and Nama tribes in South West Africa (Namibia) in 1904–08, which is now widely recognised by scholars, and since 2015 by the German government itself, as a genocide.48 While the origins and strategic thinking behind the internment camps in South Africa, Cuba and the Philippines are still hotly contested in the academic literature, with some historians claiming that they were originally inspired by humanitarian or quasi-humanitarian considerations (the protection of non-combatants whose homes and means of sustenance had been destroyed in the fighting, or ‘re-education’ of the rebels’ wives and

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children), there is nonetheless a general consensus that ultimately they served the purpose of collective punishment of a racially/culturally ‘inferior’ or ‘child-like’ population.49 In all three instances, the captor powers believed that they were fighting a savage, ‘uncivilised’ enemy, or alternatively an enemy that refused to accept defeat graciously, but instead resorted to irregular forms of guerrilla warfare. Interning them (or their families) would send out a message that they would have to change their ways, recognise that they had been beaten in a regular, ‘civilised’ war, and accept Spanish, British or American imperial rule.50 There are some parallels here with the hostages taken by the invading German armies in Belgium and northern France in August–September 1914. Both groups were again accused of not accepting defeat and of supporting irregular Franktireurs. Removing hostages to Germany was part of the forceful strategy put in place by the German military to end what was seen as illegal resistance on the part of occupied populations.51 Nonetheless, what is even more striking about the situation after 1914 is that the belligerent states, almost without exception,52 went out of their way to insist that their internment policies were not based on any desire to punish. Instead internment was typically legitimised by reference to (a) concerns about military security and (b) the right of retaliation for harm done to one’s own nationals by enemy states or irregular fighters. One reason for this was the explicit prohibition on collective punishments against occupied populations outlined in article 50 of the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare (Haager Landkriegsordnung, HLKO).53 But another reason—as will be explored in more detail in the next three chapters of this book—was that the European powers (and, in some cases, public opinion) genuinely believed that what they were doing could still fit in with their idealised image of a rules-based international order in which (a) considerations of state/imperial sovereignty took precedence over individual rights; but at the same time (b) states might reasonably expect that their own nationals—whether on home or foreign soil—would be entitled to (codified) protection against arbitrary and unlawful violence (or extra-judicial punishments) at the hands of other state entities.54 Like Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s early twentieth-century novel The Trial, they continued to insist that they lived in a Rechtsstaat, but whereas K. internalised his existential doubts, they attributed the bewildering and dark forces encircling them to external— and hopefully temporary—influences: Balkan or Turkish ‘savagery’ seeping over from the 1912–13 wars and earlier ‘oriental’ massacres into the

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current war; ‘illegal’ resisters in occupied territories in western and southern Europe using patriotism as an excuse for ‘terrorism’ against professionally-trained, law-abiding conscript armies; German ‘barbarians’ intent on destroying ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’ by returning humankind to the ‘lawlessness’ of the past; individuals and communities on the home front whose loyalties were uncertain and seemingly unknowable, even to the internal security services; and first and foremost, the endless lies told about atrocities in the enemy press.55 As will be argued later on in the book, a striking characteristic of these subjective perceptions of what internment meant for the world was that the ‘precedents’ set in South Africa, Cuba and other sites of late nineteenthcentury colonial conflict hardly featured in a direct sense at all. At least this is how the officially censored media and those in charge of grand strategy and diplomacy saw things. The views of military and civilian officials acting on the ground are more difficult to gauge, and often involved a complex mixture of positions, partly determined by their day-­to-­day experiences of the war and direct contacts with foreign or ‘suspect’ civilians. In terms of the historical precedents that influenced such actors, colonial wars were probably far less significant than ideas around incarceration as an aspect of national or communal social policy linked to the disciplining and rehabilitation of ‘social outsiders’. The nineteenth-­century work house, for instance, had been designed to ‘reeducate’ (or remove from the community) tramps, beggars, prostitutes and other ‘nuisance’ persons who ‘refused’ to contribute to the community.56 Work itself was often seen to have a prophylactic, hygienic or corrective function, protecting society (and the individuals concerned) from the threat of (urban) poverty and degeneracy.57 It is no coincidence, for instance, that the Belgian workers deported to Germany in 1916–17 were portrayed as unemployed ‘work-refusers’. This does not mean that experiences from the colonies are irrelevant to understanding First World War internment. Rather, views of the ‘work shy’, ‘Gypsies’ and ‘big city scum’ in Europe as biologically ‘inferior’, ‘lesser beings’ and so on are to some extent reminiscent of colonial attitudes towards subject (Boer or non-white) populations in the late nineteenth century.58 But what it does mean is that internment in the First World War was interpreted by its practitioners in a variety of ways, with (globally inflected) local factors often dominating and earlier colonial experiences playing a marginal and indirect role only.

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Sources and the Question of Differentiation Between Civilian and Military Captivity Any study of civilian internment in the First World War must take into account the very rich scholarly literature on violence and military captivity during this conflict.59 The best work in this field has also engaged with the cultural or transnational ‘turn’ in First World War studies and/or has applied concepts such as class, race and gender to understanding the captive phenomenon.60 Some very useful insights have been gained into cross-overs between the experience of military and civilian captivity. Oliver Wilkinson, for instance, notes how the vocabulary of military hierarchy also crept into the language and administrative set-ups used by civilian internees to govern their own internal affairs.61 Similar findings can be identified in Rainer Pöppinghege’s engaging account of POW newspapers or Lagerzeitungen in British, French and German camps, which also uncovers how both civilian and military captives saw themselves as active participants in the war and as effective communicators between the war prisoner population and the world beyond the barbed wire.62 Panikos Panayi, in his recent study of military and civilian prisoners in Britain, was able to show that both groups of captive were treated relatively humanely as part of the UK’s determination to maintain its reputation as ‘civilised’ and ‘law-abiding’, at least when it came to managing captivity on the home front.63 Older studies of the ‘diplomacy of captivity’ have also noted how bi-lateral agreements over amelioration of conditions and exchanges reached by belligerent states through international mediation usually included civilians alongside military POWs. Something of the older, nineteenth-­ century ‘liberal tradition’ of viewing all (white/European) prisoners of war as non-combatants and thus as ‘protected persons’ under the established laws and customs of war is seen by some scholars as being at the heart of these diplomatic arrangements.64 Even so, there were clear differences between civilian and military captivity. This can be seen not only through reading the growing body of secondary academic literature on daily life, internal administrative structures and socially constructed hierarchies within internment camps, which, although showing some parallels with military POW camps, were in reality very distinct cultural ‘spaces’.65 Rather—and more importantly from the perspective of this book—the particularity of civilian internment also comes to light when we take note of the views of contemporary observers and stakeholders operating outside the camps. With one or two notable

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exceptions, they too understood that holding civilians as prisoners of war was a different matter, and required a different set of moral and strategic justifications, and a different assortment of political, legal, retaliatory and humanitarian responses, to holding military personnel. In part, this can be attributed to the specific legacy of the second Anglo-Boer War, when the British were heavily criticised in international circles for their incarceration of white Boer women and children.66 But to focus on this one event alone would be to ignore the rich web of inter-connected developments in locations across the world during this period which encouraged decision-­ makers to distinguish between ‘enemies’ (or ‘war victims’) according to their combatant or non-combatant status—especially in circumstances when the boundaries between ‘combatant’ and ‘non-combatant’ were perceived to be under threat. The diverse range of archival sources used in the study both highlight and help to explain this process of discursive and administrative differentiation between military and civilian prisoners in the years 1914–20. The records of government departments and army command posts that contributed to executive decision-making about deportations and internment, both at central and ground levels, and on the home fronts as well as in borderlands and occupied territories, have been consulted for Habsburg Austria, Imperial Germany, the British empire, Portugal and its overseas colonies, the United States and neutral Switzerland. Those responsible for implementing internment decisions ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ were also often involved in defining its purpose, giving rise to contrasting assessments of its legality and political pros and cons, its importance to competing internal and external security and economic objectives, and its likely impact on domestic and international public opinion. Use has likewise been made of the observations of US, Spanish and Swiss diplomatic officials acting in their role as representatives of the protecting power in many of the belligerent territories. These shed important light not only on their subjective perceptions of the many similarities and contrasts between different internment systems, but on their often uncertain or conflicting understandings of their dual role as neutral parties and as guardians of the national interest of their own countries. Moving beyond state actors, the book also draws extensively on the records of a number of international and transnational humanitarian agencies, including the archive of the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and its wartime International Agency for Prisoners of War (Agence internationale des prisonniers de guerre, AIPG);

1 INTRODUCTION 

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and papers belonging to the Quaker-led Friends Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress (FEC) in London and its sister organisation in Berlin, the Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland, led by Elisabeth Rotten. Through a reading of the correspondence of these organisations with each other, with civilian and military representatives of belligerent and neutral powers, and with a variety of smaller, Swiss-based charities aimed at assisting war victims and refugees, it has been possible to provide the first comprehensive account of international activism in relation to First World War internment, and the first in-depth assessment of its achievements and failings. This can be contrasted with important work already done on national relief societies by Heather Jones and others.67 Finally, the claims made in the book about the global nature and significance of First World War internment are underpinned by an extensive analysis of writings by contemporary legal, medical and neurological experts. The holdings of the historical division of the US National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, have been especially useful in this respect. In particular, they have enabled this study to offer the first proper contextualisation of the term ‘barbed-wire disease’, as applied and developed (but not invented) by the Swiss physician Adolf Lukas Vischer, by combining insights drawn from the (usually separate) disciplines of political and medical history. More generally, the legal and medical texts drawn on for Chaps. 4 and 5, combined with the other published and archival material, shed further light on the myriad ways in which civilian internees were identified by international activists up to 1920 as a separate category of war prisoner, requiring particular types of protection and/or interventionist treatment. This was matched by an equally strong determination on the part of belligerent and neutral governments—as seen in their internal and inter-departmental correspondence as well as in their external propaganda—to differentiate between civilian and military prisoners and to maintain the boundaries between them as separate legal, political and bureaucratic entities. In the culture de guerre (war culture) of 1914–18, then, civilian internees were seen to be different to their military counterparts, as was the ­purpose, practice and cultural meanings attached to holding enemy civilians and deportees, as opposed to soldiers captured on the battlefield, as prisoners of war. This book will seek to explain why this was the case, and will treat the question of whether and to what extent mobilisation for ‘total war’ ultimately undermined the distinction between ‘soldiers’ and

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‘civilians’ in an absolute or ‘objective’ sense as being of secondary importance.68 The period 1918–20 might be seen as a further watershed moment in terms of subjective perceptions, particularly as many post-war governments extended the range of emergency powers available to them, or rather the range of situations which could be deemed ‘exceptional’ by the wielders of executive power (including economic and constitutional crises, strikes and labour unrest, and not just threat of imminent foreign invasion or armed insurrection) to allow greater scope for interning civilians deemed to be a threat to national or military security.69 Even then, the German-language Brockhaus encyclopaedia, in its 1925 edition, defined the term ‘concentration camp’ as denoting a place for the large-scale ‘internment of civilians during a war’ rather than during a war and emergency situation.70 This was of course in marked contrast to how the term came to be used, and understood domestically and internationally, in the 1930s and 1940s.71

The Structure of This Book Without claiming to offer an exhaustive catalogue of every camp in every location, Chap. 2 of this book will offer a panoramic and chronological view of internment measures across the world during the years 1914 and 1918, taking care to document the cross-border, transnational and at times transcontinental movement of internees as well as the many places where they were interned. The different internment experiences of particular national groups will be highlighted, beginning with Germans and Austro-Hungarians in Allied hands—including an extended examination of the little-known situation in Portugal and its overseas empire—followed by a discussion of the treatment of Allied civilians in German and Habsburg captivity. A separate section will go on to consider the regional entanglement of three other belligerents, Ottoman Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, in this global dynamic of internment. A key aim will be to deconstruct the view that there were effectively two types of internment system: a ‘liberal’ western and an ‘oriental’ or ‘Balkanised’ eastern version. Rather, for the first time in the academic literature, it will be shown that internment ­systems across the world in the years 1914–18, while in no way identical, were mutually constitutive, not only within particular empires or regions, but at the international and transnational levels. A further objective of Chap.  2 is to challenge the notion that the only internees were white males of military age imprisoned because of

1 INTRODUCTION 

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their past or potential combatant status. This may have been true in some instances, but by no means all. As Matthew Frank notes in a slightly different context, ‘The First World War demonstrated that states which could mobilize [military] resources and personnel on a scale to sustain a total and prolonged conflict were equally equipped to move populations en masse’.72 This includes the many thousands of (forgotten) women, children and older men who were deported across Europe and beyond for purposes of internment. It also includes many non-Europeans who found themselves in civilian captivity in Europe itself. The race and gender of civilian prisoners, and the ‘othering’ of those who did not meet the standard ‘white male’ norm, were therefore important political questions in their own right. In some contexts, foreign or foreign-born women could be detained ‘voluntarily’, alongside their husbands. They might also be held captive as a gender-specific threat to national security, accused of being prostitutes or female spies (or both), a phenomenon seen particularly, but not only, in wartime France.73 Last but not least, they might be interned as a form of symbolic (and sometimes real) sexual violence or harassment, in that the very act of detaining them alongside prostitutes, and treating them as such, exposed them to humiliating and degrading social and bodily experiences.74 In terms of race, numerous non-white people could be found in internment camps, albeit ostensibly on grounds of their nationality and not the colour of their skin. Those held in Europe often faced hostility from their fellow white internees, and/or had to fight, sometimes in vain, for access to food parcels and financial support from home on the same terms as their non-black compatriots.75 They might also become objects of undignified anthropological interest from their captors, or find themselves being used in propaganda campaigns.76 They usually had no private wealth, and were dependent on the benevolence of whites, official and non-­official, if they wanted to access even the most minimum comforts while in captivity. Conversely, white internees often took offence if they were housed alongside blacks, seeing this as part of the enemy’s attempt to demoralise them. Worse still, at least from the point of view of the self-­appointed European guardians of existing racial hierarchies, were reported instances of black soldiers being used to guard (male and female) white prisoners captured and held in overseas colonies. German officials in particular accused the French and Belgians of violating the principles established at the Berlin Africa conference of 1884–85, which stipulated a policy of keeping Africa neutral in the event of a European war (‘no European war

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beyond the line’) so as not to upset the white settlement, trading and missionary projects upon which the progress of western civilisation supposedly depended.77 Chapter 3 looks at internment as state policy and as an aspect of war governance, connected to other forms of local, national and imperial mobilisation for war and wartime violence. Although in most countries foreign nationals already enjoyed fewer legal rights than naturalised subjects before 1914, alien internment typically was based on wartime administrative change, often enacted by executive decree (Orders in Council, etc.), combined with unresolved power struggles between rival military and civilian authorities. Except in the case of France,78 there is little evidence of detailed pre-war planning for mass internment of enemy aliens, leading to a great deal of confusion and uncertainty in the early weeks of the war. Internment often followed other forms of violence against civilians, from anti-German rioting in Britain,79 to hostage-taking by advancing German troops in Belgium and Northern France,80 to summary hangings of suspected spies and partisans by the Habsburg armies operating in Bosnia, Serbia and East Galicia,81 and in the worst case, the Turkish genocide against the Ottoman Armenians. Camps themselves could be spaces of violence, whether from individual guards or as part of a more organised strategy of national discrimination, social disciplining and/or gendered repression. Internees might also experience new forms of violence or coercion after being formally released from captivity. This applied in particular to French civilians discharged from German internment and either returned for forced labour in occupied France, or required to work as ‘volunteers’ in the German domestic economy.82 A common feature of all internment systems was their entanglement in overlapping jurisdictions, whether between or within competing civilian and military authorities and government departments. Location was also an important factor, as camps in occupied territories and military staging areas were controlled exclusively by armies in the field, whereas camps on the home fronts typically came under the supervision of a wider number of administrative departments and agencies. At the end of this chapter, and again in the conclusion, consideration will therefore be given to French historian Annette Becker’s claim that while there were various kinds of camp for enemy aliens and ‘internal enemies’, there was as yet no fully-fledged ‘concentration camp system’ in the First World War.83 Lack of system, it will be suggested, should not be taken to imply lack of historical significance, and nor should First World War internment be u ­ nderstood

1 INTRODUCTION 

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solely or even primarily as an antechamber to the actual concentration camp systems of the Second World War era. Chapter 4, on civilian captivity and ideas of ‘order’ and ‘belonging’, pursues the argument that internment was not designed as a rational response to concrete evidence of threats to state security and public welfare, but rather was constructed and sustained as a fluid form of wartime violence through the mobilisation of stories, myths and emotional arguments contested and shared between all war participants. These stories often made reference to international conventions, such as the HLKO, but there was no consensus or common understanding of how these conventions ought to be applied in the case of civilian internees and deportees. They also made reference to domestic social issues, such as the supposed problem of ‘work-shyness’. It was thus through culture and myths, whether about spying, military security, enemy atrocities or ‘internal enemies’, that internment became internationalised (and domestically rationalised). My aim in examining this aspect of internment is not to determine in an objective sense whether it was a rules-based and evidence-­ based system or not (as opposed to a story-based system) but rather to treat wartime arguments over what the norms and rules were, and who followed them and who not, as an object of study in its own right. The stories and myths themselves become the explanandum, the thing that needs to be explained.84 Analysing myths does not mean seeking to place them alongside more historically ‘accurate’ stories or debating who the worst ‘rule-breakers’ or ‘militarists’ were; lack of incontrovertible evidence and bias in sources means that we will arguably never get to the exact ‘truth’ behind the many claims and counter-claims. What we can do, though, is understand the mobilising and remobilising potential of the stories themselves, and the way myths influence foreign, military and social policy debates, as well as retaliatory and disciplinary practices.85 Chapter 5 explores another aspect of the internationalisation of the internment question, namely efforts to mitigate the consequences of wartime captivity for individuals and families by humanitarian organisations like the ICRC, the Quakers and related groups, as well as by neutral governments. It will also examine some of the limitations and barriers they faced. International law was vague on the rights of civilian internees. Neutral diplomats and Red Cross officials were often prone to putting national interest above the imperative to protect foreign civilians caught up in the war. What they might say in private often differed greatly to what they were able to say in public when it came to criticising conditions in

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particular camps. Sensational reports in belligerent and even neutral media outlets often made getting the right balance between providing factually accurate information on camp conditions and showing compassion for the prisoners’ suffering even more difficult. Humanitarian aid also came up against the absolute pacifist objection that any attempt to regulate or soften the effects of wartime violence encouraged or at least legitimised war.86 Nonetheless, various individuals and organisations at the national, transnational and international levels came together to provide support to civilian prisoners or to press belligerent governments to reach agreements for prisoner exchanges. Feminist campaigners drew attention to the particular damage that internment did to women’s rights and interests, while tying this to a more general anti-war message which also focused on the plight of men. Between 1916 and 1919, some neutral countries—first and foremost the Netherlands and Switzerland—signed international agreements to allow specified numbers of sick or wounded military and civilian captives to cross their borders, on condition that they intern them for the remainder of the war. Scientific experts—including the above-mentioned Swiss physician Vischer—played an important role in the ‘medicalisation’ of the internment problem, especially from 1916 onwards. All of these actions bear witness to the increasing amount of international co-­operation and cross-border problem-solving in the early twentieth century, a phenomenon which the war itself did surprising little to halt.87 Chapter 6 will look at wartime attempts to end internment in 1918–20 via the more old-fashioned method of international diplomacy, particularly through the big Franco-German and Anglo-German prisoner accords of 1918, and at the relative influence of external developments in the west (as opposed to internal political and ideological factors) on the early camps in Bolshevik Russia. It will also examine why appeals from a number of quarters, including the Vatican and the ICRC, for a universal release of civilian prisoners failed before November 1918, and will explore what happened when new conflicts—such as the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918– 19, the Romanian-Hungarian war of 1919, the Russian civil war of 1918– 20 and the Polish-Soviet war of 1920–21—led to new incidents of, and ways of imagining, internment. Finally, it will consider the very different forms of reception that former internees might experience on arrival home, both before and after November 1918. While some were welcomed as heroes, at least temporarily, others were considered suspect, especially if they had lived outside the country for decades, had wives, husbands or children who were born abroad, were found to be in a state

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of destitution, or—especially after 1917—if they had potentially come into contact with ‘Bolshevism’. Indeed, some of the last internees to be returned to Germany from outside Europe had spent the war in internment in Canada, the United States and Brazil. Their continued detention long after the armistice was in part a product of new transnational and international ‘Red scares’ prompted by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in late 1917 and post-war labour unrest in various parts of the world, from Europe to the Americas to China and Australasia.88 The combined conclusion and epilogue will summarise the main findings of the book and consider some of the broader legacies of First World War internment for international politics and ‘international mindedness’89 in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Here, glib comparisons between the internment camps of the First World War and the Soviet gulag/Nazi concentration camp systems developed under Stalin and Hitler will be avoided, as will any claims about a direct path or linear connection between the former and the latter. Instead, the focus will be on the implications of First World War internment for understanding the world we live in today, including more recent incidents of violence towards captive civilians and refugees in wartime or ‘emergency’ settings, and the varied reactions of the international community. As in the period 1914– 20, these responses are still, all too often, framed within a false dichotomy between ‘the west’ and ‘the rest’. They reflect a view of the world that hides more than it reveals about the power relations that underpin the ongoing, but at the same time ever-varying, global phenomenon of internment.

Notes 1. Matthew Stibbe, ‘Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees in Europe, 1914–20’, Immigrants and Minorities, 26.1–2 (2008), pp.  49–81 (here p. 49). 2. Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi, Enemies in the Empire: Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War (Oxford, 2020), forthcoming. 3. Mahon Murphy, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 161–8. 4. See the conference report by Lena Heerdmann and Dana Hollmann, ‘Security and Humanity in the First World War: The Treatment of Civilian “Enemy Aliens” in the Belligerent States’, available at https://www.­

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hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-8294?utm_source= hskhtml&utm_ medium=email&utm_term=20195&utm_campaign= htmldigest&utm_source=hskhtml&utm_medium=email&utm_ term=2019-5&utm_campaign=htmldigest. Also the earlier essay by the conference’s organiser, Arnd Bauerkämper, ‘National Security and Humanity: The Internment of Civilian “Enemy Aliens” during the First World War’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London, 40.1 (2018), pp. 61–85. 5. For Britain, where ships moored off Gosport, Southend and Ryde were used from December 1914 to January 1915, see Panikos Panayi, Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees during the First World War (Manchester 2012), p.  90; and for Germany, where three abandoned hulks were used in the Hansahafen in Hamburg between August and December 1914, see Matthew Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914–18 (Manchester, 2008), pp. 27 and 43. 6. John Davidson Ketchum, Ruhleben: A Prison Camp Society (Toronto, ON, 1965). 7. Murphy, Colonial Captivities; Annette Becker, Oubliés de la Grande Guerre: Humanitaire et Culture de Guerre 1914–1918. Populations Occupées, Déportés Civils, Prisonniers de Guerre (Paris, 1998); Bruna Bianchi (ed.), La violanza contro la populazione civile nella grande guerra: Deportate, profughi, internati (Milan, 2006). 8. Panikos Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australasia During the Two World Wars (Oxford, 1993); Mahon Murphy, ‘Brücken, Beethoven und Baumkuchen: German and Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War and the Japanese Home Front’, in Joachim Bürgschwentner, Matthias Egger and Gunda Barth-­Scalmani (eds.), Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial (Leiden, 2014), pp. 125–44. 9. See, for instance, Iris Rachamimov, ‘Liminality and Transgression: Breaching Social Boundaries in First World War Internment Camps’, in Anne-Marie Pathé and Fabien Théofilakis (eds.), Wartime Captivity in the Twentieth Century: Archives, Stories, Memories, trans. by Helen McPhail (New York and Oxford, 2016) [2012], pp. 84–94, which refers, among other internee memoirs, to Paul Cohen-Portheim’s Time Stood Still: My Internment in England, 1914–1918 (London, 1931). Also the many stimulating ­contributions to Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum (eds.), Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity behind Barbed Wire (London and New York, 2012). 10. Helen McPhail, The Long Silence: Civilian Life Under the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914–1918 (London, 2000), p. 55.

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11. Susan R. Grayzel, ‘Men and Women at Home’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol. 3: Civil Society (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 96–120. 12. The point that the ‘relocation aspect’ is the principal common denominator in all modern concentration camp systems, from the Spanish use of reconcentración in Cuba in 1896 to the US’s rendition of terrorist suspects to Guantánamo Bay since 2002, is emphasised by Andrea Pitzer, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (London, 2017), here esp. pp. 5 and 15. 13. For an overview see Klaus J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung: Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2000), pp.  233–8. Also useful is Jochen Oltmer, Globale Migration: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich, 2012), pp.  81–2; Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, ‘Introduction’, in Gerwarth and Manela (eds.) Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford, 2014), pp.  1–16 (here pp.  7–10); and Christian Koller, ‘The Recruitment of Colonial Troops in Africa and Asia and their Deployment in Europe during the First World War’, Immigrants and Minorities, 26.1–2 (2008), pp. 111–33. 14. For a comprehensive study of these issues in respect to Europe, see Dieter Gosewinkel, Schutz und Freiheit? Staatsbürgerschaft in Europa im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2016). Also very useful is John Torpay, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, 2000); Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT and London, 2007); and in respect to the First World War in particular, Marlou Schrover, ‘Migration and Mobility’, in 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, edited by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keane, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson, Freie Universität Berlin, https:// encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/pdf/1914-1918-Online-migration_ and_mobility-2014-10-08.pdf 15. Patricia Clavin, ‘Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts’, European History Quarterly, 40.4 (2010) pp. 624–40. 16. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope, and Perspectives of Comparative History’, in Haupt and Kocka (eds.), Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York and Oxford, 2009), pp. 1–30 (here pp.  19 and 21). See also Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard, ‘Histoire globale, histoires connectées: un changement d’échelle historiographique?’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 54–5.5 (2007), pp. 7–21.

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17. Sebastian Conrad, Globalgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Munich, 2013), pp. 9–10. 18. Ibid., p. 11. 19. E.  J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962), pp. 67 and 77–98. 20. Jörn Leonhard, ‘Comparison, Transfer and Entanglement or: How to Write Modern European History today?’, Journal of Modern European History, 14.2 (2016), pp. 149–63 (here p. 156). 21. Matthew Stibbe, ‘(Dis)entangling the Local, the National and the International: Civilian internment in  First World War Germany and German-­occupied France in Global Context’, essay in forthcoming volume edited by Rotem Kowner and Iris Rachamimov. 22. Conrad, Globalgeschichte, p. 10. 23. See, for instance, Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge, 2005); Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge, 2018); Hew Strachan, The First World War in Africa (Oxford, 2004). 24. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004), p. 469. 25. John McGuffin, Internment (Tralee, 1973), p. 1. See also Joël Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager: Gefangenschaft, Zwangsarbeit, Vernichtung, trans. by Enrico Heinemann (Berlin, 2001) [French original, 2000], p. 130. 26. Mary Bosworth, Inside Immigration Detention (Oxford, 2014); Stefan Luft, Die Flüchtingskrise: Ursachen, Konflikte, Folgen (Munich, 2016); Wolfgang Kaleck and Vera Wriedt, ‘Abschiebungen aus Spanien: Gewalt im Grenzbereich’, Die Zeit, No. 9, 22 February 2018, p. 12; Amy Nethery and Stephanie J. Silverman (eds.), Immigration Detention: The Migration of a Policy and Its Human Impact (London and New York, 2015). For a forward-­looking but historically informed analysis from the perspective of the first decade of the twenty-first century, see also Eric Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (London, 2007). 27. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), p. 184; Fahrmeir, Citizenship, p. 46. 28. Hew Strachan, ‘The Nation in Arms’, in Geoffrey Best (ed.), The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, 1789–1989 (London, 1989), pp. 49–73. 29. Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, p.  190; Dan Stone, Concentration Camps: A Short History (Oxford, 2017), pp. 13–14. 30. Andreas Gestrich, ‘Konzentrationslager: Voraussetzungen und Vorläufer vor der Moderne’, in Bettina Greiner and Alan Kramer (eds.), Welt der

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25

Lager: Zur ‘Erfolgsgeschichte’ einer Institution (Hamburg, 2013), pp. 43–61 (here p. 53). 31. Gavin Daly, ‘Napoleon’s Lost Legions: French Prisoners of War in Britain, 1803–1814’, History, 89.3 (2004), pp. 361–80 (here pp. 363–5); Gestrich, ‘Konzentrationslager’, pp. 54–5. 32. Jörg Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg: ‘Feindliche Ausländer’ und die amerikanische Heimatfront während des Ersten Weltkriegs (Hamburg, 2000), p. 67. 33. Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, p.  26. Olivier Razac, Barbed Wire: A Political History, trans. by Jonathan Kneight (London, 2002) [2000], p. 5, gives 1874 as the date when barbed wire was invented, by a farmer in Illinois, J. F. Glidden. Pitzer, One Long Night, p. 13, also locates its invention, or at least its first mass use, in the 1870s. 34. David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2004), p. 8. 35. John W. Klooster, Icons of Invention: The Makers of the Modern World from Gutenberg to Gates (Santa Barbara, CA, 2009), Vol. 1, p. 108. 36. H.M.S.O., The Official History of the Russo-Japanese War, prepared by the Committee of Imperial Defence (London, 1909), Vol. 3, p. 173. 37. Stone, Concentration Camps, p.  13. See also Razac, Barbed Wire, pp. 15–23. 38. Daniela L. Caglioti, ‘Waging War on Civilians: The Expulsion of Aliens in the Franco-Prussian War’, Past and Present, 221 (2013), pp. 161–95 (here p. 167). 39. The latter were required to move to France (within the 1871 borders). See ibid., p. 192. 40. Heather Jones, Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge 2011), p. 51. 41. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘War and Peace in the Twentieth Century’, in Hobsawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, pp. 15–30 (here pp. 19–20). 42. Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, pp.  45–73; Hermann Scharnagl, Kurze Geschichte der Konzentrationslager (Wiesbaden, 2004), pp. 24–33; Jonathan Hyslop, ‘The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907’, South African Historical Journal, 63.2 (2011), pp. 251–76. 43. See Helen Bradford, ‘Regendering Afrikanerdom: The 1899–1902 AngloBoer War’, in Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds.), Gendered Nations: Nationalism and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), pp. 207–25; Heloise Brown, ‘The Truest Form of Patriotism’: Pacifist Feminism in Britain, 1870–1902 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 164–78; and Birgit Susanne Seibold, Emily Hobhouse and the Reports on the Concentration Camps during the Boer War, 1899–1902: Two Different Perspectives (Stuttgart, 2014).

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44. B.  E. Mongalo and Kobus du Pisani, ‘Victims of a White Man’s War: Blacks in Concentration Camps during the South African War (1899– 1902)’, Historia, 44.1 (1999), pp. 148–82; Elizabeth van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History (Auckland Park, 2013), esp. pp. 150–78. 45. Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘South Africa’s Indian Ocean: Boer Prisoners of War in India’, Social Dynamics, 38 (2012), pp. 363–80. 46. Particularly important here are Iain R.  Smith and Andreas Stucki, ‘The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps (1868–1902)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39.3 (2011), pp.  417–37; Sibylle Scheipers, ‘The Use of Concentration Camps in Colonial Warfare’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 43.4 (2015), pp.  678–98; and Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876– 1903 (Berkeley, CA, 2017). 47. Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History (New Haven, CT and London, 2004), p. 95. 48. See ‘Germany moves to atone for “forgotten genocide” in Namibia’, The Guardian, 25 December 2016, on-line version available at https://www. theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/germany-moves-to-atone-forforgotten-genocide-in-namibia. For an important set of scholarly essays on this issue, see Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster, 2011). 49. Stone, Concentration Camps, p.  17; Hyslop, ‘The Invention of the Concentration Camp’, pp. 259–60; Scheipers, ‘The Use of Concentration Camps’, p.  683; Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism, pp.  163–8; van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War, esp. pp. 75–8. There is admittedly one important exception to this consensus— see Smith and Stucki, ‘The Colonial Development of Camps’, p. 427. 50. Gott, Cuba, p. 94. In fact, Spanish rule in Cuba came to an end in 1898, while British rule in South Africa lasted until 1931, and American rule in the Philippines until 1946. 51. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT and London, 2001), p. 166. 52. The Turkish government’s policies towards the Ottoman Armenians in 1915–16 stand out because of the genocidal intent and consequences. Such intent cannot be found in any other internment situations during the First World War. See Chap. 3 of this book. 53. Article 50 of the HLKO read: ‘No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon [an occupied] population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible’. See http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague04.asp 54. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, p. 216.

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27

55. K.’s ‘crime’ was to assert his own innocence without first understanding the incomprehensible new rules that he was expected to live by. Many of the leaders of the warring powers in 1914–20 were guilty of the same offence. See Franz Kafka, The Trial, Penguin Classics edition, trans. by Michael Hofmann (London, 2015) [1925]. On the relevance of the Balkan wars of 1912–13 in particular in shaping the attitude of contemporary European and American ruling elites and public opinion towards wartime violence and the politics of humanitarian relief, see Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, p. 215; and on the relevance of earlier western engagement with Balkan atrocities in the 1870s, see Rebecca Gill, Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–1914 (Manchester, 2013), esp. pp. 73–95 and 195–6. 56. Gestrich, ‘Konzentrationslager’, pp. 56–9. For Germany especially, see also Hubert Kolling, Die kurhessischen ‘Straf- und Besserungsanstalten’: Institutionen des Strafvollzugs zwischen Fürsorge, Vergeltung und Abschreckung (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1994); and Rainer Hehemann, Die ‘Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens’ im Wilhelminischen Deutschland und in der Weimarer Repubik, 1871–1933 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1987). 57. Stibbe, ‘(Dis)entangling’, forthcoming. 58. See the very good discussions in Jens Thiel, ‘Menschenbassin Belgien’: Anwerbung, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg (Essen, 2007), pp.  26–30 and 89–102; and Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism, pp. 168–70. 59. For two succinct overviews, see Alan Kramer, ‘Prisoners in the First World War’, in  Sibylle Scheipers (ed.), Prisoners in War  (Oxford, 2010), pp. 75–90; and Heather Jones, ‘Prisoners of War’, in 1914–1918-online, edited by Daniel et  al., https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/ pdf/1914-1918-Online-prisoners_of_war-2014-10-08.pdf 60. Kate Ariotti, ‘International Encounters in Captivity: The Cross-Cultural Experiences of Australian POWs in the Ottoman Empire’, in Kate Ariotti and James E. Bennett (eds.), Australians and the First World War: Local-­ Global Connections and Contexts (Basingstoke, 2017), pp. 47–66; Heather Jones, ‘Imperial Captivities: Colonial Prisoners of War in Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–18’, in Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge, 2011), pp.  175–93; Daniel Rouven Steinbach, ‘Defending the Heimat: The Germans in South-West Africa and East Africa during the First World War’, in Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien and Christoph Schimdt-Supprian (eds.), Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden, 2008), pp.  179–208; Gerhard Höpp, Muslime in der Mark: Als Kriegsgefangene und Internierte in Wünsdorf und Zossen, 1914–1924 (Berlin, 1997); Brian K. Feltman, The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors, and Manhood in the Great War and Beyond (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 2015).

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61. Oliver Wilkinson, British Prisoners of War in First World War Germany (Cambridge, 2017), p. 178. 62. Rainer Pöppinghege, Im Lager unbesiegt: Deutsche, englische und französische Kriegsgefangenen-Zeitungen im Ersten Weltkrieg (Essen, 2006). 63. See Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, esp. p. 26. 64. See, in particular, Richard B. Speed III, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War: A Study in the Diplomacy of Captivity (New York, 1990), pp. 3 and passim. Also Gerald H. Davis, ‘National Red Cross Societies and Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1918’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28.1 (1993), pp. 31–52. For a recent rebuttal of the ‘liberal tradition’ argument in respect to military captivity on the western front in the First World War, see Jones, Violence, esp. pp. 6–8 and 356–63. 65. See, for instance, Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany; Panikos Panayi, ‘“Barbed Wire Disease” or a “Prison Camp Society”: The Everyday Lives of German Internees on the Isle of Man, 1914–1919’, in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Germans as Minorities during the First World War: A Global Comparative Perspective (Farnham, 2014), pp. 99–121; Claudio Ambrosi, Vite internate: Katzenau, 1915–1917 (Trento, 2008); Simon Giuseppi, L’internement à Corbara en Corse de civils austro-allemands 1914–1920 (Ajaccio, 2014); and Claudia Sternberg and David Stowe (eds.), Pleasure, Privileges, Privations: Lofthouse Park near Wakefield, 1908–1922 (Leeds, 2018). 66. On German and Austrian press criticism of British use of ‘concentration camps’ in South Africa at the turn of the century, see Steffen Bender, Der Burenkrieg und die deutschsprachige Presse: Wahrnehmung und Deutung zwischen Bureneuphorie und Anglophobie 1899–1902 (Paderborn, 2009), esp. pp.  101–20. On British concern to avoid parallels being drawn between its internment policies in the First World War and the Boer war experiences, see Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism, p. 221; and Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire. 67. Heather Jones, ‘International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action during the First World War’, European Review of History—Revue européene d’histoire, 16.5 (2009), pp. 697–713. See also Nadja Durbach, ‘The Parcel is Political: The British Government and the Regulation of Food Parcels for Prisoners of War, 1914–1918’, First World War Studies, 9.1 (2018), pp.  93–110; and Giovanna Procacci, Warfare-Welfare: Intervento dello Stato e diritti dei cittadini (1914–1918) (Rome, 2013). 68. On civilians and ‘total war’, including in relation to internment, see Tammy Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York 2010), here esp. p.  15; and Daniel Marc Segesser, Empire und Totaler Krieg: Australien, 1905–1918 (Paderborn, 2002), here esp. pp.  522–7. On the concept of ‘total war’ more generally, see Jeremy Black, The Age of

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Total War, 1860–1945 (London, 2006); and Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2000). 69. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, transl. by Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL, 2005) [Italian original, 2003]. 70. Cited in Julia Hörath, ‘Asoziale’ und ‘Berufsverbrecher’ in den Konzentrationslager 1933 bis 1938 (Göttingen, 2017), p. 60. My italics. 71. See also Wolfgang Sofsky, Die Ordnung des Terrors: Das Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1993); Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London, 2015). 72. Matthew Frank, Making Minorities History: Population Transfer in Twentieth-Century Europe (Oxford, 2017), p. 29. 73. Jean-Claude Farcy, Les camps de concentration français de la première guerre mondiale (1914–1920) (Paris, 1995), pp.  76–90. On fears of the enemy ‘female spy’, especially but not only at the time of the Mata Hari trial in 1917, see also Margaret Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford and New  York, 2000), pp. 268–308. 74. See also Matthew Stibbe, ‘Gendered Experiences of Civilian Internment during the First World War: A Forgotten Dimension of Wartime Violence’, in Ana Carden-Coyne (ed.), Gender and Conflict since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 14–28. 75. See, for example, Fiona Paisley, The Lone Protestor: A.M.  Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra, 2012), which tells the fascinating story of the Australian Aboriginal activist A.M. Fernando, including his experience of house arrest in Trieste and internment in wartime Austria, first at Grossau and then at Katzenau (here pp. 37–53). 76. Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre, pp. 317–25. 77. See Ronald Robinson, ‘The Conference in Berlin and the Future in Africa, 1884–1885’, in Stig Förster, Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Ronald Robinson (eds.), Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884– 1885 and the Onset of Partition (Oxford, 1998), pp.  1–32 (here esp. pp. 22–3). Also Strachen, The First World War in Africa, p. 14. 78. Farcy, Les camps de concentration français, pp. 5–10. See also the discussion in Chap. 3 of this book. 79. See Panikos Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War (Oxford, 1991), esp. pp. 223–58. 80. See Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, p. 166. 81. Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007), pp.  140–4; Anton Holzer, Das Lächeln der Henker: Der unbekannte Krieg gegen die Zivilbevölkerung 1914–1918 (Darmstadt, 2008); Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and

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Austria-­ Hungary at War (London, 2014), pp.  140–57; Daniel Marc Segesser, ‘Kriegsverbrechen? Die österreichisch-ungarischen Operationen des August 1914 in Serbien in Wahrnehmung und Vergleich’, in Wolfram Dornik, Julia Walleczek-Fritz and Stefan Wedrac (eds.), Frontwechsel: Österreich-Ungarns “Grosser Krieg” im Vergleich (Vienna, 2014), pp. 213–33. 82. Stibbe, ‘(Dis)entangling’, forthcoming. 83. Annette Becker, ‘Captive Civilians’, in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, Vol. 3, pp. 257–81 (here p. 281). 84. For the parallel case of stories about guerrilla warfare in Belgium in August 1914, see the very convincing defence of their book German Atrocities, 1914 offered by Alan Kramer and John Horne in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 51, 1 March 2018, p. 14. 85. As well as Horne and Kramer’s work mentioned above, I have also been influenced here by the analysis presented in Megan Mackenzie, Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth that Women Can’t Fight (Cambridge, 2015); and by Jeffrey Verhey’s important study The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000). 86. Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre, pp. 308–12. 87. See Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA, 2013), esp. pp. 11–44; and Daniel Gorman, International Cooperation in the Early Twentieth Century (London, 2017). 88. Especially useful here is Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York, 2007). 89. Sluga, Internationalism, p. 56.

CHAPTER 2

First World War Internment Across the Globe

The question as to who was interned during the First World War has already been partly addressed in the opening paragraphs of the introductory chapter. The answer given there reflected an attempt to provide a typology of internees. They could be ‘enemy aliens’ in the classic sense, namely, enemy civilians caught in the territory of a belligerent state at the outbreak of hostilities. They could also be deportees seized as hostages, suspected guerrilla fighters or forced labourers by foreign troops who had invaded their lands; ‘internal enemies’ or persons held captive by their own government because they were regarded as ‘unreliable’, or military internees held by neutral states. They might be men of military age, but equally they might be women, children or older men. They were usually white and of European background, but could be of African, Middle Eastern, Asian or native Australasian descent. Some may have travelled short distances between their initial place of arrest and the camp in which they were being held, whereas others may have been moved across borders, continents or oceans. In short, there was huge variety of ‘types’ of civilian internee, and no one type predominated. This chapter further develops the case for differentiation by arguing that categorising internees solely on the basis of their legal status as alien nationals, as some previous studies have done, is deeply problematic.1 In many cases, it will be shown, the supposed ‘foreignness’ (Fremdartigkeit) of internees was used as a catch-all justification for their detention, especially when social, racial and gendered hierarchies were being affirmed, © The Author(s) 2019 M. Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57191-5_2

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reinforced and/or re-enmeshed with ideas about national belonging and citizenship in the course of cultural mobilisation for war. A ‘connected histories’ methodology can help to make these entanglements more visible, and is applied here for the first time in relation to First World War internment camps.2 In other instances, a person’s nationality or ‘foreignness’ (as opposed to their more general, socially constructed ‘otherness’) could be almost entirely irrelevant. Prostitutes, for instance, were interned as a supposed threat to community cohesion, national and imperial security or the health and combat readiness of the fighting forces regardless of what their citizenship status was.3 In the Habsburg empire, (often inaccurate) police records were used to identify internal political suspects whose disloyalty was defined by their supposed allegiance to a hostile power (as in the case of alleged ‘Russophiles’ or Italian ‘irredentists’) rather than by nationality per se.4 In some ways, this harked back to early nineteenth-century practices, particularly the treatment of British residents in Russia during the Crimean War, when a person’s perceived ‘loyalty’ and ‘individual characteristics’ could still override concerns based on their alien background or formal legal status.5 The very fact that nationality itself could be an unreliable means of distinguishing between ‘friend’ and ‘foe’ added significantly to the internal problems that beset multi-­national states like the Habsburg Dual Monarchy and Tsarist Russia during the course of the war, and contributed to instances of violence and brutality there.6 Yet even in the apparently more stable and ethnically homogenous ‘nation-states’ of western Europe, internment exposed the fragility of modern concepts of family, nationality and citizenship, as well as the considerable variations in administrative practice from country to country and even from province to province. Some individuals simply defied categorisation on the basis of mixed heritage, mixed marriages or mixed loyalties. Others were interned on purely technical grounds, even though their cultural and linguistic ties to their old country (or to the country of their ancestors), and thus their Fremdartigkeit, had all but vanished.7 Indeed, if anything, the principle of nationality muddied rather than simplified what police, military and government officials hoped would be the uncomplicated administrative process of identifying and interning aliens—especially when it came to the question of (recently) ‘naturalised’ subjects of enemy origin. One example, among many, would be the status of Heligolanders born before the transfer of these strategic islands in the North Sea from British to German sovereignty under the Anglo-German Heligoland-Zanzibar Agreement of 1890. Born British, they had de facto

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become German, even if they had emigrated to Britain or to one of its overseas colonies after 1890, making them liable to being classified as enemy subjects under the Aliens Restriction Act of August 1914. Ironically, in many cases, the decision to emigrate had been motivated by loyalty to the British Crown and dislike of rule from ‘continental’ Germany.8 In Brazil, to take another example, the only South American country formally to declare war on Germany, in October 1917, around 75% of the almost 400,000 inhabitants of German origin were not formerly naturalised and were thus by default German subjects. Yet the Brazilian state could not afford to intern all of them, particularly those who lived in remote rural settlements in the south, and had to content itself with arresting a mere 700 ‘suspect’ Germans, mainly reservists, merchant sailors and recent arrivals living in big cities.9 In this case, it was again not nationality per se, but rather a combination of military status and perceived role in the urban economy that led to their detention. The argument being made in this chapter, it should be noted, is not that a global view of internment requires a complete side-lining of the issue of nationality, but rather its better contextualisation. Alongside the important task of identifying how and why internment was enacted in particular local, regional, national or imperial contexts, and identifying transnational knowledge transfers and connections, lies the undeniable fact that the international system as it then existed supported the primacy of nationality (rather than race, culture, disposition [Gesinnung] or regionally specific factors) in categorising civilians as ‘friends’ or ‘enemies’ in a legal and political-bureaucratic sense. This can be seen not only in the management of national relief systems via international bodies or transnational networks, but also in the records kept by the ICRC’s Geneva-based AIPG on individual prisoners. The agency’s civilian section, established in October 1914, had its own card index system for every internee whose existence it became made aware of. On each card, alongside name, age and profession, nationality featured as a prominent detail.10 Likewise, the Swiss and Dutch governments, when enacting their schemes for neutral internment in 1916 and 1917, categorised those eligible according to national as well as medical criteria.11 This is an important point which tallies with Peter Gatrell’s findings in respect to the (re-)organisation of private and international refugee relief work in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Imperial Russia along national lines during the war.12 To take a further example: in most states in 1914, women who married foreigners were forced to give up the nationality that they were born with

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(usually the nationality of their fathers) and accept the nationality of their husbands.13 Dual citizenship, meanwhile, ‘was viewed with suspicion’.14 The international system, stemming from principles first set out under the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, did nothing to challenge this discriminatory practice as it was based on respect for the sovereignty of individual states and their ‘right’ to determine their own domestic laws.15 Crucially, this meant that some women could become enemy aliens in their home country when the war broke out, because their marriage to a foreigner made them of foreign nationality too. This was especially significant as most belligerents introduced new or tighter arrangements for the compulsory registration of all aliens when the war broke out.16 In 1914, paradoxically, the most systematic challenge to this came not from international circles, but from nationalists and pro-war feminists who decried the fact that ‘patriotic’ women and children might be de-nationalised (and thereby lost to the nation) simply because of the foreign nationality of a (sometimes absent or deceased) husband or father.17 One final reason why a global history of internment must include consideration of the national, while acknowledging its brittleness as a historical category, is that in the 1920s, wartime civilian captivity could, in some circumstances, become central to stories of national victimhood. An example of this would be the efforts made by German propagandists to draw attention to the Allies’ alleged ill-treatment of German colonists and missionaries in Africa and elsewhere. This continued after the war, and particularly after Germany lost all of its overseas colonies under the Treaty of Versailles.18 Similar stories can also be found on the other side. The Italians, for instance, appointed a Royal Commission of Investigation into violations of international law committed by the enemy, which accused the Austrians of using civilian internment, deportations and mistreatment of POWs as a means of ‘destroy[ing] or reduc[ing] to a small number the Italian race on their territories’.19 In 1920, the Yugoslav authorities brought out a ‘black book’ of Habsburg atrocities in wartime Serbia and Bosnia, and were followed, more controversially, by Ukrainian nationalists who published their own four-volume anti-Austrian, anti-Polish and anti-­ Soviet work in the 1920s detailing the suffering of those suspected ‘Russophiles’ interned at the Thalerhof camp near Graz between 1914 and 1917.20 More in private than in public, Roman Catholic Slovenes in inter-war Italy remembered that many of their priests were interned in both Friuli and the Slovene-speaking Austrian territories invaded by the Italian army after May 1915 because they were arbitrarily ‘identified as key

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sympathizers of the Habsburg crown and the most rabid opponents of the Italian occupying forces’.21 For all of these reasons, it is impossible to ignore the relevance of ideas about nationality and national belonging to the internment phenomenon. Yet it is equally important not to fall into the trap of associating internment solely with national, religious or ethnic intolerance while ignoring the possibility of entanglements with both imperial and regional mind-sets and conditions, and with different forms of wartime international co-­ operation and cross-border humanitarian relief work. This chapter, and the next two, will seek to redress the balance by considering the national factors behind internment against an inter-connected, local, regional and global background. They will also further explore the transnational and international power dynamics behind the internment phenomenon by bringing into focus the hitherto largely overlooked dimensions of race and gender.

Germans and Austro-Hungarians The first country to implement mass internment of enemy aliens when the First World War broke out was France, and the initial targets, in August to October 1914, were Germans and Austro-Hungarians living within French metropolitan and colonial territory.22 Over the next weeks, months and years, subjects of the two main Central Powers found themselves interned all over Europe and in all parts of the globe. By 1917, 36,000 Germans and 11,000 Austro-Hungarians were interned in Britain and its empire, and by November 1918, 60,000 or so enemy aliens had spent at least some time in captivity in France, many for four years or more.23 In Britain, the camps on the Isle of Man, at Douglas and Knockaloe near Peel, became the most famous, although there were many others, including Lofthouse Park near Wakefield in West Yorkshire, Stobs, close to Hawick in the Scottish borderlands, and Alexandra Palace in London.24 In metropolitan France, camps could be found in various parts of the western and southern coasts, with a further four situated on the island of Corsica.25 South Africa’s main camp for civilian internees was at Fort Napier in Pietermaritzburg, then in Natal province; like many of the sites in mainland Britain and France, it also housed some enemy civilians who were initially captured in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa and were subsequently moved for purposes of imperially rather than nationally minded ‘concentration and consolidation’.26

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In the Russian empire, some 200,000–250,000 Tsarist subjects of ethnic German background were deported from their homes in Congress Poland, Riga, Volynia, Kiev, Podolia and the Volga region between 1914 and the end of 1916, in particular in the wake of the retreat of Russian forces during the Central Powers’ spring offensive in 1915.27 Although often referred to as ‘civilian prisoners’ (grazhdanskie plennye), most ended up not in camps, but abandoned to their own fate in various parts of Siberia, Northern and Eastern Russia and Central Asia. Alongside other groups, such as Poles and Jews, they were victims of an intensified nationalisation programme in Russia’s western and southern provinces that was supported by high-placed figures in the army, including the commander-­ in-­ chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and his chief of staff, N.N. Ianushkevich.28 In addition, some 13,000 Reich German inhabitants of the Prussian province of East Prussia, nearly half of them women and children, were taken as hostages and driven into the Russian interior during the two brief military incursions made by the Romanov armies into that province in September 1914 and March 1915; almost one-third of them did not survive.29 In the United States, which entered the war against Germany on 6 April 1917, and against Austria-Hungary on 7 December 1917, more than 8500 arrests were made under the 1798 Alien Enemy Statute, and 2331 ‘dangerous enemy aliens’ were permanently incarcerated in two camps set up by the War Department: Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and Fort Douglas, Utah. Alongside the civilian internees, up to 2800 seamen of various kinds (naval officers and crew accused of ‘violating American neutrality’, together with merchant mariners captured after 6 April 1917 in American ports and in colonial possessions like the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam and Puerto Rico) were also interned at Fort McPherson, Georgia, and in Hot Springs, North Carolina.30 Brazil, as we have seen, ordered the arrest of 700 Germans when it came into the war in October 1917.31 German and Austro-Hungarian nationals were also interned in Italy, Portugal and its overseas colonies, Romania, Greece, several Central American countries and eventually in nationalist China, as well as in Britain’s  other self-governing dominions: Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Even neutral countries like Chile and Argentina could be forced, under British pressure, to detain German naval personnel for the duration of hostilities.32 In 1918, two non-European countries, Panama and Siam, in effect contracted their internment and expulsion measures out to Britain and the United States, respectively. Panama arrested thirty-two Germans

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living in the canal zone after it entered the war on 7 April 1917, and held them in a camp on the island of Taboga in the Gulf of Panama; on 19 April 1918, under the direction of US immigration officials, they were deported to Ellis Island in New York, and from there were taken first to Gloucester City Immigration Station in New Jersey, and then to Fort Oglethorpe.33 Siam (Thailand) sent the 300 or so Germans in its hands, including women and children, to Ahmednagar and Sholapur, India, in February 1918, and a further 12 were sent from the Straits settlement in June of that year, another source of complaint both to the Swiss federal authorities (who represented German interests in India as well as the UK)34 and in the Reichstag committee’s report in the 1920s.35 When Haiti became the twenty-third and last sovereign country to enter the war against the Central Powers, on 14 July 1918, twenty-two Germans were interned at a camp in Port-au-Prince; they were not released until July 1919, by which time two of them had died while in captivity.36 A number of important specialist studies and essay collections have highlighted the connection between the internment phenomenon and the persecution, and in some cases the destruction, of minority German communities as a crucial part of the ‘global war’ waged against the Central Powers in the years 1914–20.37 In brief, internment was frequently associated with attempts to eradicate use of the German language in Allied and associated countries, for instance, through the renaming of cafes, public buildings and types of food, or the closure of German schools, newspapers, club houses and cultural associations. According to Bruno Cabanes, in France anyone with a German-sounding name or foreign-sounding accent was at risk of being denounced as a ‘Boche’. In Paris, the metro station ‘Berlin’ was renamed ‘Liège’, while the right-wing newspaper Action française looked forward to a time when German, or what it called ‘the rude language and crude rhapsodies of barbarians’, would no longer be taught in French schools.38 Male politicians debated whether to make abortion available to French and Belgian women raped by German soldiers, not in order to reduce their suffering as victims of sexual assault, but ‘in order root to out…the “child of the barbarian”’.39 In countries other than France, efforts were similarly made to expunge perceived German influences on national life. According to David Blackbourn, ‘when the heavily German city of Berlin, Ontario became Kitchener [in May 1916], and Berlin, Iowa became Lincoln [in June 1918], these were instances of something repeated thousands of times across the German-speaking parts of the English-speaking world’.40

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Such name-changing often went hand in hand with the state-sponsored acquisition or confiscation of German-owned homes and businesses, and/or with the failure of the state to intervene effectively in the event of mob violence. Indeed, starting in Britain in August and October 1914; spreading from there to Moscow, Sydney, Melbourne and several South African cities in the wake of the Lusitania sinking in May 1915; and returning to mainland Britain again in June 1916 and July 1917, anti-German riots led to mass looting, the destruction of German property, and, occasionally, the loss of German lives.41 Germans were also the targets of violent unrest in Brazil in April and October 1917, marking in the first case that country’s suspension of diplomatic relations with the Central Powers in the wake of the sinking of one of its ships by a German submarine, and in the second instance, its formal entry into the war. Luso-Brazilians, but also Italian and British immigrants, were behind these disturbances.42 In the major cities of the United States, mob violence against Germans and Habsburg subjects after 1917 was lower level and more sporadic, but also more intense and personal in form. The worst case was the public lynching of Robert Prager, a German immigrant from Dresden and coal miner working in Collinsville, Illinois, on 5 April 1918, who was targeted by locals because of his alien origins and possibly also his socialist beliefs.43 More typical was the example of Fred Schmidt, an official of the International Office of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America based in St. Louis, Missouri, who was arrested and interned in May 1918 for ‘being an [unregistered] enemy alien in a barred zone’. This was due to his mistaken belief, as he explained in a letter to the President of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, ‘that to swear allegiance to the American flag, to serve three years (1908 to 1911  in Company M, 8th US Infantry) under this same flag and to secure after this time of service, an honorable discharge, was equivalent to citizenship papers’.44 In fact, it was not. In Australian cities too, individuals could be targeted merely for being of ‘hostile origin and associations’. This included naturalised British subjects of German descent such as Carl Zoeller and Dr Eugen Hirschfeld, both of Brisbane, who were interned on the orders of the Minister of Defence in February 1916 simply because of the wild stories circulated about them in late 1915, stories which Intelligence Officers in the city had been unable to confirm.

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Zoeller and his [Australian-born] son, then aged eight, were alleged to have laid mines in Moreton Bay and to have attempted to derail troop trains en route to the army camp at Enoggera. Zoeller was also alleged to have a wireless concealed in a piano at his home and to be in direct contact with Germany… Hirschfeld was alleged to have mutilated the genitals of every male child he had delivered since his migration to Queensland and caused an outbreak of meningitis in Enoggera.45

Except in a few cases of excessive public demonstrations of pro-German feeling,46 the victims of these and similar measures all over the world had typically not done anything to bring such attacks upon themselves. Rather, anti-Germanism as a global wartime phenomenon, and one of the causes of internment, can be attributed to a number of factors, including envy towards what was often seen as a successful but largely separate and supposedly aloof or over-privileged migrant group; religious differences (especially in Catholic countries like Brazil where German immigrants, particularly those who did not assimilate or learn Portuguese, were usually associated with Protestantism); spy scares and xenophobia recklessly whipped up by right-wing newspapers and unscrupulous nationalist agitators; long-standing myths that Germans were either agents of Wilhelm II’s plans for imperialist world domination or fomenters of industrial unrest and left-wing subversion; and last but not least, the actions of the wartime German government, including its use of submarines to target Allied and neutral shipping or its confiscation of foreign-owned goods held in warehouses in its major ports.47 The persecution of Germans and Austrians in particular national, colonial and regional contexts has already been examined in detail in other studies, and it is not the intention to repeat this material in detail here.48 More relevant is to examine the reaction of the German and Habsburg governments, and especially their belief, genuinely held, that Britain and France were behind the decision of other Allied nations to target Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and Turks for internment. Both during and after the war, charges were made that (a) British and French agents had deliberately stirred up anti-German, anti-Habsburg and anti-Ottoman feeling in neutral countries, with negative and sometimes catastrophic effects for individual Germans and Austrians living there; and (b) that they had broken the spirit of the 1885 Berlin Africa conference by encouraging internment of Germans in colonial settings, with use of black guards regarded as an additional, aggravating feature.49 All of these charges contained a grain

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of truth, although the situation was often more complex, and involved a number of overlapping local, national, regional and imperial factors. The case of Portugal, which formally entered the war in March 1916, is instructive in this respect, not least as it involved internment in both European and extra-European settings (mainland Portugal, the Portuguese-owned Azores islands, and Portugal’s overseas colonies in Africa and India), and in consecutive but inter-linked periods of quasi- (before March 1916) and actual belligerency (thereafter). I have also chosen to examine the Portuguese example here as it has not been considered in any previous studies of First World War internment. From the sixteenth century until the 1930s, Portugal was often cast as Britain’s oldest and most dependable (or rather, dependent and therefore compliant) ally. War between Britain and Germany in 1914 was bound to have a negative impact on Portugal’s trade with both countries, but in practice, it relied more heavily on British than on German markets and investment and, as a weak colonial power with investment-starved and settler-starved holdings in various parts of Africa and Asia, could not afford a major quarrel with the ocean-dominating British Royal Navy. Under pressure from London, on 4 August 1914, Portugal did not follow other countries, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands and even its erstwhile colony Brazil, by publicly declaring its neutrality. But nor did it immediately engage in hostilities. Instead, its position remained ambiguous: it was not officially entering the war but retained the freedom to act in the interests of one side or the other, as it saw fit.50 In practice, this meant agreeing to assist Britain and its allies in finding ways to prevent Germany from using Portuguese colonies as a means of obtaining food supplies, military intelligence or  black recruits for its armies in Africa, while allowing British troops free access to its harbours, the right to pursue German forces through its territories, and the right to draw on up to 30,000 Portuguese  East African porters in the process.51 In the late summer of 1914, under the false assumption that Portugal had actually entered the war, German forces entered northern Mozambique and southern Angola, leading to skirmishes and urgent requests made to Lisbon to send reinforcements. A bigger clash occurred in December 1914, when imperial troops in German South West Africa (Namibia) again violated the border with Angola and defeated Portuguese forces at Naulila, destroying the fortress there. The Germans were pushed out of Angola for good in June 1915 as part of the joint British-South African conquest of German South West Africa, but their earlier raids also encouraged revolts from black Angolans, now

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v­ iolently repressed by a new expeditionary force despatched from Lisbon, a campaign which climaxed with the battle of Môngua in August 1915.52 Even if it had wanted to take a more neutral position after 1915, Portugal could not, as its continued presence in Africa, and its desire to avoid being held to account for violent atrocities committed at Môngua and, in the period before 1914, at Sâo Tomé and elsewhere,53 made it vital to have a seat at any prospective peace conference. Indeed, without British/Allied support, it was assumed that the Portuguese empire would be finished. Germany, on the other hand, was suspected of fomenting unrest among the indigenous populations of Portuguese East Africa, as well as among the European and Indian troops stationed there. In particular, it was accused of ‘preaching a Holy War, in the name of the Sultan of Turkey, among the natives of Nyassa territory, especially among the Mussulmans’ and of ‘endeavouring to stir the natives up generally’.54 Well before it formally entered the war in Europe in March 1916, then, Portugal had already introduced a series of anti-German measures in Angola and Mozambique. First, German soldiers and civilians captured during the campaigns in Angola in 1914–15 were interned at the main port of Luanda55; second German merchant ships and their crews who had entered either Angolan or Mozambican harbours since the beginning of the war were detained on board their ships56 and third efforts were made—not always successfully—to impose an embargo on food exports and postal deliveries to German East Africa.57 Germany formally declared war on Portugal on 9 March 1916 after the latter announced that German merchant ships held in Portuguese harbours since 1914 would be requisitioned and handed over to prize courts, meaning in effect that they could be sold to the British (the likely highest bidders). Yet, in terms of its administrative conduct of the war at home and in its Asian and Atlantic holdings, Portugal tended to follow the French notion of a union sacrée (in Portuguese, the união sagrada)58 rather than the British model of voluntary patriotic mobilisation, not least as it had become a republic following a coup against the constitutional monarchy in October 1910, and many of its pro-interventionist military leaders had developed pronounced francophile tendencies in the years leading up to 1916.59 When Germany formally opened hostilities in Europe on 9 March 1916, with Austria-Hungary following suit on 15 March, all German and Habsburg subjects living in Portugal automatically became enemy aliens. After an initial period of uncertainty, during which many Portugal-based Germans fled to Spain on the advice of German

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consular officials,60 the Lisbon government issued a decree on 20 April ordering the expulsion, within five days, of all remaining enemy alien women, children and men over forty-five years of age.61 Meanwhile, German (but not Austrian) men of military age were to be interned, along with wives and children who chose to stay with them. By May 1916, 637 Germans were being held at Peniche on the mainland. An additional 736, including some who were initially detained in Madeira, were shipped out to Angra do Heroismo, a fortress town on the island of Terceira in the Azores.62 A strange—and possibly coincidental parallel—developed between the Portuguese camps at Peniche and Angra do Heroismo, and the camps in mainland France and Corsica. As in the Corsican case (see Chap. 3), the camp at Angra do Heroismo was generally a more pleasant place to spend the war than the facility on mainland Portugal—with greater freedom of movement and greater scope for local employment. Following the French model from 1915, Portugal’s citizenship laws were also changed to make the overturning of naturalisation certificates for persons of enemy origin easier.63 Meanwhile, in Portuguese overseas colonies, camps were set up to hold all enemy aliens, irrespective of age and gender, as ordered under the decree of 20 April. In Portuguese India (Goa), some 136 Germans and 44 Habsburg subjects were held in camps at Panjim, Benaulim and Aguada.64 The Hamburg-America Line made efforts to send money via the Swiss consul in Bombay to those of its employees who were interned in either British or Portuguese India.65 Plans were drawn up—but not implemented until late 1919—to repatriate the internees held in Goa to Germany and Austria. The alternative, of allowing them to apply, or re-apply, for naturalisation, was considered but ruled out.66 Yet alongside, and entangled with, this largely republican-francophile way of proceeding with internment and claims to national citizenship, which also extended to the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores, and in a slightly different sense to the Portuguese mainland, there remained the problem of more urgent, and more threatened, imperial interests in Angola and Mozambique, which required a different approach, and one which the authorities in Lisbon were slow to grasp. Indeed, as Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses puts it, during the war, Portuguese soldiers and administrators in Africa often found that ‘metropolitan nationalist sentiment and aspirations obscured colonial realities’, not least the constant fear of black anti-colonial rebellion.67 Through the decree issued in Lisbon on 20 April 1916, all Germans in Mozambique, irrespective of age and

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gender, were to be interned, lest they make common cause with black African insurgents. Camps were set up in the then capital, Lourenço Marques, and in the port cities of Quelimane and Beira (both in the south), holding several hundred German civilians and a handful of military POWs between them—the majority at Lourenço Marques.68 Yet Portugal was still faced with the challenge of suppressing both indigenous revolts and repeated German military incursions into Mozambique in 1917–18, made worse by South African ambitions in the region and British resentments at Lisbon’s repeated failure to send enough reinforcements to capture and disarm the hostile German armies (largely made up of Askaris under the command of the Prussian general Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck) operating in this part of East Africa.69 Lack of resources—including lack of troops to guard them—meant that the German civilian internees held on the coast of Mozambique soon became a drain on supplies and a distraction from the main task of repressing black rebellion, not least as some fell ill with malaria and had to be nursed. Efforts were made to get financial aid to these stranded Germans and internees in Mozambique via the Sociedade Beneficente Alemã, a São Paulo-based, German-Brazilian relief organisation, but these came to a halt once Brazil had cut diplomatic relations with Berlin in April 1917.70 By the end of 1917, the Portuguese Governor General had persuaded Lisbon to allow the most sick and vulnerable civilian German prisoners to be shipped out on several boats heading for metropolitan Portugal. On arrival, they were held first at a sanatorium at Caldas da Rainha. Those whose health recovered were subsequently transferred to the nearby camp at Peniche, with 200 of them (including eight women and seven children) registered there on 10 May 1918.71 Meanwhile, in June 1919, according to Portuguese sources, 536 Germans were still being held at Lourenço Marques, 22 at Quelimane and 28 at Beira. Following the surrender of Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces to the Allies on 25 November 1918 and he and his staff’s ‘triumphant’ return to Berlin in March 1919, these (largely civilian) prisoners of the Portuguese were probably the last Germans present in all of East Africa, apart from a small colony left in Dar-es-Salaam.72 Portugal, with its complex entanglements with Britain, Germany and South Africa, was unique in many ways, but there are significant parallels with internment practices in other countries. France, as Mahon Murphy notes, was ‘second only to Britain in terms of the global reach of its empire’ and the geographical range of its European and extra-European network of camps.73 In 1914–15, civilian and military prisoners were transported

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from Morocco and Tunisia to Algeria, and from metropolitan France to various destinations in French North Africa (and back again in 1916).74 In Madagascar, prisoners were moved from Antsiranana (Diego-Suarez) in the far north to Tolagnaro (Fort-Dauphin) in the south east, where the climate was supposedly better.75 The most notorious French camp in mainland West Africa was in Dahomey, situated next to the former German colony of Togo, which, because of the alleged deployment of black troops as guards, and use of forced labour, ‘received more attention in the German press than any other camp in the extra-European world’, and was strongly condemned again by the Reichstag committee of investigation into the causes and consequences of war in the 1920s.76 The camp at Tahiti, the largest of the French Polynesian islands in the South Pacific, which held thirteen military and eighteen civilian prisoners in December 1915, all of them German except for one Austrian, had a much better reputation. Light work was required of the military prisoners only, and the inmates were allowed to use part of the grassy area surrounding their barracks for sports and other amusements.77 Little was known in Berlin about the fate of enemy alien internees in Greece after that country entered the war on the Allied side in June 1917—at least until a German war ship intercepted a boat travelling from the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea to the Greek mainland in early 1918. On board were found letters from prisoners held on the island, as well as a note from the captain of the police who complained that the island’s latest ‘guests’ were rapidly using up scarce food supplies. According to a secret report on this find, drawn up by German naval intelligence and sent to (among others) the Berlin-based Reichsstelle für das Auswanderungswesen in April 1918, Skyros was being used not only to house German and Austro-Hungarian ‘enemy aliens’ but also domestic political opponents of the pro-interventionist Venizelos government. The latter were allegedly treated far worse than the former. The report also noted, on the positive side, that the German and Austrian internees were allowed to roam freely around the island. Among them was the German classical philologist (and one-time director of the National Library of Greece in Athens) Professor Michael Deffner who was determined, with the apparent approval of the local authorities, not to allow the small matter of the current war to interfere with his all-important research projects: Under his leadership, the Greeks have conducted extensive archaeological excavations at a cemetery in Furka, and have uncovered the remains of a

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temple dating back to five hundred years before Christ, bearing the inscription ‘Theseus’. The team based there is delighted, and hopes that the [island] government will allow them to continue their work.78

The French state, or rather French military intelligence, was probably behind the Greek internment measures, using its command of the Allied military base in Salonika (under a succession of French generals belonging to the larger Armée d’Orient) and the power of its financial assistance to non-Royalist elements in Athens, as sanctioned by the Inter-Allied conference in Paris in 1917, to back the pro-interventionist Venizelists in the Greek army and government. In so doing, it likely ‘meddled in the [Greek] situation more than strict interpretation of international law would allow’.79 Certainly this was the finding of the Reichstag Commission of Inquiry in the relevant section of its 1927 report on wartime breaches of international law. Written by Johannes Kriege of the legal department of the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt, AA), the Commission’s sub-report on Greece concluded that ‘there are scarcely any rules governing neutrality that were not trampled underfoot by the Entente, and especially by France, in their dealings with this unfortunate land’: On some individual points negotiations were pursued with the Greek authorities, which usually ended with the latter giving way under duress. But equally facts were created on the ground without any prior discussion, in particular through the stationing of French landing troops in Athens and Piraeus, the sending out of patrols, and the enactment of arrests.80

Of all the Allied and Associated Powers, though, Britain was the only one that was both capable of, and willing to pursue, a policy of ‘global incarceration’, affecting Germans and Austrians in all corners of the world.81 As Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi have now demonstrated, internment decisions in British colonies and dominions were made in close consultation with, and often as a result of direct instructions from, officials in Whitehall.82 Australia, for instance, not only interned and subsequently expelled 4500 of its ‘own’ Germans, but also agreed to take in more than 2000 deported from British possessions in South East Asia, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Ceylon and Fiji.83 The Australian authorities also deported eight-five German men of military age from the Pacific colony of German New Guinea in March 1917 and interned them in Australia, a move which the AA claimed had violated the surrender agreement of November 1914, but

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which London saw as ‘imperative for military reasons’ because ‘the men were retaining arms contrary to the terms of the capitulation and were inciting the natives against British rule’.84 New Zealand, which took hold of the German-owned Samoan islands at the very beginning of the war, likewise expelled and interned around 60–70 of the roughly 250 white male German settlers and colonial administrators living there. Most of them were held at a disused mental hospital at Motuihi Island in Auckland harbour, and some at the much larger Somes Island camp in Wellington Bay.85 A number of Germans captured in East Africa in 1914–16 were shipped to India, Egypt and South Africa86; and most of the several hundred seized in the Middle East (Jaffa and Jerusalem) in late 1917, following the success of British forces against the Turkish forces in Palestine, were deported in 1918 to camps in Malta and Egypt.87 By February 1919, some 300 Germans were being held in Egypt, 2300  in South Africa, 1200  in India, 194  in Barbados, Bermuda and Trinidad, 2100  in Canada, 236  in New Zealand, 11  in Gibraltar and 1323  in Malta.88 Equivalent figures for Austro-Hungarians civilians interned in British dominions and colonies are less easy to find, but at least 117 were being held in Canada in July 1919, and a further one hundred or so in Malta, Egypt, Gibraltar and elsewhere.89 Many of these German and Habsburg subjects had not begun the war in the places where they were now interned, but had been transported from one part of the British empire (or British-occupied territory) to another. After 1918, London in particular made strenuous efforts to prevent their return to British or other Allied colonies, and to former German and Ottoman possessions now administered under League of Nations mandates.90

The German and Habsburg Empires’ Response The creation of global networks of camps for German and Austro-­ Hungarian subjects in Europe and across the non-European world caused the two Central Powers to respond in a number of ways. Neither empire had many ‘western’ enemy aliens under their control in August 1914, at least in comparison to their counterparts among the Allies. Germany, for instance, had a mere 15,000 British and French civilians living in its territories, and Austria-Hungary a few hundred at most.91 Both empires sought to portray their internment decisions, first against British, French and Russian enemy aliens in the early months of the war, and later against Portuguese, Brazilian, Greek, Central American and

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Siamese civilians, as being reactive, measured and proportionate, a line resolutely adopted by the legal department (Rechtsabteilung) of the AA in particular, and later upheld by the Reichstag Committee of Inquiry in the 1920s.92 On the one hand, when Japan decided to free German civilians detained after the capture of the Chinese concession of Qingdao in Shandong province in September 1914, the German government was quick to release the small number of Japanese civilians it had been holding following the Japanese declaration of war on 23 August.93 On the other hand, all British men of military age on 6 November, and their French counterparts on 16 December 1914, were rounded up by the German police and military authorities as a retaliatory measure for the continued detention and supposed poor treatment of Germans in Allied hands, with just over 4000 Britishers being sent to Ruhleben near Berlin and a roughly similar number of Frenchmen ending up at the more remote Holzminden camp in the Duchy of Brunswick.94 Austria-Hungary followed suit, for instance, by ordering enhanced measures against enemy aliens in early November 1914, although, unlike Germany, it stopped short of interning all British and French men. Instead, it preferred a less harsh restriction on freedom of movement known as ‘confinement’, except where those found to be destitute or considered a threat to military security were concerned.95 Nationality was a clear criterion for classification as an enemy alien in Germany and the Habsburg Dual Monarchy in a formal sense, but in fact being an enemy alien did not necessarily lead to internment, even after the heightened retaliatory measures of late 1914. Caution and pragmatism were particularly evident in Austria (Cisleithania), where, for example, regional authorities were advised in November 1914 to ensure ‘that the internment measures do not damage the interests of our native industry and economy, or affect British subjects who are more or less to be regarded as pro-Austrian as a result of long-term residency in the Monarchy or close family ties with subjects of the Monarchy’.96 In Hungary (Transleithania), meanwhile, anti-alien measures were even slower to get off the ground, and a mere 26 British men (out of 565 residents) and 51 Frenchmen (out of 509) were interned even as late as September 1915.97 German internment measures were at first applied in a more blanket manner, but here too, especially from 1916 as the Allied economic blockade continued and labour and food shortages began to bite, a sense that ‘retaliatory’ action had so far failed to help Germans interned abroad, and had left the home front with the economic expense of keeping Allied enemy aliens in camps for a long period, began to set in. In September

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1916, for instance, the chief of deputy general staff ordered the internment of all Portuguese men of military age in Germany, using Portuguese measures against German nationals in Europe, Africa and India as justification, but adding, in advice to the acting commanding generals on the home front, that this measure should only be undertaken ‘so long as no damage to German interests is to be expected as a result’. Furthermore, special consideration should be given to individuals whose internment ‘would harm the German economy… provided such individuals do not also represent an espionage risk’.98 In October 1916, reacting to Italy’s and Romania’s declaration of war on Germany a few weeks earlier, the deputy general staff was even more cautious, advising the acting commanding generals to leave Italians and Romanians at liberty as far as possible, and above all not to intern those who ‘are currently engaged in war work of any kind and have shown themselves willing to continue in that work’.99 The Habsburgs, who were already at war with Italy from May 1915, were inclined to treat Italian nationals more harshly through a policy of expulsion and internment, often in very brutal conditions.100 However, in September 1916, they too decided on a relatively ‘mild’ treatment of Romanian nationals, particularly those who could support themselves financially and were ‘harmless from a political point of view’ [politisch unbedenklich]. Even when they moved to a harsher policy in February 1917, ordering the internment of all Romanian males aged seventeen and over at the internment camp at Katzenau near Linz ‘as an act of retaliation for the terrible treatment of our citizens in Romania’, exceptions were still to be made for those ‘whom we cannot afford to dispense with as part of the workforce in our factories’.101 Considerations of this kind, it should be noted, had no discernible impact on British and French internment policies, given that they had access to a much more abundant supply of cheap labour which they could transport to Europe from their own colonies and from China. Finally, Germany and Austria-Hungary were also at a geographical and strategic disadvantage in the sense that they could not, in contrast to Britain and France, instigate global networks of camps or use internment as a means of consolidating overseas empires and maritime trade and supply routes at their enemies’ expense. Instead, their internment measures against enemy aliens were almost entirely restricted to continental Europe (including occupied territories there, a factor that will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 3), where their management of captivity had to be undertaken in the context of ever-tightening blockade and shortages. One

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partial and temporary exception to this was the decision by the colonial authorities in German East Africa to establish two camps at Kilimatinde and Tabora for Allied civilian and military prisoners in October 1914, followed by a further camp at Kiboriani in January 1915. The inmates are known to have included British and Belgian residents caught on German colonial territory when the war began, and Indian soldiers fighting overseas for the British empire, although information on all of these camps, including numbers held there, is thin and almost non-existent.102 Only in September 1917 did the British government publish a collection of eye-­ witness accounts, written mainly by British missionaries-turned-internees and containing vivid depictions of alleged German brutality.103 A Reverend E.F. Spanton, the principal of St. Andrew’s College, Zanzibar, who was interned from October 1914, first in Kilmatinde, then from January 1915 at Kiboriani and finally, from May 1915 at Tabora, was particularly keen to outline the German abuse of black African natives: The porters engaged in transport work were consistently treated with the greatest brutality. When a man fell exhausted under the weight of his load, he was flogged until he staggered to his feet and stumbled on again. Those who were too weak to do this were shot as they lay. For example, one of the German officers with his column retreating from Ruanda [Rwanda] country before the advancing Belgians, wrote in a private letter: ‘Our road is paved with the corpses of natives who we have been obliged to kill.104

Others, including Herbert Willouby Woodward, Archdeacon of the Diocese of Zanzibar and East Africa, seemed more outraged that the German military authorities had supposedly forced white Britishers to perform physical tasks in front of blacks: During my internment at Tabora, between the beginning of April 1915 to the middle of May 1915, and again from February 1916 to May 1916, every day I saw service men and civilians… of the mission, compelled to drag a lorry containing empty drums from the camp to a well in the vicinity of natives, and there draw and fill such drums with water and drag the lorry back to the camp. There were many native prisoners there, including our own mission men, who could have done this… for a white man to be forced to perform such labours is most degrading in the eyes of natives.105

The liberation of the Allied prisoners in German East Africa in May 1916 following the arrival of occupying British and Belgian troops brought

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with it the end of the only camps run by the Central Powers outside Europe (or in the case of Ottoman Turkey, outside the Middle East). However, this does not mean that Germany and Austria-Hungary interned only European British and Frenchmen. Rather, they were obliged to intern black and Asian civilians of Allied nationality in their prison camps, as well as white prisoners from British dominions such as Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. At least one hundred black British seamen were sent from Hamburg (where they had been held on board their ships since the start of the war) to Ruhleben in December 1914.106 Among them were Sierra Leonean and Liberian sailors and firemen from West Africa, as well as members of the Yemeni seafaring community in South Shields, north-­east England.107 More than 860 Indian seamen could be found in various German prison camps, including some 300 at Havelberg in Prussia’s Brandenburg province (today in the Stendal district of Saxony-Anhalt).108 What these and other examples tell us is that we should not consider civilian internment camp populations as being uniformly white. Still less should we consider the non-white camp population in Europe as an undifferentiated whole. For instance, at Ruhleben, while the majority of black prisoners seem to have been merchant seamen, there were others, including former circus workers and a famous Jamaican actor, Sylvester Leon, who had been working in the German capital before the outbreak of the war.109 At the military prison in the Habsburg-administered castle at Laibach (today the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana), several British seamen, nearly all from India, and two French nationals, one a businessman and one a dentist, were being held from September 1914. Twenty-nine of the British-Indian mariners were Muslims who had been employed as stokers on the S.S. Spuma, a ship owned by the Trieste-based company Navagazione Libera, part of the Austrian Lloyd group. They were hired in Calcutta and were arrested in Novigrad, Dalmatia, on 8 September, before they had even reached Trieste.110 A further eight were Hindus from Bombay, part of the crew of the S.S. Gablonz, which had been making a return voyage from Bombay to Trieste; they were dismissed from the service of Austrian Lloyd when their shipped had docked further down the Dalmatian coast, at Sebenico (today Šibenik in Croatia), on 30 September, and were subsequently arrested in Trieste on 2 October.111 In addition, three sailors from Malta and one from Zanzibar were also taken from Trieste to Laibach, bringing the total to forty-one by late November.112

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Reactions from the German and Habsburg authorities, and wider public, were mixed. Racial hostility and fascination with, or exoticisation of, inmates from non-European backgrounds, were present in equal measure. More to the point, the First World War internment experience is an illustration of the Nigerian author Helon Habila’s observation, in his novel Travellers, that ‘a black person’s relationship with Europe would always need qualification’. Irrespective of whether they had been resident in or travelling through Europe before 1914, or held the nationality of a European country, they ‘couldn’t simply be native European, there had to be an origin explanation’.113 In Germany, photographs of black prisoners, including those at Ruhleben, frequently appeared in German newspapers and other publications as a means of arousing readers’ interest in the ‘exotic’ nature and ‘primitive savagery’ of the ‘enemy’.114 In Trieste, the local newspapers were full of reports about the supposed inability of the sailors from Calcutta to adjust to the cold weather in in-land Europe.115 When the US consul in Trieste, Ralph C. Busser, motored to Laibach/ Ljubljana to visit the prisoners on a Saturday in early November—in fulfilment of his duties as official representative of British interests—this too was widely remarked upon in the regional press, as was the fact that he was accompanied by his wife. The Consul took with him a quantity of winter garments, etc. contributed by charitable British, French and native residents of Trieste. Also the Societa di Navagazione Libera of Trieste gave pecuniary aid to the British Indian prisoners who were formerly employed on their ships.116

Both the German and Habsburg authorities were keen to stress the lengths they went to in order to accommodate the religious practices and dietary needs of non-European detainees—whether Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs or others.117 In an effort to underline its support for the Turkish Sultan’s ‘holy war’ against the Allied powers, Imperial Germany even opened up a special propaganda camp for Muslim civilian and military prisoners at Wünsdorf near Zossen in Prussia’s Brandenburg province.118 However, they also actively discouraged their own subjects from offering gifts to ‘colonial’ prisoners, particularly where this might be perceived as coming at the expense of donations to patriotic charities.119 This was combined with accusations that the presence of ‘coloured troops’ from Africa and Asia among the French and British forces on the western front, and the atrocities they supposedly committed against German soldiers,

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were violations of ‘civilised’ norms and of the solidarity of the white race.120 In Prussia, the acting commander of the third army corps may have had Indian sailors, among others, on his mind when he complained in July 1916 that Havelberg camp, which was situated within his army corps district in Brandenburg province, contained ‘an extremely diverse range of elements…including criminals and non-criminals, suspect and harmless persons, educated and uneducated people, our own nationals and foreigners of all nationalities’. His communiqué ended with an appeal to the acting commanders of other army corps districts to end the practice of sending enemy civilian prisoners there ‘indiscriminately and without warning’.121 The Prussian Ministry of War’s major brochure on POWs, published in several different languages in 1915, featured pictures of Allied prisoners of various non-white races under headings such as ‘champions of liberty and civilisation’ or ‘the brothers-in-arms of our adversaries’ in a further attempt to counter Allied propaganda about German ‘barbarians’.122 Racial prejudice also existed among the white British prisoners being held in civilian camps in Germany, some of whom resented being housed alongside blacks and saw it as a deliberate attempt by their captors to demoralise them by showing that ‘anything was good enough for Englishmen’.123 This in turn indicated that for some at least, the supposed ‘Britishness’ of Ruhleben, and indeed the very notion of Britishness, was not so much about nationality but about the maintenance of racial hierarchies and the orderly separation of whites from blacks. One white internee, G.A. Packe, recorded in his diary on 16 November 1915: Very nearly had a scrap with a party of niggers, on behalf of Lambert, with whom one of their crowd had had trouble in the convalescent barrack. Another item to a/c, for mixing blacks with us Europeans here. To make matters worse the Authorities have deliberately spoilt them all along, out of spite to us, and there will probably be a row before the end.124

Black and Asian prisoners in internment camps, particularly those with little or no means and/or those who had married European women, typically struggled to gain access to the same levels of recognition and support from their home governments as their white counterparts. David Russell, a black British sailor from Jamaica who had resided in Europe on a British passport since 1902, first in Vienna where he worked in various ‘travelling shows’ and then from 1905 in Leipzig, where he married a local German

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woman, was interned in Ruhleben in November 1914. His wife and their four mixed-race children travelled to Hull in January 1915, where they arrived penniless and were separated and placed in a succession of local workhouses. Russell himself fell ill while at Ruhleben, suffering from frost-­ bite to his feet and a severe mental health condition, and was himself sent to Britain—a country he had never been to before—in November 1916. On one occasion in 1917, he walked from Hull to London in search of employment, but his physical and psychological injuries meant that he could not work for anything other than short periods of time. Even so, a request by the poor law guardians for money to send him and his family back to Jamaica was vetoed by the British Governor there, on the grounds that they would be a financial burden. Russell could only go home if he left his family in Britain. An official at the Colonial Office put it thus: ‘I have no sympathy with European women, even Germans, who marry black men and I would not stir a finger to help her. The local workhouse can look after her and the children’.125 To take another example, in Habsburg-ruled Trieste in 1914, US consul Busser was concerned that the British government was not sending enough support to the Indian prisoners at Laibach/Ljubljana, and that his own embassy in Vienna was also slow to take an interest in their welfare.126 His visit to Laibach on 7 November may have been calculated to add additional pressure, although it probably also caused consternation in the War Ministry in Vienna. At any rate, in early December 1914, Busser was informed by the Austrian authorities in Trieste that twenty-eight of the British-subject Indian prisoners from Calcutta, all of them Muslims, had been handed over to Turkish representatives in Budapest. Whether this was at their own choosing, or under duress, and whether they were offered safe passage home, or were recruited by the Ottomans for their ‘holy war’ against the British empire, is not clear from the documents.127 Certainly, it made things easier for American diplomats in Vienna to no longer have these prisoners under their official protection. Indeed, the secretary to the US ambassador, A.  Grant-Smith, had already written to Busser in September 1914 to explain that while the United States was ‘permitted by mutual request and consent to exercise our unofficial good offices on behalf of enemy nationals…the Embassy feels that any representations of an energetic character should be reserved for our own nationals’.128 Among the Russian-subject civilians stranded in Germany and Austria-­Hungary in August 1914 were also people from many different ethnic, religious and national backgrounds. The exact numbers involved

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are difficult to determine, not least as mutual exchanges (or ‘evacuations’) of ‘harmless’ enemy civilians between Russia and the Central Powers were already taking place in October and November 1914,129 and because the Danish Red Cross in Copenhagen, rather than the ICRC, acted as a clearing house for international correspondence and agreements concerning military and civilian prisoners captured on the eastern front.130 Not all stranded Russians and deserters wanted to go home, of course, particularly those men of military age who had no desire to fight in the Tsar’s armies. In Habsburg Austria, the Markl camp in the Waidhofen an der Thaya district of Lower Austria was set up in 1915 to house 1400 Russian-­origin orthodox Jewish internees, who, it was decided by the district commissioner, should be separated from the roughly 3000 or so non-Jewish Russians held elsewhere in Waidhofen, largely for dietary reasons.131 In general, the Habsburg authorities believed that East European Jews were more likely to side with the Central Powers than with Tsarist Russia (or with Romania after August 1916), and were confirmed in this view through regular censorship reports drawn up by military intelligence. Where hostility did exist, it usually was directed towards the much larger numbers of Habsburgsubject Jews who had fled into the Austrian and Hungarian interiors to escape the heavy fighting and temporary Russian occupation of eastern Galicia and Bukovina in 1914–15.132 From November 1914, around 100 to 200 stateless Russian Jews living in Germany were held in Ruhleben where they were exposed to both anti-­ British and anti-Semitic prejudice. The deputy Prussian War Minister, General von Wandel, referred to them disparagingly as ‘international Jews of British nationality’ [internationale Juden englischer Staatszugehörigkeit] in an address to the Reichstag on 7 April 1916, although some Zionist sympathisers in Germany, particularly the Independent Social Democrat (USPD) Reichstag deputy Oskar Cohn, took up their cause politically and sought improvements in their treatment.133 The reverse side of this was that in the period 1914–16 naturalisation was offered to several categories of British, Russian and Russian-Jewish alien residents of German origin— on the grounds that they were ‘pro-German’ and their release would serve the German war effort.134 What rankled the German military authorities on the home front more than persons of enemy nationality were persons of mixed or no nationality who refused to have themselves naturalised as German—particularly stateless Jews of Russian of Russian-Polish origin who were resident in Germany when the war began and committed the

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ultimate sin of being ‘nationally indifferent’, seeming not to care if they were interned alongside the British at Ruhleben.135 Russian nationals of Baltic German origin also sparked a great deal of interest, albeit for different reasons. In February 1916, the Prussian War Ministry advised the acting commanding generals on the home front that they were now permitted to ‘lift police registration requirements and internment orders for these people, provided that a thorough investigation of their individual circumstances makes this seem appropriate, and provided that upstanding German persons can vouch for their reliability’. In cases that were difficult to determine, Professor Schliemann, chairman of the Baltic German advisory committee (Vertrauensrat), was recommended as a trustworthy source who could provide information ‘on every Baltic German in Germany in respect to their disposition and [material] circumstances’.136 Otherwise, the German military authorities were quick to reassure the AA in Berlin (and through them, neutral officials from the Spanish embassy) that Russian nationals held in internment camps such as Havelberg and Holzminden in 1915–16 had merely been ‘evacuated’ from the fighting zones in Poland and Lithuania for their own safety, in other words, to remove them from the range of artillery fire while battles continued.137 As the Unterkunftsdepartement (POW department) of the Prussian War Ministry put it in a reply to the editors of the Protestant journal Die Eiche in February 1916, the persons concerned were not in fact ‘prisoners of war’ but ‘Schutzgefangene’.138 This designation was almost certainly to their disadvantage because—although not spelled out in the letter—it was likely to mean that they would not be included on the Red Cross lists sent to Geneva or Copenhagen, and that they would  ­ therefore not have access to correspondence or parcels from home.139 In September 1916, the War Ministry also told the German Foreign Office: The repatriation of interned civilians from the occupied parts of Russia has been going on for quite some time now, with the cooperation of relevant military commanders on the ground… it is open as an option to all persons who wish to return home and who are considered harmless [unverdächtig].140

How many Russian-subject civilians were forcibly ‘evacuated’ into Germany in the wake of the Central Powers’ military advances on the eastern front from May 1915, and how many were able to return in

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1915–16, is not possible to determine from German or ICRC records, in contrast to the number of French and Belgian deportees, which will be discussed in Chap. 3.

Ottoman Turkey, Bulgaria and the Balkans To what extent were the two other Central Powers, the Ottoman empire and Bulgaria, affected by, and actively involved in, the international politics of civilian internment after they entered the war in November 1914 and October 1915, respectively? Often this region is treated separately in the historiography on internment, in other words as belonging to ‘the rest’ rather than ‘the west’. The US jurist James W. Garner, for instance, did not even consider the Balkans and Ottoman Turkey in his seminal essay on the treatment of enemy aliens during the war, published in January 1918.141 By implication, they did not belong to that part of the ‘civilised’ world that respected international law in any manner or form, a viewpoint strengthened by western ‘knowledge’ of atrocities committed on all sides during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and the association of internment in Ottoman Turkey with the 1915–16 genocide against the Armenians. The unique case of the Armenian genocide will be examined in more detail in Chap. 3. In the meantime, this section sets out to challenge the narrative that internment in Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans was wholly unrelated to processes and events going on in the wider world; rather it will show that it was part of a broader global picture, connected in particular to the growing ‘totalisation’ of war after 1914 and to the development of new practices around reprisals and reciprocity.142 Admittedly, it cannot be claimed that Ottoman subjects and Bulgarians were targeted for internment by Allied countries on quite the same scale or with quite the same level of ferocity as Germans and Austro-Hungarians. Rather, the figures suggest a smaller base and a greater degree of selectivity, albeit with arrests carried out on the same worldwide basis and against the same background of European and global inter-connectivity. In metropolitan France, for instance, Bulgarians were given a fairly generous (more than the standard twenty-four hour) window of opportunity to leave the country following their country’s declaration of war, and even after that, most ‘francophile’ Bulgarians were allowed to live at liberty, with only those considered a danger to national security being earmarked for internment. At the beginning of the year 1917 this amounted to no more than forty-two persons.143 Similarly Britain allowed Bulgarians a

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period of grace to leave British territory in October 1915 and after that only ordered the arrest of ‘suspect’ or destitute persons. A mere 22 Bulgarians were being held at the Knockaloe camp on the Isle of Man in November 1917, compared to 15,773 Germans and 2450 Habsburg subjects.144 In both instances, Bulgaria reciprocated by allowing the voluntary departure of British and French nationals from its territory.145 In New Brunswick, Canada, twelve Bulgarians were reportedly sent to the detention camps at Amherst and Halifax, both in Nova Scotia, in early 1916, but seventy-four were allowed to remain where they were, albeit under parole conditions, and a further eleven had been allowed to leave Canadian territory.146 In Malta, some 27 Bulgarians were among the 1906 prisoners being held at the camp at Fort Verdala, above the capital Valetta, in April 1918, according to a Danish diplomatic report, although some of them may have been military POWs.147 Canada and Malta aside, there is little evidence of any Bulgarians being held in British or French overseas territories, or of any moves towards whole expulsion or expropriation. Another reason for this may have been the administrative difficulty in establishing the exact legal status of persons who were born before 1912/13 in what one British Foreign Office mandarin described, in a letter to the Colonial Office in April 1915, as ‘that district of Turkey in Europe formerly loosely referred to as Macedonia’ and ‘now divided up between Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria’.148 Ottoman subjects in France and Britain did not fare quite so well, although here too there were attempts to distinguish between pro-Allied and ‘hostile’ national and religious groups, with Armenians, Syrian Christians and Ottoman Greeks in both countries being categorised as ‘friendly’ aliens and as victims of Turkish persecution and massacres. In Britain, a special Order in Council, known as the Aliens Restriction (Armenians, &c.) Order of 7 January 1915, stipulated that: A registration officer may, subject to the general or special instructions of the Secretary of State, grant to a Turkish subject resident in his registration district, who is shown to his satisfaction to be by race a Greek, Armenian or Syrian, or a member of any other community well known as opposed to the Turkish regime, and to be a Christian, a certificate of exemption from all or any of the provisions of this Part of this Order, except such as apply to alien friends.149

Similar measures were introduced in France, where, on 1 February 1917, a mere 324 Ottoman subjects were interned out of an estimated pre-war

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population of 8000.150 Most of them were in camps on the French mainland but a handful were also held in Algeria.151 A plan by the French Ministry of Interior in late 1915 to organise the expulsion of others who ‘merely claim to have francophile sentiments without being able to prove this with any sincerity’ does not seem to have been carried out.152 Both the established and recently arrived refugee Armenian Christian community in France was treated as patriotic and pro-French, with numbers growing from 4000 in 1914 to 30,000 by 1925.153 Ottoman Jews also seemed to have commanded more consistently generous treatment as ‘friendly’ aliens in France than in the UK.154 According to the War Office in London, 94 Ottoman subjects were interned in Britain and 114 in Malta as of June 1915.155 At the same time, the Home Office reported that 493 registered Ottoman subjects were still living at liberty in the UK, 460 in England and Wales, 29 in Scotland and 4  in Ireland.156 Across the empire, and in accordance with the above-­ mentioned Aliens Restriction (Armenians, etc.) Order, most Turks were not interned. As the War Office put it, ‘they are dealt with generally on the same lines as other alien enemies, but greater latitude is allowed in deciding on individual cases than in the case of Germans and Austrians’.157 Even so, British Foreign Office records for 1914/15 provide evidence of small numbers of Turkish civilians being held captive in South Africa, India, Hong Kong, Canada and New Zealand.158 The ICRC in Geneva was also aware of some Turks interned in British East Africa via lists it received from the British Red Cross.159 The Turkish government in turn imprisoned some British, French and Russian citizens resident on Ottoman territory at the start of the war, and arrested others as the conflict continued, without ordering wholesale internment. When Allied officials detained by the Turks at the start of the war were not released and sent home by a deadline set in 1915, retaliatory measures were ordered on the French side, including the internment in January 1916 of Turkish diplomat Salih-Bey who had previously been allowed to reside under restrictions in Paris in order to take care of the archives of his country’s embassy.160 In 1917, selected British and French civilians were expelled from Smyrna (Izmir) into the Anatolian interior in retaliation for Allied naval attacks on the Turkish western coast and on Rhodes Island, although what it is most striking about this measure is that it had not happened at an earlier point in the war.161 In fact, the worst moment for British and French civilians in Smyrna had come in the winter of 1914/15, when many were sacked from their maritime jobs following

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the outbreak of hostilities between Turkey and the Allies, and the port was closed to international traffic. At one point, the US consul in Smyrna was trying to feed 1000 stranded Britons and a further 400 Cypriots on five pounds a day, an amount he described as totally inadequate in a letter to the British Minister in Athens.162 Athens itself had also become the favoured (or perhaps the only possible) destination for significant numbers of British and Maltese traders who had fled Constantinople in the early weeks of the war, but again many could not find employment or a ticket home, and fell into destitution.163 Compared to this, (some forms of) internment may actually have been a better option, and even a quicker route back to ‘normality’, not least as an agreement was eventually signed between Britain and Turkey at Bern in December 1917 allowing, among other things, for a mutual exchange of enemy civilian prisoners.164 If Turkey’s involvement in the wartime incarceration of ‘enemy aliens’ appears to have been conducted within a slightly broader geographical framework than Bulgaria’s, it would nonetheless be wrong to assume that the latter did not attract some European and worldwide, as well as local reactions, in relation to its treatment of civilian enemy subjects. The main issue was Bulgaria’s deportation of enemy civilians from that part of Serbia that it came to occupy from the end of 1915. The deportations took place in a number of waves, beginning in early 1916 and peaking in the spring of 1917. In late 1916, Bulgaria was also able to deport smaller numbers of Romanians captured in border areas, following the latter’s entry into the war. This brought with it a great deal of condemnation from the ICRC, which repeatedly criticised Bulgaria’s failure to provide accurate lists of, and, more importantly, access to the prisoners, and also the havoc caused to the local economy by the deportations of young men: ‘We must draw attention to the devastation and hunger present in certain parts of Serbia where the population is no longer able to find the means to feed itself’.165 Already in July 1916, the Geneva-based Serb Red Cross society complained to the ICRC that one of its representatives, Nikola Iovanovitsch, had been seized by the Bulgarian army in occupied Nish (Niš) and deported to a camp in Vrace (Vratsa) in north-western Bulgaria.166 An apparently pro-Allied Bulgarian informant in Switzerland, having just returned from a trip to his home country in late November of the following year, told the British minister in Bern, Horace Rumbold, that while the British, French and Russian prisoners held there were ‘extremely well treated’, the Serb and Romanian deportees were subject to terrible abuses, ‘especially those in the concentration camps around Bourgas [Burgas].

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Malaria is rife in the district, and the prisoners are starting to die off like flies’.167 The Serb legation in London alleged in July 1918 that over 21,000 Serb civilians were currently being held in camps in Bulgaria, and that a further 10,679 had already perished in Bulgarian captivity.168 This came close to the figure of 30,000 to 50,000 suggested by Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the London-based Serbian Relief Fund, in a letter to the British Foreign Office in December 1916.169 Some of the criticism coming from the Allied and Swiss side was admittedly refracted through the lens of stereotypes about ‘Balkan savagery’ stemming from long-standing western perceptions of that region and its supposed ‘Asiatic Byzantinism’.170 The memoirs of the Swiss doctor Adolf Lukas Vischer concerning his experiences during the first Balkan war of October to December 1912 would be a case in point. When he announced his intention to travel with a group of Red Cross volunteers to Serb-­ occupied Macedonia to help treat wounded soldiers and civilians on both sides, he was met by concerned colleagues’ fears that he and his companions might not realise what they were letting themselves in for: More than a few of them imagined us lying dead in some fallow field with our noses and ears cut off or with our bodies mutilated in some other way. There was no question of anybody respecting the Geneva Convention in a Balkan war, so they told us. Here it was not regular armies, but hordes of wild fighters [Horden wilder Krieger] who stood ready to do battle.171

As Daniel Gorman also notes, ‘[West] European hegemony in the international system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was based on a proclaimed standard of civilization’. Alongside Turkey, the new nations on the south-eastern periphery of Europe were held not to meet this standard.172 It was left first to Vischer in 1913, and then to the radical American journalist John Reed, in a critical travelogue published in 1916, to assert that the violence against civilians and captured prisoners committed on all sides during the first and second Balkan wars was the responsibility not just of the states involved, but of the entire international community. For Reed, it was linked to the spread of western imperial ideas and administrative practices, including the application of rigid, non-­ Byzantine notions of national ‘loyalty’ in the post-Ottoman Balkans, and was by no means just a Turkish or Albanian or Bulgarian speciality. In particular, he noted that before 1915, the Greeks and Serbs had been ‘quietly working to Grecianize and Serbanize [the] new territories’ in

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Macedonia that they had acquired from Turkey and Bulgaria, with western blessing, in 1912–13, and that they had been doing this by means of forcing non-Greeks and non-Serbs to ‘renounce their nationality’ on pain of ‘death or flight’.173 Publicly, the other Central Powers defended Bulgaria, both in and after 1915, and made reference to Serb ‘terrorists’ operating in the occupied zones. As Vischer already noted in 1913, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians had invested a lot of capital in the Berlin-­ Baghdad railway project, begun a decade earlier, in 1903, and saw Serb military expansion as the chief threat to their economic interests in the region.174 Yet in private even the Habsburg ambassador in Sofia, Count Adam Tarnowski von Tarnów, occasionally expressed his exasperation at what he called—following an unsatisfactory conversation in 1916 with Bulgarian Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov—the ‘system of extermination and robbery’ [Ausrottungs- und Raubsytem] that was now being practised by the Bulgarian military in Serbia.175 When defeat and surrender came in September 1918, the Bulgarian government finally revealed to the ICRC that it was holding 14,831 Serb and Romanian civilians.176 Apart from the extremely poor conditions of the camps in Bulgaria, and the possibility that large numbers had died in 1917–18, another reason why this information may have been withheld almost until the end of the war was the campaign that the Bulgarian Red Cross had been waging since 1916 on behalf of ethnic Bulgarians from the disputed Dobruja region who had been forcibly removed from their homes by the Romanians and sent to camps in non-occupied Romania. Officially, the exiled Romanian government in the city of Iaşi admitted to holding 1000 Bulgarian nationals alongside 5000 German and Habsburg subjects, according to lists delivered to the ICRC at the end of 1916, but the Bulgarian Red Cross claimed that an additional 14,000 Romanian-­ subject Bulgarians were missing from the lists.177 Research by the Romanian scholar Andrei Şiperco indicates that between 15,000 and 20,000 ethnic Bulgarians and Turks were indeed interned in Romania. Most of them were Bulgarians, so that the figure of 14,000 was pretty accurate and possibly even a slight under-estimation.178 Yet over and above this, the disputed ‘facts’ about internment conditions in both Romania and Bulgaria indicate that these two countries were bound up in a set of local, regional and global internment practices and associated expulsions, deportations and de-nationalisations, with implications for the largely negative way in which the Balkans were seen more generally in international, and especially western, circles.

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More generally, this chapter has shown that one of the insights to be gained from moving away from a nation-state oriented to a global view of First World War internment is that the western understanding of nationality—although a crucial pillar of the international system at this time—was not a stable instrument whose uncontested meaning belligerent and neutral states and international bodies could automatically take for granted in all given circumstances. Rather, its hidden and not so hidden entanglements with other ‘culturally constructed…systems of difference’,179 in particular race and gender, make it at best an unreliable guide to the unequal relations of power embedded in and between different internment systems, and at worst an active agent in the reproduction of those inequalities—unless, of course, the entanglements became part of the object of historical study in their own right. A similar methodological point might also be made in respect to the theme tackled in the next chapter, namely the relationship between internment and ‘war governance’ in the different belligerent states. Like the parallel nexus between nationality and internment, this relationship might be treated in a comparative manner, for instance, by examining its different manifestations at local, regional, national or imperial levels across the globe. However, it is best approached— to borrow the words of Patricia Clavin—as something that both contributed to, and was shaped by, ‘the entire world and the rich variety of connections and ruptures within it’.180 The one qualification is that in this instance, there was a strong lead coming from the (western) European imperial powers which, as we shall see, provided the key concepts and mechanisms behind the whole notion of ‘war governance’ and then imposed them on large parts of the non-European world—with a greater and more rapid degree of global success than they had had in any previous colonial wars.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Bade, Europa in Bewegung, pp. 246–54; Gosewinkel, Schutz und Freiheit?, pp. 124–7. 2. Cf. Douki and Minard, ‘Histoire globale, histoires connectées’. 3. See, for instance, Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 76–90; Procacci, Warfare-Welfare, p. 106. 4. Matthew Stibbe, ‘Krieg und Brutalisierung: Die Internierung von Zivilisten bzw. “politisch Unzuverlässigen” in Österreich-Ungarn während des Ersten Weltkriegs’, in Alfred Eisfeld, Guido Hausmann and

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Dietmar Neutatz (eds.), Besetzt, interniert, deportiert: Der Erste Weltkrieg und die deutsche, jüdische, polnische und ukrainische Zivilbevölkerung im östlichen Europa (Essen, 2013), pp. 87–106. 5. Simon Dixon, ‘Allegiance and Betrayal: British Residents in Russia during the Crimean War’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 94.3 (2016), pp. 431–67. See also Fahrmeir, Citizenship, p. 85. 6. Stibbe, ‘Krieg und Brutalisierung’; Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA, 2003). 7. Fahrmeir, Citizenship, pp. 120–1. 8. Jan Rüger, Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea (Oxford, 2017), pp. 94 and 147–50. 9. Frederick C.  Luebke, Germans in Brazil: A Comparative History of Cultural Conflict during World War I (Baton Rouge, LA and London, 1987), pp. 1, 66 and 174. 10. Matthew Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Civilians by Belligerent States During the First World War and the Response of the International Committee of the Red Cross’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41.1 (2006), pp. 5–19 (here p. 10). 11. See Chap. 5. 12. Peter Gatrell, ‘Refugees and Forced Migrants during the First World War’, Immigrants and Minorities, 26.1–2 (2008), pp. 82–110 (here esp. pp. 94–101). See also Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford, 2013), pp. 41–8. 13. Gosewinkel, Schutz und Freiheit?, pp. 128–9. 14. Daniela L. Caglioti, ‘Enemy Aliens and Colonial Subjects: Confinement and Internment in Italy, 1911–19’, in Stefan Manz, Panikos Panayi and Matthew Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War: A Mass Global Phenomenon (London and New  York, 2019), pp.  125–44 (here p. 126). 15. See also Glenda Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination: A Gendered Re-Reading of the “Apogee of Nationalism”’, Nations and Nationalism, 6.4 (2000), pp. 495–521. 16. Fahrmeir, Citizenship, p. 120. 17. See, for instance, Gertrud Bäumer (Nationaler Frauendienst) to the Reich Office of Interior, 27 November 1914, in Bundesarchiv Berlin-­ Lichterfelde (henceforth BArch), R 1501/112364, Bl. 157. Similar concerns were raised by some American women’s political organisations after the passing of the Expatriation Act of 1907—see Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley CA, and London, 1998), pp. 4–5 and 47.

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18. For further details, see Matthew Stibbe, ‘The German Empire’s Response: From Retaliation to the Painful Realities of Defeat’, in Panayi (ed.), Germans as Minorities, pp. 47–68. Also Chap. 6. 19. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, p. 60. See also Relazioni della reale commissione d’inchiesta sulle violazioni del diritto delle genti commesse dal nemico, Vol. 3: Trattamento dei prigionieri di Guerra e degli internati civili (Rome, 1920). 20. Vladimir Ćorović, Crna Knjiga: Patnje srba Bosne i Hercegovine za vreme Svetskog Rata 1914–1918 (Belgrade and Sarajevo, 1920) [Black Book: The Suffering of the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Great War, 1914–1918]; Talergofs’kyj al’manach: Propamjatnaja knyga avstryjs’kych žestokostej, yzuvirstv y nasylij nad karpato-russ’kym narodom vo vremja vsemyrnoj vojny 1914–1917  gg., 4 Vols. (Lvov, 1924–32) [Thalerhof Almanach: Book of remembrance to the Austrian atrocities and acts of violence against the Carpatho-Ruthenian people during the World War, 1914–1917]. 21. Petra Svoljšak, ‘The Sacrificed Slovenian Memory of the Great War’, in Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman (eds.), Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War (New York and Oxford, 2016), pp. 216– 32 (here p. 226). 22. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 11–12. 23. Ibid., p.  129; Panikos Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War (Providence, RI and Oxford, 1991), p.  87; Stibbe, ‘Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees’, p.  73. The ICRC reported knowledge of 47,600 civilian prisoners in Britain and its colonies by the end of the war, and described the British lists as ‘très complètes’, but was not so flattering about the French lists and declined to give even an estimate of numbers there. See CICR, Rapport général du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge sur son activité de 1912 à 1920 (Geneva, 1921), p. 137. A British source gives 20,050 German civilians interned in Britain and 9850 ‘elsewhere in H.M. Dominions’ as of June 1918—see Foreign Office to H.H. Richardson MP, 14 June 1918, in The National Archives, Kew, London (henceforth TNA), FO 383/416. 24. Panayi, Prisoners of Britain. On Stobs in particular, see Stefan Manz, ‘“Enemy Aliens” in Scotland in a Global Context, 1914–1919: Germanophobia, Internment, Forgetting’, in Hannah Ewence and Tim Grady (eds.), Minorities and the First World War: From War to Peace (London, 2017), pp. 117–42; and on Lofthouse Park, see Sternberg and Stowe (eds.), Pleasure, Privileges, Privations. 25. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 135–9. On Corsica, see also Simon Giuseppi, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens in France during the First

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World War: The “Depot” at Corbara in Corsica’, in Manz, Panayi and Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War, pp. 85–124. 26. Stefan Manz and Tilman Dedering, ‘Enemy Aliens’ in Wartime: Civilian Internment in South Africa during World War I’, South African Historical Journal, 68.4 (2016), pp. 536–56 (here p. 545). 27. Peter Lieb, ‘Der deutsche Krieg im Osten von 1914 bis 1919: Ein Vorläufer des Vernichtungskriegs?’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 65.4 (2017), pp. 465–506 (here p. 473). 28. Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Bloomington, IN, 1999), pp.  23–4; Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, pp. 129–37; Dittmar Dahlmann, ‘The Russian Germans: A Heterogeneous Minority during the First World War’, in Panayi (ed.), Germans as Minorities, pp. 171–88 (here esp. pp. 177–9). For the fate of Germans in Congress Poland specifically, see also Pascal Trees, ‘Russland und die deutsche Zivilbevölkerung in Polen während des ersten Weltkriegsjahres 1914/15’; and Sergej Nelipović, ‘Die Deportation der deutschen Bevölkerung aus dem Gouvernement Warschau 1914/15’, both in Eisfeld, Hausmann and Neutatz (eds.), Besetzt, interniert, deportiert, pp. 199–230 and 231–62, respectively. 29. Alexander Watson, ‘“Unheard-of Brutality”: Russian Atrocities against Civilians in East Prussia, 1914–1915’, Journal of Modern History, 86.4 (2014), pp. 780–825 (here p. 794); Lieb, ‘Der deutsche Krieg im Osten’, p. 469. See also Serena Tiepolato, ‘L’internamento di civili prussiani in Russia (1914–1920)’, in Bianchi (ed.), La violanza contro la populazione civile, pp. 107–25 (here p. 108), who cites the figure of 13,600 German deportees, including 4000 women and more than 2500 children. 30. Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, pp.  427  and 539; Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, p. 156. 31. Luebke, Germans in Brazil, p. 174. 32. See the correspondence in TNA, FO 383/244, for efforts by the British authorities in 1916 to persuade the Chilean and Argentinian governments to continue to retain the crews of German battleships captured off Quiriquina Island and Martin Garcia Island respectively, and to increase security after reports of escapes and attempted escapes. Writing to the Foreign Office on 6 June 1916, the Admiralty urged that unless Britain kept up the diplomatic pressure on Chile and Argentina, the prisoners would be released, and then ‘somewhere in South America there [would be] a number of trained enemy seamen ready for any desperate enterprise’. 33. See the letter signed by the thirty-two Panama-Germans at Fort Oglethorpe sent to the Swiss Chargé d’Affaires in Washington DC, 26 July 1918, and demanding ‘permission to return at once to Panama, if

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not to our homes, then back to our former internment Camp at Taboga Island’. Copy in BArch, R 901/83614. 34. See the relevant correspondence in Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv Bern (henceforth SBA), E 2020, 1000/130, BD. 73, DE 95. 35. Deutscher Reichstag (ed.), Das Werk des Untersuchungsausschusses, 1919– 1928 (henceforth WUA), Reihe 3: Völkerrecht im Weltkrieg. Bd. III/2: Gutachten des Sachverständigen Geh. Rates Prof. Dr. Meurer (Berlin, 1927), pp. 820–2. See also Panikos Panayi, The Germans in India: Elite European Migrants in the British Empire (Manchester, 2017), p. 51. 36. One was admittedly released early due to poor health. Other Germans were allowed to live at liberty in Haiti, provided that they report each day to their local police station. See Swiss Legation in Washington DC to the Swiss Political Department, Section for Foreign Interests and Internees, 19 March 1919, and further correspondence, in SBA, E 2020, 1000/130, BD. 73, DA 53. 37. For a useful overview, see Panikos Panayi, ‘Germans as Minorities during the First World War: Global Comparative Perspectives’, in Panayi (ed.), Germans as Minorities, pp. 3–25. 38. Bruno Cabanes, August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month that Changed the World Forever, trans. by Stephanie O’Hara (New Haven, CT and London, 2016) [2014], pp. 135–6. 39. Marcia Klotz, ‘The Weimar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-­ Colonial World’, in Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz and Lora Wildenthal (eds.), Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln, NA and London, 2005), pp. 135–47 (here p. 138). 40. David Blackbourn, ‘Germans Abroad and Auslandsdeutsche: Places, Networks and Experiences from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 41 (2015), pp. 321–46 (here p. 344). 41. On anti-German riots in mainland Britain, see Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, pp.  223–58. On anti-German riots in Moscow see Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, pp. 31–54. For Sydney and Melbourne, see Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914–1920 (St. Lucia, 1989), p.  125; and for South Africa, see Tilman Dedering, ‘“Avenge the Lusitania!”: The AntiGerman Riots in South Africa in 1915’, Immigrants and Minorities, 31.3 (2013), pp. 256–88. 42. Luebke, Germans in Brazil, pp. 119–46 and 162–74. 43. Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, pp. 384–403. 44. See Schmidt to Gompers, 28 June 1918, and further materials relating to this case, in National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, Maryland (henceforth NARA), RG 174, General Records of the Department of Labor, Box 54, 16/640.

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45. R. A. Paterson, ‘Aspects of Internment in Australia during the First World War’, in Jeanette Covacevich, John Pearn, Donna Chase, Ian Chapple and Gael Phillips (eds.), History, Heritage and Health: Proceedings of the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Australian Society for the History of Medicine (Brisbane, 1996), pp. 77–82 (here pp. 77–8). 46. For examples of this, see Stefan Manz, Constructing a German Diaspora: The ‘Greater German Empire’, 1871–1914 (London and New  York, 2014), pp. 261–4. 47. This is the conclusion of the two pioneering works in this area: Luebke, Germans in Brazil; and Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst. 48. See the various contribution to Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime; and idem., (ed.), Germans as Minorities. 49. See WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, pp. 719–855. Many of the conclusions of this post-war report drew on the wartime ‘investigations’ of the Reichskommissar zur Erörterung von Gewalttätigkeiten gegen deutsche Zivilpersonen in Feindesland, Dr. Just. Examples of the Reichskommissar’s material, which was labelled ‘only for internal government use’ [nur für Dienstgebrauch], can be found in BArch, R 67/779 and R 901/82916-82917. 50. Pedro Aires Oliveira, ‘Diplomacy (Portugal)’, in 1914–1918 online, edited by Daniel et  al., https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/ pdf/1914-1918-Online-diplomacy_portugal-2014-12-08.pdf 51. Strachan, The First World War in Africa, pp. 6 and 161. 52. Ibid., pp. 79–80; Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘The Portuguese Empire’, in Gerwarth and Manela (eds.), Empires at War, pp. 179–96 (here p. 186). 53. On pre-war Portuguese atrocities in Africa, see Gorman, International Cooperation, pp. 78 and 98. 54. See British Foreign Office to British consul general in Lourenço Marques, 21 October 1915, reporting on a message it had received from the Portuguese government via the British Legation in Lisbon. Copy in TNA, FO 929/1. 55. See Murphy, Colonial Captivity, p. 155. 56. Reference is made to those held on boats at Lourenço Marques in a petition sent by German internees held at Peniche to the King of Spain, 10 May 1918. Copy in Arquivio Histórico Militar Lisbon (henceforth AHM), PT/AHM/DIV/1/35/0428/02. For the equivalent situation in Luanda, see the German minister in Lisbon to Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, 19 October 1915, in BArch, R 1505/20, Bl. 43. 57. For British complaints about instances when Portugal failed to uphold these bans in 1915, and the increasingly desperate-sounding assurances offered by the Portuguese Governor General  in Mozambique that his

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officials would continue to maintain a ‘strict and constant vigilance on the frontier’, despite the grossly inadequate resources at their disposal, see the correspondence in TNA, FO 929/1–2. 58. A. H. de Oliveira Marques, A Short History of Portugal (Lisbon, 2018), p. 183. 59. Maria Fernanda Rollo, Anna Paula Pires and Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘Portugal’, in 1914–1918 online, edited by Daniel et  al., https:// encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/pdf/1914-1918-Online-portugal-2017-08-30.pdf 60. See the newspaper article ‘Rechtzeitig gewarnt’, Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 27 March 1916. Copy in BArch, R 901/83531. 61. Johannes Kriege to the State Secretary of Interior, 30 April 1916, in ibid. 62. Figures produced by the Lisbon-based Comissão Central de Informacões sobre Prisioneiros de Guerra for the period May 1916 to May 1919, in AHM, PT/AHM/DIV/1/35/0436/01. 63. See Manuela Franco, ‘Os Desnacionalizados da Primeira República’, in Filipo Ribeiro de Meneses and Pedro Aires Oliveira (eds.), A Primeira República Portuguesa: Diplomacia, Guerra e Império (Lisbon, 2011), pp. 245–65. 64. See note 62. 65. See the relevant correspondence in SBA, E 2020, 1000/130, BD. 63, DE 89. 66. See the November 1919 report of the Comissão Central de Informacões sobre Prisioneiros de Guerra, in AHM, PT/AHM/DIV/1/35/0436/01. 67. Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘The Portuguese Empire’, p. 179. 68. See note 62. 69. Strachan, The First World War in Africa, pp. 174–84; Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘The Portuguese Empire’, pp. 188–91. 70. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, p. 156. 71. See the petition sent to the King of Spain by prisoners at Peniche, 10 May 1918, in AHM, PT/AHM/DIV/1/35/0428/02. 72. See note 62 above. 73. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, p. 161. 74. See ICRC to the Prussian Ministry of War (Colonel Friedrich), 2 July 1915, in Archives du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge, Geneva (henceforth ACICR), C G1, A 35–03. On the fate of the several hundred German civilians in Morocco, who were deported first to Algeria in August 1914 and then to metropolitan France in March 1916, see also Gunther Mai, Die Marokko-Deutschen 1873–1918 (Göttingen, 2014), pp. 663–80. 75. Berichte des Hamburgischen Landesvereins vom Roten Kreuz über die Lage der deutschen Zivil- und Kriegsgefangenen im feindlichen Ausland

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während des Krieges, zusammengefasste Wochenberichte, 15 February 1915, p. 13. Copy in BArch, R 901/82920. 76. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, pp.  161–2. See also Stibbe, ‘The German Empire’s Response’ p. 60; WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, pp. 846–55; and the extensive material on Dahomey collected by the ICRC, including an undated, twenty-two-page ‘Denkschrift über die Gesundheitszustände der afrikanischen Lager’, probably put together by the German Colonial Office in 1915/16, in ACICR, C G1, A 35–06. 77. See the references to two visits made by the US consul on 13 December 1915 and 28 February 1916 in Berichte des Hamburgischen Landesvereins vom Roten Kreuz über die Lage der deutschen Zivil- und Kriegsgefangenen im feindlichen Ausland während des Krieges, Wochenbericht No. 83, 24 June 1916, pp. 4–5. Copy in BArch, R 901/82929. 78. See the naval intelligence report on these confiscated letters, dated 5 April 1918, in BArch, R 1505/21. Bl. 293–4. Theseus was one of the most important hero-kings in ancient Greek mythology, reputedly the unifier of Athens and Attica, and slayer of the Cretan Minotaur. 79. Grace P.  Hayes, World War I: A Compact History (Folkestone, 1973), p. 300. 80. ‘Die Verletzung der Neutralität Griechenlands: Gutachten des Sachverständigen Wirklichen Geheimen Rates Dr. Kriege’, in WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. II, pp. 17–46 (here pp. 46 and 32). 81. Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, p. 307. 82. Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi, ‘The Internment of Civilian “Enemy Aliens” in the British Empire’, in Manz, Panayi and Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War, pp. 19–40. 83. Fischer, Enemy Aliens, pp. 278 and 280–302. 84. See Swiss Legation in London to Swiss Political Department in Bern, 11 April 1917, in SBA, E 2020, 1000/130, BD. 51, DE 13. Also ‘List of German Persons Removed from New Guinea and Interned in Australia’, 15 March 1917, in ibid. 85. Sandra Barkhof, ‘The New Zealand Occupation of German Samoa during the First World War 1914–1918: Enemy Aliens and Internment’, in Manz, Panayi and Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War, pp. 205–26. 86. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, p.  63. In early 1918 the German Foreign Office complained to the Swiss authorities that letters sent from German internees in Egypt to their relatives in East Africa were being directed through London, leading to unacceptable delays. See the correspondence in SBA, E 2020, 1000/130, BD. 73, DE 92. 87. On the German hostages taken from Jaffa and Jerusalem and sent first to a temporary camp at Rafah in Egypt in December 1917, and then to the

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permanent camp at Sidi Bishr near Alexandria, see the relevant correspondence between the German Foreign Office and the Swiss federal authorities in SBA, E 2020, 1000/130, BD. 73, DE 97. Also Deutsches Kolonialblatt, vols. 28–30, 1917–19, p.  185; and Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire. 88. WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, p.  822. According to the Swiss Consul in Bombay, 2500 enemy aliens were still being held in India in October 1919, although some of these would have been Austro-Hungarians and possibly Turks, as well as Germans. See Panayi, The Germans in India, pp. 212 and 218. 89. See Deutschösterrisches Staatsamt für Äußeres to the Kriegsgefangenenund Zivilinterniertenamt, 3 July 1919, and R. Slatin to the KGF, 10 July 1919, both in Österreichisches Staatsarchiv Vienna, Archiv der Republik (henceforth ÖStA-AdR), Bestand KGF, Karton 15: 1919, Zl. 12,536 and 13,433. 90. Matthew Stibbe, ‘Ein globales Phänomen: Zivilinternierung im Ersten Weltkrieg in transnationaler und internationaler Dimension’, in Christoph Jahr and Jens Thiel (eds.), Lager vor Auschwitz: Gewalt und Integration im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2013), pp. 158–76 (here p. 172); Murphy, Colonial Captivity, pp. 199–200. 91. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, p. 147. 92. WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, p. 822. 93. Chief of the deputy German general staff to the Prussian Ministry of Interior, 23 September 1914. Copy in Niedersächsiches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hanover (henceforth NHStA), Hann. 122a, No. 7011, Bl. 224. 94. Chief of the deputy German general staff to the Prussian Ministry of Interior, 3 November 1914; and Chief of the deputy German general staff to the Prussian Ministry of Interior, 11 December 1914. Copies of both in ibid., Bl. 77–9 and 185. 95. Matthew Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens in the Habsburg Empire’, in Manz, Panayi and Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War, pp. 61–84 (here pp. 65–6). 96. Guidelines issued by the KÜA, 15 November 1914. Copies in TNA, FO 383/5, and Österreiches Staatsarchiv Vienna, Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv (henceforth ÖStA-HHStA), F36, Karton 556, 26/2a, Zl. 14. 97. CICR, Rapports de MM.  G. Ador, Dr. F.  Ferrière et Dr. de Schulthess-­ Schindler sur leurs visites à quelques camps de prisonniers en AutricheHongrie (Geneva and Paris, 1915), p. 25. 98. Prussian War Ministry to the acting commanding general of the 10th army corps, 5 September 1916. Copy in NHStA, Hann. 122a, No. 7010, Bl. 391.

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99. Prussian War Ministry to acting commanding general of the 10th army corps, 10 October 1916. Copy in ibid., Bl. 394. 100. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, pp. 59–61. 101. See KÜA to Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 3 June 1917, also containing reference to earlier correspondence dated 13 September 1916 and 8 February 1917, in ÖStA-HHStA, Karton 600, 45 1/a, Zl. 59. 102. Daniel Steinbach, ‘Challenging European Colonial Supremacy: The Internment of “Enemy Aliens” in British and German East Africa during the First World War’, in Laura Rowe, Alisa Miller and James Kitchen (eds.), Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War (Newcastle, 2011), pp. 147–69 (here pp. 156–9). 103. H.M.S.O., Treatment by the Germans of British Prisoners and Natives in East Africa: Report Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty (London, 1917). 104. Ibid., p. 7. 105. Ibid., pp. 28–9. 106. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, p. 59. 107. See ‘List of Merchant Seamen and Fishermen, detained as Prisoners of War in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, issued by the Board of Trade, 12 October 1916’, pp. 45–9. Copy in TNA, FO 383/244. 108. The figure of 860 comes from Franziska Roy, ‘Indian Seamen in World War I Prison Camps in Germany’, Südasien-Chronik  – South Asia Chronicle, 5 (2015), pp. 63–91 (here p. 63); and the figure of around 300 British Indians in Havelberg, ‘chiefly sailors and ships’ stewards’, from the American chargé d’affaires in London to the British Foreign Secretary, 18 September 1916, in TNA, FO 383/210. The Board of Trade’s figures in the list mentioned in note 107 suggest 213 Indian seamen at Havelberg in October 1916. 109. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 98–9. 110. Letter from the prisoners to US consul Busser, 27 September 1914, in NARA, RG 84, Vol. 170. 111. Letter from the prisoners to US consul Busser, 18 October 1914, in ibid. 112. See K.  Landwehrarrest., ‘Namensverzeichnis für die hier internierten Briten und Franzosen’, 21 November 1914, in ibid. 113. Helon Habila, Travellers (London, 2019), p. 165. 114. See, for instance, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Ruhleben’, in Die Woche, no. 37, 11 September 1915, p.  1313; und ‘Im Gefangenenlager Ruhleben’, in Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, no. 47, 21 November 1915, p. 652. 115. See, for example, translation of an untitled article in the Trieste newspaper Il Piccolo, 10 November 1914, in NARA, RG 84, Vol. 185. 116. Translation of an untitled article in the Trieste Tageblatt, 10 November 1914, in ibid.

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117. Ibid. See also Die Kriegsgefangenen in Deutschland: Gegen 250 Wirklichkeitsaufnahmen aus deutschen Gefangenenlagern mit einer Erläuterung von Professor Dr. Backhaus (Siegen, 1915). 118. Höpp, Muslime in der Mark. 119. See Chap. 4. 120. Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre, pp. 317–25; Christian Koller, ‘Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt’: Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914–1930) (Stuttgart, 2001). 121. Acting commander of the third Prussian army corps to acting commander of the first Bavarian army corps (and others), 22 July 1916, in Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich: Abteilung IV: Kriegsarchiv (henceforth BayHStA-KA), Generalkommando I. Armeekorps (WK) 2005. 122. Die Kriegsgefangenen in Deutschland, pp.  110–11. See also Uta Hinz, ‘“Die deutschen ‘Barbaren’ sind doch die besseren Menschen”: Kriegsgefangenschaft und gefangene “Feinde” in der Darstellung der deutschen Publizistik 1914–1918’, in Rüdiger Overmans (ed.), In der Hand des Feindes: Kriegsgefangenschaft von der Antike bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Cologne, 1999), pp. 339–61. 123. Joseph Powell and Francis Gribble, The History of Ruhleben: A Record of British Organisation in a Prison Camp in Germany (London, 1919), p. 10. 124. Christoph Jahr, ‘Zivilisten als Kriegsgefangene: Die Internierung von “Feindstaaten-Ausländern” in Deutschland während des Ersten Weltkrieges am Beispiel des “Engländerlagers” Ruhleben’, in Overmans (ed.), In der Hand des Feindes, pp. 297–321 (here p. 308). 125. I would like to thank Mark Long, Russell’s great-grandson, for providing me with details of this story in two emails on 9 and 20 May 2019. See also the relevant documents in TNA, FO 383/68, 209 and 318. 126. Busser to the US ambassador in Vienna, Frederic C. Penfield, 4 November 1914, in NARA, RG 84, Vol. 185. 127. Busser to Penfield, 2 December 1914, in ibid. 128. Grant-Smith to Busser, 19 September 1914, in NARA, RG 84, Vol. 202. 129. Christoph Jahr and Jens Thiel, ‘Adding Colour to the Silhouettes: The Internment and Treatment of Foreign Civilians in Germany during the First World War’, in Manz, Panayi and Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War, pp. 41–60 (here pp. 44–5). 130. CICR, Rapport général, p. 138. 131. Reinhard Mundschütz, ‘Internierung im Waldviertel: Die Internierungslager und –stationen der BH Waidhofen an der Thaya, 1914–1918’, D.Phil dissertation, University of Vienna, 2002. See also Mundschütz, ‘Markl Internment Camp’, in 1914–1918 online, edited by

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Daniel et  al., http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/pdf/19141918-Online-markl_internment_camp-2016-04-26.pdf 132. Walter Mentzel, ‘Weltkriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithanien 1914–1918’, in Gernot Heiss and Oliver Rathkolb (eds.), Asylland wider Willen: Flüchtlinge in Österreich im europäischen Kontext seit 1914 (Vienna, 1995), pp. 17–44. 133. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 59 and 124–5. 134. Eli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism (Oxford and New York, 2004), p. 185. See also Fahrmeir, Citizenship, p. 121. 135. See Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany, p. 59; and Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War (New Haven, CT and London, 2017), pp. 62 and 139. On the concept of ‘national indifference’, see Tara Zahra, ‘Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis’, Slavic Review, 69.1 (2010), pp. 93–119. 136. Prussian War Ministry to acting commanding general of the 10th army corps, 16 February 1916. Copy in NHStA, Hann. 122a, No. 7011, Bl. 433. 137. Prussian War Ministry to German Foreign Office, 8 June 1915, in BArch, R 901/82916. The notion that Russian-subject  Polish civilians in German-occupied Poland were ‘evacuated’ (rather than deported) in order to protect them from artillery fire in the fighting zones is also emphasised—perhaps a little uncritically—in Lieb, ‘Der deutsche Krieg im Osten’, p. 474. 138. Prussian War Ministry, Unterkunftsdepartement, to the editors of Die Eiche, 5 February 1916, in Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin (henceforth EZA), Bestand 51 C III g 3. The term ‘Schutzgefangene’ is difficult to translate into English. It should not be confused with ‘Schutzhaftling’, the term used for German political suspects held in ‘protective custody’ or detention without trial, but it implies something vaguely similar—persons held not as prisoners of war but as ‘prisoners for their own protection’. 139. Further evidence of the terrible poverty faced by Russian evacuee-­ internees in 1915–16, especially the women accompanied by children and babies, can be found in letters and postcards collected in ibid., Bestand 51 C III g 1. 140. Prussian War Ministry to German Foreign Office, 4 September 1916, in BArch, R 901/82917. The use of the phrase ‘internierte Zivilpersonen’ in this communiqué suggests that officials in the Prussian Ministry of War had forgotten about their earlier designation of these prisoners as ‘Schutzgefangene’.

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141. James W. Garner, ‘Treatment of Enemy Aliens: Measures in Respect to Personal Liberty’, American Journal of International Law, 12.1 (1918), pp. 27–55. 142. The link between internment and ‘totalisation of war’ [Totalisierung des Krieges] is also stressed by Segesser, Empire und Totaler Krieg, pp. 522–7. 143. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 41. 144. Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, p. 99. 145. See the relevant documents in TNA, FO 383/8. According to a note from the Swedish Chargé d’Affaires in London to the British Foreign Office, 18 October 1917, there were by then only fifty or so British subjects still living in Bulgaria, ‘most of whom carry on their business in full freedom’. See TNA, FO 383/254. 146. American consulate, New Brunswick, Canada, to Secretary of State, Washington DC, 7 April 1916. Copy in BArch, R 1505/23, Bl. 488–91. 147. Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire. 148. Foreign Office to the Under-Secretary of State in the Colonial Office, 10 April 1915, in TNA, FO 383/88. This letter was written six months or so before Bulgaria’s entry into the war, but neatly anticipates the difficulties, perhaps because Macedonians could also still technically count as (enemy) Ottoman subjects. 149. Aliens Restriction (Armenians, &c.) Order, 7 January 1915. Copy in TNA, FO 383/88. 150. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 43 and 45. 151. According to an ICRC report on a visit to the civilian camp at Berrouaghia, just south of Algiers, made on 22 January 1916, there were 204 prisoners, including 148 male and 5 female Germans, 22 male and 5 female Austro-­Hungarians, 9 Turkish men and 3 Turkish women, 5 children of Habsburg nationality and 7 men from Alsace-Lorraine. They had all been there since May 1915. See Rapports de M. le Dr. A. Vernet et M. Richard de Muralt sur leurs visites aux dépôts de prisonniers en Tunisie et de MM. P. Schazmann et Dr. O.-L. Kramer sur leurs visites aux dépôts de prisonniers en Algérie en Décembre 1915 et Janvier 1916 (Geneva and Paris, 1916), p. 102. 152. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 44. 153. Anthonie Holslag, The Transgenerational Consequences of the Armenian Genocide: Near the Foot of Mount Ararat (London, 2018), p. 84. See also Edmond Khayadjian, Archag Tchobanian et le mouvement arménophile en France (Aix-en-Provence, 1983). 154. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 43.

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155. War Office to Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, 27 June 1915, in TNA, FO 383/88. 156. Under Secretary of State, Home Office, to Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office, 3 July 1915, in ibid. 157. War Office to Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, 27 June 1915, in ibid. 158. See the relevant documents in ibid. According to Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire, there were six Turks among the 2426 prisoners held at Fort Napier in South Africa in August 1916. 159. CICR, Rapport général, p. 138. 160. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 46. 161. See the relevant documents, including correspondence with the French government, in TNA, FO 383/332. 162. See American consul general, Smyrna, to Sir Francis Elliot, British Minister, Athens, 26 December 1914 and 21 January 1915, both in TNA, FO 383/88. 163. See Foreign Office to Secretary of the Board of Trade, 23 January 1915, in ibid. 164. Accord entre les Gouvernements Britannique et Ottoman au sujet des prisonniers de guerre et des civils, Bern, 28 December 1917. Copy in TNA, FO 93/110/79. The extent to which this agreement had been carried out before the end of the war is not clear from the documents. 165. Frédéric Ferrière, Conférence des Croix-Rouges Neutres à Genève: Questions concernant les Civils (Geneva, 1917), p.  3. Copy in ACICR, C G1, A 09–10. See also Ferrière to the President of the Bulgarian Red Cross Society, 10 February 1917, in ACICR, C G1, A 15–15. 166. Societé serbe de la Croix-Rouge to the ICRC, 14 July 1916, in ACICR, C G1, A 15–15. 167. Horace Rumbold to British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, 26 November 1917, in TNA, FO 383/254. 168. Serb Legation in London to Balfour, 2 July 1918, in TNA, FO 383/463. 169. Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck to Foreign Office, 20 December 1916, in TNA, FO 383/244. 170. For a comprehensive study of these prejudices, see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997), here esp. p. 162. On the Balkan wars of 1912–13  in particular, see Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, pp. 132–40, here esp. p. 137. 171. Adolf L. Vischer, An der serbischen Front: Erlebnisse eines Artzes auf dem serbisch-türkischen Kriegsschauplatz 1912 (Basel, 1913), p. 9. 172. Gorman, International Cooperation, pp. 36 and 105. 173. John Reed, War in Eastern Europe: Travels Through the Balkans in 1915 (New York, 1916; reprinted, London, 1994), pp.  160–1. For a more

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recent critical study, which ‘challenges the widely held view that there is something morbidly distinctive about violence in the Balkans’ and instead finds that ‘Balkan armies and paramilitary forces were little different in their behavior from armed forces of the era throughout the Western world’, see Stefan Sotiris Papaioannou, ‘Balkan Wars between the Lines: Violence and Civilians in Macedonia, 1912–1918’, Ph.D dissertation, University of Maryland, 2012. 174. Vischer, An der serbischen Front, p. 79. 175. Count Tarnowski to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1 March 1916, in ÖStA-HHStA, F 36, Karton 573, 28 2/a, Zl. 107. 176. CICR, Rapport général, p. 138. 177. Ibid., pp. 137–8. 178. Andrei Şiperco, ‘Internment in Neutral and Belligerent Romania (1914– 1919)’, in Manz, Panayi and Stibbe (eds.), Internment During the First World War, pp. 227–51 (here p. 228). 179. Clavin, ‘Time, Manner, Place’, p. 636. 180. Ibid., p. 626.

CHAPTER 3

Internment and War Governance in the First World War

This chapter will seek to understand how internment practices took shape as an aspect of war governance in five of the main belligerents: France, Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey (two other belligerents, the United States and [post-1917] Bolshevik Russia, will be considered in Chap. 6). It will draw out links with related aspects of wartime rule at home and in overseas and occupied territories, including deportations, use of forced labour and violence towards ‘internal enemies’. While focusing on the state as the primary unit of analysis, it will not lose sight of the global and transnational nature of internment, or the international factors driving the emergence of a plurality and hybridisation of incarceration methods and procedures. In fact, the international system as it existed in 1914 impacted on state policies in two ways. It ensured that there was no single, globally applicable model for internment, and allowed spaces for the expression of local, national and regional idiosyncrasies. However, at the same time, it made certain that the multitude of different practices would overlap with, and be dependent upon, each other, and that they would have a strong European bias. In this sense, the chapter seeks to grapple with a methodological problem identified by C.A. Bayly, namely that any historical study that seeks to ‘chart…global interconnections and the multiple origins of change’ must both acknowledge the far-­ reaching role of European power and dominance in the modern world and do so in a way that does not end up simply mirroring the unequal

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57191-5_3

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nexus between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’ in an undifferentiated, ‘one-­ dimensional’ manner.1 The state-centred principle of territorial sovereignty lay at the heart of the international system in 1914, a system which in the decades leading up to the First World War was still largely dominated by European norms and assumptions dating back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.2 This meant that in theory each belligerent state, as the sole source of legitimate authority over any given territory, and the one and only guarantor of the rule of law in that territory, was free to decide on its own wartime internment policies. Decisions would be reached on the basis of a state’s assessment of its particular imperial and national security needs, the internal legal basis for detention without trial, different traditions of policing, welfare and treatment of foreigners at local level, the strength of domestic public opinion on the ‘alien’ question, and/or considerations of external power and prestige. All of these factors were part and parcel of ‘war governance’, which might be defined as the sum total of the instruments available for, political and strategic assumptions behind and evolving practices of wartime rule over domestic, occupied and colonial populations. ‘War governance’, whether as a tool in the hands of the military, the civil authorities, or a combination of both, not only privileged executive over legislative and judicial power, but—as the jurist Joseph Redlich sought to show for wartime Austria—was often highly arbitrary and repressive.3 In the case of Tsarist Russia, Imperial Germany and the Habsburg lands, it also provoked large-scale working-class resistance by 1917–18, albeit from war-weary indigenous populations at home and latterly, by soldiers or sailors on leave or at the front, rather than persecuted or imprisoned foreigners. In Ireland, it was one of the many causes of the nationalist uprising of Easter 1916.4 For our purposes, detention of enemy aliens and ‘internal enemies’ was an integral part of ‘war governance’ in Europe, the Middle East and ­further afield. As will be argued below, it also reflected a set of largely hidden assumptions about who (in terms of race and gender, and in terms of European versus non-European actors) should have the power to govern at local, regional, national or imperial level. Internment, or release from internment, was decided not by private institutions, political movements, courts, elected parliaments or NGOs, but by belligerent and neutral states or, more accurately, by local military commanders and police officials using executive powers delegated to them by central governments in the name of sovereign rulers (prince regents, kings, emperors, federal councils

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of state, presidents).5 This model was imposed by Europeans on the rest of the world. Yet it would be wrong to assume that belligerent states and empires, whether European or non-European, were homogenous entities or that concepts like ‘territoriality’ and ‘sovereignty’ were inherently stable and unchanging.6 Often internment gave rise to internal battles or jurisdictional disputes over spheres of competence between military and civilian authorities. In some states, notably Germany and Austria-Hungary, wartime administration entailed territorial fragmentation, with some districts, particularly those close to the front lines and army staging areas, as well as garrison towns and naval ports, being placed directly under martial law, and those further away from the fighting experiencing a more confused form of governance based on overlapping military and civilian jurisdictions. In Habsburg Austria, for instance, a special body, the War Supervisory Office (Kriegsüberwachungsamt, KÜA), was established to coordinate the implementation of emergency wartime regulations across a variety of competing civil and military authorities, but its efforts were not always successful and its ability to issue orders in the Hungarian half of the empire was in practice rendered null due to objections from the constitutionally separate and prerogative-obsessed government in Budapest.7 In Imperial Germany, the task of coordination in theory lay in the hands of the Kaiser as supreme war lord and commander-in-chief of the twenty-­ four separate army corps districts, but in practice he increasingly lay in the shadow of the Army Supreme Command.8 In Europe and around the world, the authority of military commanders in the field and in the army staging areas to make decisions over the heads of civilian administrators was typically absolute, in the sense that they were freed from all ministerial (or, in the eyes of army commanders, ‘political’) interference from home. On the other hand, certain aspects of the power to destroy the enemy completely were still held in check by international law, at least for those states that were party to the 1899 HLKO and its revised version of 1907. In 1914, this included Austria-Hungary, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Romania, Russia, the UK and the United States, but not Turkey, Montenegro or Serbia, and not colonial territories outside Europe.9 Occupied civilians, as opposed to enemy aliens or internal enemies arrested on home territory, had certain explicit rights under this convention, as long as they were white, including protection from ‘collective punishments’. In particular, they could not be compelled to ‘swear allegiance to the hostile Power’ or be forcibly converted to their captors’ religion or ideology. The occupier was also tasked with ‘ensur[ing],

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as far as possible, public order and safety’ within the bounds of the occupied territory, ‘while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country’.10 As we will see below, this did not mean that occupied civilians could not be deported from their homes and sent to camps in the enemy’s home territory (or in other occupied territories). But it did create some limits to the ability of occupying powers to carry out such measures without incurring significant levels of domestic and international criticism. Finally, while all states were equal in terms of territorial sovereignty, some were more equal than others when it came to issues of power and status within the international system. True, with the partial exception of the British empire, no belligerent power set out to make its internment measures globally applicable. Countries allied to one other did not seek to dictate each other’s policies towards enemy alien civilians, although again Britain sailed fairly close to this in the case of its relationship with neutral Portugal in 1914–16 and with South American countries like Chile and Argentina through to the end of the war. In most cases, state sovereignty was respected, leading to a plurality of internment practices (together with a plurality of types of ‘war governance’). But judgements were still made as to what was and what was not ‘civilised’ behaviour. In different ways, Ottoman Turkey, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Russia and Greece were all regarded by governments in western Europe as being at best semi-civilised (and conversely, as being over-burdened by ethno-religious tribalism and lacking in both ‘natural’/stable borders and political restraint). To use Henry Kissinger’s elegant phrase in reference to the Napoleonic and post-­ Napoleonic periods, they were regarded as being situated ‘in Europe, but not quite of it’.11 Likewise, Germany was considered to have forfeited its right to colonies in Africa and elsewhere because of its ‘barbaric’ behaviour in occupied Belgium and France. In August 1916, for example, the British Foreign Office sent a sharply word note to Berlin through American diplomatic channels maintaining that there could be no question of allowing German settlers expelled from Cameroon and Togo in 1914/15 to return to their homes ‘while hostilities still continued’ in Europe, and pointing out that the German occupiers in northern France had themselves undertaken deportations of women and children from the Lille-­ Roubaix-­Tourcoing conurbation at Easter 1916.12 These assumptions also lay at the heart of the peace treaties of 1919– 23. France, for instance, staked its claim to moral and political superiority on the basis that, while tolerant of different religions, ethnicities and cul-

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tures, it represented a people and civilisation ‘one and indivisible’. A French delegate to the League of Nations in 1925 reinforced this by asserting that in France, which stood for a higher, universal form of citizenship, there were no national minorities—and therefore no need for international treaties ‘inventing’ and ‘protecting’ them.13 The wartime denaturalisation and internment of persons of German and Austrian heritage had been a legitimate act of national defence—and not an illegitimate or unenlightened form of nationalist intolerance or persecution. By contrast, in post-1918 Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Turkey and Iraq, bilateral treaties were imposed under League of Nations auspices to protect national, religious and linguistic minorities from the perils of unstable/artificial borders and less ‘enlightened’ or less ‘tolerant’ rulers. Meanwhile, Japan’s more audacious bid ‘for race equality to be written into the League [of Nations] Covenant’, a proposal it later watered down into an amendment calling for the ‘just treatment of all nationals’ was blocked by the British, the Americans and the Poles.14 And in Western Europe, Imperial Germany’s loss of Alsace-Lorraine as well as its extra-­ European colonies was justified on the basis that it had ‘prove[n itself] unworthy of holding foreign peoples and territories’.15 In this way, the unequal power relations that were already at the heart of the international system before and during the war were reproduced, in modified and starker form, in the post-war peace settlement.

France Although France was the first belligerent to enact internment measures against enemy aliens during the First World War, to date only one specialist work has been published on this theme, a French-language monograph by Jean-Claude Farcy, which appeared in 1995.16 Outside of French academic literature it is barely mentioned, apart from a few insightful ­references to the situation in French African and Pacific colonies in Mahon Murphy’s book on internment and the end of the German overseas empire.17 This is in spite of the fact that in north-western Europe, France was second only to Germany in terms of the number of enemy civilians it detained in camps (around 60,000 compared to 111,879),18 and in spite of the further truth that in global terms it was second only to Imperial Britain when it came to the geographical reach and political influence of its internment measures. Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Portuguese variants of civilian captivity to be found in European and

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non-­European settings were in effect composite adaptations of French and British practices. Greek and Brazilian policies after 1916–17 also showed many hallmarks of this international hybridism. The French approach was globally influential even though it can hardly be said to have led to the creation of a fully functioning camp system by 1918. On the contrary here, as many other parts of Europe and the rest of the world, organised chaos seemed to reign. For instance, in its report on its activities during the war, delivered at its first post-war conference in Geneva in March 1921 and subsequently published in book form, the ICRC complained that it had only ever received two incomplete lists of German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish and Bulgarian civilian prisoners held in France and French colonies, in July and then again in September 1915. Apart from this, the French ‘have not sent us regular lists in the same fashion as the British, and later the United States’.19 Part of the reason for this, it argued, was the confusion caused by the different agencies involved in administering internment. The Ministry of Interior was responsible for the vast majority of enemy aliens caught on French soil at the beginning of the war and eventually placed in camps or dépôts overseen by regional prefects. It was also in charge of Carnet B, the famous list of 2500 or so foreign spies and domestic subversives—first established by French military intelligence in 1886—whose arrest was to be carried out by the police immediately on the outbreak of hostilities.20 Yet enemy civilians captured at sea or in overseas colonies came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of War, and those imperial German civil servants and their wives who were deliberately seized as hostages following the brief incursions into German territory in Alsace in August 1914 were likewise the responsibility of the French military authorities.21 To add to the confusion, the French army acquired exclusive jurisdiction over all territory thirty kilometres or less from the front lines (known officially as the zones des armées), allowing it to impose martial law and order the expulsion of individual ‘suspects’, ­‘ex-­convicts’ (repris de justice) and ‘dangerous persons’, regardless of whether they were of French or foreign nationality.22 The Ministry of Interior, for its part, created a separate category of ‘alien’, neither ‘hostile’ nor ‘neutral’, for inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine who had settled in France after 1870 and were of French background but not French nationality. Those of military age who volunteered to fight in the French army were granted immediate citizenship, albeit through the round-about route of requiring them to enlist in the Foreign Legion first. Civilians were examined by a newly established ‘Interministerial

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Commission for Alsace-Lorrainers’ which took into account the views of soldiers, government officials and trusted émigré groups. In general, they were treated with greater forbearance but could still find themselves evacuated to certain parts of western or south-eastern France and forced to live in so-called dépôts libres (‘supervised residence’), or, if considered suspect, in dépôts surveillés (‘supervised camps’).23 Occasionally they were mistaken for enemy aliens, as happened to a group of 400 Alsatian evacuees erroneously sent to the newly-opened dépôt at Corbara in Corsica by the Prefect of the Bouches-Rhone département in October 1914, only to be brought back to the mainland two days later.24 However, the competing jurisdictions are not really an adequate explanation for the distinctiveness of French internment measures, not least as Britain, Germany and Austria-Hungary all had even greater challenges to face in this respect. France’s Interior Ministry indeed exercised a degree of centralised oversight over aliens which its equivalents elsewhere in Europe could only dream of. This included an agreement with the Ministry of War that it was responsible for border protection and internal security, including surveillance operations launched by the Sûreté Générale (the secret police) in collaboration with the deuxième bureau or intelligence section of the army general staff.25 Military commanders, by contrast, were responsible for external security (meaning policing in the zones des armées and security outside France and Algeria, including in overseas protectorates and international waters) only. A second, perhaps more important, characteristic of French policy was its very close association with notions of ‘public safety’.26 In terms of planning for war, this had admittedly not been a matter of great concern to the general staff or the Ministry of Interior. Following the cliché that armies always plan to fight the previous war, French generals before 1914 believed that the next conflict would be characterised by mobility, long-range weaponry and rapid deployment of troops, rather than long drawn-out sieges requiring fortress commanders to order the prompt evacuation of bouches inutiles (i.e. non-combatants whose presence prior to the arrival of relief would make them an unwanted burden on food and other resources).27 In 1890, the new thinking was laid out by the chief of general staff of the armies (Chef d’Etat-Major général des armées) and agreed by the Ministry of Interior. In the event of war, internment should be reserved for known spies, foreign and French ‘suspects’ on the Carnet B list and ­so-called mobilisables (enemy reservists); any alien judged to be a nuisance might nonetheless be expelled from the country on order of the Interior Ministry. Evacuations of all or all but the most vital civilians from

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the zones des armées might be undertaken, not least for their own protection, in other words, to move them beyond the reach of enemy fire. As far as enemy aliens were concerned, the principal concern was to make sure that they did not sabotage the smooth implementation of the army’s mobilisation orders, and that reservists should not be given the opportunity to return home to join the hostile armies. It was estimated in 1890 that 25,000 Germans and 95,000 Italians who fell into the administrative category mobilisable were resident in France: if war broke out, they would have to be interned in the west and south-west of the country.28 These plans were revised in 1912–13, when Germany (but not Italy) was still seen as a likely enemy (thus opening up the possibility of using south-­ eastern France as an alternative reception point for aliens expelled from more northerly regions). By this time, the total number of German residents living in France had risen from 94,000  in 1881 to 120,000  in 1911.29 The essentials remained the same as far as men of military age was concerned, but now all enemy aliens who remained in Paris and Lyon during the period of mobilisation would be required to register with their local préfecture de police; and after the sixteenth day of mobilisation, they would be ‘evacuated’ to designated sites in western and south-eastern France, where they would be provided with lodgings and, if possible, work, and from where—once the immediate mobilisation period was over—they might apply for repatriation via a neutral country, most likely Spain, Italy or Switzerland.30 What scuppered these plans was the unexpected ferocity of outbursts of anti-German hatred and acts of street violence in the early days of the war, accompanied by the rapidity of the German advance into north-eastern France.31 Significantly, on 1 August 1914, the Minister of Interior, Louis Malvy, took the decision not to implement use of Carnet B when it came to home-grown left-wing subversives, following the Sûreté Général’s ­reassuring appraisal of public reactions to the assassination in Paris of France’s socialist leader and foremost anti-militarist Jean Jaurès on 31 July which indicated that there would be no general strike in the event of war.32 Yet plans for the removal of German and Austro-Hungarian subjects from Paris and Lyon were brought forward ahead of the sixteenth day of mobilisation, because of alarming reports in the early days of August concerning the sheer number of ‘Germans’ being sacked by ‘patriotic’ employers, or finding themselves thrown out of rented accommodation, and therefore facing destitution. On 2 August, under the Décret relative aux mesures à prendre à l’égard des étrangers stationnés en France—referred to in

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Germany as an ‘exclusion order’—all foreigners had been granted the requisite twenty-four hours to leave.33 However, given the chaos and shortage of trains, most enemy aliens failed to get out in time—with an estimated 45,000 stranded in Paris alone.34 They were now required to register their names and addresses with the local police, but some no longer had a fixed address and instead—fearing arrest as vagrants—unsuccessfully sought refuge in their own countries’ consulates or in the US embassy in Paris. Those who failed to register, and/or considered trying to escape from the country by illicit means, were warned that, if caught, they could expect to be treated as spies and shot. As one observer, the Hungarian writer Aladar Kuncz, remembered: Paris was swept by hate of the foreigner, by the spy-scare….which in the name of national courage and fighting-will sent flag-waving demonstrations marching through the streets and in the evening darkness looted or destroyed the shops and houses of German or other enemy citizens.35

Trains were laid on to evacuate them to reception centres in western and south-eastern France, but often the local police authorities at these centres took matters into their own hands and arrested them on arrival, in effect making them internees rather than evacuees. Kuncz, who was sent first to Périgueux in the Dordogne region, arrived to find the ‘station crowded with soldiers waiting for us, bayonets fixed… Then we realised that the town public was waiting for us, and that our escort was also our guard’.36 He, and thousands like him, were accommodated in make-shift buildings before being transferred, in September and October, to more stable dépôts—usually in abandoned monasteries and convents, or disused forts and army barracks. Most found themselves in dépôts in western and south-­ eastern France, although a group of 2000 or so were despatched by boat to Corsica.37 An agreement signed with Germany and Austria-Hungary in October allowed for the release and voluntary repatriation of women, children and men over military age.38 Yet even after this had been implemented, the overall number of enemy civilian detainees had recovered to around 45,000 by December 1915 (the same level as it had reached in early November 1914), among them now a small number of Turks and Bulgarians as well as Germans and Austro-Hungarians.39 According to Farcy, by the end of 1915, there were fifty-five dépôts for enemy aliens (including six in Algeria, which was administratively part of metropolitan France); two for suspected ‘spies’ deported from the zones

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des armées; four ‘marshalling camps’ (camps de triage); and five dépôts surveillés for ‘evacuees’ from Alsace-Lorraine. If the eight dépôts libres for trusted Alsace-Lorrainers are included, there were now a total of seventy-­ four camps in metropolitan France.40 Just over half of the dépôts for enemy aliens were so-called camps de mobilisables for single or unaccompanied men only, as envisaged under the army’s plans of 1890 and 1912–13; but almost the same number were camps de families. As well as married men of military age, the latter included women and children, many of them French-born, who had refused repatriation to Germany or Austria-­ Hungary in October 1914.41 The clamour for ‘public safety’ and the accompanying ‘spy-fever’ gives these French actions a superficial similarity with the expulsion of 40,000 or more Germans from Paris in 1870.42 However, for Farcy, what made 1914 distinctive was not only the existence of camps de families alongside camp de mobilisables, but the centralised nature of the internment measures, and the brutal determination shown by members of the established French administrative authorities, that is the police, regional prefects and Ministry of Interior officials, as well as members of the public. The decision—taken by the Ministry of Interior in September–October 1914—to transfer all evacuees to permanent camps or dépôts pending their expulsion or retention until after the war, and then expulsion, marked the beginning of a radical separation of enemy aliens from French society and signalled official endorsement of the notion that they represented a foreign, unassimilable body in the French nation.43 It was a decision that went further than Britain had by this stage of the war (see the section below), but also demonstrated a certain convergence in terms of policy towards enemy aliens. Some of the victims were, as Kuncz later pointed out, ‘innocent’ tourists ‘brought to France [in the summer holidays] by their enthusiasm’ for French food and culture, and subsequently finding themselves unable to leave the country during the twenty-four-hour window on offer in early August 1914, but many more were established residents whose ‘children went to French schools’. Within a matter of days, they had been transformed from ‘desirable’ migrants and ‘industrious servants of the [country’s] trade’ into ‘humiliated wretches’, forced to leave their homes ‘under police guard… [while] watched by an indifferent or derisively abusive crowd’.44 In the French protectorate of Morocco, where executive power lay in the hands of the French Resident-General, Hubert Lyautey, similar anti-­ German outbursts marked the forced departure of the remaining, several-­ hundred-­strong German population on 12 August 1914 and their arrival

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at the Algerian port of Oran three days later. As Gunther Mai reports, after the first of the two ships carrying them had docked at Oran, the fifty-six adult men on board were forced to wait for hours on deck in the hot sun before being forced marched through the streets to the railway station: The mob attacked the Germans with fists, sticks, umbrellas and stones, egged on by French soldiers, including officers and medical orderlies. None got away without receiving some injuries, mostly on the head. Three didn’t make it [all the way to the station], because they were severely hurt…At least one of them died from severe trauma to the skull. The women and children, who were driven to the station, were also on the receiving end of insults and threats, and stones were even thrown at them, but they were safe to some extent inside the carriage and were protected by the soldiers who accompanied them.45

A further marker of the brutality of officialdom towards German and Austro-Hungarian aliens was the response shown to instances of disobedience and insubordination among inmates of the mainland French camps. As in Britain, German internees in particular were not regarded as innocent victims of their own government’s dastardly decision to invade France, but as a ‘dangerous’ and ongoing threat to the war effort, unless kept behind barbed wire in isolated spots and closely monitored in case they engaged in ‘suspicious’ activities. True, in contrast to Germany, Austria-Hungary or Canada, they were not subjected to forced labour. Nonetheless, discipline inside the camps could be harsh, especially in large, over-crowded dépôts such as the Crozon camp erected on the Île-Longue peninsula in Brest, Brittany in November 1914 or the grim fortress on the island of Noirmoutier in the Vendée, known as the ‘black monastery’ in Kuncz’s account.46 A circular issued to regional prefects by the Ministry of Interior on 4 November 1915 designated two of the existing camps—at Île de Groix off the coast of Brittany and at the fortress in Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera—as places for those internees whose presence in ‘ordinary dépôts would pose dangers or particular drawbacks from the point of view of maintenance of discipline and the prevention of escapes…the same dépôts can also be used to hold recaptured escapees and those hard-to-­ manage prisoners who are bent on provoking disorder’. This was followed in November 1917 by the reclassification of the dépôts at Île-Longue (Crozon) and Noirmoutier for ‘internees who have exhibited poor behaviour’ [internés ayant eu une mauvaise conduite].47

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In the worst case scenarios, individual internees were sentenced by criminal courts or special military tribunals (conseils de guerre, councils of war) for particular war-related offences. Apart from an unknown number charged and convicted of relatively trivial crimes in ‘ordinary’ courts and sent to French prisons, the Ministry of Interior reported in December 1915 that 1125 aliens had been arrested on suspicion of espionage. Of these, councils of war had sentenced fifty-five to death, thirty-four to life-­ long penal servitude, fourteen to imprisonment of more than five years (réclusion) and twenty-nine to shorter periods in jail.48 As Farcy argues, ‘even those who were acquitted…remained under suspicion’ and could be sent to special camps de suspects, the number of which rose from two in December 1915 to four in March 1917.49 Another instrument of persecution used by the Interior Ministry was the denaturalisation law of 7 April 1915. Of the estimated 25,000 French-born persons who were summarily stripped of their citizenship under this law, some 8000 ended up in internment camps as enemy aliens. Many of the latter were German-born women who had married Frenchmen.50 Yet for all the directives issued by the Interior Ministry, and the centralised administrative processes and overarching control maintained through regional prefects, there was still no uniform concentration camp system in France, and much still depended on local circumstances. Simon Giuseppi, for instance, in his recent work on the 2000 or so enemy civilian internees held in First World War Corsica, has questioned some of Farcy’s findings. Harsh regimentation and strict separation from the local population was perhaps more typical of dépôts established on the mainland and on islands close to the north-west coast, as opposed to camps found in the relative tranquillity, warmer climate and more relaxed (because more escape-proof and isolated) environment of Corsica.51 True, the regional prefect in the capital, Ajaccio, the various sub-prefects spread out across the island and the directors of the four dépôts established at the disused convents at Corbara, Oletta, Morsiglia and Luri between October 1914 and June 1915, had to follow instructions from Paris to some extent. Yet they also enjoyed considerable latitude when it came to granting the (exclusively male) civilian internee population freedom to roam, to pursue cultural activities, to grow, catch and/or cook their own food, and to look, on a voluntary basis, for paid labour on the island.52 Inhabitants of Corsica also appear to have been less hostile towards these ‘enemies in their midst’, except for a few ugly instances when the internees first arrived in October 1914. Incoming internee labour was welcomed by local farmers,

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­ anufacturers and traders as a replacement for the 44,000 young Corsican m men called up to fight in mainland France or in extra-European theatres. Two artists among the civilian prisoners received commissions to decorate the interiors of Corsican churches, while another was hired to redesign the main reception room in the upmarket Hotel Solferino in Ajaccio. The latter venue soon became an ‘international’ meeting point for French and foreign painters anxious to share their compositions. More generally, increased opportunities for contacts between locals and internees helped to lower animosities and build friendships. There were even some marriages between former internees and local women after the war.53 It was examples such as these that the French delegate at the League of Nations may have had in mind when he argued in 1925 that France did not have any national minorities. Rather, it had French men who, through their patriotic behaviour rather than their ethnicity, demonstrated their unity with the republic and their ability to assimilate its core secular and democratic values, and their cultural/legal opposites: outsiders without recognised or ‘objectively’ recognisable minority status (étrangers) who— particularly in the event of war or imminent foreign invasion—represented a constant threat to ‘public security’.54 Equally, though, he may well have shared the belief since 1914/15 that even French-born Germans, or ‘Boche’ women who had married French men and raised families on French soil, could no longer be regarded as French in the civic sense— thus building on and exemplifying what Rogers Brubaker has identified as ‘two distinct responses to immigrants’ in France from the late nineteenth century onwards—‘one assimilationist, the other exclusionist’.55

Britain In terms of geographical reach and worldwide influence, civilian captivity in France was surpassed only by Britain and its global empire. A comparison between the French and the British approaches to war governance and internment can indeed be revealing in two respects. First, at empirical level, it can help to uncover hitherto overlooked similarities, differences and convergences, a mode of inquiry pursued here and taken up again in Chap. 6. Second, and more importantly, at the methodological level, identifying such similarities, differences and convergences is a prerequisite for revealing the European and worldwide connections—whether at the local, regional, national or imperial levels—that, taken together, transformed

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internment into a global phenomenon marked by worldwide interconnectivities during the period 1914–20. Of all the belligerent countries, France stood out as the only one to have developed concrete plans before 1914 to intern large numbers of enemy civilians, albeit mobilisables only, in the event of war.56 Nonetheless, the UK offers the closest parallel and the best case study for international convergences and divergences. In Paris, memories of 1870–1 dominated strategic thinking and shaped the priorities of military intelligence officers, but Britain’s pre-war relations with its European and non-European neighbours were also marked by invasion fears and spy scares, with Germany replacing France as the main focus of concern from the early 1900s onwards. Xenophobic groups like the British Brothers League associated ‘foreigners’ with espionage, alongside ‘terrorism’, common criminality, sexual licentiousness, the spread of infectious diseases, and a variety of other supposed threats to public safety. The Aliens Act of 1905, on the other hand, was directed in practice, if not in the actual letter of the law, against destitute immigrants from Eastern European, with ‘Gypsies’ as well as Russian Jews attempting to flee Tsarist persecution forming the most obvious targets for exclusion or expulsion by the Home Secretary.57 As in France, economic migrants from Central Europe were still largely seen as ‘desirable’; indeed, according to the 1911 census, there were 51,163 non-naturalised and 6422 naturalised Germans living in England and Wales, alongside 14,222 non-naturalised and 1395 naturalised Habsburg subjects. German-speakers made up the third-largest ‘foreign’ community in mainland Britain as a whole, with only Irish and (generally Yiddish-speaking) Russian-Jewish immigrants ahead of them when it came to numbers.58 Meanwhile, the Security Service or MI5, established as a secret, not officially acknowledged body in 1909, was tasked with domestic counter-espionage and surveillance operations, complementing the focus that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB) placed on tracking foreign political subversives and Irish republicans since its foundation in 1883.59 MI5 based its calls for active planning for mass expulsion or internment of enemy aliens in case of war on an unofficial (and possibly illegal) register of aliens which it began compiling soon after 1909. For this, it drew on official census records and its own intelligence data. However, its strategic argument that expulsion and internment measures would release the War Office from the burden of having to provide large numbers of soldiers for policing and border security purposes at home in the event of war on the continent was rejected by the Home Office, and

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the Liberal government as a whole, in the period up to August 1914. So too was MI5’s recommendation for compulsory peacetime registration of aliens on a legally established list covered by parliamentary legislation.60 In spite of winning the active cooperation of a great many government departments, and the chief constables of several police forces, there was little that MI5 could do with its unofficial list except continue to build it in secret. Meanwhile, limited financial resources, and the likely absence of a significant number of ‘real’ enemy spies within the German community in Britain anyway, meant that the best that MI5 had achieved in terms of surveillance and planning before August 1914 was an ‘active’ list of twenty-five German nationals to be arrested under Home Office warrant immediately after the outbreak of hostilities. There were also fifty-six Germans whose movements would need to be watched by MI5 officers around the clock, and a further 155 who were to be placed under special police observation. In addition, eleven foreigners had already been placed in custody on charges of spying in the period from April to July, and efforts were afoot to prosecute them.61 On 5 August 1914, the Liberal Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna, told the House of Commons that Britain’s borders were now closed and twenty-one German ‘spies’ had been arrested ‘all over the country’. In fact, twenty-two names had appeared on the latest ‘active’ list secretly handed to the Home Secretary by the Director of MI5, Vernon Kell on 4 August, and only fifteen of them had been taken into custody when McKenna spoke. The remaining seven were apprehended between 6 and 16 August. This was the extent of plans for internment of civilians in Britain before the war began.62 When McKenna appeared in the House of Commons on 5 August, however, with war having been declared on Germany barely twenty-fours earlier, his intention was not only to report on the arrest of enemy ‘spies’ but to push for major legislative change on the question of control of all aliens. On his and the government’s recommendation, and against the background of heightened press interest in foreign threats to national security, parliament now passed the Aliens Restriction Act (ARA). Firstly, this act placed the unofficial MI5 register on a firm legal foundation, without of course declaring its secret pre-war origin, and made registration obligatory for all aliens in Britain, whether of enemy or neutral nationality. Secondly, alongside the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), passed three days later, it placed significant powers in the hands of the Home Secretary to restrict aliens’ movements and limit their freedoms through Orders in Council issued in the name of the King ‘when a state of war exists between His

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Majesty and any foreign power or [when an] imminent national danger or great emergency has arisen’.63 This included the right to approve secret recommendations for the expulsion or detention without trial of individual aliens, or conversely, to order their exemption from all or any parts of the ARA, without having to answer for this in the courts or parliament and without having to operate within the more narrow stipulations of the previous Aliens Act of 1905.64 Working closely with the Metropolitan Police and other police forces up and down the British Isles, as well as MI5, and military and naval intelligence, McKenna now prepared warrants for the arrest of several thousand male German and Austrian subjects between August and October 1914, and their handing over to the military authorities for internment, all in the name of the state and border security for which he was responsible. The total number held soon surpassed 10,000, but over the next few weeks, the Home Secretary was forced to approve the release of around 3000 of them, because, not for the last time, the War Office had run out of space to hold them all.65 His handling of the enemy alien question was also influenced to some extent by shifts in public opinion, with anti-­ German feeling manifesting itself in acts of rioting and vandalism in many parts of Britain in August, and on a much larger scale, in October 1914— albeit with intervening periods of relative calm.66 Politically, then, as in France, on top of security arguments, internment could be justified as an act of kindness designed to ‘protect’ Germans and Austrians from the consequences of popular anti-alien sentiment which might end in their losing their jobs, finding themselves unintentionally homeless and on the streets, and/or coming at the receiving end of unprovoked mob violence.67 Day-to-day ‘public safety’ arrangements on the home front nonetheless still left a lot of latitude for the chief constables of individual police forces at county level. The latter had to decide operationally which enemy nationals needed to be detained for security reasons and which could be left in relative freedom—as well as enforcing a variety of lesser restrictions on aliens in general, including the imposition of local curfews, bans on entering ‘prohibited areas’, for instance, ports and dockyards, and arrangements for registration both in permanent abodes and when staying in temporary accommodation, such as hotels.68 How this worked in practice can be seen with reference to the operation of the Aliens Restriction (Armenians etc.) Order of 7 January 1915, one of many Orders in Council which introduced or consolidated amendments to the ARA in the period after 5 August 1914. Intended to exempt ‘friendly’ Turkish subjects from

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restrictions placed on enemy aliens, it soon came up against the question of who might be considered ‘friendly’ and whether, alongside Christian Greeks, Syrians and Armenians, non-Christians, and in particular non-­ naturalised Jews born in the Ottoman empire and now resident in Britain, might be included. As the Home Office explained in a letter to the Under-­ Secretary of State in the Foreign Office on 7 October 1915, although in theory, this might be considered as a question of state/imperial security and immigration policy, in practice it was a matter to be left to individual police forces: There are special reasons in history why the Armenian, Greek and Syrian Christian subjects of the Turkish Empire should be recognised as hostile to the Turks and treated accordingly. These reasons have not arisen in the case of Jews and the Secretary of State has not, therefore, seen his way to advise any extension to them of the scope of the Armenians, etc. Order in Council. He is prepared, however, to instruct the Police, on being satisfied as to the bona fides and loyalty of individual Salonica Jews, to accord them favourable consideration in the matter of permits etc. under the Aliens Restriction Orders.69

In respect to internment itself, policy proceeded piecemeal in the first nine months of the war. As Martin Farrar has shown, this was in part due to the ‘sheer number’ of government departments involved in the development of alien control measures, among them the Home Office, the War Office, the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the Board of Trade, the Ministry of National Service, the Post Office, the Treasury, the Police, Military and Naval Intelligence, the Colonial and India Offices, and, when it was founded in 1916, the Prisoner of War Department headed by Lord Newton.70 This may in part account for the slower pace of decision-­making compared to France, and even compared to British Dominions like Australia and New Zealand. Only in the wake of the Lusitania Riots of May 1915 did Britain move towards wholesale internment of German and Austrian enemy aliens at national level, with numbers held in camps rising from 12,871 on 13 May 1915 to 32,440 by 22 November 191571; before then there was no coherent or consistent policy. The sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine on 7 May 1915 was an event of global significance which also pushed the Liberal government towards a more ‘stringent’ use of domestic control measures against enemy alien civilians under DORA and the ARA.72 This now seemed to include internment for

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all enemy males of military age, but even then, exemptions continued to apply, particularly for ‘friendly’ aliens. Indeed, as the War Office put it in a letter to the Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign Office on 27 June 1915, Turkish subjects ‘were dealt with generally on the same lines as other alien enemies, but greater latitude is allowed in deciding on individual cases than in the case of Germans and Austrians’.73 The same applied to Bulgarian subjects after October 1915.74 Visiting the Aliens Department of the Home Office on 19 May 1915, shortly after the new internment wave had begun, representatives of the Quaker-led Friends Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress (FEC) were assured that ‘[d]iscrimination in favour of Poles, Bohemians, Alsatians and probably Hungarians will continue to be applied, but they must fill up forms of exemption like the rest’.75 In the end, around 12,000 exemptions were approved—among them not only members of nationality groups considered hostile to the Central Powers, but a handful of individual Germans who were involved in ‘valuable  scientific or industrial service to the country in connection with the war’ and around 6000 ‘persons of long-term residence’ whose loyalty to Britain seemed beyond doubt—in many cases because they had sons or other male relatives serving in the British army.76 Finally, women, children and men above draft age were to remain entirely excluded from internment orders (as opposed to wider Aliens Restriction Orders), a policy that remained in force throughout the war so that (to use the French terminology) while already by September 1914, there were many camps de mobilisables in mainland Britain, and from October 1914, two very large ones at Douglas and Knockaloe on the Isle of Man, there were no camps de families.77 Part of the reason for this may have been a desire to avoid a repeat of the domestic and international criticism provoked by the camps for women and children in the Boer War. Even so, family camps appeared in some parts of the British empire after 1914, including in Australia, South Africa and India.78 Even taking into account the mass internment of German and Austrian men of military age in May 1915, it would be a mistake to assume that Britain moved towards a uniform camp system after that date. As in France, there was a variety of internment experiences and situations, with local factors, including the make-up of the guards and the proximity of the prisoners’ families, often as important as national ones. On the Isle of Man, for instance, the War Office was in charge of the day-to-day running of the two main camps at Douglas and Knockaloe, while alien women who

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came to the island to visit their male relatives, and incoming and outgoing letters, were subject to Home Office-imposed restrictions (including temporary residence permits, compulsory registration and censorship) enforced locally by the Isle of Man government and police.79 By contrast, at the ‘gentlemen’s camp’ at Lofthouse Park near Wakefield, a place of incarceration reserved for ‘better educated’ German and Austrians, more powers were handed to the prisoners themselves, leading to the emergence of what one internee, Paul Cohen-Portheim, later referred to as a ‘true Beamtenstaat [bureaucratic state]’ where ‘nearly everyone seemed to have a sort of “official position” he was proud of’.80 The Alexandra Palace internment camp was deliberately set up by the War Office in May 1915 to house Germans and Austrians who had established a ‘settled’ (and in the eyes of the police and intelligence services) wholly unsullied existence in pre-war London, and had not been caught up in previous waves of arrests. Similarly, a camp at Feltham in West London was used to house trusted enemy alien prisoners from favoured nationality groups, including (Austrian) Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Croats and Slovenes as well as (German) Alsatians.81 Visiting procedures were considerably easier here than for internees held in the camps on the Isle of Man—although a ‘privilege camp’ was established at Douglas too for those who could afford to pay for the not insignificant advantages of being held there, including, among other things, more space, better food and the possibility of retaining a personal butler.82 Meanwhile, the Home Office and War Office together ran a number of camps on the  UK mainland—usually temporary ones, although some of them lasting beyond 1914, and often based in former workhouses or on disused industrial sites—for male enemy alien civilians who had first come to attention locally because they were destitute or infirm, and therefore a potential burden on the Poor Law, and not because the police or intelligence agencies were actively looking for them (or were anxious to protect them from the ‘mob’).83 The Destitute Aliens Committee, a body founded at the start of the war and deriving its authority from the Home Office, also played a major role in the choice of Knockaloe farm on the Isle of Man as the site of what was to become the largest camp on British soil when it visited the island for a second time in October 1914.84 The Austrian-born Cohen-Portheim, who was holidaying in London in August 1914 and spent time at both Knockaloe and at the ‘gentleman’s camp’ in Lofthouse Park between 1915 and 1918, noted that before his internment  he was repeatedly

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interviewed by the Metropolitan Police about his financial circumstances. As a friend told him, in Britain’s capital city ‘enemy aliens who had no means of subsistence’ were being earmarked for indefinite detention, and ‘as nearly all those who worked for their living had meanwhile been dismissed, that meant a gradual round-up’.85 In the sphere of alien internment policy, as in many other aspects of war and early post-war governance in Britain, it is indeed difficult to escape the conclusion that control over the urban poor and ‘lower orders’ were important side goals of the British state, as they were in France, even if national security and public safety received top priority, and even if appeasement of xenophobic public opinion and newspapers also remained high up on the government’s domestic agenda.86 Maintenance of social discipline and accommodation of anti-German feeling, for instance, were two principal considerations behind the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, an amended version of a 1914 law which made its way through parliament between May and July 1918 and received Royal Assent on 8 August. Under the revised Act, the Home Secretary acquired a much wider remit to overturn the naturalisation certificates of foreign-born British subjects considered a risk to public security. Not surprisingly, those of German heritage were the main targets for loss of UK citizenship (and possible internment or expulsion), especially if they had ‘communicated or traded with the enemy during the War’; had committed crimes ending in ‘twelve months’ imprisonment, a term of penal servitude, or…a fine of £100′; or in general were ‘not of good character’87—often simply meaning that they were ‘work-shy’ or unable to support their families. On the other hand, the perceived needs of the war economy played a negligible role in denaturalisation or internment decisions. As in France, there was no use of enemy civilian forced labour, and, more to the point, no suggestion in government or military records that this was ever considered as a policy option at any stage in the war (although, as we shall see in the next chapter, for a while Canada took a slightly different approach before being pressed to stay in line with the rest of the empire). The British Isles also acted as a ‘hub’ for internees captured on board ships in the North Atlantic and in German, French and British colonies in West Africa, as we saw in Chap. 2. A number of those held at Handforth in Cheshire and Knockaloe on the Isle of Man, for instance, had begun their wartime internment as prisoners of the British in Togo and Cameroon,88 as well as in the British possession of Nigeria.89 A Turkish national, Mustapha Shefket, even claimed to have been arrested by the

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British military on the Greek island of Chios in April 1916, shortly after they occupied it, and to have been transferred, along with the German and Austrian consuls, from there to Knockaloe.90 Vice versa, the Orders in Council referred to above were also applied—with the same latitude for local decision-making—throughout Britain’s colonies and self-governing dominions. In New Zealand, for instance, the government and people were called upon to demonstrate their ‘Britishness’ not just by developing a common anti-German feeling, but by following the aliens restriction legislation that emanated from London, including closure of German and Austrian consulates, and internment of most enemy men of military age in 1914– 15.91 In the white Dominions, but not always in the African colonies (including South Africa), the absolute ban on interning women and children was also rigorously adhered to. The one partial exception here was the Belgaum camp in India, where a small group of women and children—some of whom had been shipped there after being deported from German East Africa— were allowed to opt to remain in internment after 1915 rather than accept repatriation to Europe.92 Canada did introduce a form of compulsory labour for some of its enemy alien internees, particularly those labelled ‘destitute’ and sent to camps in the remoter parts of Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, where they were put to work on ‘road-building and land-clearing projects’. However, this seems to have been a response to local conditions and perceived communal needs, and was not part of a more general, empire-wide agenda stemming from London.93 One final feature of British internment was the very good record it enjoyed with the ICRC and the system of international inspection through neutral diplomats. This contrasts with the criticisms, sometimes mild but occasionally more severe, made of camp conditions in several of the continental European belligerent states, whether by the Red Cross or other international observers. In the ICRC’s final report on the war, for instance, only the United States stood out as much as Britain for its adherence to international conventions and the good treatment of its military and civilian prisoners.94 As early as January 1915, the head of the civilian section of the ICRC’s prisoner of war agency, Frédéric Ferrière, praised the British Red Cross as ‘the first [national inquiry office] to supply us with complete lists of civilian prisoners and to respond, with equal precision and speed, to our queries about individual cases’.95 In March 1915, a published report on an inspection of several military and civilian camps in Britain, conducted by the ICRC officials Edouard Naville and Victor van Berchem, noted that the system in operation here had left a ‘very satisfactory impression’ and

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concluded that ‘both the German government and the prisoners’ families need not worry greatly [peuvent être sans inquiétude] ‘about those being held in camps in Britain’.96 This makes the British case far from typical, and again brings into focus the importance of hybrid forms of war governance, including the connections, overlaps and mutual influences between France and other parts of the (British and non-British) world. Indeed, the arguments advanced by Richard B. Speed and other scholars in the 1990s in support of the continuity of a western ‘liberal tradition’ of captivity in the First World War, compared to an eastern ‘radical tradition’ which first ‘emerged…within the context of the turmoil of the Russian Revolution’ after 1917, says more about the inward-looking, Anglo-centric bias in their approach than about the historical reality.97

Germany War governance in Germany was equally, and in some ways even more complex, than in Britain and France. Furthermore, what it lacked when it came to international convergences and global influence it made up for in terms of continental European reach. As in Paris and London, so in Berlin and some of the south German provincial capitals, a huge number of government and military departments were involved behind the scenes in developing policy towards enemy aliens, including the move towards internment of British and French men. Among them were the Foreign Office, the Reich Office of Interior, the Reich Naval Office, the Prussian Ministry of Interior and Ministry of War and their equivalents in Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg, the general staff, the admiralty staff, and the Supreme Commander in the Marches (covering Berlin and surroundings).98 This was in spite of the relatively low number of French and British enemy aliens living there in August 1914, amounting to at best 15,000,99 and concentrated mostly in large cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt-am-Main and Munich.100 Unlike France and Britain, the Imperial German authorities did not even go through the motions of allowing enemy aliens a formal twenty-­ four-­hour period of grace in which to leave the country, although movement from Lindau in Bavaria to neutral Switzerland—a border which was initially closed to civilian traffic in response to the outbreak of war—was possible again during a brief window of opportunity in late August and September 1914.101 Other than that, aliens were required to register with their local police station, and report there once a week, but—apart from a

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few individuals identified as ‘dangerous’ to national security—they were left in freedom. Restrictions imposed on them were determined by the twenty-four individual acting army corps commanders on the German home front, and included the imposition of curfews and prohibited zones in naval ports and garrison towns, and in some cases, exclusion of enemy alien children from German schools.102 Women, children and men over military age were allowed to leave Germany in October 1914 under reciprocal agreements with Britain and France, with two exit points to choose from: Bentheim on the Dutch border and Lindau in southern Bavaria.103 Russian nationals, men of military age among them, were also sent home via Copenhagen, using the Baltic port of Sassnitz on Rügen Island as their place of departure,104 although the chief of the deputy general staff— backed by the Prussian War, Interior and Agriculture Ministries—passed a series of decrees between August and October 1914 excluding the largest group of Russians from these measures, namely the 500,000 to 600,000 (Russian-) Polish seasonal labourers who had signed pre-war contracts for work in agriculture and industry. The latter, although not interned, were now effectively banned from returning home until the end of the war.105 Mass internment of British and French male enemy aliens came only in November and December 1914. Roughly 4000 British men were sent to the camp at Ruhleben, near Berlin, and a similar number of French men to Holzminden, then in the Duchy of Brunswick, today in Lower Saxony. On one level this was a military measure, ordered by the chief of the deputy general staff and directed at men who, because of their nationality, might fight in the opposing armies if allowed to go home.106 But it was also presented by the Imperial government as a legitimate act of retaliation for the internment of German nationals in Britain and France, the vague implication being that Germany would be minded to release these men under conditions of reciprocity.107 Later in the war, decisions were reached—and then communicated by the chief of the deputy general staff—to intern men of military age from Canada, South Africa and New Zealand (January 1915); Australia (February 1915); Portugal (September 1916); and Romania (October 1916), among others.108 The British dominion internees were despatched to Ruhleben, while those of non-­ British nationality usually ended up in Holzminden, with 124 ‘civilian prisoners of higher social position’ (Zivilgefangene höherer Lebensstellung) sent to the ‘officers camp’ at Schloß Celle.109 Like their (Russian-) Polish counterparts, Italian seasonal workers were not interned when Italy declared war on Germany in August 1916, but they were retained for use

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in the German war economy.110 The final internment order was sent out against Siamese civilians in August 1918.111 Meanwhile, certain categories of British and French enemy alien internee were released under reciprocal agreements between 1915 and 1918, beginning with those who were seriously ill and ending with all those aged forty-five and over. French repatriates were sent home (to unoccupied France) via Switzerland, and British repatriates via the Netherlands and then across the North Sea.112 However, enemy aliens in the classic sense (namely nationals of enemy countries caught on German territory at the outbreak of war) represented only a small proportion—probably no more than 10,000—of the total 111,879 civilians officially interned in Germany during the war.113 Most of the remaining 100,000 or so were deportees from occupied territories, mainly Belgian and French nationals. Among them were many women, children and older men, as well as men of conscript age. Some were deported as hostages, especially in the initial weeks of the fighting—but also, for reprisal purposes, later on in the war.114 Some had committed indictable offences under German occupation or domestic law and had been sent to serve sentences in civilian German jails run by the Prussian Ministry of Justice or its Bavarian, Saxon and Württemberg counterparts. The ICRC official Frédéric Ferrière, speaking at a conference of neutral Red Cross societies in Geneva in September 1917, claimed that ‘since 1916, 5,000 Belgians and 2,000 French men, as well as 1,000 Belgian and 700 French families, have been held in German prisons’.115 Other evidence comes from eye-witness accounts. In October 1916, for instance, the following plea, concerning foreign prisoners detained at the Stadtvogtei—the popular name for the Moabit house of ­correction  (Strafanstalt Moabit), one of the largest criminal prisons in Berlin—was passed on to Maurice Ettinghausen, head of the prisoner welfare committee at the Ruhleben camp for British enemy alien prisoners: There are a number of fellows here, even among the Britishers to say nothing of the Belgians, French and crowds of Poles who are absolutely dependant on the prison food to keep body and soul together; we do what we can in our own small way to help, but of course our supplies are inadequate.116

However, especially from 1916 onwards, the majority of French and Belgian civilian deportees did not enter POW camps or the criminal justice system; rather they were earmarked for work in the German war economy. With labour shortages increasing, the home front could not afford to keep

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them as ‘useless eaters’ sitting in camps or jails for months on end. Nor, after 1915, was their much call to hold them as hostages to ensure the good behaviour of their compatriots at home. Rather, it was expected that ‘healthy’ deportees would take up employment in German agriculture or industry on the same terms as rank-and-file military POWs, albeit on a supposedly ‘voluntary’ basis. Again, a variety of government departments and military authorities became involved in deportation decisions. In the famous case of the 60,000 Belgian workers deported to Germany from the civilian-administered General Government between October 1916 and February 1917, German industrialists and the OHL both supported this move but were opposed by the Reich Chancellor, the AA and the wartime Governor General, Moritz von Bissing, who were concerned about the rising level of domestic and international protests. Eventually, the latter were able to force a reversal of this policy in March 1917, and most of this group of deportees were sent home.117 Meanwhile, from early 1916, and with the tacit approval of the AA, other French and Belgian civilians were rounded up and used directly as forced labour by the German armies operating in occupied territories and the Etappengebieten (the staging areas directly behind the front lines). As long as these enemy civilians were not forced to work against their will while officially prisoners of war on German soil, and as long as the work they were required to do in the occupied territories could be justified under article 52 of the HLKO (‘urgent repairs to public utilities’ [Notstandsarbeiten] and/or work considered vital to the maintenance of ‘public order and safety’, such as planting seeds and bringing in the harvest, or chopping wood and mining coal ‘in order to supply the ­population with material for heating’), officials from the legal department of the AA and the Prussian Ministry of War were happy.118 When encountering resistance to voluntary round-ups, army commanders in the field were even prepared to enter a ‘grey zone’ beyond the law, establishing special ZivilArbeiter-Bataillone or ZABs (mobile battalions of forced civilian workers) in October 1916 which were moved around the occupied territories under armed guard and forced to work on infrastructure projects, including, on some occasions, digging trenches while under fire from the opposite side. Each ZAB was made up of four companies of 500 men; by the spring of 1918, there were 25 ZABs working behind the lines on the western front, and a further five in occupied Lithuania (OberOst).119 In respect to civilian camps in Germany, a ‘revolving door’ policy also emerged, whereby some deportees were actually sent back to their homes (and families) in occupied French and Belgian territory on the

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­ nderstanding that they would ‘volunteer’ to work for the German armies u on their return. If they refused, they would risk being forcibly recruited into one of the ZABs.120 Either way they were removed from the official statistics collected by the Prussian Ministry of War, and no longer appeared on the lists sent to the ICRC via the German Red Cross. This—together with the chaos in accounting procedures in the final weeks of the war— explains why on 10 October 1918 the Prussian War Ministry claimed to be holding a mere 21,342 civilian prisoners of war out of the total of 111,879 who, it admitted, had spent some time in its camps since the beginning of the conflict. Of the remainder, 85,976 (or 76.8%) had supposedly been ‘released’, 3165 (or 2.8%) had died in captivity and 1396 (or 1.2%) had escaped and not been caught.121 The number who had genuinely been released, rather than being transferred into another form of captivity in Germany or in the occupied territories through being forced to sign ‘voluntary’ work contracts or being recruited into a ZAB, is impossible to establish. Nonetheless, even on the basis of the official figures, it is possible to claim that between 1914 and 1918, the Kaiserreich interned slightly more enemy civilians than the French and British empires combined: 111,879 versus 60,000 and 47,000, respectively.122

Austria-Hungary While the government ministries and military departments involved in internment decisions in France, Britain and Germany showed some interest in the threat posed by so-called internal subversives, their primary ­concern remained state control of enemy aliens and (in Germany’s case) economic exploitation of occupied enemy civilians, and they devoted more policing resources to this aspect of war governance, at least in the early months of the war. A grey area was the interest France and Germany both showed in 1914 in the potential disloyalty of naturalised and non-­ naturalised Alsace-Lorrainers and ‘Gypsies’: deportation and internment decisions here showed a certain blurring of lines between ‘enemy aliens’ and ‘enemies within’.123 Similarly, in the aftermath of the Easter Uprising in Dublin, the British state deported up to 1800 suspected Sinn Fein sympathisers between May and December 1916 on grounds of military security, and held them at a camp at Frongoch in rural North Wales (Snowdonia).124 They had all been repatriated to Ireland by 23 December 1916.125 Outside of these regionally specific examples, though, the internment of domestic subjects without trial tended to cause more political

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problems than the internment of aliens, not least as the national legislatures of all three countries were in continuous session throughout the war, and there was always the risk that opposition deputies might raise awkward questions about the behaviour of military and state officials, using parliamentary privilege as a means of circumventing wartime emergency regulations. For this reason, it was generally avoided, and other instruments of war governance were used against ‘internal enemies’ instead, such as prosecution for the countless number of new criminal offences created under DORA (in Britain’s case)126; use of military tribunals or conseils de guerre (in France)127; or the issuing of Schutzhaftbefehle (protective custody orders) against individual political ‘agitators’, peace activists and social deviants under the wartime state of siege (in Germany).128 The situation in Austria-Hungary differed in several important respects, although again it is important, following the methodology established in this book, that it be seen in context as an active contributor to the global phenomenon of internment, and not as entirely separate to its western European neighbours. Cross-border connections, transfers and overlaps were still there, even though they may have been obscured by differences in strategic war aims, mechanisms of domination and potentials for violence at local and imperial levels. First, domestic political subversion, in the form of nationalist movements of various kinds (among Poles, Ruthenes, Czechs, Bosnians, Slovenes, Croats, Italian-speakers and so on), was a much bigger problem in the Habsburg Monarchy—both in reality and in the eyes of the security-obsessed military authorities. On top of this there was also a powerful socialist movement, although, as in France and Germany, it tended to support the war effort, at least until 1916/17. Second, the Austrian parliament, the Reichsrat, although elected by universal suffrage, had been suspended in March 1914 and was not recalled until May 1917. Third, the separate Hungarian diet was elected on an extremely narrow franchise, and although not suspended, was dominated by the Hungarian landed classes who had little sympathy with the demands of the non-Magyar population for greater autonomy. Finally, the Habsburg military authorities were convinced from the start that they were fighting two wars—one against an external foe beyond the empire’s borders, and another against internal enemies, namely local nationalisms, in frontier districts. This meant that when it came to war governance and the use of emergency powers, equal if not more weight was placed on controlling potentially disloyal Habsburg subjects as opposed to aliens. Furthermore, the military had little to fear by way of parliamentary scrutiny, at least until

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1917, although there were some checks on its use of power in the shape of the empire’s bureaucratic (and supposedly nationally impartial) officials in the Imperial capital, Vienna.129 In the war zones and occupied territories, the army’s authority was practically unrestrained, and use of deportations to internment camps in the interior against whole groups of Habsburg-subject ‘suspects’ was common. The largest waves of arrests came at the time of sudden military defeats or successes—for instance, in Bosnia during the initial, failed incursions into Serbia in August 1914; in east Galicia as Russian armies invaded that province in autumn 1914; and in the Trentino and Austrian Littoral as Italy entered the war in May–June 1915 and again following Austrian advances after the Battle of Caporetto in late 1917.130 The deportations of Bosnians and ‘Russophile’ Ruthenians in 1914 were also accompanied by a great deal of on-the-spot violence meted out by Habsburg troops, including summary executions of suspected ‘traitors’ and the burning down of houses, schools and places of worship.131 The deportations of Habsburg-subject Italianspeakers involved greater planning, with the army relying more on lists of ‘suspects’ drawn up by military security and intelligence officers before and during 1915 rather than random arrests carried out in the chaos of retreat132; and also a greater degree of caution when it came to use of violence, given that most Habsburg-subject Italians were Catholic, and the empire’s rulers were anxious to avoid public censure from the Vatican.133 Even so, the lists themselves were often inaccurate, especially as they were based largely on malicious denunciations, rumours and local gossip, rather than more balanced assessments from experienced and ‘impartial’ state administrators. In Tyrol, for instance, there were many instances of mistaken identity or of ‘moderate’ Italian nationalists being confused with ‘irredentists’, the term used for irreconcilable opponents of the Habsburg monarchy.134 The same applies for the Slovene political ‘suspects’ picked up in 1914–15  in the mixed German-Slovene regions of Austrian Styria.135 In the Austrian interior, the main tool of war governance was the KÜA, which appointed an inspector of internment camps, Hans Swoboda, shortly after the outbreak of hostilities. Interestingly, Swoboda was seconded from the Austrian Ministry of Interior, not the common Ministry of War or the High Command (AOK), although his powers were subject only to administrative and not judicial or democratic-political oversight.136 As far as the treatment of enemy alien prisoners was concerned, the common Ministry of Foreign Affairs exercised an important restraining influence, largely due to its anxiety to protect the interests of

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Habsburg subjects interned in enemy and neutral countries abroad and to uphold the Monarchy’s desired reputation as a guardian of international order.137 However, there were no such external protections for ‘internal enemies’, whose fate rested entirely in the hands of the relevant government ministries in Vienna (War and Interior especially),  and beneath them, police and military intelligence providers, the gendarmerie and territorial militias, and the different regional governors (Statthalter), assisted by a variety of lower Habsburg officials who were anxious to demonstrate their loyalty to the Emperor by helping to identify enemies of the state. Strict wartime censorship, again exercised through the KÜA, ensured that far less was said officially about internment measures in the press than in Britain, France or Germany (or, for that matter, in the Hungarian half of the Habsburg empire).138 The AOK in particular was more concerned with developing its own militarised, neo-absolutist concept of imperial security, beginning in occupied Serbia and applying ‘lessons’ learned there to the home front too, than with manipulating (or appeasing) domestic public opinion by playing on popular anti-Slav or anti-Italian sentiment.139 Combatting ‘work-shyness’ and labour shortages was another consideration, and as the war continued, many Habsburg-subject deportees were forcibly assigned to military work details (Notstandsarbeiten) or were required to sign contracts with private employers on the home front.140 However, in contrast to Germany, this was not the prime motivating factor. The AOK’s aim was political more than social and economic: it wanted to destroy nationalism once and for all and replace it with an authoritarian, apolitical and supra-national form of wartime governance. Indeed, in its view, the pre-war imperial bureaucracy in Vienna had been far too lenient towards nationalist movements; now was the time to sweep all internal opposition away. However, the decision made by the new Emperor, Karl, to recall the Reichsrat in May 1917, and at the same time to order the release of internal political suspects, led to a flood of complaints about the army’s behaviour in frontier districts and at home which were impossible to keep out of the public domain, because they were made by elected deputies exercising their right to immunity from arrest or prosecution for speeches made during parliamentary proceedings.141 The army had banked on not having to answer politically for its actions; after May 1917, this was no longer possible, a fact readily exploited by Allied propaganda and anti-­ Habsburg politicians living in western exile, although the AOK still enjoyed a significant amount of backing from ‘patriotic’ and pro-state

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­elements among all the nationalities of the empire—Slavs and Italianspeakers included.142 Two camps in particular became notorious in wartime Austria for their brutality: Thalerhof near Graz in Styria, and Steinklamm near St. Pölten in Lower Austria. Thalerhof was used to hold suspected Habsburg-subject ‘Russophiles’ deported from East Galicia. Of the estimated 7000–30,000 Ruthenians who passed through this camp between 1914 and 1917, at least 1767 are known to have died, most of them during a typhus epidemic in the first winter of the war.143 The Reichsrat deputy Roman Czajkowski, who was initially sent to the army’s fortress prison at Theresienstadt and then transferred from there to Thalerhof in May 1915, claimed after the war that the deportations of 1914 and 1915 had been part of a ‘systematic extermination campaign’ waged by the Habsburg state against the Ruthenian people.144 There were also reports of beatings and torture, with middle-class prisoners and women in particular being singled out for degrading treatment.145 Steinklamm, which held Ruthenian deportees in 1914 and then Italians from June 1915, was known in Italy as the Campo della morte (‘Camp of the Dead’) because of the very high mortality rates there in the second half of 1915.146 In an internal report written in September 1915, the head of the Italian censorship group B of the AOK’s central intelligence office (Gemeinsames Zentralnachweisbüro, GZNB), referred to this camp as a terrible ‘stain’ [Schandfleck] on the Monarchy’s reputation and demanded its immediate closure.147 It was subsequently turned into a refugee camp in December 1915, with the 3100 Italian inmates being transferred to various internment stations in Waidhofen an der Thaya, or to Katzenau bei Linz.148 Katzenau, which already counted 800 Italian-speaking Austrian-subject political suspects alongside 3000 Italian nationals shortly after it opened on 8 June 1915,149 soon developed its own reputation for extreme brutality, based in particular on stories about the contempt towards Italians felt by camp commandant Baron von Reicher. For instance, the latter was said to have dismissed all of the internees under his command, ‘without exception’, as a ‘bunch of enemies of Austria’.150 The seemingly endless number of special camp rules certainly indicates that a particularly severe regime was put in place. This included use of censorship of outgoing and incoming letters to identify ‘traitors’, and frequent referrals to military tribunals for those Austrian-subject Italians accused of sabotage or political agitation. Thus, a set of instructions to the guards issued by Reicher on 30 March 1916 stated that the ‘purpose of internment is to prevent the

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­ersons detained from endangering state security through espionage, p incitement to disorder, destruction of military and other vital installations, and similar activities’. To achieve this goal, the internees ‘must be cut off from contact with the outside world and must be guarded at all times during the period of their detention’.151 An order issued a month before forbade ‘any gathering of internees inside the camp for the purpose of discussion of any matter without my prior permission’ as well as the ‘collection of signatures on petitions’. Those who contravened these rules were threatened with being placed before military courts.152 Other camps were equally as bad but escaped bureaucratic oversight and civilian administration altogether because they were in the designated war zones, including a detention centre for suspect Bosnians set up by the AOK in Bihac in north-western Bosnia, which already held 600 inmates in December 1914.153 On a larger scale, the wartime Austrian interior was home to a number of refugee camps (Barackenlager) used to house the literally hundreds of thousands of Habsburg subjects who fled, or were forcibly evacuated, from the endangered frontier districts of the Monarchy, supposedly for their own safety. Such persons were not technically prisoners, but the camps they were held in—at places such as Braunau am Inn in Upper Austria, Mitterndorf and Pottendorf in Lower Austria, Wagna bei Leibnitz in Styria, Deutsch Brod and Chotzen in Bohemia, and Nikolsburg, Pohrlitz and Gaya in Moravia—were often surrounded by barbed wire and guard posts in order to segregate them from the local population.154 These were the kind of places, for instance, in which up to 114,000 ­ Italian-­ speakers from the Trentino region of Austrian-ruled Tyrol—equivalent to a nearly one third of the pre-1915 population—as well as tens of thousands of ‘evacuees’ from Galicia, Bukovina, Carniola (modern-day Slovenia), Dalmatia, Istria, Gorizia and Trieste, were forced to spend the war.155 Conditions in the Barackenlager were often as bad as in places formally designated as internment camps or stations, not least due to atrocious over-crowding. The refugee camp at Wagna bei Leibnitz in Styria, for instance, was reported to have very high mortality rates in December 1915, especially among children.156 Indeed, the number of inmates here already stood at 21,300 in May 1915, making it comparable in size to the Knockaloe internment camp on the Isle of Man.157 The overcrowding was not helped by an order issued by the AOK ­insisting that Wagna also be used as a clearing station for ‘suspect’ Italian-speaking Habsburg subjects appearing on secret police lists who—depending on the outcome of investigations conducted in the camp—might be

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s­ingled out for confinement or internment in places further into the Austrian interior. The main priority, more important, indeed, than the welfare of civilians who fled the border areas voluntarily, was to ensure ‘that suspicious and unreliable elements are not able to re-establish themselves close to the area of military operations’.158 As well as safeguarding military security, it is also possible to find evidence of use of deportation and internment orders as a means of exerting social control over ‘undesirables’ and petty criminals in border towns of the Austrian half of the Monarchy—a point at which the connections that Austria-Hungary had with similar developments in western Europe and the wider world become more visible. In the strategic port city of Trieste, for instance, police files indicate that alongside enemy aliens of various nationalities, some 234 Habsburg subjects were forcibly removed between May 1915 and March 1916, with the numbers still growing. Some were political suspects and ‘irredentists’ but others were listed as ‘prostitutes’, ‘work-shy’, ‘drunks’ and ‘habitual criminals’.159 Both the ‘politicals’ and the ‘undesirables’ were often victims of anonymous denunciations made by persons describing themselves as ‘loyal Austrians’ or ‘Austrian Italians’. In their own words, they wished to rid Trieste of ‘unclean elements’ [von unsauberen Elementen] so that it might recover its former reputation as the city most devoted to the Emperor and the Austrian Imperial idea [la città feddelissima].160 After being screened at Wagna, these ‘suspect individuals’ were officially denied the status of refugees and were also usually considered too untrustworthy for mere confinement in the Austrian ­interior. Instead, they were sent on to internment camps at Oberhollabrunn and Göllersdorf, both in Lower Austria.161 Even then, the district commissioner of Trieste complained in a letter to police headquarters in December 1915 that not enough was being done to purge the city of people who ‘are best kept far away’. The only solution was for the police chief to go through the lists of suspects again, this time personally, ‘and pick out all those individuals who give any grounds for concerns from a policing point of view’, in order that they might be expelled from Trieste using the emergency powers granted to the military in the endangered regions.162 The situation in the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Monarchy (Transleithania) was somewhat different, in the sense that here, the Prime Minister, István Tisza, refused entirely to recognise the authority of the KÜA, citing Hungary’s constitutional ‘rights’ under the 1867 Compromise (Ausgleich). Instead, a weaker body, the Hadifelügyleti Bizottság, housed

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within the Hungarian Ministry of Defence in Budapest, was set up to oversee wartime government and emergency regulations.163 Moreover, whereas Austria did not have one dominant nationality (the Germans, at 35.6% of the population according to the 1910 census, were still a minority), in Hungary, the Magyars represented both something much closer to a numerical majority (at 48.1% of the population) and dominated the parliament (as well as the press, higher education, and positions at the top of the Honvéd, the Hungarian territorial militia).164 This meant that Hungarian war government could be run on a more ‘national’, as opposed to an ostensibly supra-national or imperial, basis.165 The one exception to this was Croatia, administered by Hungary but with its own separate parliament in Zagreb, the Sabor. Most Croats were considered to be loyal to the Monarchy, and hostile towards the Allies, especially after the entry of Italy into the war in May 1915. Nonetheless, Croatian-based nationalist politicians who were suspected of sympathising with Serbia or of allying themselves with the Serbian Independence Party (SIP) in the Sabor had already been subjected to various forms of persecution and harassment in the years leading up to 1914, and some—including SIP leader Svetozar Pribićević—were interned or placed under house arrest in Budapest in the early part of the war.166 In addition, several hundred Italian nationals were expelled from the port of Fiume (now Rijeka) in May 1915 and sent to a camp at the village of Tapio Süly (today Sülysáp) in Pest County. This camp held 377 inmates, including thirteen women, when it was inspected, and given a largely positive appraisal, by an ICRC team from Geneva in September 1915.167 Not inspected was a camp at Kiskunhalas, further south from Budapest in Bács-Kiskun County, where Habsburg-subject Italian political suspects from Fiume, as well as Italian subjects who failed to obey the rules at Tapio Süly, were sent. Among them were four women, including Ersilia Mastrogiacomo, who worked for the Fiume-based Italian-nationalist newspaper La Voce del popolo.168 Far worse were the camps for deportees from Bosnia and occupied Serbia, including one at Arad (for Bosnian Serbs) and another at Nezsider (today Neusiedl in Austria) (for subjects of the Kingdom of Serbia). Conditions in both of these camps were as bad as any of the facilities to be found in Bulgaria. According to one source, the diary of Bosnian Serb deportee Damjan Djurić, prisoners at Arad were dying at the rate of fifty or more per day in January and February 1915.169 The Croat Reichsrat deputy Ante Tresić Pavičić later claimed that 3000–4000 people had perished at Arad in 1914–15.170 Nezider became the principal destination for

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Serbs deported as suspected agitators and ‘terrorists’, particularly in late autumn 1915, summer 1916 and spring 1917. By May 1917, the camp population stood at 9934.171 Women as well as children as young as nine years old were among the deportees, and there were reports of high death rates. Serb refugees in Britain, France, Italy and Switzerland were vociferous in their denunciations, turning this into an international scandal, and even the Spanish authorities and the Vatican complained through diplomatic channels.172 The Austro-Hungarian War Ministry brushed aside such complaints, however, sending a note to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the end of 1917 admitting the presence of 526 Serb children in the camp, but justifying this on the grounds of military security. As for the Serb men and women detained at Nezsider, they were held to be largely responsible for their own misery, ‘particularly as so many of them, and especially the women, sell their clothes or give them to local residents in exchange for Schnaps and other alcohol’.173 One final, and, in European and global context, far from unique aspect of internment in both halves of the Habsburg Monarchy was the deliberate conflation of the line between enemy aliens and internal enemies. True, nationals of Britain, France and Russia were clearly classified as ‘enemy aliens’ and were treated as such, with lists of internees and confinees being passed to the ICRC in Geneva (or, in the case of Russians, to the Danish Red Cross in Copenhagen) and access being granted to neutral diplomats. Such prisoners were also not pressured into forced labour.174 One explanation for this was the much higher number of Habsburg subjects held in these countries. However, internees and deportees of Serb or Italian nationality did not appear on the lists sent by the Austrian and Hungarian Red Cross societies to Geneva. Instead, they were treated as ‘internal enemies’ and often held alongside Habsburg-subject internees who belonged to the same national group. At Katzenau, for instance, 3000 Reichsitaliener were detained in June 1915 alongside 800 or so suspected Italian irredentists from the Trentino, Trieste and the Austrian Littoral who were subjects of the Monarchy.175 The same applied to up to 16,000 Italian nationals deported from the occupied parts of Friuli and Veneto after the Battle of Caporetto in November 1917.176 In the second half of 1916, the AOK-GZNB stopped providing any information at all to the Austrian and Hungarian Red Cross societies on Serb and Montenegrin military and civil prisoners, including numbers and which camps they were being held in. Instead, it set up two separate ‘Central Inquiry Offices’, one in Belgrade and one in Cetinje, which were

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charged with corresponding directly with the ICRC (and through them, with the Serb Red Cross Society in Geneva and the Montenegrin Red Cross and Relief Fund in London). This was presented as a necessary security measure in view of the ongoing ‘terrorist’ and ‘insurgency’ threats in occupied Serbia and Montenegro, and the need to keep secret details on where certain individuals were being held. However, it also allowed the AOK to exercise very tight control over what kinds of information were sent to Geneva (and from there to the wider world) and hinted at its innate distrust not only of the ICRC, but of civilian bureaucrats in Vienna and Budapest when it came to knowing how to handle sensitive military material.177 More broadly, the de facto treatment of Italian and Serb deportees and civilian prisoners as dangerous ‘internal enemies’ rather than run-of-the-­ mill enemy alien internees reveals a great deal about the imperial mind-sets and expansionist aims of those in charge of the Habsburg war effort. There are indeed some hidden parallels, if not direct cross-overs with the Allies’ treatment of German and Austrian nationals captured in Africa, where again whole families—including older men, women and children—were designated for deportation and (permanent) exclusion, and where ‘disloyal’ or ‘alien’ elements were accused of stirring up ‘native’ anti-­colonial rebellion.178 In order to secure, and extend, the frontiers of the empire, the AOK in particular felt it was vital to eliminate nationalism as an ideology, by targeting as potential ‘terrorists’ both ‘hostile’ border populations in general, and members of middle-class professions such as doctors, priests, teachers, lawyers and local government officials in p ­ articular. In place of nationalism, a sense of neo-absolutist loyalty to the emperor and the ‘imperial idea’ would be inculcated by propaganda and the promotion of supra-national forms of Austrophilism, thereby supposedly safeguarding the future of the Monarchy and the privileged position of the army within it. At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with its agenda to safeguard the interests of Austrians and Hungarians living abroad, could be assured that, in contrast to Britain, France and Russia, Serbia and Italy were holding tiny numbers of Habsburg subjects only—and certainly far fewer than the number of Serbs and Italians now in Austro-Hungarian captivity.179 Those residents, alien or non-alien, who left the territory of the Monarchy after the start of the war—such as the 50,000 or so Italianspeakers who departed Trieste for Italy during the period of Italian neutrality between August 1914 and May 1915, representing a loss of more than one fifth of that city’s pre-war population180—were not considered

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worthy of activity in the diplomatic realm. They were deemed to have lost their right to Imperial protection and were no longer usable as hostages or bargaining counters.

War Governance, Camps and the Turkish Genocide Against the Ottoman Armenians, 1915–16 Conditions in Austrian and Hungarian camps were bad, and at times atrocious, and it is instructive to learn that the worst camps were reserved for Habsburg-subject deportees and refugees suspected of actual or potential disloyalty to the empire, rather than enemy aliens from Britain and France. Death rates were high in 1914–15, and, as we will see in Chap. 6, grew significantly again in the last year of the war, as food shortages in the Austrian half of the Monarchy reached critical levels. However, propagandistic post-war claims aside, there is no real evidence of any intention to use deportations and internment as part of a systematic attempt to physically eliminate ‘internal enemies’ of the empire. In this sense, the genocide committed by the Turkish government against the Ottoman Armenians in 1915–16 stands out as something unique and without parallel in any other part of the world during this period. It also marks the only real early twentieth-­century precursor to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews during the Second World War.181 Until recently, the role of camps in the Armenian genocide has been marginalised in the historiography. Instead, the main emphasis has been on the one million or more Armenians who died from disease, starvation, exhaustion or deliberate massacres carried out by agents of the governing CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) regime in 1915 when Armenian communities across the Ottoman empire were uprooted from their homes and forced to march in the direction of northern Syria, beyond the region marked out for ‘Turkification’.182 As intended, many did not last the journey, but those who were still alive ended up in a network of hitherto little-­ discussed camps situated near Aleppo, in Ras ul-Ain, and along the lower Euphrates, from Meskeneh to Der Zor. Here, as Khatchig Mouradian has recently shown, a deliberate connection between war, internment and physical destruction was created, with up to 400,000 Armenians dying in the camps or in subsequent killings carried out in Ras ul-Ain (March 1916) and the desert of Der Zor (August 1916).183 German observers were aware of these camps and had a good understanding of their role in

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what Raymond Kévorkian calls the ‘second phase of the genocide’ from autumn 1915 through to the end of 1916.184 Walter Rössler, the German consul in Aleppo, in one of his numerous reports on this theme to the German ambassador in Constantinople, recorded in April 1916 that ‘During the past few days, the Armenian concentration camp in Rus-ul-­ Ain was attacked by the Circassians and other similar local people living nearby. The largest part of the 14,000 [Armenian] inmates was massacred. There are no further details at this point’.185 In July 1916, the ambassador, Count Paul Wolff-Metternich, in turn, wrote to Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg informing him that: The concentration camp in Rasul-Ain, which still had 2,000 inhabitants at the end of April, has been completely evacuated; a first transport has been attacked and smashed to pieces while walking towards Der Zor; one can assume that the others have met no better fate.186

Local inhabitants knew about the camps and were encouraged to report escapees to the authorities. Yet it was upon the locals that surviving Armenians also depended for food and other necessities of life, for the Turkish government itself provided nothing, not even the means to dig latrines or graves to bury the dead.187 Auguste Bernau, a German employee of the American Vacuum Oil Company who witnessed several of the camps, later wrote: The Administration which took on itself to lead [the prisoners] through the desert does not care about feeding them. It even seems that it may be a principle of [the] government to let them die of hunger. A massacre…would have been more humane.188

Earlier, in August 1915, Rudolf Zabel, a German journalist working for the Tägliche Rundschau, offered his observations on what happened to deportees from Western Anatolia as they entered the Euphrates valley, implicitly acknowledging that the first year of the war had brought with it new and radical forms of warfare against ‘internal enemies’: The transports are first directed to Konia, where there is a fairly large concentration camp. Accommodation and food-supply for the deportees is bad. There is a high death rate. In Eregli there is a large camp (approx. 3,000) people; it appears that those who have travelled by train are accommodated there as the people still had lots of belongings with them; there is also a high

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death rate in this camp. In Eregli, five railway trains arrive each day, each with 1,000–1,500 Armenians; Mr. Zabel has seen 8,000 moving along on foot. Ulukirchla is one of the worst stations. The camp there was formerly occupied by labour battalions, is infested with refuge, insects, etc.189

The exact place of camps in the annihilation of the Armenian people remains contested, even though eyewitnesses like Bernau and Zabel clearly identified connections between the two. Bernau, for instance, noted of the interned Armenians he saw in 1916: ‘the majority…are left in the open air like cattle, without shelter, almost without clothing, [and] are barely supported by a completely insufficient diet’.190 Zabel likewise reported that ‘beyond Ulukirchla there is no more transport by train…the military route Adana-Osmanié-Hamidé is now only passed along on foot; the camps (in the open air) are in a terrible condition’.191 Furthermore, as Mihran Dabag argued in the 1990s, while the deportations of 1915 represented ‘a central step in the unfolding of the elimination plan’, ignoring the other, subsequent ‘steps’, including the establishment of camps for Armenian deportees in Syria, disguises the extent to which this crime truly prefigures the Holocaust, combining as it did grand imperial visions of ‘Ottomanisation’ with modern technology, mobilisation of ethnic hatreds among the local indigenous populations, and a new form of biological war on civilian ‘enemies’ beyond anything conceivable in the nineteenth century or before.192 Focusing on the deportations alone also has the effect of creating a false, value-laden way of measuring genocides against each other, one in which the Holocaust stands out from ‘Turkish barbarianism’ because of its supposedly more ‘modern’, ‘organised’, ‘Germanic’ or ‘European’ elements.193 From the perspective of writing a European and global history of First World War internment, the eye-witness accounts also demonstrate that civilian incarceration was already capable of being imagined, by 1915–16, as a new form of social or even biological control which—in the right circumstances, namely ‘under the cover of world wars’—could be ‘interwoven with extreme forms of violence’.194 Thus, it was possible for German observers like Rössler and Wolff-Metternich to describe the Turkish camps as ‘Konzentrationslager’ (concentration camps) not because they had any premonitions of what might happen later in the twentieth century, but because the phrase ‘concentration camp’ had, since the beginning of the century, become part of a new international language of, and understanding about, wartime concentration and incarceration of civilians and the

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multiple purposes it might have—up to and including the dispossession and annihilation of a whole people.195 Zaréh E. Ghougassian, an Armenian deportee and one of the few survivors of the camp at Ras-el-Ain in 1916, later wrote that the inmates who had not yet died looked like ‘living ghosts imprisoned in a cemetery’: Many wailed [or] cried out for help, while others lay dying on the ground. Bodies were piled up at the entrances to the tents. Every day the same terrible scenes played out before my eyes: the average death count at the end of each day was 120. The area around the tent camp rapidly became an Armenian cemetery. This horror lasted for three months.196

Martin Niepage, a teacher at the German Technical School in Aleppo whose ‘Word to the Accredited Representatives of Germany’, urging them to put the ‘strongest pressure’ on their Turkish ally to stop the ‘massacres’ was published in London as early as 1917, wrote that the deportations and concentration camps were ‘aimed at exterminating, root and branch, the intelligent, industrious, and progressive Armenian nation, and at transferring its property to Turkish hands… Only just before I left Aleppo [in May 1916], the crowds of exiles encamped at Ras-el-Ain on the Bagdad Railway, estimated at 20,000 women and children, were slaughtered to the last one’.197 As Annette Becker argues, the use of the language of ‘concentration camps’, and evidence of convergences as well as divergences, especially between wartime French and British internment practices, did not mean that there was a ‘concentration camp system’ anywhere in the world before the 1920s.198 Internment had become a globally inter-connected means of waging war on and committing violence against a range of ‘internal’ as well as external foes, and against civilians as well as combatants, but, except in the Armenian case, a link had not yet been made—at least at state/war governance level—with what were the profoundly new ‘form[s] of societal politics or social engineering’ that went on to inform Nazi (and Stalinist) approaches to the preparation and (demographic) management of territorial and ideological conquest in the 1930s and 1940s.199 What can be said with greater certainty is that the 1914/18 conflict, even in its first twenty months, had given rise to various ‘models’ for concentrating civilians as a part of war governance both in Europe and further afield. After the precedent set by the Armenian genocide, murderous intentions, even if they were not yet the rule, could no longer be ruled out as beyond the

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i­maginable. Furthermore, international observers had become used to talking about these models and identifying their ‘modern’, war-making and internal security threat-reducing potential, with or without the added dimension of intent to commit mass murder.200 What was harder for contemporaries to imagine was the situation in Imperial Russia, where mass deportations of ‘internal enemies’ led to a more primitive form of concentration without camps, or, to use Dan Stone’s term again, ‘open-­ air’ internment.201 The forced removal of civilians in the Russian context remained to a large extent unknown and unreported, partly for these reasons, and partly because it was superseded after 1917 by the class-based terror of the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of the world’s first mass, camp-based civilian prisoner system, the Gulag.202 By contrast, the Armenian genocide was known and became part of the propaganda war waged on both sides, even if, as Horne and Kramer argue, it formed a ‘distinct but minority, current in the [Allied] literature on enemy “atrocities”’, and even if—for reasons that were not yet imaginable in 1915–16— it was largely erased from global memory after 1918. Indeed, it was only recalled after news of the Nazi extermination camps began to reach the world in 1943, with European Jews now seen as sharing a similar fate, albeit on an even larger scale, to the Ottoman Armenians.203

Notes 1. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, pp. 475–6. 2. Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (London, 2014), esp. pp. 2–4 and 23–31. 3. Joseph Redlich, Austrian War Government (New Haven, CT, 1929). 4. Richard S. Grayson, Dublin’s Great Wars: The First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution (Cambridge, 2018). 5. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, p. 204; Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 11–12. 6. On the instability of these concepts, see Charles S. Maier, ‘Transformations of Territoriality, 1600–2000’, in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Oliver Janz (eds.), Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 32–55. 7. On the KÜA, which was transformed into a less powerful body, the Ministerial Commission inside the War Ministry (Ministerialkommission im Kriegsministerium or MK/KM) in 1917–18, see Tamara Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront: Österreich-Ungarn, das Kriegsüberwachungsamt und der Ausnahmezustand während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Vienna, 2010).

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8. Wilhelm Deist, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II. als Oberster Kriegsherr’, in John C. G Röhl (ed.), Der Ort Kaiser Wilhlems II. in der deutschen Geschichte (Munich, 1991), pp. 25–42. 9. Although Montengro, Serbia and Turkey had  failed to ratify the 1907 convention by 1914, and were therefore not party to it, they were still bound, as state signatories of article 4, to honour the 1899 convention, which was virtually identical to the 1907 convention, give or take a handful of ‘minimal changes’. See Isabel V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War (Ithaca, NY and London, 2014), p. 89. 10. See §§ 43 and 45 of the 1907 HLKO at http://avalon.law.yale. edu/20th_century/hague04.asp 11. Kissinger, World Order, p. 58. See also Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005), p. 8. 12. British Foreign Office to the US ambassador in London, 28 August 1916, in TNA, FO 383/198. On the Easter 1916 deportations from Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing, see Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre, pp. 68–77. 13. Karl Josef Partsch, ‘Die Armenierfrage und das Völkerrecht in der Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges: Zum Wirken von André Mandelstam’, in Mihran Dabag and Kristin Platt (eds.), Genozid und Moderne. Band 1: Strukturen kollektiver Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert (Opladen, 1998), pp. 338–46 (here p. 345). 14. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (London, 2014), pp. 324–6. 15. Eric D.  Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations and Civilizing Missions’, American Historical Review, 113.5 (2008) pp. 1313–43 (here esp. pp. 1332–3 and 1339). 16. Farcy, Les camps de concentration. 17. Murphy, Colonial Captivity. 18. Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Civilians’, p. 7. 19. CICR, Rapport général, p. 137. 20. According to Richard M. Watt, Dare Call it Treason: The True Story of the French Army Mutinies of 1917 (New York, 1969), p. 39, there were 2501 names on the list in 1914. 21. CICR, Rapport général, p. 156. On hostages, see also Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 53–6; Paul Smith, ‘The Kiss of France: The Republic and the Alsatians During the First World War’, in Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime, pp.  27–49 (here pp.  27–8); and François Laurent, 1914– 1918: Des Alsaciens-Lorrains otages en France: Souvenirs d’un Lorrain

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interné en France et en Suisse pendant la guerre, edited by Camille Marie (Strasbourg, 1998). 22. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 6–7. 23. Ibid., pp. 51–62 and 180–5; Smith, ‘The Kiss of France’, pp. 31–2. 24. Giuseppi, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens in France’, p. 89. 25. Nortoriously, it was members of the (officially non-existent) statistical section of the deuxième bureau who had helped to frame the Alsace-born French-Jewish artilliery officer Captain Albert Dreyfus as a German spy in 1894. The ensuing scandal, which ended in Dreyfus’ eventual full acquittal and rehabiltation in 1906, damaged the reputation of the army, at least within anti-clercial and radical republican circles, and may explain the stronger positon enjoyed by the more staunchly republican Interior Ministry in matters of internal security—epsecially during the period when the Radicals Georges Clemenceau (1906–1909), Aristide Briand (1909–11, 1913) and Louis Malvy (1914–17) served as Ministers. For further details, see Watt, Dare Call it Treason, pp. 38–40. 26. This is emphasised in particular by Garner, ‘Treatment of Enemy Aliens’, p. 46. 27. The problem of ‘bouches inutile’ is discussed in the Prussian context by Bernhard Sicken, ‘Militärische Notwendigkeit und soziale Diskriminierung: Zur Ausweisung von Einwohnern aus preußischen Festungsstädten bei drohender Invasion (1830/31–1870/71)’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, 74.1–2 (2015), pp. 97–126. 28. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 6. 29. Caglioti, ‘Waging War on Civilians’, p. 192. 30. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 8. 31. On xenophobia in France at the beginning of the war, see Cabanes, August 1914, pp. 128–51. 32. Watt, Dare Call it Treason, pp. 43–4. 33. See ‘Der französische Ausweisungsbefehl’, Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 8 August 1914. Copy in Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen (henceforth LNRW), Abteilung Rheinland, Oberpräsidium Düsseldorf, No. 14986, Bl. 4. 34. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 8. 35. Aladar Kuncz, Black Monastery, translated from the Hungarian by Ralph Murray (New York, 1934), pp. 9–11. 36. Ibid., pp. 21–2. 37. Giuseppi, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens in France’, p. 85. 38. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, p. 151. 39. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 127 and 129. 40. Ibid., p. 134. 41. Ibid., p. 135.

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42. Caglioti, ‘Waging War on Civilians’, p. 161. 43. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 20–4. 44. Kuncz, Black Monastery, p. 11. 45. Mai, Die Marokko-Deutschen, pp. 659–61. 46. Kuncz, Black Monastery, pp.  47–244. For the camp at Île-Longue, which was the largest in France during the First World War, see the very informative website created by local historians at http://www. ilelongue14-18.eu/ 47. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 177–8. 48. Garner, ‘Treatment of Enemy Aliens’, p. 46, n. 44. 49. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 91 and 134–7. 50. Laurent Dornel, Les étrangers dans la grande guerre (Paris, 2014), p. 18. 51. Simon Giuseppi, Corse: Terre d’Accueil, Terre d’Exil, 1914–1918 (Ajaccio, 2017). 52. Idem., ‘The Internmment of Enemy Aliens in France’‚ p. 116. 53. Ibid.‚ pp. 93–4 and 121. 54. Partsch, ‘Die Armenierfrage’, p. 345. 55. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 112. 56. Garner, ‘Treatment of Enemy Aliens’, pp. 43–8. 57. Bade, Europa in Bewegung, pp.  217–18. See also Aliens Act, 1905, at h t t p s : / / w w w. l e g i s l a t i o n . g o v. u k / u k p g a / 1 9 0 5 / 1 3 / p d f s / ukpga_19050013_en.pdf 58. Martin John Farrar, ‘The Illusory Threat: Enemy Aliens in Britain during the Great War’, Ph.D dissertation, King’s College London, 2016, pp. 10 and 54. 59. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London, 2009), pp. 5 and 29–52. 60. Farrar, ‘The Illusory Threat’, pp. 44–66 (here esp. pp. 53–4 and 65). 61. Ibid., p. 62. 62. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 50–3. 63. Section 1 of the Aliens Restriction Act, 5 August 1914, at https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1914/12/pdfs/ukpga_19140012_en.pdf 64. On the ARA, see also Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, pp. 47–61; and John C. Bird, Control of Enemy Alien Civilians in Great Britain, 1914– 1918 (London, 1986), pp. 14–44. 65. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, p. 74. 66. Ibid., pp. 223–58. 67. Even the Quaker activist Stephen Hobhouse (cousin of Emily) seems eventually to have been persuaded by the Home Office’s argument that internment could be in the ‘interests of the aliens to protect them from possible future outbreaks’ of anti-German violence. See his letter to

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Elisabeth Rotten, 24 May 1915, in Society of Friends Library, London (henceforth SFL), FEWVRC/EME/06. 68. Kevin James, ‘Aliens, Subjects and the State: Surveillance in British Hotels during World War I’, Immigrants and Minorities, 36.3 (2018), pp. 199–231. 69. Home Office to Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, 7 October 1915, in TNA, FO 383/88. Salonika passed from Turkish into Greek hands following the two Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Under Article IV of the Treaty of Athens, November 1913, persons born in the city and now living elsewhere in the world were given a six-month ‘period of option’ to decide whether they wanted to apply for Greek citzenship, the default assumption being that they would otherwise remain Turkish. For the text of Article IV, see Coleman Phillipson, Termination of War and Treaties of Peace (New York, 1916; reprinted Clark, NJ, 2008), p. 299. 70. Farrar, ‘The Illusory Threat’, pp.  13–14. On the Prisoner of War Department, see also Lord Newton, Retrosepction (London, 1941). 71. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, p. 81. 72. Bird, Control of Enemy Alien Civilians, p. 217. 73. War Office to Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, 27 June 1915, in TNA, FO 383/88. 74. See the relevant documents in TNA, FO 383/8 and 383/254. 75. Notes of interview with the Home Office Aliens Department, 19 May 1915, in SFL, FEWVRC/CAMPS/2. 76. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, pp. 81–2. 77. ICRC, Rapport de MM. Ed. Naville et J. Martin sur une seconde visite aux camps en Angleterre en janvier 1916 (Geneva and Paris, 1916), pp. 17–26 (here esp. p. 19). 78. See Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire. 79. Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, pp. 83 and 152. 80. Cohen-Portheim, Time Stood Still, pp. 45 and 94. 81. Bird, Control of Enemy Alien Civilians, p. 148. 82. See ‘Annexe: Règlement du camp spécial de Douglas’, in Rapport de MM. Ed. Naville et J. Martin sur une seconde visite aux camps en Angleterre, pp. 28–9. 83. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, pp. 111–12. 84. Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire. 85. Cohen-Portheim, Time Stood Still, p. 14. 86. Catriona Pennell, ‘“The Germans Have Landed!”: Invasion Fears in the South-East of England, August to December 1914’, in Jones, O’Brien and Schimdt-Supprian (eds.), Untold War, pp.  95–116. See also Jacqueline Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain (Liverpool, 2009).

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87. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, pp. 65–6. 88. See Rapport de MM. Ed. Naville et J. Martin sur une seconde visite aux camps en Angleterre, pp. 21–2; and Deutsches Kolonialblatt, vols. 28–30, 1917–19, pp. 158 and 185–6. Also Murphy, Colonial Captivity, pp. 46, 175 and 184; and Tim Grady, ‘Landscapes of Internment: British Prisoner of War Camps and the Memory of the First World War’, Journal of British Studies, 58.3 (2019), pp. 543–64 (here p. 548). 89. The German seaman Wilhelm Karl Paul Scheffelinge, who died of heart failure at Knockaloe in late 1918, was reported to have been arrested at Lagos on 19 August 1914 and to have been transferred from Alexandra Palace, London to Knockaloe on 16 June 1916. See ‘Alien Inquests’, Peel City Guardian, 23 November 1918. 90. Mustapha Shefket to the Swedish Legation in London, n.d. [September 1917]. Copy in Manx National Heritage, Library and Archives, Douglas, Isle of Man (henceforth MNH), MS 13127. 91. Andrew Francis, ‘To Be Truly British We Must Be Anti-German’: New Zealand, Enemy Aliens and the Great War Experience, 1914–1919 (Oxford, 2012), esp. pp. 113–17. 92. Panayi, The Germans in India, pp. 203 and 211–12. 93. Bohdan S. Kordan, ‘Internment in Canada during the Great War: Rights, Responsibilities and Diplomacy’, in Manz, Panayi and Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War, pp. 162–80 (here esp. pp. 166–7 and 174). See also Chap. 4. 94. CICR, Rapport général, p. 137. 95. Ferrière in the Bulletin international des sociétés de la Croix-Rouge, January 1915. Cited in Max Turmann, La Suisse pendant la guerre: L’aide aux victimes (Paris, 1917), p. 33. 96. ICRC, Rapport de MM. Ed. Naville et V. van Berchem, Dr. C. de Marvel et A. Eugster sur leurs visites aux camps de prisonniers en Angleterre, France et Allemagne en mars 1915 (Geneva and Paris, 1915), p. 26. 97. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, pp. 186–7. 98. See the minutes of the periodic inter-departmental meetings that took place between representatives from these bodies in BArch, R 1501/112361–112365. 99. Jahr and Thiel, ‘Adding Colour’, pp. 44–5. 100. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 190–2. 101. See the relevant documents in BayHStA-KA, Stellvetretendes Generalkommando 1. Armeekorps (WK), Bd. 1984—Ausländer— Allgemeines, 1914. 102. For examples from the tenth army corps district (Hanover and surroundings), see NHStA, Hann 122a, No. 7010–7011, Akten betreffend Kontrolle, Festnahme und Heimbeförderung der Ausländer feindlicher

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Staaten; for examples from the thirteenth army corps district (Stuttgart and surroundings) see Württembergisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (henceforth WHStA), M 77/1, 821 and 826–7; and for examples from the fourteenth army corps district (Grand Duchy of Baden), see Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe (henceforth GLA), Bestand 456/F8, No. 269. 103. Chief of the deputy general staff to all acting general commanders, 8 October 1914, in NHStA, Hann 122a, No. 7010, Bl. 44. 104. Jahr and Thiel, ‘Adding Colour’, p. 42. 105. See Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerbeschäftigung in Deutschland 1880 bis 1980: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter (Bonn, 1986), pp. 87–8 and 100. 106. Chief of the deputy general staff to President of the Province of Hanover, 3 November 1914 and 11 December 1914, in NHStA, Hann 122a, No. 7011, Bl. 77–9 and 185. 107. Matthew Stibbe, ‘A Question of Retaliation?: The Internment of British Civilians in Germany in November 1914’, Immigrants and Minorities, 23.1 (2005), pp. 1–29. 108. See the relevant instructions in NHStA, Hann 122a, No. 7010, Bl. 391 and 394, and No. 7011, Bl. 107 and 117. 109. Jahr and Thiel, ‘Adding Colour’, p. 43. On the enemy alien civilians held at Schloß Celle, see also Hilke Langhammer, ‘Das Celler Schloss als Internierungslager für “Feindstaatenausländer’, in Hilke Langhammer (ed.), Hinter Stacheldraht: Die Kriegsgefangenenlager in Celle 1914–1918 (Celle, 2018), pp. 30–59. 110. Jahr and Thiel, ‘Adding Colour’, p. 45. 111. Chief of the deputy general staff to the President of the Province of Hanover, 7 August 1918, in Hann 122a, No. 7010, Bl. 472. 112. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 129 and 137–8. 113. Wilhelm Doegen, Kriegsgefangene Völker. Bd. 1: Der Kriegsgefangenen Haltung und Schicksal in Deutschland, im Auftrage des Reichswehr-­ Ministeriums (Berlin, 1919), p. 29. 114. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, p. 166. 115. Ferrière, Conférence des Croix-Rouges Neutres, p. 2. 116. Extract from letter sent by H. W. Dixon (Stadtvogtei) to C. W. Donnelly (Ruhleben camp), 10 October 1916, in Harvard Law Library, Cambridge, MA (henceforth HLL), Ruhleben: Maurice Ettinghausen Collection, Box 6, File 9. 117. The key study on this episode is Thiel, ‘Menschenbassin Belgien’. For Bissing’s ‘principled’ opposition, see also Hull, A Scrap of Paper, p. 132. 118. See, for example, Etappen-Inspektion der 6. Armee, ‘Richtlinien für die Heranziehung der Bevölkerung besetzter Gebiete zu öffentlichen

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Arbeiten’, 14 June 1917, in BHStA-KA, Etappenformationen (WK), 147. For a broader discussion, see also Jahr and Thiel, ‘Adding Colour’, pp. 51–3. 119. Watson, Ring of Steel, pp. 400–5; Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 73–4. 120. This is the main argument in my forthcoming book chapter, ‘(Dis) entangling’. 121. Kriegs- und Zivilgefangene in Gefangenenlagern, Lazeretten und Austauschstationen (zahlenmäßige Aufstellungen nach dem Stand vom 10. Oktober 1918), in BArch, R 67/525. 122. For 60,000 in France (including Algeria), see Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p.  129; and for 47,000  in Britain and its empire, see Stibbe, ‘Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees’, p. 73. 123. Alan Kramer, ‘Wackes at War: Alsace-Lorraine and the Failure of German National Mobilization, 1914–1918’, in John Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe During the First World War (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 105–22 (here esp. p. 106). 124. Jon Parry, ‘“The Black Hand”: 1916 and Irish Republican Prisoners in North Wales’, in Paul O’Leary (ed.), Irish Migrants in Modern Wales (Liverpool, 2004), pp. 139–55 (here p. 139). 125. Ibid., p. 147. See also Grayson, Dublin’s Great Wars, pp. 173–4. 126. Christopher Andrew argues that DORA ‘gave the [British] government powers close to martial law’—see Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 53–4. 127. See Darrow, French Women and the First World War, pp. 284–308. 128. Christian Schudnagies, Der Kriegs- und Belagerungszustand im Deutschen Reich während des Ersten Weltkrieges: Eine Studie zur Entwicklung und Handhabung des deutschen Ausnahmezustandsrechts bis 1918 (Frankfurtam-­Main, 1994). See also Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 6–7. 129. For two particularly useful accounts of how Austria-Hungary fought the war at home, as well as beyond its borders, see Pieter M.  Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA, 2016), pp. 385–441; and Hannes Leidinger, Der Untergang der Habsburgermonarchie (Innsbruck, 2017), pp. 147–297. 130. Stibbe, ‘Krieg und Brutalisierung’, esp. pp. 90–4. 131. On summary executions, see Holzer, Das Lachen der Henker, esp. pp. 66–86 and 112–32. On Austrian brutalities against enemy civilians more generally, see Hannes Leidinger, Verena Moritz, Karin Moser and Wolfram Dornik, Habsburgs schmutziger Krieg: Ermittlungen zur österreichisch-­ ungarischen Kriegsführung 1914–1918 (St. Pölten, 2014).

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132. See Statthalter of Tyrol and Vorarlberg to District Commissioners and the Police Commissioner in Trent, 28 November 1912 and 1 December 1913, in Tiroler Landesarchiv Innsbruck (henceforth TLA), Statt. Präs 1915, 1012/3. 133. Stibbe, ‘Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees’, p. 68. 134. See, for instance, the complaint sent by the Statthalter of Tyrol and Vorarlberg to the Minister of Interior in Vienna, 17 June 1915, in TLA, Statt. Präs 1915, 1012/107. Here, it was claimed that the military had exceeded its authority and that those it arrested as ‘politically unreliable’ were ‘for the most part persons against whom there were no suspicions, apart from their openly espoused Italian national cultural views; it is a well-­known fact that the local civil authorities were given no say in the drawing up of lists of suspects’. 135. Martin Moll, Die Steiermark im Ersten Weltkrieg: Der Kampf des Hinterlandes ums Überleben 1914–1918 (Graz, 2014). 136. See Hans Swoboda, ‘Zivilinternierte in Österreich’, in Hans Weiland and Leopold Kern (eds.), In Feindeshand: Die Gefangenschaft im Weltkriege in Einzeldarstellungen, Vol. 2 (Vienna, 1931), pp. 229–30. 137. Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens’, p. 66. 138. On Austrian censorship, see Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront. According to Pieter Judson, ‘the Hungarian press often reported far more freely on the war than Austrian newspapers could’—see Judson, The Habsburg Empire, p. 393. 139. Jonathan E. Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2009). 140. Hermann J.  W. Kuprian, ‘“Frondienst redivivus im XX.  Jahrhundert!”: Arbeitszwang am Beispiel von Flucht, Vertreibung und Internierung in Österreich während des Ersten Weltkrieges’, Geschichte und Region/storia e regione, 12.1 (2003), pp. 15–38. 141. Matthew Stibbe, ‘Enemy Aliens, Deportees, Refugees: Internment Practices in the Habsburg Empire, 1914–1918’, Journal of Modern European History, 12.4 (2014), pp. 479–99 (here pp. 495–6); Hannes Leidinger, ‘“Der Einzug des Galgens und des Mordes”: Die parlamentarischen Stellungnahmen polnischer und ruthenischer Reichsratsabgeordneter zu den massiven Hinrichtungen in Galizien’, Zeitgeschichte, 32 (2006), pp. 235–60. 142. The best study on this is Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-­ Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (Basingstoke, 2000). 143. See Militärkommando Graz to the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of War, 1 February 1918, in Österreichisches Staatsarchiv Vienna, Kriegsarchiv (henceforth ÖStA-KA), Kriegsministerium 1918, Karton 2049,10/14/3. Also Georg Hoffmann, Nicole-Melanie Goll and Philipp Lesiak, Thalerhof

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1914–1936: Die Geschichte eines vergessenen Lagers und seiner Opfer (Herne, 2010), p.  95, who document 1448 deaths at Thalerhof in 1914–15. 144. Talergofs’kyj al’manach, Vol. 4, p. 128. 145. See the British intelligence report from Italian General Headquarters, 23 June 1916, in TNA, FO 383/123. Also the accusations made by the Czech deputy Jiří Stříbrný in the Reichsrat on 14 June 1917, in Stenographische Protokolle des Abgeordnetenhauses des Reichsrates, XXII.  Session (Vienna, 1917), pp.  240–50—republished in Czech as Thalerhof (Prague, 1934). Further evidence of abuses against prisoners during the journey from East Galicia to Thalerhof and Theresienstadt is provided by Katharina Wesener, ‘Internment in WW1: The Case of Thalerhof’, in Oto Luthar (ed.), The Great War and Memory in Central and South-Eastern Europe (Leiden, 2017), pp.  111–22 (here esp. pp. 114–15). 146. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, pp. 59–60. 147. Bericht der italienischen Zensurgruppe B, 23 September 1915, in ÖStA-KA, AOK/GZNB, Karton 3732, Zl. 1913. 148. Reinhard Mundschütz, ‘Internierung im Waldviertel: Die Internierungslager und –stationen der BH Waidhofen an der Thaya, 1914–1918’, D.Phil dissertation, University of Vienna, 2002, p.  65; Daniela Luigia Caglioti, ‘Tra la Sardegna e Katzenau: Donne e uomini al confine e nei campi di concentramento’, in Stefania Bartoloni (ed.), La Grande Guerra delle italiane: Mobilitazioni, diritti, trasformazioni (Rome, 2016), pp. 249–70 (here p. 258). 149. Baron von Reicher to Statthalterei-Präsidium Innsbruck, 11 June 1915, in TLA, Statt. Präs 1915, 1012/153. 150. Oswald Haller, ‘Das Internierungslager Katzenau bei Linz: Die Internierung und Konfinierung der italienischsprachigen Zivilbevölkerung des Trentinos zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges’, Dipl. Arb., University of Vienna, 1999, p. 45. 151. Baron von Reicher, Instruktion für die zur Bewachung der internierten verwendete Mannschaft, Katzenau, 30 March 1916, in Museo storico italiano della guerra, Archivio storico, Rovereto (henceforth ASR), Fondi Tematici: Bestand Katzenau, fasc. 3, Bl. 8. 152. Baron von Reicher, Kundmachung/Avviso, 3 February 1916, in ASR, Fondi Tematici: Bestand Katzenau, fasc. 5, Bl. 42. 153. Landeschef Sarajevo to the Austrian War Ministry, Department 10, 1 December 1914, in ÖStA-KA, Kriegsministerium 1914, Karton 565, Zl. 18137. 154. The most detailed, albeit still unpublished study, is Walter Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithanien im Ersten Weltkrieg’, D.Phil dissertation, University of Vienna, 1997.

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155. Stibbe, ‘Enemy Aliens, Deportees, Refugees’, p. 496. For the situation in the Trentino, see also Paolo Piccolo and Armando Vadagnini, Degasperi: Un trentino nella storia d’Europa (Soveria Mannelli, 2004), p. 103. 156. Italienische Zensurgruppe D, Sanitäre Verhältnisse im Konzentrationslager Wagna bei Leibnitz, 18 December 1915, in ÖStA-KA, AOK/GZNB, Karton 3737, Zl. 3025. 157. Judson, The Habsburg Empire, p. 411. 158. District Governor of Trieste to Police Chief of Trieste, 22 December 1915, passing on latest orders from the AOK. Copy in Archivio di Stato di Trieste (henceforth AST), Direzione di Polizia, Atti Presidiali Riservati, no. 387. 159. Verzeichnis der seit 20. Mai 1915 von Triest aus internierten und konfinierten Personen, 18 March 1916, in ibid. 160. See the scores of denunciations, written in both Italian and German, in AST, Direzione di Polizia, Atti Presidiali Riservati, no. 380. The quotations are taken from an undated letter signed by a ‘faithful Austrian’ [un fedele austriaco], and from an unsigned letter dated 22 September 1915 and sent in the first instance to the police inspectorate in Vienna (which forwarded it to Trieste). 161. See the lists of internees held at Oberhallabrunn and Göllersdorf internment camps, with reasons for their internment added in the margins, in AST, Direzione di Polizia, Atti Presidiali Riservati, no. 387. The lists are undated but were probably drawn up in September or October 1915. 162. District Governor of Trieste to Police Chief of Trieste, 12 December 1915, in ibid. 163. Judson, The Habsburg Empire, pp. 392–3. 164. Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 (Harlow, 1989), pp. 212, 218 and 225. 165. See also József Galántai, Hungary in the First World War (Budapest, 1989). 166. Nicholas J. Miller, Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia Before the First World War (Pittsburgh, PA, 1998), p. 169. 167. Caglioti, ‘Tra la Sardegna e Katzenau’, p. 257. 168. Giovanni Stelli, Storia di Fiume: Dalla origini ai giorni nostri (Pordenone, 2017), pp. 208–9. 169. Andrej Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War, 1914–1918 (London, 2007), p. 76. 170. Holzer, Das Lächeln der Henker, p. 76. 171. Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War, p. 369, n. 113. 172. See the German translation of a note from the Spanish embassy to the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, 10 April 1917, in ÖStA-HHStA, F36, Karton 573, 28 2/a, Zl. 156. On the inter-

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vention of the papal nuncio in Vienna, also in mid-April 1917, see Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War, p.  229; and on complaints in the proEntente Serb press in Switzerland, see Becker, ‘Captive Civilians’, p. 272. 173. War Ministry to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, n.d. [February 1918], in ÖStA-KA, Kriegsminsterium 1918, 10/18/1/37. 174. Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens’, p. 66. 175. Baron von Reicher (Commander of Katzenau camp) to Statthalterei-­ Präsidium Innsbruck, 11 June 1915, in TLA, Statt.-Präs. 1915, 1012/153. 176. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, pp. 60–1; Cagliotti, ‘Tra la Sardegna e Katzenau’, p. 260. 177. Gemeinsames Zentralnachweisebureau der AOK, Zentralstelle für Kriegsgefangene, to the ICRC, 22 August 1916 and 19 October 1916. Copies in ACICR, C G1, A 15-10. 178. See Stibbe, ‘Ein globales Phänomen’. Also Chap. 2 of this book. 179. Stibbe, ‘Enemy Aliens, Deportees, Refugees’, pp. 487 and 497. 180. Matteo Perissinotto, ‘L’attività del Consolato italiano e dell’Associazione Italiana di Beneficenza in Trieste a favour dei regnicoli (agosto 1914-­maggio 1915)’, in Matteo Ermacora (ed.), Neutralità e guerra: Friuli e Litorale austriaco nella crisi del 1914–1915 (Trieste, 2015), pp. 59–73 (here p. 59). 181. For the most comprehensive study, see Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London, 2011) [French original, 2006]. A countervailing, but less convincing view, which asserts the wider prevalence and European-based ‘normalisation’ of genocidal and near-­genocidal acts during and after the First World War era, can be found in Mark Levene, ‘Frontiers of Genocide: Jews in the Eastern War Zones, 1914–1920 and 1941’, in Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime, pp.  83–117; and idem., The Crisis of Genocide. Vol 1: Devastation: The European Rimlands, 1912–1938 (Oxford, 2013), here esp. p. 12. 182. Jay Winter, ‘Under Cover of War: The Armenian Genocide in the Context of Total War’, in Winter (ed.), America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge, 2003), pp.  37–51 (here p.  41). See also Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, pp.  149–50; Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, pp.  99–116; Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, 4th ed. (London, 2010), p. 170. 183. Khatchig  Mouradian, ‘Internment and Destruction: Concentration Camps during the Armenian Genocide, 1915–16’, in Manz, Panayi and Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War, pp.  145–61 (here pp. 149 and 155). Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, pp. 104–10 designate some of these camps as ‘death camps’ and give a higher figure of 630,000 Armenians who died in them. 184. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, pp. 625–96.

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185. Rössler to the Embassy in Constantinople, 6 April 1916, in Wolfgang Gust (ed.), The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives (New York and Oxford, 2014) [German original, 2005], pp. 573–4 (here p. 573). 186. Wolff-Metternich to Bethmann Hollweg, 10 July 1916, in ibid., pp. 601–3 (here p. 601). 187. Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, pp. 106–7. 188. Mouradian, ‘Internment and Destruction’, pp. 150–1. 189. Cited in Gust (ed.), The Armenian Genocide, p. 25. 190. Mouradian, ‘Internment and Destruction’, p. 150. 191. Gust (ed.), The Armenian Genocide, p. 25. 192. Mihran Dabag, ‘Jungtürkische Visionen und der Völkermord an den Armenien’, in Dabag and Platt (eds.), Genozid und Moderne Band 1, pp. 152–205 (here p. 154). 193. See also the similar point made by Jo Laycock, Imagining Armenia: Orientalism, Ambiguity and Intervention (Manchester, 2009), pp. 112–17. 194. Winter, ‘Under Cover of War’, p. 37; Becker, ‘Captive Civilians’, pp. 280– 1; Segesser, Empire und Totaler Krieg, pp. 507–8. 195. Dabag, ‘Jungtürkische Visionen’, p. 155. 196. Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, p. 112. 197. Martin Niepage, The Horrors of Aleppo: A Word to Germany’s Accredited Representatives (London, 1917), pp. 1 and 24. Online copy at https:// archive.org/stream/horrorsofaleppos00niep/horrorsofaleppos00niep_ djvu.txt 198. Becker, ‘Captive Civilians’, p. 281. 199. Benjamin Ziemann, ‘The First World War and National Socialism’, in Shelley Baranowski, Armin Nolzen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann (eds.), A Companion to Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2018), pp. 47–61 (here p. 51). See also the various thought-provoking contributions to Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism: Nazism and Stalinism Compared (Cambridge, 2009). 200. Cf. Garner, ‘Treatment of Enemy Aliens’. 201. Stone, Concentration Camps, pp. 13–14. 202. See Chap. 6. 203. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914, p.  528, n. 18. See also Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, pp.  6–7 and 115–69; Laycock, Imagining Armenia, pp. 99–143; Yair Auron, The Armenian Genocide: Forgotten and Denied (Tel Aviv, 2013), pp. 93–8.

CHAPTER 4

Imagining Internment: International Law, Social Order and National Community

This chapter will demonstrate that there is more to the cultural history of First World War internment than efforts to reconstruct associational life behind the barbed wire or to assess how internees chose to communicate their war experiences to themselves and others. For those who administered or were bureaucratically or politically accountable for wartime internment practices from afar, but rarely, if ever, saw the inside of a camp; for those lower level officials frustrated by the limits currently placed on what internment could ‘achieve’ for the communal, national or imperial war effort and at the same time able to imagine new potentials for the camp as an instrument of social control; and for those local and national campaigners seeking to make political capital out of the ‘enemy alien’/‘internal enemy’ question and its entanglement with so many other questions thrown up by the war concerning identity, belonging and civic duty—for all of these persons, internment could also take on a multitude of cultural meanings. This chapter explores how some of these meanings were constructed and communicated during the war itself, and hints at others that became more important after the end of the war. The emphasis will be on legal and political interpretations, on attempts by both sides in the war to draw distinctions between themselves and the ‘alien’, ‘barbaric’ other, and on the interactions and ruptures that this process involved between officials working at local and regional, as well as national and imperial levels.

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57191-5_4

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The European powers and the United States, who had learned about the Armenian genocide and the death camps in Syria through eye-witness reports and diplomatic channels in 1916, certainly recognised that what had taken place was deeply unsettling. However, they did not connect it to any broader concern about a breakdown of the rules-based international order stemming from the world war as a whole. Rather, its causes were attributed to internal factors inside the Ottoman empire and/or linked to earlier ethnic massacres carried out by the Turks, with both the Allies and the Central Powers (and neutral America) determined not to allow it to interfere with their broader imperial interests in the region. The British and French, for instance, were wary of even identifying the victims of the Turkish genocide in public as Armenian Christians, in case this upset their relations with Islamic subjects in their respective empires.1 This was in fact quite similar to international reactions to the German death camps for the Herero and Nama during the brutal colonial war in South-­ West Africa in 1904–08; here the other colonial powers were anxious not to pinpoint the victims as black, lest this have any broader negative implications for the legitimacy of white rule (and the concomitant European ‘civilising mission’) across the African continent and beyond.2 Even more significantly, and taking a European and global rather than purely imperial perspective, the internment camps that had sprung up in all corners of the world since 1914 were not (yet) imagined as ‘extra-legal spaces within a modern society’ in which inmates, irrespective of age, religion, nationality and gender, could be terrorised, worked to death, systematically starved and beaten or murdered en masse.3 Rather, what happened in eastern Anatolia and Syria, if discussed at all in the international community, was considered to be unrelated to incidents of violence against civilians in other theatres of war. There was still a long way to go, in other words, before the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s could take place, and for the time being the Armenian genocide appeared to be part of the ‘murky interplay between barbarous orientals’ which did not leave a mark on contemporaries’ broader ‘horizon of expectation’.4 Furthermore, in contrast to the Second World War, when the Axis powers clearly presented themselves as seeking to overturn the very principle of a rules-based order which had governed relations between European states since at least 1815, all belligerents in the 1914/18 conflict still cast themselves as upholders of international justice and the ‘laws of humanity’, and accused their opponents of using brute military force to threaten geopolitical stability, the balance of power, the freedom of the seas, the

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values of the ‘civilised world’, the ‘dictates of public conscience’ and so forth. All were signatories to the 1899 and/or the 1907 HLKO, and while they might differ over interpretations of particular clauses or stipulations, none claimed to want to tear up the conventions in their entirety.5 German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s unfortunate reference to Belgian neutrality as being founded on a ‘scrap of paper’ (namely, the 1839 Treaty of London, signed by Britain, France, Habsburg Austria, the German Confederation, Tsarist Russia and the Netherlands) was a propaganda gift to the Allies in 1914, but in retrospect it is perhaps surprising that this is as far as self-confessed Imperial German defiance of international law was prepared to go. Indeed, during the war, the most vocal critics of international conventions were to be found not on the militarist right, but on the pacifist left, and in particular among those cross-border networks of feminist and socialist peace activists who believed that establishing rules for conduct in war merely legitimised violence and aggression, rather than tackling their root causes (secret diplomacy, male hegemony, the arms race and so on).6 Meanwhile, for the statesmen of Europe, civilian internment constituted a different kind of presentational problem to Belgian neutrality, in the sense that there was no treaty or convention explicitly outlawing it, and because after August 1914 it became a tool of war governance used by both sides. Since the early nineteenth century, experts on international law had gradually shifted from the ‘liberal’ assumption that it could never be legally (or morally) justified to hold non-combatants as prisoners of war to a slightly more compromising post-1870 position that suggested that it could be used legitimately as a security measure during the first weeks of mobilisation, to prevent foreigners from returning home with sensitive information about the movement of soldiers and equipment. A minority of jurists, including the German-born Cambridge Professor of International Law Lassa Oppenheim, argued that holding reservists and other mobilisables ‘either at once at the outbreak of the war or during the course of the war’ could be classed as a legitimate form of self-defence in the new age of mass conscription in Europe.7 However, the majority believed that retention of non-combatants beyond the early phases of armed conflict could only be justified so long as there were reasonable grounds for suspicions against them, and not just the fact of their nationality.8 The legal difficulties in holding individuals were further compounded by the fact that intelligence services—by the very nature of their modus operandi— were often unable publicly to reveal what their grounds for suspicion were,

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in order not to compromise their sources and, in many cases, in order not to give away the mere fact of their existence.9 In the eyes of most international jurists before and after 1914, including the German scholar Franz von Liszt, holding individual non-­ combatants for the full duration of a war could still not be justified at all, with the only positive legal defence being ‘reasonable and proportionate use of force’ to prevent illegal acts of sabotage or tangible instances of ‘assisting the enemy’.10 Even Oppenheim, who defended the right of belligerent states to intern male civilian enemy aliens of military age, still asserted the importance of guaranteeing that ‘their treatment as prisoners of war is the mildest treatment possible’, meaning, in effect, that they should be offered the same privileges as officer POWs, including exemption from the requirement to work.11 Under no circumstances were they to be classed as ‘criminals’ or ‘held in convict prisons’. Furthermore, they could ‘only be confined as an indispensable measure of safety; they must be properly fed and clothed; they must be allowed to communicate with their friends by post without charge; they may receive parcels from their friends without charge, and the like’.12 Due regard would also have to be given to the conventions arising from the Berlin Africa conference of 1884–85, which placed a special obligation on all European imperial powers to keep Africa neutral in the event of war and not to conduct white-­ against-­white military or espionage operations there. In fact, this worked both ways. Demonstrable violations of African neutrality might justify imprisonment or expulsion of individual enemy aliens (again with the caveats noted above), but collective detention of foreign whites in colonial camps would itself potentially constitute a gross violation of that neutrality, as well as upsetting the established racial hierarchies upon which European rule was supposed to depend.13 On the other hand, counting in the captor states’ favour when it came to war on European, and more broadly on non-African, soil was the fact that civilian internment did not actually constitute a formal breach of international law or treaties, so long as it did not take the form of ‘collective punishment’ (banned under article 50 of the 1907 HLKO) and provided there was no ‘unnecessarily cruel’ treatment.14 Paradoxically, this made it safer to intern whole groups rather than individuals. To take one example among many: in a much more careful use of words than in his Reichstag statement on Belgian neutrality, and doubtless on the advice of the legal department of the AA, Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, in a press release justifying the wholesale internment of male British civilians

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of military age on 6 November 1914, neatly pre-empted potential accusations of ‘collective punishment’ and ‘cruel treatment’, instead emphasising that this was a ‘balanced’ act of retaliation for the internment of Germans in Britain: Wanton cases of cruelty against Germans are by and large not in evidence as far as the English are concerned. But instances of unnecessarily harsh and unworthy treatment have come to light which at the very least indicate some degree of negligence on the part of servants of the British crown. Full redress cannot be sought through revenge against innocent people, nor through an exchange of letters, nor through the intervention of neutrals, nor through referring the matter to a court of arbitration. These matters are part of the stubborn arrogance with which England has offended against everything German, and we must include them in the balancing of accounts which we are determined to carry through against this island nation that insists on its unassailable position.15

This was also the line consistently pursued by the head of the AA’s legal department, Johannes Kriege, in his dealings with the Reichstag, the domestic and foreign press, and German and overseas officials. In May 1915, for instance, following an enquiry from a US diplomat in Bucharest, Kriege instructed the German consul-general there to inform his American colleague that ‘in so far as enemy civilians have been interned in Germany, this has been merely for purposes of retaliation’.16 The first two sections of this chapter will further consider what role civilian internment played in the warring governments’ perceptions of international law and the right to retaliate in kind in the event of abuses against civilian detainees committed by the opposing side. These two questions were indeed the main pre-occupations of jurists, senior bureaucrats and military officials when they came to formulate policies in specific response to actions taken by the enemy (as opposed to the internal security concerns at home and in occupied territories discussed in Chap. 3). However, it is also important to recognise that the purpose of internment could look very different when viewed through the eyes of lower level military commanders and officials, as opposed to policy-makers in the top tiers of government and the military. The strict administrative separation between civilian and military prisoners, and between ‘enemy alien’ and ‘internal enemy’ ­internees, which senior bureaucrats at least in the Interior and War Ministries of France, Britain, Germany and Austria-Hungary

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sought to uphold,17 often had far less meaning for those in charge of policing home front and occupied populations on a day-by-day and week-by-­ week basis. For them, as we shall see later on in the chapter, internment was less about grand strategy or große Politik, and more about wartime social control (although not yet—with the exception of the Turkish case— about bio-politics or demographic engineering).18 Finally, political movements and pressure groups could also see opportunities in internment for strengthening community ties or feelings of national solidarity. This could happen in several different contexts, some negative, others more positive. First, xenophobic groups might regard internment as a welcome prelude to mass expulsions of aliens and much stricter controls on immigration and naturalisation after the war. Second, support for one’s own fellow citizens interned in enemy countries helped to expand the notion of national belonging beyond existing frontiers, giving rise to new ways of imagining the state’s and civil society’s responsibility for looking after the interests of, and maintaining ties with, diaspora communities—or what was sometimes known as the ‘nation abroad’.19 Third, in multi-national empires like the Habsburg monarchy and Tsarist Russia, political grievances about how internment and ‘evacuations’ from border zones were organised were increasingly expressed in national as opposed to imperial terms. And last but not least, denial of material or moral support from home states could be a way of symbolically excluding prisoners from the ‘national community’, particularly if their patriotism or masculinity were placed into question by the very fact of their captivity.

International Law and Perceptions of the ‘Other’: The View of Officials Whatever the expectations were in August 1914, it soon became clear that the belligerent powers were determined de facto to hold certain categories of enemy alien in camps long after the initial mobilisation plans had been completed, and not merely to order their expulsion (as had happened in Paris in 1870) or restrict their movements within the home territory. In fact, after the first few months of the war, the question of whether internment of civilians was legal in an abstract sense was gradually eclipsed—at least in the minds of government officials rather than jurists—with other questions: What kind of conditions should internees be held in? Did they enjoy the same status and international protections as military prisoners of

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war? Should they be included on the lists of POWs sent to the ICRC in Geneva, and if so, were the captor powers obliged to reveal any other information apart from name, nationality and age (as rank clearly did not apply here)? Finally, under what circumstances, if any, could internees—young and old, male and female—be required to perform labour against their will? Unlike internal enemies, who in most countries still enjoyed the theoretical right to file legal appeals against their detention without trial, enemy alien internees did not have recourse to domestic courts in any national or colonial jurisdiction. Any formal reckoning of accounts, as Bethmann Hollweg suggested in his above-mentioned press release, would therefore have to await the end of the war. Perhaps in anticipation of this, it was the Central Powers who first began to collect evidence of the deliberate mistreatment of their subjects by the British, French, Belgians and Russians. As early as August 1914, the German Reich Office of Interior appointed one of its former ministerial directors, Dr Otto Just, as Reichskommissar zur Erörterung belgischer Gewalttätigkeiten gegen Deutsche (Reich Commissioner for the discussion of Belgian atrocities against Germans). His remit was to collect evidence, as a counter-weight to Allied propaganda concerning German misdeeds in Belgium, that German civilians living in Belgian territory had been mistreated in the early weeks of the war. Within a month Just’s remit had been extended: now he was appointed Reichskommissar zur Erörterung von Gewalttätigkeiten gegen deutsche Zivilpersonen in Feindesland (Reich Commissioner for the discussion of acts of violence committed against German civilians on enemy territory).20 Just made use of witness statements from Germans returning from abroad. A principal source was information gathered by Prussian officials at the border posts between Germany and the Netherlands in the administrative district (Regierungsbezirk) of Düsseldorf,21 as well as by the police authorities (Polizeibehörde) in Hamburg (before the British naval blockade effectively closed this city as a port of entry from January 1915).22 In spring 1915, having gathered quite a lot of eye-witness accounts, he set out to get some of this material into the press in neutral countries, but without much success, particularly as in order to do so, he seems to have deliberately tried to by-pass the AA’s official news agency (Auslandsnachrichtenstelle), for instance by urging chambers of commerce in different German cities to send it to their contacts abroad. If the response of the chamber of commerce in Düsseldorf is anything to go by, he was met with an understandable reluctance.23 Businesses wanted to conduct trade in neutral countries, not engage in propaganda.

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A report sent to the legal department of the AA at the end of 1915 indicated that Just had also compiled four internal memoranda to date: on conditions in the French camps; on the treatment of Germans deported from Morocco to Algeria; on alleged attempts by the French government to pressurise civilian prisoners from Alsace-Lorraine to renounce their German citizenship; and a negative comparison of the March 1915 ICRC report on camps in the British Isles with more critical witness statements obtained from former internees who had been able to return home after being released. Two further memoranda were in the process of being composed: one on the expulsion of settlers from German colonies, and the other on the treatment of German deportees in Tsarist Russia.24 Some of Just’s material was cited verbatim in the Reichstag Committee of Inquiry’s report into the causes and consequences of the war, published in 1927.25 So too were extracts from the separate ‘evidence’ collected by the Reich Colonial Office.26 Interestingly, though, the Reich Office of Interior was unable to persuade officials from other government departments to do more with it during the war itself, especially when it came to propaganda abroad. A similar degree of scepticism was also shown towards an unofficial report drawn up by the left-liberal Reichstag deputy Ernst Müller-Meiningen, which again relied largely on eye-witness testimony.27 The strongest objections came from the legal department of the AA, which argued that ‘the use of material such as this in communications with enemy and neutral governments and in the press should occur in a consistent manner and thus come from one source only [in einer Hand liegen muss]’, and further that uncorroborated witness statements alone should not be used to challenge the work of respected international bodies like the ICRC.28 Its caution in this respect was related especially to the memorandum comparing the ICRC report on British camps of March 1915 with the Reichskommissar’s findings, because some of its wording directly challenged the ICRC’s impartiality and accuracy. For instance, Just wrote: If one takes into account all these depositions made under oath [to members of my commission], then it is difficult to concur readily with the conclusions reached by the Red Cross representative following his tour of inspection ‘that the overall impression is very satisfactory’. Even the basic contention that the German government and the families of those still held in captivity need not worry greatly [ohne Beunruhigung sein können], does not appear to be entirely justified.29

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For this reason, the AA advised that the Reichskommissar’s reports should be used for internal circulation within government departments only, even though it also appeared to acknowledge the Reich Office of Interior’s point that ‘the memorandum contains an abundance of important material and is without doubt of considerable value, for the time being for individual government departments, and later [my italics, M.S.] as evidence of the unlawful actions of our enemies’.30 In Austria-Hungary, the common Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not seem to share such concerns about (indirectly) challenging the ICRC’s findings. Instead, between early 1915 and late 1916, it published four volumes of material on alleged atrocities committed against Habsburg subjects living or interned in Allied countries, also paying for them to be translated into English and French for distribution abroad.31 Most of the supporting material again came from eye-witness accounts from returnees, supplemented by information received from neutral diplomats and internees’ private letters intercepted by the POW section of the AOK’s central intelligence office. There was no explicit criticism of ICRC reports, but a clear sense that the Allies, particularly Britain and France, had managed to hide many of the abuses they had committed. The introduction, written in January 1915 and reprinted in all four volumes, claimed in respect to civilian internment that the British and French had already begun arresting Habsburg subjects before the formal declaration of hostilities on 6 August 1914, and continued: Even if one accepts that there are some justifications for preventing enemy males of military age from participating in the war, it is still the case that the methods which our opponents have brought to bear, and in particular the arrest and incarceration of old men, the sick, women and children, contravene the most basic principles of humanity.32

No direct mention was made of the Habsburg army’s own deportations of occupied Serb and Montenegrin civilians in 1914/15, and the establishment of camps at Arad and Nezsider to house them, but reasons were still offered as to why such actions might be entirely different to what the Allies were doing to Austro-Hungarian and German civilians trapped in their countries: Alongside the countless cases of failure to comply with the rules concerning use of illegal types of munitions, the Hague Convention on the laws and

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customs of land warfare and the Geneva Convention come the terrible atrocities committed by Serbian and Montenegrin troops. This unrestrained form of warfare, together with the horrific and insidious participation of the whole population in the fighting provides fresh evidence of the wildness [Verwilderung] which has seized hold of the people of these two states.33

Finally, the Allies’ use of black soldiers to guard Habsburg and German civilians held in (and subsequently deported from) North,  West and Central Africa was condemned as a breach of ‘European conventions’ [europäische Völkerrecht] since the British, French and Belgian authorities could offer no guarantees that the ‘wild and half-wild hordes’ [Wilde und Halbwilde] who made up the ranks of their colonial armies ‘will stick within the rules of warfare determined by international law’.34 There is no evidence of any official response from Britain, France or Belgium to these volumes. As the leading Catholic power in Europe, the Habsburgs’ principal intention may anyway have been to pull together some useful material in line with the increasingly pro-active stance of the Vatican on the issue of prisoner treatment and exchanges.35 For the Allied powers, however, the question was more how to link the civilian internment phenomenon with their ‘othering’ of the main (non-Catholic) enemy, Germany, and the ‘Prussian militarists’ in particular. The latter were held to be responsible for a whole range of unspeakable atrocities committed against civilians in occupied Belgium and France. They were painted as ‘intrinsic[ally] evil’ in Allied propaganda, and not just as breakers of international law or violators of specific customs in relation to the treatment of enemy civilians in wartime.36 Individual testimonies from internees in German (or Habsburg) hands seemed less important to creating this message, and the accuracy of ICRC reports on particular camps on the German front does not seem to have been contested, even in internal government circles. Indeed, if anything, the head of Whitehall’s POW department, Lord Newton—like his German counterparts in the legal department of the AA—was concerned to lower the temperature rather than rouse public opinion over this issue. Speaking in the House of Lords on 22 February 1917, he countered criticism made of a book by the Anglican Bishop Herbert Bury on his visit to the  Ruhleben camp near Berlin for being too ‘pro-German’ by arguing that ‘[t]here was nothing to be gained by exaggerating the conditions of the prisoners in Germany or elsewhere’.37

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Even so, alongside the POW department, the British government had set up a secret Committee on the Treatment by the Enemy of British Prisoners, which collected statements from repatriated civilian internees as well as military personnel. Both bodies were housed within the Foreign Office, but operated according to separate principles and agendas. The Committee on the Treatment by the Enemy of British Prisoners was nominally headed by Sir Robert Younger, a leading high court judge, while the interviews themselves were conducted by members of the civilian legal profession under the supervision of an American, Adelaide Livingstone, who had settled in Britain and was married to a British army officer.38 Among the most interesting group of repatriated civilians interviewed by Livingstone and her legal team were a small number of British women who were captured by the Germans at sea and held for a few weeks in the female barracks at the Holzminden camp. Ostensibly, the central issue was that Germany appeared to have broken its reciprocal agreement with Britain not to intern women, although in fact this was a difficult allegation to substantiate given that the women concerned were released and allowed to travel home after a relatively short period. More serious, from Livingstone’s viewpoint, was the evidence that these witnesses provided of the ‘disgusting condition[s]’ which the much larger group of French and Belgium women were still expected to endure after months and even years of detention at Holzminden. It was alleged, for instance, that middle-class female prisoners were placed in the same barracks as Belgian and French prostitutes deported from Brussels, Antwerp and Lille, and that male prisoners and guards had access to the women’s compound throughout the day and the night. In the eyes of British officials, this was not only a dereliction of the duty to protect women and children from ‘moral’ harm, but also indicated an alarmingly cavalier attitude towards the maintenance of class distinctions: Many of the women in the camp were of the lowest possible character, and many of them were horribly diseased… until the spring of this year all alike lived together, bathed together and used the same sanitary accommodation… [T]he most open immorality has been habitual, and no restraint imposed, even in the interest of the children, who have been left to grow familiar with the sight of vice, and in some cases to suffer contamination themselves. Not only is there free communication between the men’s and women’s quarters during the day, but at night the men are able to climb the barrier, and habitually use the opportunity of doing so. Irregular births have

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occurred in the camp… The German soldiers on guard have themselves been among the offenders, and the officer who is second in command of the camp is stated to have been as bad as they.39

British views of the innately violent (and, at times, ‘bestial’ or sexually perverse) nature of ‘Prussian militarism’40 were also shared to some extent by neutral US officials stationed in Europe, including those responsible for safeguarding the welfare of civilian and military prisoners in their capacity as diplomatic representatives of the ‘protecting power’. This applied in particular to those diplomats posted to London and Berlin between 1914 and 1917. True, the US ambassadors in London (Walter Hines Page) and Berlin (James W. Gerard) were officially committed to not taking sides. Instead, in Gerard’s words, they agreed a policy of doing ‘all in our power to prevent an increase of bitterness which seems to have arisen between the German and the English peoples, and to make it possible for the two countries to become friends again on the close of the war’.41 This meant, among other things, writing inspection reports on military and civilian camps which used ‘moderate’ or ‘diplomatic’ language in order not to stir up mutual antagonisms or give cause for further misunderstandings. In private, however, some of the American officials stationed in Berlin found this principle hard to live by. In a letter to his father-in-law in December 1914, for instance, the embassy’s first secretary, Joseph C. Grew, gave vent to his inner frustrations: Whatever may be our sympathy for individual Germans, admiration for the great fighting machine and naval exploits which have been clean and above-­ board and in accordance with the provisions of international law, we are, at heart, entirely pro-Ally. We are opposed to the German cause, and all it stands for, the origin of the war, the method of conducting it, the dropping of bombs on defenseless cities, killing innocent people, the shooting of non-­ combatants, the violation of the Red Cross, the maiming of the wounded – all these things have horrified and disgusted us as much as they have you – so far as they are true, though we are convinced – with our many sources of information – that of every ten such reports published and told in the US, nine are exaggerated or false. We believe that a German victory would be a step backward in civilization and a misfortune to mankind, and we realize that if militarism is not now killed once and for ever, the progress of the world will be retarded for many generations to come.42

While the relationship between US diplomatic representatives in Berlin and Vienna and the rulers of Germany and Austria-Hungary grew ever

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more strained in the count-down to January 1917, largely for reasons unconnected to internment, relations between the American embassies in London and Berlin and the British government in Whitehall remained ‘cordial’ throughout the period of US neutrality and indeed beyond. Like the ICRC, neutral American inspectors typically wrote positive reports on British camps, as did their Swiss counterparts after January 1917.43 This may also explain why the Foreign Office periodically published verbatim reports of its correspondence with Page and Gerard on matters connected with military and civilian prisoners, mainly in the form of miscellaneous parliamentary white papers, in spite of protests from Berlin that this breached diplomatic protocol.44 The ‘neutral’ voices of Page, Gerard and the ICRC indeed were a far more effective propaganda tool than the legal dispositions collected for the Foreign Office by Livingstone and her team, which served a number of internal war-related purposes but were (deliberately?) not put into the public domain, perhaps for fear of contestation.45 However, there was one Allied country where US diplomats and the British government did run into occasional problems before 1917 concerning treatment of civilian internees: the self-governing dominion of Canada. The issue here pertained to one of the clauses in the Order in Council issued by the Governor-General in Ottawa in September 1914 under the War Measures Act, which allowed the militia in the different provinces and remoter territories of the Canadian federation to treat enemy alien internees as prisoners of war according to the same principles as rank-and-file military POWs. This meant in effect that they were no longer regarded as civilians and could be required to work ‘in keeping with their war prisoner status’, as stipulated under the 1907 HLKO.  It also meant that, at a time of high unemployment among aliens, they would be able to maintain themselves rather than become a burden on local welfare resources because they would be ‘paid a nominal military wage’.46 As the war continued, thousands of destitute enemy nationals, most of them Habsburg-subject Ukrainians, as well as a smaller number of Croats, Poles and poorer economic migrants from Germany, were despatched to labour camps in isolated frontier districts in the Canadian west, where they were put to work on various building and public infrastructure programmes. In eastern Canada, in non-working camps such as Amherst and Halifax in Nova Scotia, enemy civilians, including some deported from the West Indies, Bermuda and other Atlantic island possessions, were also held alongside military prisoners.47 When the German government got wind of this via American diplomatic reports, it made protests to London on the

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grounds that the commonly accepted customs of war dictated that civilians should not be categorised or treated as military prisoners. It also objected to the fact that German subjects held in labour camps in the Canadian west were being paid at the ‘nominal military rate’, whereas Germany claimed to use enemy civilian labour on a voluntary basis only, and to set wages according to the local rate paid to German workers. Anxious to be seen to be looking after the interests of its subjects abroad, Berlin repeatedly threatened to initiate reprisals against all British civilian internees in Germany unless the ‘abuses’ in Canada were rectified.48 The diplomatic dispute over the situation in Canada can be identified as significant for a number of reasons. First, it is possibly the only real instance where a part of the British empire pursued a particular policy in relation to treatment of enemy civilian internees that was at odds with the general line emanating from London. Whitehall disapproved of what Ottawa had done in no uncertain terms, and eventually succeeded in forcing a climb down before reprisals were enacted by Germany. The then Colonial Secretary, Andrew Bonar Law, took the lead on this, demanding to know from the Governor-General on 8 March 1916 how Canadian policy could possibly be compatible ‘with the assurance that has been given to the German Government that no civilian prisoner is compelled to work’.49 Second, Berlin’s decision to pursue its complaint in public, even though it too used forced enemy civilian labour, may shed new light not only on the particularity but also the local and global connectedness of Germany’s contribution to the First World War internment phenomenon.50 Third, and related to this, Canada’s justification for its use of internee labour went to the heart of the question as to whether civilian prisoners enjoyed the same or a different (perhaps more, perhaps less privileged) status to military prisoners of war, and whether this matter could or should be decided by local traditions and community values as opposed to imperial diktat or international law. This was an issue that also preyed on the minds of German, US and British officials, albeit for different reasons. American diplomats, for instance, were divided in their opinion on Ottawa’s polices. Some bought into the justifications of Canadian immigration officials that the prisoners were mainly migrant labourers ‘of the lowest sort’ and might actually benefit from the ‘hygienic’ conditions and disciplined lifestyle offered by the camp environment. However, others were ‘less inclined to suspend judgement on what amounted to the imprisonment and forced labour of civilians’.51

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At the international level, conventions like the HLKO of 1899 and 1907 did not offer much guidance on the issue. Canada’s case was that internment in labour camps was an act both of humanity and economic common sense designed to avoid the exposure of poorer aliens to destitution and/or xenophobic violence and very much in keeping with the values of its local communities. Regardless of this, officials in Whitehall were convinced that it was in Britain’s national and imperial interest to work with American diplomats in order to dissuade Canada from continuing to use civilian prisoners of war as a source of forced labour. Britain’s stance in turn exposed the fact that what at first appeared as a manifestation of Canadian exceptionalism in respect to the treatment of civilian internees actually ended up highlighting important features of Germany’s local and cross-border interactions with the rest of the world. From the German point of view, Canada, and by extension, Britain had been at fault, but not because forced labour in itself was a violation of the rules and customs of war. On the contrary, Reich and Prussian officials believed that international law allowed forced labour in some circumstances. The threshold had apparently been met in occupied France and Belgium because the growing phenomenon of Arbeitsverweigerung (work refusal) threatened ‘public order and safety’ and thereby constituted an impediment to the lawful administration of an occupied territory, a test which—in German eyes at least—could not be said to apply in the Canadian case.52 However, this did not mean that occupied French and Belgian civilians deported to Germany for the offence of Arbeitsverweigerung had suddenly acquired the same legal status as military prisoners of war. Indeed, in April 1916, the Unterkunftsdepartement of the Prussian Ministry of War had circulated its own definition to the acting military commanders on the home front and to the War Ministries of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg explicitly refuting any such suggestion. ‘Zivilgefangene’ [as distinct from ‘Kriegsgefangene’] are enemy civilians… who were not serving in a hostile army when the war broke out and have not enlisted since, but who have nonetheless been placed in a German prisoner-­ of-­war camp – regardless of whether they are still of arms-bearing age and whether they have been found to be permanently unfit for active service or not.53

True, ‘military necessity’ might in some circumstances justify going beyond the law when it came to treatment of ‘Zivilgefangene’, although

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the Prussian War Ministry was unable or unwilling to specify exactly when and where such circumstances might arise, contenting itself with the notion that this was a matter for jurists, not soldiers.54 In practice, it had no real say in what happened in occupied territories anyway; this was down to the Supreme Command (OHL) and individual German commanders in the field. As far as the home front was concerned, however, in February 1917, it accepted the advice of the Reich Chancellor, the AA, the Reich Office of Interior and the civilian occupation administration in Brussels (against the initial objections of Ludendorff and the general staff) that the deportations from occupied Belgium since October 1916 had to stop for legal and political reasons. By June 1917, it also reluctantly agreed that the only labour carried out by enemy civilians on German soil (as opposed to occupied territory) had to be ‘voluntary’ in nature, and that the 20,000 to 25,000 Belgian forced labourers (out of an initial 60,000) who remained in Germany but had so far not signed contracts had to be allowed to return home.55 The human consequences of these rulings were of little significance to officials in the Prussian Ministry of War; what concerned them more was the bureaucratic implications, in the sense that all ‘Zivilgefangene’ who ‘voluntarily’ signed work contracts—and not just the Belgian deportees of 1916/17—had to be reclassified as ‘free labourers’ (freie feindliche Ausländer).56 They were still subject to the standard residency and other police restrictions imposed on all enemy aliens since the outbreak of war, but were no longer ‘prisoners’ in an administrative sense and, as we saw in the previous chapter, were no longer included on the lists sent to the ICRC in Geneva. This locally and globally entangled but still nationally-orientated form of thinking in effect allowed the Prussian War Ministry to have it both ways: unlike in Canada, there was no forced labour for civilian enemy prisoners in Germany, or at least no forced labour that couldn’t easily be concealed behind careful use of bureaucratic terminology including official reclassification of prisoners as freie feindliche Ausländer.57 At the same time, it was still possible to follow the wishes of commanders in the field, who made it clear that French and Belgian civilian deportees were not to be sent back to the Etappengebieten if they were physically unable to work (as well as if they were considered to pose a security risk).58 If they were fit to work, on the other hand, then there was increasing pressure from early 1917 onwards—and again from early 1918—for them to be repatriated, with or without their consent: all that was needed was a formal request to the relevant Etappeninspekteur from the commandant of the camp where the prisoner or prisoners in

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question were being held.59 Labour shortages at local level were the driving force behind these shifts, but they also reflected growing political antagonism towards those groups, German and alien, who were seen to be an economic or social drain on the national and  global  war effort (socalled ‘useless eaters’). As we shall see in the section after next, this way of thinking was present lower down the military and civilian hierarchy, and had begun to influence policies on the ground, even before the new head of the Supreme Command, Paul von Hindenburg, made his famous assertion in September 1916 that the entire civilian war economy should be reorganised according to the principle: ‘he who does not work shall not eat’.60 First, though, we will turn to the question of reprisals and punishments at the local, national and global levels.

Reprisals and Punishments The official collection of evidence of prisoner abuse, whether for internal ministerial or public consumption, gave rise to speculation about the possibility—and the political legitimacy, whether defined in national, international or local terms—of reprisal measures. In the historiography on this issue, a difference of interpretation has emerged as to whether reprisal policy was driven by, and a reflection of, the broader ‘intoxicating’ and ‘brutalising’ impact of the war, or whether it served more rational and utilitarian objectives, in particular forcing the opposing side to agree to end whatever abuses or breaches of international conventions it had been accused of.61 The warring governments were of course determined to present themselves as falling into the latter bracket, and were quick to advertise any ‘successes’ they had in terms of compelling the enemy to back down, particularly when it appeared to lend retrospective moral and political justification to their own actions. Nonetheless, there are still strong reasons for believing that utilitarian considerations of reciprocity (the so-called Gegenseitigkeitsprinzip) did act as a significant check on the extent and brutality of reprisal measures at the national and international levels. An important local exception would be the German army on the western front in 1918, which—according to Heather Jones—entered a phase of ‘unchecked’ and ‘radicalis[ed]’ abuse of its POW labour battalions following an already very brutal series of reprisals in 1916 and 1917.62 Before 1918, however, targeted acts of retaliation against POWs, and their polar opposite, favoured treatment for particular national, ethnic or religious groups, were both primarily motivated by ‘national interest’, in other

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words by  state-directed political-strategic and economic considerations, and not by the ‘intoxicating’ desire to escalate violence against the enemy for its own sake.63 As Uta Hinz, among others, emphasises, when it comes to camps on the home fronts, it is also important to distinguish between controlled reprisals and sanctions ordered ‘from above’ on the one hand, and ad hoc or ‘wild’ punishments against individual prisoners on the other.64 The latter were usually determined at local level, in situations where prisoners were accused of breaking one or more camp rules, ranging from minor cases of insubordinate behaviour, drunkenness or theft to escapes, attempted escapes, acts of sabotage and physical assaults on guards. ICRC reports, as well as eye-witness accounts provided by repatriated prisoners during or after the war, bear witness to a wide variety of penal sanctions used to enforce discipline among civilian as well as military detainees in both European and non-European/colonial settings.65 There seems little doubt that some camp regimes were extremely brutal in this respect, although much depended on the attitude of individual commandants. In the Austrian camp at Steinklamm, for instance, recalcitrant Italian civilian prisoners were on occasion tied to a pole and beaten, a punishment conventionally reserved in the Habsburg (and German) armies for cases of military insubordination.66 At Thalerhof, near Graz, women among the suspect ‘Russophile’ prisoners were sexually humiliated by being forced to undress and shower in front of camera-wielding and jeering male guards.67 And at three other camps in Austrian Styria—Wagna bei Leibnitz, St. Michael and Premstätten—around 4000 Habsburg-subject Polish ‘returnees’ (male seasonal workers who had illicitly journeyed back from Germany since the start of the war) and several hundred Ruthenians (Austrian Ukrainians) were selected to work on punishing road-building and infrastructure projects for the invading imperial and royal forces in Serbia in early December 1914. According to one source, only 1500 of the Poles were brought back to the Austrian interior when Habsburg troops withdrew for a second time from Serbia in January 1915; it is not clear how many of the Ruthenians survived.68 On a more minor level, for eighteen months from November 1914, British confinees in the Lower Austrian districts of St. Pölten and Waidhofen an der Thaya were singled out by being barred from visiting local bars, restaurants and coffee shops, unlike their French and Russian counterparts. The reason given was ‘the especially dismal position’ of Austro-Hungarian subjects living in Britain and its overseas empire since

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the outbreak of the war.69 However, although state-directed, this was not a formal reprisal in the sense that no specific demands were made of, or communicated to, Britain. Rather, it is best seen as an act of petty retribution. It was also rescinded by order of the KÜA in May 1916 after not only ICRC reports, but also secret intelligence gathered by the POW department of the AOK’s central intelligence office revealed that Britain actually treated its civilian internees relatively well compared to other enemy states.70 Attention now shifted to France, where, according to information sent by Habsburg diplomats in Bern to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna in June 1916, ‘the terrible situation faced by civilian prisoners is aggravated by the reduction of their food allowance at every unfavourable turn in the war fortunes of our enemies… [and] represents an ever-­ growing, tangible threat to the lives of these defenceless victims’.71 Even worse conditions were reported in French territories outside Europe. In Dahomey in West Africa in 1914–15, black guards were allegedly ordered to use ox-hide whips and thumbscrews on the German prisoners held at the civilian camp at Abomey.72 Likewise, at the fortress camp at Sebdou in north-western Algeria, German internees complained of the symbolic violence done to their status as white Europeans when they were forced to sweep the streets of the camp and local town in front of Arab ‘natives’.73 In December 1915, the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs received information from the ambassador in Madrid that Habsburg civilians held in Morocco and Algeria, having benefitted from some improvements in their conditions over the summer, were again being ‘forced to suffer under French capriciousness and cruelty’.74 Another report from the Austrian Red Cross noted particular concerns about the treatment of Austro-Hungarian civilians held in the prison at Berrouaghia, Algeria, and called for strong protests to be made to the French government.75 Jean-Claude Farcy notes the harsh regimen prevailing in the punitive civilian camps (camps disciplinaires) in metropolitan France, where a mixture of indisciplinés and anciens condamnés (foreign convicts) were held alongside internees considered to have shown ‘militant pro-German feelings’ [une germanophilie militante]. By November 1917, four such dépôts were in operation.76 Inspecting the Spirit Lake camp in Canada’s remote Yukon Territory in 1916, one US diplomat was concerned when inmates reported instances of ‘beatings, solitary confinement, insults and neglect’.77 In mainland Britain and on the Isle of Man, most internees who broke the rules were ‘simply “admonished”’, although custodial sentences were

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occasionally imposed by civilian criminal courts in more serious incidents of theft and violence, including one isolated case of manslaughter at Knockaloe.78 In camps in Germany, as in Britain, there was officially no use of physical sanctions against civilian inmates, with the use of ‘arrest’ (solitary confinement with restricted diet) being the most common penalty for minor to medium infractions.79 However, although formally abolished for the whole German army outside the field of operations in May 1917, Anbinden (tying to a pole or tree) was permitted as a punishment for military, and possibly civilian, POWs in occupied territories from 1916.80 The British civilian internees at Ruhleben were treated very mildly compared to this, but were kept in line through the threat (occasionally carried out) of being sent either to the isolation cells at the Stadtvogtei (criminal prison) in Berlin-Moabit or to the much worse internment facilities at Havelberg, where they would be denied access to Red Cross food parcels and other ‘privileges’. All that was required for these and other sanctions to be put into effect was the approval of the camp commandant.81 In more serious cases, where judicially sanctioned punishments such as the death penalty or substantial terms of imprisonment in correctional institutions run by the Prussian army or Justice Ministry (or their equivalents in Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg) were sought, referrals had to be made to ‘extraordinary war courts’, up to and including the Reichsmilitärgericht in Berlin-Charlottenburg.82 Under the wartime state-­ of-­siege, extraordinary military courts could try enemy civilians and military POWs  as well as German nationals for a variety of political or security-related offences, whether committed in or outside camps.83 Officially sanctioned non-judicial reprisals, however, were a different matter altogether, with the evidence suggesting that they could not be carried out except with the express approval of army commanders or state departments at the highest levels—even though responsibility for selecting the actual ‘victims’ was usually handed to those lower down the chain of command. The Austro-Hungarian chief of general staff, Conrad von Hoetzendorff, for instance, actively promoted the concept of ‘Right of Defence in a War Emergency’ (Kriegsnotwehrrecht), insisting that officers in the field took all measures deemed necessary to protect their troops from ‘underhand’ attacks launched by enemy civilian populations.84 Alongside summary executions and use of civilians as human shields, hostage-­taking was widely practised by the Habsburg military during its operations in hostile territory in 1914–15, and the targets usually belonged to the more privileged sections of society: mayors, businessmen, local

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­ oliticians, doctors, priests and so on. As we saw in the previous section, p the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna was already justifying this in January 1915 as a ‘measured’ response to ‘illegal’ forms of fighting supposedly practised by guerrilla fighters (the Komitadji) in Serbia and Montenegro.85 In the first months of the war, 13,000 Belgian and 10,000 French hostages were also seized by the German armies operating in western Europe, with the same aim in mind. If, after a certain amount of time, there were no more ‘illegal’ acts of sabotage in particular areas of occupied enemy territory, the hostages might be released and sent home—or even repatriated to non-occupied France.86 The French army seized a much smaller number of German hostages from the tiny area of Alsace, including Mulhouse, which it briefly occupied on 8–10 August 1914—earning the apparent retrospective disapproval of the President, Raymond Poincaré.87 It also forced the French War and Interior Ministries to enter into a long-running ‘war of words’ with Berlin over its refusal to hand them over. This ended in threats of retaliation and eventually, in June 1915, the deportation of forty French-speaking women from the German-controlled part of Alsace whose husbands were believed to be fighting with the French forces, and their retention as bargaining counters at the Holzminden camp. When the French army still refused to release ‘its’ civilian hostages as part of a broader exchange agreement reached with Germany in January 1916, the French-Alsatian women at Holzminden were also held back from the scheme.88 Meanwhile, by the second half of 1915, even harsher reprisals were being carried out in response to developments in the treatment of prisoners and internees at the global, or at least the trans-regional level—with the ICRC again making substantial efforts both to mediate solutions in particular instances and, by 1917/18, to agree on generic rules about usage. The most publicised case affecting civilian prisoners revolved around camps in West and North Africa. After the French were accused of a variety of abuses, including deporting some 30,000 German military POWs from Europe to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco in 1915, holding German missionaries and colonial officials seized in Togo and Cameroon, including their wives and children, in terrible conditions in Dahomey, and equally forcing over 200 Moroccan Germans to remain in sub-standard places of detention in Algeria, the Prussian Ministry of War ordered 30,000 French  military POWs and a further 250 French civilians to be sent to work camps in German-occupied Latvia.89 The crisis ended when the French agreed in June 1916 to close the camps at Dahomey and in North Africa, and return

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all German (and Austro-Hungarian) prisoners back to mainland France, ‘except those serving prison sentences’.90 The most sick among them were also made eligible for transfer into Swiss internment under the January 1916 Franco-German exchange agreement reached at Bern.91 A second instance came in 1917 and involved German civilian prisoners captured by the Belgians in German East Africa (Tabora) in 1916, among them twenty-five women and children. The latter were forced marched through Belgian Congo to the west coast of Africa, and from there deported by sea, first to Britain (where the authorities wanted to set them free and expel them to Germany) and then to Le Havre in France (global headquarters of the free Belgian army and government). The Prussian Ministry of War subsequently ordered that twenty-five ‘prominent’ Belgian women from the General Government (the civilian-administered part of occupied Belgium) be seized and taken to Holzminden in retaliation.92 Elisabeth Rotten’s philanthropic organisation in Berlin offered to mediate on behalf of the ICRC, a process which took almost a year to complete. As she reported in November 1917: The negotiations dragged on, since Belgium was only willing to release them as part of a general exchange. The German authorities brought hostages to Holzminden in order to put further pressure on Belgium. Now, at last, an agreement has been reached.93

Finally, reprisals have been an area where historians deploying comparative methodologies have identified certain German peculiarities. This applies, for instance, in the case of the behaviour of the German armies on the western front in 1918. Following a previous cycle of violent reprisals against military POWs in this theatre of the war in 1916–17, the so-called thirty-kilometre agreements, foisted on Britain and France by Germany in April–May 1917, stipulated that POW labour battalions on both sides of the western front were to be withdrawn to what was considered to be a safe distance from the firing lines. This was an understanding which, according to Heather Jones, the German military later reneged on but the Allied side adhered to with ‘remarkabl[e] tenaci[ty] for the remainder of the conflict’.94 Situational factors on the western front in 1918 and growing lack of political or bureaucratic oversight over the strategy of the German armies in the field in the last months of the war have been blamed for this ‘radicalisation’,95 although it is also worth noting that reprisals were still being organised by central government departments in Berlin as

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well. In January 1918, for instance, the Prussian Ministry of War ordered that 1000 civilians, 600 men and 400 women, be seized from among the ‘high society of Northern France’ [haute société du Nord de la France], with the women being sent as hostages to Holzminden and the men to forced labour details in German-occupied Latvia. This was in connection with the on-going row over France’s continued refusal to allow German colonial settlers to return to Cameroon and Togo, even though Allied military operations had ceased there in 1915–16.96 In a more introspective way, Isabel Hull has cited certain ‘destructive’ traditions in ‘German military culture’ going back to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 and the violent colonial campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a contributory factor in Germany’s particularly brutal treatment of occupied civilians and POWs in the latter part of the war.97 However, irrespective of what might be said about local conditions on the western front and in the Etappengebieten, especially in 1918, the case for ‘unchecked’ violence as a marker of supposed German singularity stands up less well in respect to reprisals against enemy civilian (and military) prisoners across all fighting zones, as well as the home front, in 1916–17. Whereas legal experts in the civilian offices of state in Berlin, above all the AA, had played a key role in ending the deportations from Belgium in early 1917, behind the scenes there was in fact considerably more agreement between them and the Prussian War Ministry when it came to ordering limited reprisals for Allied ‘misdeeds’ against German subjects abroad. This again highlights the importance of avoiding a ‘one-­dimensional’, purely comparative or inward-looking approach to Germany’s contribution to the internment phenomenon (or to wartime violence in general), while overlooking questions of inter-connectivity at global as well as local level. In Berlin, controlled, proportionate retaliation was considered essential, not just for military but for ‘prestige’ and propagandistic reasons. Only thus could Germany be seen to be looking after the interests of overseas Germans, whose cause was continually taken up by transnational networks of militant nationalist groups at home and abroad. In October 1916, none other than Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg himself intervened in the question of use of reprisals against enemy alien prisoners, setting out in a nine-page memorandum to rebut rumours of split between the AA and the Prussian Ministry of War on this issue. The Auswärtiges Amt is not, as the War Ministry claims, fundamentally opposed to the idea of reprisals, but rather has willingly supported such

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measures in instances where they seem necessary and appropriate. It has nonetheless, on my approval, upheld certain pre-conditions which have proved the test of time and which have also met the general approval of the War Ministry and the overwhelming majority in the Reichstag. These pre-­ conditions are 1) that there is clear evidence that the wrongdoing, for which the reprisal has been instigated, has actually taken place; 2) that a culpable act of criminality or negligence has been committed by the enemy government in question, and not just by a lower organ; 3) that the reprisal itself constitutes no more than like for like; and 4) that explicit acts of barbarism are excluded. Only in these circumstances – which make it self-evident that they are not about revenge but merely about protection of our own subjects in enemy captivity – can reprisals be justified.98

Earlier that same month, he had also complained about the lack of international protests following Russia’s deportation of German civilians from East Prussia in 1914.99 German policies towards enemy civilians, including reprisal measures, he seemed to imply, were simply a justifiable reaction to the way in which the Allies had been fighting what was tantamount to a global war against German citizens since August 1914. In fact, in his eyes, as well as those of the AA, German policy was not only more measured than that of Britain and France but also considerably less brutal than the actions taken by Tsarist forces in Eastern Europe in 1914–15. For the AA, there was also the matter of the Anglo-French forces operating in Cameroon and Togo during the same period, who, it was alleged, had carried out the ‘unjustifiable and illegal removal of the civil [i.e. white colonial] population from their private occupations’ in contravention of the international agreement reached in Berlin in 1884–85 to ‘abstain from war measures in Colonial territory in Africa’.100 These same points were made in the report published by the Reichstag committee of inquiry in 1927, while the more violent German reprisals and civilian hostage-taking on the western front in 1914 and 1917–18 were, perhaps not surprisingly, left out of the account.101

Internment and Social Control Viewing First World War internment as a deliberate ‘“act of reprisal” by one government against another’, as both Bethmann Hollweg and the former Ruhleben inmate John Davidson Ketchum did in his 1965 book, makes sense if our interest is mainly in ‘grand strategy’ (große Politik) and

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its key framers. From this perspective, indeed, civilian prisoners appear as ‘mere implements of state policy’ and bargaining counters in wartime diplomatic negotiations.102 However, those less powerful servants of the state who were given responsibility for operationalising enemy alien measures on the ground often saw things differently. In particular, police and welfare officials were necessarily influenced by pre-war experiences and policy assumptions, as well as by their own multi-layered understandings of what the wartime emergency and the new ‘Right of Defence’ (Kriegsnotwehrrecht) might mean in societal terms. Categorising members of resident (urban) populations as ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, or ‘desirables’ and ‘non-desirables’, according to their social position and ‘settled’ or ‘non-settled’ status as well as their nationality, race or religion indeed had a history stretching back into the policing, judicial and welfare practices of the nineteenth century (and even earlier).103 Before 1914, non-naturalised immigrants in Europe and North and South America would usually only come into prolonged contact with the local state authorities for two reasons: either because they had been arrested on suspicion of having committed one or more criminal offences, or because they had fallen into destitution and homelessness, whether due to unemployment, ill-health, death of, or abandonment by a spouse, or some other cause. Fear of the ‘alien pauper’ or ‘foreign law-breaker’ was indeed a principal motive behind much nineteenth-century legislation restricting peacetime inward migration, tightening passport and police registration requirements, or allowing the expulsion of ‘unwanted’ outsiders.104 In some states, notably Imperial Germany, seasonal workers from neighbouring countries were treated as a particular category of (un)desirable migrant from the late nineteenth century, and were more closely controlled by the state authorities in case they broke their legally binding contracts with private employers or failed to return home at the end of their temporary work permits.105 Yet certain categories of non-foreign itinerant labourer—especially those labelled as ‘Gypsies’, ‘tramps’, ‘beggars’, ‘hawkers’ or ‘work-shy’—were also subject to state surveillance and various forms of social disciplining through local or regional police ­measures, including, in some cases, incarceration in workhouses or ‘houses of correction’ following an initial period of judicial detention, a phenomenon known as korrektionelle Nachhaft.106 With the outbreak of war in 1914, resident enemy aliens were at greater risk of falling into destitution for a variety of reasons. First, any financial support from home was usually cut off, at least until indirect routes via

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neutral countries or embassies could be established.107 The ICRC’s AIPG facilitated the delivery of relief parcels and letters to the military and civilian prisoners who appeared on its lists, but not to those ‘stranded’ outside camps. Second, xenophobic employers and landlords might throw non-­ interned enemy civilians out of their jobs, businesses or homes. Third, the wives and children of interned men, or black colonial subjects from outside Europe, might find that they had no welfare provision at all, with patriotic wartime charities refusing to treat them as worthy clients for relief. Fourth, seasonal workers might be refused permission to travel home for security reasons during the initial phase of mobilisation, but again find themselves temporarily out of work due to the economic effects of the same mobilisation measures. In Germany, this latter problem was dealt with quite effectively by decisions finalised on 7 November 1914 to retain seasonal labourers from Russia and Russian Poland and require them to sign new work contracts. By this time, the early wartime unemployment was beginning to dissipate anyway.108 Yet other enemy alien groups—particularly those who were not initially interned, including single women in part-time or irregular employment and married women previously dependent on their now interned husbands’ wages—found themselves in an increasingly precarious socio-economic position. Even if they had reasonably good savings to start with, these typically ran out within a matter of weeks or months of the start of the war.109 In his recent study of late Victorian Britain’s ‘empire of camps’, Aidan Forth establishes an important link between methods of imperial rule designed to maintain ‘order’ among rebellious, destitute or disease-ridden colonial populations in Africa and Asia and the introduction of new welfare and social hygiene measures at home aimed at ‘disciplining’ the urban under-class, including recently arrived immigrants. ‘Famine’ and ‘plague’ camps for non-whites in the poorest parts of the world, including India, and workhouses for the unemployed and ‘work-shy’ in Europe and North America, he argues, were the product of ‘shared mindsets and mentalities… that circulated throughout the empires and cultures of Western civilization’ and were thus by no means unique to the United Kingdom and its overseas possessions.110 An especially striking example of the continued influence of pre-1914 local and global thinking around poverty, public health and immigration controls on wartime policy towards enemy aliens comes from Habsburg Austria. Here, Hans Swoboda, the senior Ministry of Interior official placed in charge of civilian internee affairs by the KÜA, used the categories ‘bemittelt’ and ‘mittellos’ (‘with’ or ‘without financial

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means’) as a primary indicator of the degree of danger posed by individual enemy aliens and as a key factor in deciding whether they should be interned or merely subject to residency restrictions (konfiniert). Under this system, Russians were more likely to be interned than French and British subjects not because of their nationality, and not because they were considered to be politically more dangerous, but because they were more regularly labelled by Habsburg Imperial officials investigating their individual circumstances as ‘mittellos’.111 Yet there are also traces of class discrimination towards impoverished and irregularly employed foreign (and especially central and eastern European) migrant workers in several other belligerent states, including Canada and the United States, where peacetime anti-alien legislation was only in its infancy. As we have seen, interning poor and unemployed enemy aliens, and in the Canadian case, requiring them to work in the same fashion as military POWs, was presented by local officials as an act of humanity as well as a necessary means of overcoming a distinct, war-related social threat.112 Even if they were not judged to be at high risk of destitution, enemy aliens might still be labelled a social, medical or moral ‘menace’ by officials on the ground because of their newly found and, in some contexts, highly conspicuous status as ‘outsiders’. Thus, by their mere presence, they might be accused of exhausting scare local resources, of engaging in ‘work refusal’ or of driving up food prices, particularly in localities that played host to wartime camps. At Knockaloe on the Isle of Man, where the non-­ privileged German internees were held, attempts were made by the Home Office to keep records of those men who sent money from earnings to wives and other dependants on the British mainland, using this as an excuse to cut the latter’s separation allowances. One German internee, Karl Schönwalder, who had lived in the United Kingdom since 1900 and married his British-born wife in 1905, noted in his diary in March 1916 that when he heard that ‘the Govt is stopping some wifes [sic!] allowance because some chaps have sent money home from Camp’ he immediately removed his name from the list of those who were willing to work for wages.113 As well as having their allowances cut, dependants of internees might also become a target for mob violence, as was the case when alien businesses were attacked. Worse still in the authorities’ eyes was fear of the opposite, namely that elements among the native population might show an unpatriotic interest in trading or fraternising with enemy aliens to a degree that offended popular or official wartime notions of ‘respectable behaviour’.

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In the case of illicit contacts in particular, the impulse towards social control often took on highly gendered forms. Against the background of constant exhortations to patriotic self-sacrifice and restraint, men were held to outrage public decency by drinking, brawling or gambling to excess. Local residents accused of encouraging (or failing to prevent) enemy aliens in their midst from engaging in the same pernicious vices often faced public censure, minor punishments or fines—even if no criminal offence had been committed.114 Instances of female wartime ‘misconduct’, on the other hand, as Susan Grayzel notes, were usually defined in sexual terms.115 This also applied in relation to the internment phenomenon. In November 1914, for example, the District Commissioner for Waidhofen an der Thaya in Lower Austria complained in a report to his superiors in Vienna that contact with locals was encouraging the British men confined in the village of Raabs to engage in ‘haughty’ and ‘arrogant’ behaviour: The local population, intolerably good-natured as they are, have shown far too much kindness towards these foreigners. I had to order a ban on tennis matches between the Englishmen and some of the girls from Raabs, and to suggest to the village mayor that these girls should devote any free time they have to knitting clothes for our soldiers.116

In August 1918, two women—one Russian and one native of the Isle of Man—were charged with ‘interfering with the discipline of the Douglas Internment Camp’ after being accused of abusing the visiting system to arrange sexual encounters with prisoners held there. After appearing in court—and having their names published in the local press—they were told to expect a fine or short jail term.117 By contrast, male internees on the Isle of Man who ended up in court were usually charged with assault or property crimes. The Ramsey Courier, for instance, reported on 3 May 1918 on cases heard the previous day in Douglas. One German was sentenced to two months for stealing flour from the kitchens at Knockaloe, and a second German, who, it was noted, had already ‘undergone several terms of imprisonment in England and Africa’, received a similar sentence for ‘breaking into a warehouse with intent to steal’. Meanwhile, a Turkish internee got twelve months hard labour after being found guilty of stabbing a co-national ‘with intent to do grievous bodily harm’.118 Looking at possible links between internment and other forms of wartime social control also helps us to understand why middle- and lower-­ ranking officials were less likely to stick to the bureaucratic formalities of a

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strict separation between ‘enemy aliens’ and ‘internal enemies’—at least when it came to the way they imagined their roles as servants of a state or nation under siege. Prolonged war—combined with economic blockade in the case of the Central Powers—led to a rapid rise in urban crime and poverty more generally, and a desire to punish and discipline the most marginal elements in society under cover of the wartime emergency.119 In France, for instance, Parisians arrested by the police for the crime of ‘vagabondage’ (mostly out-of-work male French citizens rather than foreigners) were expelled from the capital and sent initially to camps de triage located in Western and Central France. Those who were declared fit for military service were called up into the army, while those judged to be an on-going threat to public security were confined permanently in camps de suspects as ‘bouches inutiles’ and ‘sans travail’.120 In 1915, a communiqué from the French general staff also reminded military commanders serving in the field that the 1849 state-of-siege legislation allowed them to ‘expel from the zones des armées all nomads who are found there or who attempt to enter this territory’. The term ‘nomads’, as used here, included ‘street hawkers’, ‘rag-and-bone men’, ‘basket sellers’ and other ‘itinerant persons’.121 In Imperial Germany, social (and in part racial) prejudice against the ‘unemployed’ and ‘big city scum’ (Großstadtgesindel) was also rife, and manifested itself, among other things, in requests from the police to the acting military commanders on the home front to use their wartime powers to issue further ordinances against ‘community aliens’ and ‘nuisance persons’.122 Initially, the talk was of ‘Gypsies’ (Zigeuner) but increasingly the target was expanded to include other categories of ‘asocials’ including ‘tramps, beggars and all manner of unemployed persons wandering aimlessly around the country’.123 ‘Free’ Belgian workers who acted in a ‘lazy’ or ‘disobedient’ manner were likewise seen as a particular problem. According to the police chief of the Ruhr city of Essen, writing in March 1916, it would be a good thing if such persons ‘were placed in a prison camp’.124 Between summer 1916 and winter 1916/17 pressure to act grew, partly as a result of increasingly negative coverage in the local press in various parts of Germany of the ‘Gypsy menace’125; partly because the new Auxiliary Service Law (vaterländischer Hilfdienstgesetz) of 5 December 1916 increased the range of legal remedies that could be used against ‘work-shy persons’ (Arbeitsscheue) who were deemed to be shirking their wartime patriotic duty to work126; and partly because the Prussian Ministry of War also issued guidelines to the acting military commanders in early 1917 calling

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for the immediate internment of all ‘Gypsies’ of enemy nationality, the expulsion of ‘Gypsies’ from neutral countries, closer supervision of stateless or apparently stateless ‘Gypsies’, and the investigation of ‘bands’ of ‘Gypsies’ who allegedly hid draft-dodgers and deserters within their wandering communities: Until their nationality has been determined and their papers have been checked, the apprehended persons are to be held in the nearest prison camp. The police authorities are responsible for looking after their wagons and animals in the interim.127

Alongside ‘Gypsies’ and the ‘work-shy’, unregulated prostitutes were also a favourite target of wartime control measures, and not just in Germany, where an unknown number of both native and foreign sex workers were held in the women’s compounds of camps like Holzminden and Havelberg.128 In France, for instance, where the number of maisons tolerées (state-countenanced brothels) was allowed to grow to meet imagined male wartime need, suspected practitioners of ‘la prostitution clandestine’ (unregulated commercial sex)—particularly those had yet to reach full adulthood—could nonetheless find themselves in camps de triage where they were required to undergo compulsory gynaecological examinations for venereal diseases. Those in need of treatment had to wait in the camps until a place became available in a medical facility. Those who were found to be clear of infection might be released under residency restrictions or sent to charitable institutions for ‘wayward girls’ and ‘fallen women’. Alternatively, they might be offered a place in a maison tolérée if they were not under-age and were willing to submit to the police rules about regular medical checks. By contrast, those of non-French nationality, especially if they were deemed to be an on-going risk to ‘public safety’ usually faced being transferred to a camp de suspects pending possible expulsion from France.129 The aim here, as in many other continental European countries, was to uphold the long-established system of police-regulated prostitution. This was now considered essential not only to protect bourgeois sensibilities and prevent the ‘greater evils’ of international trafficking, the enrichment of ‘foreign’ pimps and criminal gangs, and the sexual exploitation of minors and ‘vulnerable’ adults, but also to safeguard the welfare and battle-­readiness of the military for as long as the state-of-siege lasted (and perhaps also for a long time after).130 In wartime Austria, for instance, as

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Nancy M. Wingfield has shown, an informal ‘civilian-military partnership’ emerged within the lower and upper echelons of the Imperial bureaucracy and the medical profession over this issue with implications lasting well beyond the collapse of the Monarchy in 1918. The common goal was to marginalise and stigmatise unregulated prostitutes as ‘asocial’, ‘work-shy’, the ‘enemy within’ and/or the hyper-sexualised ‘Other’, and to justify their extra-legal incarceration in administrative terms as a vital health and security measure, while simultaneously protecting the institution of state regulation against its largely female domestic critics.131 In Britain, where there were no maisons tolérées and all forms of prostitution were illegal full stop, women sex workers arrested for ‘soliciting’ and pimps or brothel madams accused of ‘living from immoral earnings’ were dealt with by the courts rather than by bureaucratic-regulatory procedures. This in turn reflected a long history of criminalising prostitutes accused of spreading infections under the nineteenth-century Contagious Diseases Acts, with passing on STIs to serving members of the military a separate and more serious infraction in its own right—even after the formal repeal of the Acts in 1886. New (or, in practice, ‘revived’) offences were drawn up under DORA, and prosecutions increased—with harsher fines or jail terms for those convicted of selling their own or others’ bodies for commercial gain.132 Uniquely, then, there was no significant overlap between the wartime policing of prostitution on the home front and the internment system in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, in America, the Department of Justice ordered that a small number of ‘dangerous’ enemy alien women arrested in April–May 1918 be held in prisons and privately run shelters for female ex-convicts and ‘fallen women’, on the grounds that the male internment camp at Fort Oglethorpe was not ready to receive women prisoners and anyway had been placed under quarantine after an outbreak of Spanish flu. This in turn led to a raft of complaints made to the Swiss diplomatic authorities, who inspected one of the facilities in question, Waverley House on Manhattan’s West 10th Street, on 25 September 1918, and found it to be ‘an Institution of the New  York Probation Association for the temporary care of delinquent women’. Mrs de Brunner [the Superintendent] was under the impression, when taking charge of the German Internees, that it would only be a temporary measure, for a few weeks, until proper Internment Quarters should be provided for these women by the American Government. The few weeks have now been extended to a few months… The Waverley House is a private

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Charity Institution, conducted under rules which may be the best for its purpose, but are not such for the internment of alien women by a Government. Any connection of such detention or internment with an institution for fallen women should be avoided.133

Nor was this an exception. On 3 September 1918, for instance the ‘Hilfskomitee of the POW Relief Committee’ at Fort Oglethorpe wrote to the Swiss Legation in Washington DC to report that the married men who had been sent there after being deported with their families from Panama and the Philippines, had still not heard from their wives and children some four months after being separated from them by US immigration officials upon their arrival at Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay: It seems to us that the treatment which the [German] women from Panama and the Philippine Islands have suffered must have escaped your attention, as it was about the worst imaginable… Some of these women were… thrown together with foreign prostitutes [who were being held on Ellis Island for deportation, M.S.], children were separated from their mothers, in short these women suffered a treatment which under no circumstances can be called humane, and which reminds one closely of the sad case of the Boer women of 1899.134

Again, the wartime emergency supposedly justified treating enemy alien women in this way, although in the end, less than fifteen were sent on to Fort Oglethorpe when the female barracks were completed at the end of January 1919, some of them having ‘volunteered’ for internment in the hope either of being reunited with their husbands or at any rate avoiding further detention in jails and ‘houses of correction’.135 They were released in August 1919.136 It is not known what happened to the four or five alien women detained at Waverley House on orders of the Department of Justice, but their case, and that of other German women internees, was pursued by Swiss officials right up until the end of the war and beyond.137 Class also played a role. At Fort Oglethorpe itself, and at the sister camp at Fort Douglas, around one in ten of the 2300 interned German men belonged to the German-American economic elite and were suspected of using their financial influence to aid the German cause, for instance by sponsoring pro-German propaganda. Most of the rest were either known strike leaders and working-class activists, or penniless itinerant labourers. Illiteracy and/or ‘insanity’ were rife within the latter group, and some of

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the ‘worst cases’ were transferred to privately run homeless hostels or mental asylums upon their release in 1920.138 Thus, even in the United States, a relative late-comer to the war which operated a highly selective internment system after April 1917—leading at most to the screening and temporary arrest of around 8%, and the long-term incarceration of a mere 2%, of the resident male enemy alien population of military age139—the poorest and already most disadvantaged immigrants were disproportionally targeted. At federal level, Department of Justice officials drew up lists of those aliens (including women) considered ‘dangerous’ for political reasons. However, their counterparts in the Department of Labor, as well as their informants among municipal and state authorities and ‘ordinary’ Americans, were more interested in singling out persons judged to be a social burden—the destitute, the sick and those deemed to be without a proper work ethic.140 ‘Desirable’ immigrants were still welcome, and the Department of Labor indeed involved itself in the organisation of mass naturalisations of army recruits in 1918, including an event in the gigantic amphitheatre at Camp Lee, Petersburg, Virginia, on 16 August 1918 at which up to 20,000 trainee soldiers became US citizens in a vast ceremony.141 On the other hand, under section 19 of the February 1917 Immigration Act, certain classes of ‘deportable’ alien could be excluded from naturalisation ‘by law’, provided they could be shown to be ‘personally culpable’ for the situation that had led them to fall foul of the requirements of a ‘good’ immigrant. Furthermore, ‘upon the warrant of the Secretary of Labor’, they could be subject ‘to arrest and deportation at any time within five years after they entered the United States’.142 Similar attitudes dividing ‘desirable’ from ‘undesirable’ aliens were held by the camp commandant at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, who told a Swiss inspection team on 2 July 1918 that the inmates of compound C, used to house those who habitually refused to carry out the required maintenance and cleaning work around the Camp, were mostly ‘I.W.W. members [‘Wobblies’] and degenerates with low morals and poor diction’.143 Clearly, they would be no good as recruits to the US army, and it was expected that they would be deported after the war (but not before then). Such instances of social discrimination followed a global pattern in the treatment of enemy alien internees that was already visible (albeit with local variations) in neighbouring Canada, as well as in many parts of continental Europe, Great Britain and other British colonies and Dominions. Only in Germany, however, did the concern to combat ‘work-shyness’ and ‘criminality’ among the urban poor cross over from occupied territory to

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the home front and back, developing mutually reinforcing quasi-­biological as well as social-disciplinary overtones in the process. The ‘work-shy’ in German-occupied France were thus treated with the same or an even greater amount of disdain as their home-based German counterparts, and indeed were already being referred to by commanders on the ground as unnütze Esser (‘useless eaters’) in late 1915.144 The language became more radicalised as the war continued and the scope for use of arrests, deportations to camps and other extra-legal sanctions widened. The rear area inspectorate for the (Bavarian) Sixth Army, which covered the occupied French city of Lille and surrounding areas, even passed on to General Headquarters its view that those unemployed French men whom its officers had assembled into the first wave of mobile forced labour battalions (ZABs) on the western front in October 1916 were made of ‘inferior human material’ (minderwertiges Menschenmaterial) and were not used to hard work and orderly conduct because they ‘are drawn almost exclusively from the urban population’ and were ‘often in poor health as a result of the unhygienic conditions in working-class quarters’.145 These men were paid, but their conditions of work were intentionally harsh and degrading, and they were in effect prisoners of war. Unlike ‘free’ labourers, they were forced to wear special coloured brassards, were not permitted leave to visit their families expect in ‘exceptional’ circumstances, were banned from drinking alcohol or playing cards (as in workhouses and ‘houses of correction’ at home), and were under armed guard twenty-four hours a day.146 From January 1917, they were also compelled to undergo medical examinations for STIs, representing another layer of social discipline and punishment.147 Upon arriving at the ‘ghastly, cold and unpleasant’ Havelberg camp in late December 1917, where he had been sent from Ruhleben (via the Stadtvogtei) after a failed escape attempt, the British civilian prisoner Thomas Wyndham Richards noted that he had ‘jabbered French with some men from Lille, who had consistently refused to work for the Germans and had therefore been put here’.148 In the last months of the war, all kinds of enemy prisoners—military and civilian, male and female, young and old— were transferred by the German army between the home front, occupied Belgium and the rapidly disintegrating battle lines in France on the grounds of being ‘work-shy’, with the OHL continuing to block the extension of the thirty-kilometre fire zone  limit to civilian prisoners  even after  it began ­reissuing orders that British and French military POWs  be  withdrawn  to beyond that limit from May 1918.149 Reich subjects still had more rights than aliens, and even Strafgefangene (criminal convicts) could not be forced

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to work outside Germany’s borders if they possessed German citizenship. Nonetheless, in summer 1918, the police and acing military authorities in southern Bavaria, in conjunction with the public body responsible for the promotion of rural infrastructure, soil conservation and water supply systems in that part of Germany (the Kulturbauamt München), came up with a scheme to set up a camp not just for ‘Gypsies’ but for a variety of ‘Arbeitsscheue’ and ‘Großstadtgesindel’ at Weilheim in Upper Bavaria.150 Detailed plans were laid down for putting these ‘habitual law-breakers’ to work through establishing a strict daily regime including early morning roll-calls, a ban on alcohol, and other ‘forms of compulsion’ (wirksame… Zwangsmaßnahmen), with an anticipated initial camp population of 200. Only the outbreak of revolution in Munich in November 1918, and the passing of police powers to the new socialist-led government under Kurt Eisner, led to the final abandonment of the Weilheim project in January 1919.151 The ZABs and the proposed camp at Weilheim should certainly not be seen as a form of social engineering on the same scale and with the same murderous design as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia from the 1930s onwards. Internment and forced labour as a measure of social control and disciplining, and as a prophylactic tool against the ‘chaos’ of urban life, had gained a certain amount of political traction in the First World War, particularly but not only in Imperial Germany. However, in their targeting of the poor and dispossessed, such policies still showed traces of pre-war social welfare and policing practices, and had not yet developed into a system for the total transformation of society by means of systematic, exclusionary violence against racial or community outsiders. Even so, the radicalisation of attitudes in Germany towards groups labelled ‘useless eaters’ and ‘urban scum’, especially when the food shortages really began to bite in 1917–18 and again in the immediate post-war period, was a worrying sign for the future.152

Internment and Ideas About ‘National Community’ As we shall see in the next chapter, internment and associated deportations did provoke some concern among a minority of humanitarian activists and civic-minded persons for the plight of enemy aliens and their families. For the most part, however, it boosted support for new forms of bigotry, with all foreigners, and especially those born or raised in hostile countries, now potentially exposed to cultural and social exclusion from the robust

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‘national community’ of 100% patriotic loyalists. Sometimes even previously tolerant and open-minded individuals could get caught up in this seemingly all-encompassing wave of intolerance and suspicion. In January 1915, for instance, the German-born British national Walter Lewenz, who had just been released on parole after several weeks in Ruhleben camp to find that his (and his fellow internees’) children had been expelled from their German schools, was shocked when his attempt to gain the support of one of his neighbours in Grünewald, the famous liberal Berlin law professor and constitutional expert Gerhard Anschütz, ended in an angry rebuttal. Anschütz replied to him: That the children of British internees have been excluded from all German schools is a natural consequence of the war between the two nations. I simply cannot understand why anybody would be of a different opinion. British children no longer belong among German children. Our children will be educated to hate England and so they SHOULD be, since hatred of this kind is now one of our national maxims [Lebensprinzipien]. It would be a gross violation of this maxim were we to allow our children to be educated alongside the children of the enemy. It would also be a very poor way of serving the interests of the British children, since our children – by the very nature of things and as children are want to do – would vent their hatred on them. Thus, apart from anything else, the granting of your wish to have your son readmitted to the local school is impermissible on pedagogical grounds. If I were to have any say in the matter, I would do all I could to prevent your wish from being fulfilled.

As if this were not enough, he added for good measure: That you are British through naturalisation rather than heritage is in my opinion an aggravating, not a mitigating feature of your case. Those who have thrown away their German nationality in exchange for what they once judged to be the more worthy prize of British citizenship must now bear the consequences.153

Cases such as this were far from untypical and could be found in all parts of the globe. In France, for instance, as Farcy shows, ‘for the entire duration of the war and right up to the signing of the peace treaty’, foreigners were regarded as ‘suspect… whatever their [age or] nationality’.154 ‘Patriotic’ citizens were quick to denounce anybody of non-French background, and, in some cases, to accuse the state authorities of lack of

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v­ igilance. In one instance, in November 1914, the Prefect of the Vendée département in Western France received a complaint from the townspeople of Luçon demanding to know why the director of the local gas company had not been taken into internment ‘like the remaining Germans in France’. Further investigation revealed that the person in question was from Luxembourg and had lived in Luçon for almost forty years. Even so, in the imagination of the local complainants, he no longer belonged to the ‘national community’.155 In Tsarist Russia, according to Eric Lohr, not only members of right-­ wing and nationalist parties in the Duma, but also elements in the mainstream press and even ‘moderate liberals’ used demands for tighter restrictions on enemy aliens as a means of ‘challeng[ing] the legitimacy of the imperial monarchy’. A ‘state purged of alien influences’, which meant ethnic Germans (and other ‘internal enemies’, especially Jews) as well as ‘foreign’ Reich and Habsburg German subjects, was considered to be the only form of state worthy of representing the Russian people.156 In Austria-­ Hungary, the legitimacy of the Dual Monarchy was not challenged by the nationalist/pan-German right to the same extent, at least until late 1918. Nonetheless, denunciations of suspect ‘foreigners’ and ‘disloyal elements’ was a key element in the policing of the home front and had a crucial impact on local as well as imperial senses of ‘belonging’, as Maureen Healy has shown in relation to multi-national Vienna during the war. One letter sent to the Viennese police in 1914 even demanded that persons ‘overheard speaking English in public’ should be immediately expelled from the Imperial capital and sent to a ‘“concentration camp”’.157 In Britain, the Daily Mail ran an article in February 1917 calling for the immediate removal of all naturalised and non-naturalised Germans from the country and across the entire empire under the unambiguous headline ‘Send them all home!’ And in October 1918 William JoynsonHicks, the right-wing populist MP (and Conservative Home Secretary in the years 1924–29), wrote a letter to The Times complaining about the supposed ‘lack of a forcible policy on the part of the Government regarding our alien enemies’, especially in respect to concrete planning for postwar deportations.158 The rise in the political temperature caused by such ‘expulsion fantasies’ (Healy) certainly impacted on the 14 December 1918 general election. The Daily Mail ran an article on 2 December in which it accused Lord Newton, the Conservative Foreign Office Minister in charge of prisoner exchange negotiations, of having been both flippant about German atrocities towards British captives and ineffective in his

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dealings with German officials. It also mischievously suggested that the Minister might be paid for his public opposition to the blanket expulsion of German and Austrian enemy aliens from Britain with a post in the new government in Berlin. Newton was subsequently awarded £5000 in damages plus costs in July 1919 after he sued the newspaper for libel. However, political attacks on him continued when, now as a private member, he successfully moved an unpopular amendment to the new governmentbacked Aliens Restriction Bill as it passed through the House of Lords in November 1919.159 In Canada after 1914, and America after 1917, as Katja Wüstenbecker notes, ‘laws were passed… which limited use of the German language or even banned it altogether’, leading the younger generation of North American-raised German immigrants to lose their mother tongue with such speed ‘that, by the time of the Second World War at the latest, the cultural presence of German had all but disappeared’.160 Worse still, in the United States numerous private organisations were established with the self-declared purpose of spying on persons of German origin… if they kept quiet or took part only passively in patriotic events then they were accused of being ‘disloyal’. However, if they aligned themselves demonstrably with the ‘Hurrah-­ Patriotism’ of their fellow American citizens, then it was claimed that they did this only to ensure their own safety, while hiding their true feelings.161

However, while there is no denying that ‘certain organs of the Press’, as Lord Newton put it, were responsible for stirring up hatred of foreigners in all countries involved in the war, this did not mean that nationalist or patriotic opinion was solely focused on the question of expulsions, removals from schools, or other forms of ‘vindictive action’.162 Another, related aspect of the changing ways in which the ‘national community’ could appear in the popular imagination was the pressure that belligerent states often came under to do more by way of relief and assistance to their own citizens stranded or interned in enemy countries, especially in the second half of the war. In Britain, for instance, a Ruhleben Prisoners’ Release Committee was formed in February 1917 and staged a series of public meetings to draw attention to the plight of internees and their wives and children. Although the Committee ultimately failed in its mission to persuade the Imperial War Cabinet to agree to the German proposal for an ‘all for all exchange’ of civilian prisoners, it mobilised a certain amount of

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support in the press and across all political parties for its contention that the Ruhleben internees and their families, by bearing the brunt of Germany’s retaliation for the internment of its own subjects across the British empire, were performing a vital war service and were thus part of the national war effort.163 It is also no coincidence that the government renewed its efforts around the same time to nationalise and standardise relief to British military and civilian prisoners through the (ostensibly independent) work of the Central Prisoners of War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, founded in October 1916 and based at Thurloe Place, London.164 On 26 January 1917, it sent a letter to the British camp captain at Ruhleben, Joseph Powell, to draw attention to its work on the internees’ behalf, but its intended message of ‘equality of sacrifice’ across the classes faltered somewhat when it also made the following urgent appeal on behalf of one of its members: [A lady] who has been employed in the packing of parcels for prisoners at Ruhleben has had the misfortune to lose a ring, and thinks it very probably may have fallen into one of the parcels dispatched from here on January 18th or 19th. The ring was a small gold one with five diamonds in a gypsy setting… We would be extremely grateful to you if you could have this information circulated to the camp together with the information that a reward of £2 is offered for the recovery of the ring.165

The German authorities moved even earlier on the issue of nationalising the relief effort to its military prisoners and civilian internees in foreign hands. As a sign of its growing self-assertiveness as the foremost representative body of the German people, and as guardian of its transnational as well as national interests, the Reichstag passed a resolution in June 1916 calling on the government to provide greater financial assistance to Reich subjects living overseas who had been interned or had otherwise fallen on hard times as a result of the war.166 Meanwhile, the Reich Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, had already agreed to act as honorary president, together with Johannes Kaempf, the President of the Reichstag, of a new body, the Volksspende für die deutsche Kriegs- und Zivilgefangene (the National or People’s Subscription for German military and civilian prisoners). The committee meetings of this body were organised and chaired by the head of the Prussian Ministry of War’s Unterkunftsdepartement, Colonel (later General) Emil Friedrich, with representatives from the AA,

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the Reich Naval Office, the Reich Colonial Office and the War Ministries of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg in attendance. Voluntary corporate members included the Central Committee of German Red Cross Societies, the Frauenverein vom Roten Kreuz, the Ausschuß für kriegsgefangene Deutsche, the Kriegsgefangenenhilfe des Christlichen Vereins Jünger Männer, the Caritasverband für das katholische Deutschland, the Hilfsverein deutscher Juden, and the Deutscher Flottenverein. Its aim, as it explained in its founding appeal in June 1916, was to coordinate and distribute voluntary donations, whether large, medium or small, for the care of all German prisoners so that ‘our brothers receive sustenance and— upon their return home—give bright-eyed accounts of the fantastic help they received’.167 Its decision to name itself the Volksspende rather than the Reichsspende also suggested that it was a popular-democratic subscription set up at the behest of the people rather than the state—even though the latter continued to play a dominant role. At the Volksspende’s first committee meeting on 26 May 1916, the AA representative Paul Eckardt supported a proposal to also make appeals among Auslandsdeutsche (Germans living abroad) but noted that ‘We will have to confine ourselves to those lands that directly border our own, since there are no longer any postal services with overseas countries and trying to re-establish such [transnational] connections would take up too much time’.168 Collections were certainly organised among the expatriate German community in Switzerland, and were used to fund welfare and education programmes for Germans interned there under the January 1916 Franco-German exchange agreement, although the monies had run out by 1917.169 Elisabeth Rotten’s Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle, on the other hand, was refused permission to join the Volksspende’s campaigns on the grounds that its aim to help foreign prisoners and enemy aliens in Germany took money and other resources away from the people’s effort to aid German internees. More than this, the very existence of the Volksspende was used as an excuse to ban Rotten from making further public appeals for charitable donations in early 1916.170 In Habsburg Austria, the parliament or Reichsrat was suspended until May 1917, meaning that there was no direct parliamentary pressure for the government there to follow suit. Nonetheless, in July 1916, the Austrian Minister-President, Karl von Stürgkh, wrote to the common Finance Ministry to express his, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’, strong support for the introduction of administrative measures designed to compensate Habsburg subjects who had suffered at enemy hands as a

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result of the war. In his view, it was important to take this step, not only as an ‘act of humanity’ but also as a means of ‘strengthening the bonds that our next-of-kin living abroad feel towards our state in these difficult times’.171 Meanwhile, the AOK’s central intelligence office was also aware—from its interception of letters sent from Habsburg subjects in British and French captivity to their friends and families—that German internees in enemy lands were envied because of the superior relief in goods and cash that they, and their families beyond the barbed wire, got from home. It was important to try and match Germany’s generosity, was the implication.172 However, this was easier said than done. By March 1918, as the Swiss Legation in Berlin reported to the Federal Political Department in Bern, the German Foreign Office had managed to secure the payment of 10 shillings or 10 francs per month to all German civilian internees in Britain and France ‘from Reich funds’. It also wished to enquire whether it could send similar sums to Germans held in the United States via the Swiss Legation in Washington DC.173 At the same time, the Volksspende had amassed 14.5 million marks in private and corporate donations, according to its committee meeting on 18 January 1918: The despatch of supplies to our civilian and military prisoners, made possible by these donations, takes place through the Red Cross and other benevolent organisations; at least 30,000,000 marks has been collected for these purposes through public subscription and from Reich funds.174

By contrast, the Swedish legation in London, which had been representing Habsburg interests in the United Kingdom since 1917, was still having to report in January 1919, after visiting Austro-Hungarian civilian and military prisoners at the Nell Lane Military hospital in Manchester, that the men expressed their regret that their Government did not seem to take as much interest in their captivity as the German government did for her sons in the same plight. They state that the Germans received money, letters and parcels very often from their home-land, but they received nothing. It seemed as if their home-country had forgotten them.175

In France, concern for the welfare of French civilians held at Holzminden, Germany, and the notion that it was a national responsibility to do more to help them, began to grow in 1916. A report by the camp

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captain (chef civil du camp), Louis Jacquet, dated 9 March 1916, thanked the French government and his fellow countrymen for providing the equivalent of 652,572 marks in public and private donations towards the creation of a ‘Universitaire Populaire’ inside the camp. Of this, 553,230 marks had already been spent, principally on building new huts where teachers were now able to provide ‘primary education for children and adults’, ‘practical courses and modern language tuition’, ‘secondary and university-level teaching’, and ‘public lectures’. A separate building housed the camp library.176 Even so, an exchanged prisoner, Max Anglès, was reported to have published an article on 9 April 1916 in one of the leading French newspapers, the nationalist-leaning Le Matin, in which he criticised material conditions at Holzminden and called on the French authorities to do even more to compensate for the Germans’ failure to uphold reasonable standards there: If France is really minded to ensure that its captured sons do not arrive home from the war exhausted by all the stress and privations, it must actively intervene to improve their lot. Or, to put it another way, if it is to return healthy and well-nourished soldiers to Germany, it will expect something more in recompense than human garbage. It must do much more to help those who are suffering [in German captivity] and keep themselves going only through the thought of making it back home and exacting revenge.177

In this way, the question of internment and the provision of national relief to internees became tied up in the renegotiation of ideas of citizenship and national/imperial belonging which took place in many countries during (and after) the war. Indeed, there are important parallels here with the treatment of refugees.178 ‘Good citizens’, like ‘good governments’ were now defined in terms of their active espousal of voluntary, patriotic self-­sacrifice for the welfare and education of fellow nationals, including those living overseas and those in enemy captivity. ‘Bad citizens’, like ‘bad politicians’, paid only passive lip service to the provision of welfare services to the public, or worse still, ‘feigned’ interest in such issues in order to disguise their own ‘foreign’ origins or alien sympathies. The whole question of national/imperial concern for, and the provision of relief to, interned civilians abroad was thus a process inscribed with deep political and cultural meaning. In particular, it led to the inclusion of some former outsiders (such as Germans living in Switzerland) and the exclusion of others (women who married foreigners, black colonial subjects,  naturalised enemy aliens, and even

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­ overnment ministers who allegedly failed to take popular anti-alien sentig ment seriously), both in definitions of ‘national community’ at home, and—in the case of diaspora groups—in new transnational efforts to promote ‘ethnic identity construction’ abroad.179 While belligerent states differed significantly in terms of their financial power and geographical ability to provide sustained material aid to civilian and military prisoners detained overseas, only one—Italy—openly saw and treated its subjects in enemy captivity as a national disgrace rather than as an exhortation to national solidarity.180 The AOK’s central intelligence office, which showed particular interest in the hostile attitudes of Reich Italian prisoners and their families at home towards their own army and government, noted instances of this in their secret reports for the Austrian Red Cross, but certainly did not recommend following suit.181 On the contrary, the Austrian Red Cross was allowed to show a high level of concern for the welfare of Habsburg-subject Italians from Trentino and Trieste interned in various camps in France, sending lists to their home municipalities and districts in a bid to encourage the sending of gifts and the maintenance of patriotic imperial ties.182 Whether this appeal met with any response is unknown, and certainly the Habsburg state was unable to match the level of support offered to German internees in France and elsewhere by their government, but the intention is still significant. Matthias Egger, in a recent dissertation, has also documented the enormous efforts that the Dual Monarchy went to in organising a ‘full scale relief action’ for the 2.1 million Austro-Hungarian soldiers and 60,000 to 80,000 civilian internees held in Russian captivity during the war, even if this action was often beset by significant logistical and other problems.183 More generally, the evolution of government-backed, nationalised wartime relief to civilian internees, even when partly motivated by humanitarian concerns, is best seen—following Heather Jones—as a transnational rather than an international phenomenon.184 Belligerent states, national Red Cross societies and the civilian and military officials responsible for the day-to-day running of camps and the negotiation of reciprocity agreements learned much from each other’s relief systems. Indeed, they could hardly fail to do so, as they had frequent opportunity to observe how they operated in practice. However, what they largely lacked—at least until 1918—was a sense of humanitarian relief as an international problem requiring international solutions, including the application and/or enforcement of international law. Appeasing domestic public opinion, which from all sides of the political spectrum was increasingly on the side

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of the prisoners’ families, was their chief priority. Countering families’ criticisms of centralised relief efforts, especially in countries where such efforts were deemed to threaten (middle-class) internees’ ‘sense of themselves as loyal, self-sacrificing, independent citizens’, could take up a great deal of political energy.185 By contrast, there was as yet no meaningful international public opinion to appeal to or take note of, which may also partly explain why the Italian government took the risks that it did when it came to the welfare of its own citizens. That said, there were some individual activists, NGOs and non-belligerent governments who did come to approach internment through an international-humanitarian lens, and who recognised that cooperation with, and campaigning alongside, warring states was essential in order to mitigate its effects and/or to bring it to an end. This will be the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1. Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, pp. 136–7. 2. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, p.  423; Smith, Jamaican Volunteers, p. 44. 3. Dieter Pohl, ‘Terror’, in Baranowski, Nolzen and Szejnmann (eds.), A Companion to Nazi Germany, pp. 431–48 (here p. 433). 4. Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, p. 25. 5. Hull, A Scrap of Paper, pp. 1–2. 6. Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre, pp. 308–12. 7. Ronald Francis Roxburgh, The Prisoners of War Information Bureau in London, with an introduction by L. Oppenheim (London, 1915), p. ix. 8. See Garner, ‘Treatment of Enemy Aliens’, pp. 27–9; and Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, p. 143. 9. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. xix, borrows a quote from Sir Michael Howard to illustrate this point: ‘So far as official government policy is concerned, the British security and intelligence services do not exist. Enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes and intelligence is brought by the storks’. 10. Franz von Liszt, Das Völkerrecht, systematisch dargestellt, 11th ed. (Berlin, 1920), p. 285. 11. Oppenheim’s introduction to Roxburgh, The Prisoners of War Information Bureau, p. vii. Emphasis in the original. 12. Ibid., p. viii. 13. Stibbe, ‘Ein globales Phänomen’, p. 164. 14. See article 50 of the HLKO at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague04.asp

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15. Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 November 1914 [evening edition], cited in Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, p. 40. 16. Kriege to the German consul-general in Bucharest, 23 May 1915, in BArch, R 901/82016. 17. See, for instance, Begriff: ‘Kriegs- und Zivilgefangene’—communiqué issued by the Prussian War Ministry, 17 April 1916. Copies in BHStA-KA, Infanteriedivisionen (WK) 4379, and BArch, R 901/82017. 18. See also Stibbe, ‘(Dis)entangling’, forthcoming. 19. Here I have been particularly influenced by the approach taken in Manz, Constructing a German Diaspora. 20. Sebastian Bischoff, ‘“Die größte Summe von Lügen unserer Feinde knüpft sich an das Wort Belgien”: Die deutsche Presse und die Gräuel-­ Vorwürfe der Entente, 1914–1918’, in Sebastian Bischoff, Christoph Jahr, Tatjana Mrowka and Jens Thiel (eds.), ‘Belgium is a Beautiful City?’: Resultate und Perspektiven der Historischen Belgienforschung (Münster, 2018), pp. 55–65 (here p. 57). 21. See Otto Just to the governor (Regierungspräsident) of the Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf, 29 September 1914, in LNRW, Abt. Rheinland, Oberpräsidium Düsseldorf, No. 14986, Bl. 70. 22. See the evidence collected in Staatsarchiv Hamburg (henceforth StA Hamburg), Senatskriegsakten, Lz 16a: Gewalttätigkeiten gegen die deutsche Zivilbevölkerung in Feindesland, 1914–1919. 23. Düsseldorf Chamber of Commerce to the governor of the Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf, 27 March 1915, in LNRW, Abt. Rheinland, Oberpräsidium Düsseldorf, No. 14986, Bl. 97. 24. See Reich Office of Interior to the AA, 10 December 1915, in BArch, R 901/82917. 25. See WUA, Reihe III/Bd. 2, pp. 719–855. 26. See Reichskolonialamt, Denkschrift über die Behandlung der deutschen Bevölkerung seitens der französischen und englischen Truppen und Behörden in den von diesen besetzten Teilen der Kolonien, n.d. [1914/15]. Copy in BArch, R 1501/112364, Bl. 83–6. Also Reich Colonial Office to the AA, 17 February 1915, in BArch, R 901/82915. 27. Ernst Müller-Meiningen, Weltkrieg und Völkerrecht. Eine Anklage gegen die Kriegsführung des Dreiverbandes (Berlin, 1915). 28. AA to the Reich Office of Interior, 10 December 1915, in BArch, R 901 /82917. 29. Vergleich der Berichte des Genfer Roten Kreuzes über die englischen und französischen Sammellager mit den Festellungen des Reichskommissars zur Erörterung von Gewalttätigkeiten gegen deutsche Zivilpersonen in Feindesland (Berlin, 1915), p. 5. Copy in BArch, R 67/779.

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30. Reich Office of Interior to the AA, 10 December 1915, in BArch, R 901 /82917. 31. k.u.k. Ministerium des Äussern (ed.), Sammlung von Nachweisen für die Verletzungen des Völkerrechts durch die mit Österreich-Ungarn kriegführenden Staaten, 4 vols. (Vienna 1915–1916). The abridged English version bore the title Collection of Evidence Concerning the Violations of International Law by the Countries at War with Austria-Hungary, and the abridged French version appeared as Recueil de témoignages concernant les actes de violation du droit des gens commis par les États en guerre avec l’Autriche-Hongrie. 32. ‘Einleitende Bemerkungen’, in k.u.k. Ministerium des Äussern (ed.), Sammlung von Nachweisen, Vol. 1, pp. XI–XIII (here p. XI). 33. Ibid., pp. XI–XII. 34. Ibid., pp. XII-XIII. 35. Stibbe, ‘Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees’, p.  68. See also Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Austro-Hungarian envoy in Bern, n.d. [April 1916]. Copy in SBA, E27, 1000/721, Bd. 2906. 36. See Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, esp. pp. 317–25. 37. See the report on the previous day’s debates in the House of Lords published in the Morning Post, 23 February 1917. Copy in HLL, Masterman Collection, Box 21. 38. On Livingstone, see Jones, Violence, p. 16. 39. Adelaide Livingstone, ‘Report on the Camp for Interned Civilians at Holzminden’, 4 December 1916, in TNA, FO 383/210. Corroborating evidence can be found in the ICRC newssheet Nouvelles de l’Agence internationale des prisonniers de guerre, which on 5 January 1918 carried a report on the release of seventy ‘Belgian women of low morals’ who had been held at Holzminden ‘for close to a year, or in some cases for longer’. Copy in ACICR, C G1, A 42–01. 40. For British views, see also Tracey Loughran, Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain (Cambridge, 2016), p. 228. 41. Gerard to Page, 8 November 1914, in TNA, FO 369/714. 42. Grew to Tom Perry, 6 December 1914, in Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA (henceforth HL), Grew Papers, MS Am 1687 (5). 43. See Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, esp. pp.  26, 80, 105, 133, 143–4 and 271. 44. On German protests, see Kordan, ‘Internment in Canada’, p. 177, n. 1. 45. Lord Newton, Retrospection (London, 1941), pp. 237 and 243. 46. Kordan, ‘Internment in Canada’, pp. 165–6. 47. Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire. 48. Kordan, ‘Internment in Canada’, p. 172.

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49. Ibid., pp. 173–4. 50. For a further discussion, see Stibbe, ‘(Dis)entangling’. 51. Kordan, ‘Internment in Canada’, p. 174. 52. See article 43 of the 1907 HLKO at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_ century/hague04.asp. Also Philipp Nivet, La France occupée, 1914–1918 (Paris, 2011), pp. 52–4. 53. Begriff: ‘Kriegs- und Zivilgefangene’ (as note 17 above). 54. Ibid. 55. Thiel, ‘Menschenbassin Belgien’, pp. 156–62. 56. Ibid., p. 161. 57. The War Ministry maintained this stance to the end of the war and beyond—see, for instance, Doegen, Kriegsgefangene Völker, Vol. 1, p. 175. 58. Commander of the second Bavarian army corps, 2 March 1917, in BayHStA-KA, Generalkommando II.  Bayerisches Armeekorps (WK) 693, Bd. 5. 59. Quarter Master General to Prussian Ministry of War, 24 February 1917. Copy in BayHStA-KA, Generalkommando I. Armeekorps (WK) 2005. 60. Watson, Ring of Steel, p. 381. 61. See the competing interpretations offered by Marc Michel, ‘Intoxication ou “brutalisation”? Les “represailles” de la grande guerre’, 14–18 aujourd’hui today heute, 4 (2001), pp. 175–97; and Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg, pp. 56–65 and 87–91. 62. Jones, Violence, p.  168. See also Heather Jones, ‘The German Spring Reprisals of 1917: Prisoners of War and the Violence of the Western Front’, German History, 26.3 (2008), pp. 335–56. 63. Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg, p.  81; Heather Jones, ‘International Law and Western Front Prisoners in the First World War’, in Pathé and Théofilakis (eds.), Wartime Captivity, pp. 30–43 (here esp. pp. 36–7). 64. Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg, pp. 158–69. 65. See, for instance, Rapports de MM. Dr. C. Manuel et A. Eugster sur leurs visites aux camps de prisonniers en France et en Allemagne du 22 février au 11 mars 1915 (Geneva and Paris, 1915), p. 46; and Rapports de M. le Dr. A. Vernet et M. Richard de Muralt sur leurs visites aux dépôts de prisonniers en Tunisie et de MM. P. Schazmann et Dr. O.-L. Kramer sur leurs visites aux dépôts de prisonniers en Algérie en décembre 1915 et janvier 1916 (Geneva and Paris, 1916), pp. 23, 27–8 and 60–2. 66. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, p. 59. 67. Stibbe, ‘Enemy Aliens, Deportees, Refugees’, p. 493. 68. Katharina Stampler, ‘Flüchtlingswesen in der Steiermark, 1914–1918’, Magisterarbeit, University of Graz, 2004, pp. 65–8.

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69. Erlass des KÜA, 15 November 1914, in ÖStA-HHStA, Karton 556, 26/2a, Zl. 14. This measure was accompanied by a wave of Anglophobia in the Austrian, and in particular the Viennese, press, lasting well into 1915. See also Watson, Ring of Steel, pp. 243–4. 70. See the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the KÜA, 6 April 1916, and the KÜA to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4 May 1916, in ÖStA-HHStA, Karton 556, 26/2a, Zl. 48. Also Deutsche Gruppe C, Bericht umfassend die Zeit vom 1. bis 30. September 1915, p.  72, in ÖStA-KA, GZNB, Karton 3732, Zl. 2063. 71. Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Minister-Presidents in Vienna and Budapest, 20 June 1916. Copy in ÖStA-AVA, MdI, Allg. Sign. 19/1916, Zl. 33334. 72. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, p. 163. 73. Mai, Die Marokko-Deutschen, p. 666. 74. Austro-Hungarian Ambassador in Madrid to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, 20 December 1915, in ÖStA-HHStA, Karton 563, 27/1a, Zl. 246. 75. Austrian Red Cross, Fürsorgekomitee für Kriegsgefangene, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4 November 1915, in ibid., Zl. 227. 76. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 177–80. 77. Kordan, ‘Internment in Canada’, pp. 174–5. 78. Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, pp. 139 and 155–7. 79. Rapports de MM. Dr. C. Manuel et A. Eugster (as note 65 above), p. 46. 80. Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg, pp. 156–8 and 164; Jones, Violence, p. 152. 81. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 122–3 and 151. 82. Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg, pp. 141–4, 149–55, 182 and 296. 83. See also Kramer, ‘Wackes at War’, pp. 108–110. 84. Watson, Ring of Steel, p. 145. 85. See ‘Einleitende Bemerkungen’, in k.u.k. Ministerium des Äussern (ed.), Sammlung von Nachweisen, Vol. 1, pp. XI–XII. 86. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, p. 166. See also Nivet, La France occupée, pp. 191–2. 87. Hull, A Scrap of Paper, p. 101, n. 13. See also Smith, ‘The Kiss of France’, pp. 28–9. 88. Protokoll der Sitzung der Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland, 20 October 1916, in EZA, Bestand 51 C III a 4/2. 89. For the 30,000 military POWs see Jones, Violence, pp. 115–16. For the 250 French ‘Zivilgefangene’ deported with them (and returned to Holzminden after France had submitted to Germany’s demands), see Prussian War Ministry to AA, 6 November 1916, in BArch, R 901/82917.

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90. See US ambassador in Vienna to Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 27 June 1916, forwarding note from US ambassador in Paris, 20 June 1916, in ÖStA-HHStA, Karton 563, 27/1a. Zl. 301. Also German embassy to Vienna to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 21 June 1916, in ibid., Zl. 299. 91. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, pp.  163–4 and 177; Mai, Die Marokko-­ Deutschen, pp. 674–5 and 680–2. On neutral internment, see also Chap. 5. 92. Stibbe, ‘Ein globales Phänomen’, p. 165. 93. Protokoll der Sitzung der Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland, 1 November 1917, in EZA, Bestand 51 C III a 4/2. For more on Rotten, see Chap. 5. 94. Jones, Violence, pp. 159–60. 95. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, esp. pp.  62–8 and 268–72. See also Kramer, ‘Prisoners in the First World War’, esp. pp. 79 and 81–2. 96. As reported in the Bulletin International des sociétés de la Croix-Rouge, no. 194, April 1918, pp. 221–2. 97. See Isabel V.  Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY and London, 2005), esp. pp. 145–8, 321 and 332–3. 98. Nine-page memorandum signed by Bethmann Hollweg, Berlin, 31 October 1916 (here pp. 2–3), in BArch, R 901/82917. 99. Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: Das Problem des ‘Militarismus’ in Deutschland. Bd. 3: Die Trägodie des Staatskunsts: Bethmann Hollweg als Kriegskanzler (1914–1917) (Munich, 1964), p. 448. 100. AA, note to the US ambassador in Berlin, 14 July 1916, forwarded to the British Foreign Office, 31 July 1916. Copy in TNA, FO 383/198. 101. WUA, Reihe III/Bd. 2, pp. 719–855. 102. Ketchum, Ruhleben, p. xviii. See also Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats, and the Great War, pp. 152–3. 103. Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London, 1977). 104. See Andreas Fahrmeir, ‘Passports and the Status of Aliens’, in Martin H.  Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford, 2001), pp.  93–119 (here esp. pp.  98–101). On similar fears of ‘alien ­pauperism’ in Imperial Germany, and use of expulsion as an administrative tool to control this at state and Reich level, see Christoph Rass, ‘Praktiken der Exklusion: Die Reichsverweisung im Migrationsregime des Deutschen Reichs 1871/75 bis 1914/18’, IMISBeiträge, 52 (2018), pp. 97–138.

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105. Fahrmeir, ‘Passports and the Status of Aliens’, pp.  113–16; Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerbeschäftigung, pp. 22–7. 106. One example among many would be the nineteenth-century Bavarian laws surrounding use of ‘police detention’ as a ‘corrective measure’ (Besserungsmaßnahme). See here Joseph Schiller, Die Polizeihaft in Bayern (Kallmünz, 1931), esp. pp.  38–41. Also Rass, ‘Praktiken der Exklusion’, p. 118. 107. For the case of British nationals trapped in Germany, see Gerard to Page, 14 October, 16 November and 12 December 1914, all in TNA, FO 369/712. 108. Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerbeschäftigung, pp. 87–8. 109. On the financial difficulties that alien women in particular could find themselves in, see Matthew Stibbe, ‘Elisabeth Rotten and the Auskunftsund Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland, 1914–1919’, in Alison S.  Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds.), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–19 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp.  194–210; and Zoë Denness, ‘Gender and Germanophobia: The Forgotten Experiences of German Women in Britain, 1914–1919’, in Panayi (ed.), Germans as Minorities, pp. 71–97. 110. Forth. Barbed-Wire Imperialism, p. 4. 111. Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens’, pp. 66–7. 112. Kordan, ‘Internment in Canada’. 113. Schönwalder diary, entry for 27 March 1916, in MNH, MS 12028. 114. Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, pp. 155 and 241–44. 115. Susan R.  Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1999), p. 155. 116. District Commissioner in Waidhofen to KÜA, 10 November 1914, in ÖStA-KA, KÜA, Zl. 9634. 117. Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, pp. 152–3. 118. ‘Aliens sent to gaol’, Ramsey Courier, 3 May 1918. 119. The first major study of this phenomenon was Ute Daniel’s The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, trans. by Margaret Ries (Oxford, 1997) [1989]—see here esp. pp.  160–71 and 198–203. For fears about wartime ‘youth delinquency’ in particular, see also Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004). 120. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 98. 121. Ibid., p. 100. 122. See, for instance, the proclamations issued by the acting commanders of the first, second and third Bavarian army corps, 26 September 1915, in BayHStA-KA, Stellvertretendes Generalkommando I.  Armeekorps (WK) 986.

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123. Bavarian War Ministry to the acting commanders of the first, second and third Bavarian army corps, 17 February 1917, in ibid. 124. Police Chief of Essen to the governor of the Düsseldorf region, 6 March 1916, in LNRW, Abt. Rheinland, Oberpräsidium Düsseldorf, No. 15001, Bl. 58. 125. See, for example, the cutting from the Mangfallischen Zeitung, No. 107, 9 September 1916, in BayHStA-KA, Stellvertretendes Generalkommando I. Armeekorps (WK) 986. 126. Bavarian War Ministry to the acting commanders of the first, second and third Bavarian army corps, 17 February 1917, in ibid. 127. Prussian War Ministry to the acting commanders of all Prussian (and Bavarian) army corps, 17 January 1917, in ibid. 128. On Holzminden, see the allegations contained in the French newspaper Le Matin, 9 April 1916, and Spanish embassy in Berlin to AA, 19 June 1916, copies of both in BArch, R 901/82917; and on Havelberg see ‘Les prisonniers au camp de Havelberg (Brandebourg)’, Le Genevois, no. 17, 17 January 1918. Copy in BArch, R 901/84319. 129. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 82–7. 130. Ibid., pp. 77–80; Grayzel, Women’s Identities, pp. 122–3. 131. Nancy M. Wingfield, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford, 2017), here esp. p. 14. 132. Grayzel, Women’s Identities, pp. 122, 129–30, 140 and 150–2. 133. See the report submitted by the Swiss consulate in New York to the Swiss Legation in Washington DC, 26 September 1918, in SBA, E2020, 1000/130, Bd. 73. 134. Hilfskomitee of the POW Relief Committee, Fort Oglethorpe, to the Swiss Legation in Washington DC, 3 September 1918, in SBA, E2200.36, 1000/1738, Bd. 10. 135. Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, p. 595. 136. Central Committee of Internees, Fort Oglethorpe, to the Swiss Legation in Washington DC, 30 August 1919, in SBA, E2200.36, 1000/1738, Bd. 10. 137. See the relevant correspondence in SBA, E2020, 1000/130, Bd. 73. Also Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, pp. 593–4. 138. Jörg Nagler, ‘Victims of the Home Front: Enemy Aliens in the United States during the First World War’, in Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime, pp. 191–215 (here pp. 211–13). 139. Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, pp. 539–40 and 691. 140. Nagler, ‘Victims of the Home Front’, p. 213. 141. Memorandum for Mr. Post, Assistant Secretary for Labor, 6 August 1918, in NARA, RG 174, Box 174, 167/626.

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142. Post to L. L. Thompson, Attorney General, Washington State, n.d. [May 1920?], in NARA, RG 174, Box 177, 167/255. 143. Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, p. 561. The IWW (Industrial Workers of the World or ‘Wobblies’) were a pre-war anarchist group founded in Chicago, IL, in 1905. 144. See, for instance, the use of this phrase in Commander of the second Bavarian army corps, Korpstagesbefehl, 12 November 1915 and Supreme Commander of the Sixth Army to all army corps commanders, 17 December 1915. Copies of both in BayHStA-KA, Generalkommando II.  Bayerisches Armeekorps (WK) 693, Bd. 2: Kriegsgefangene, 1915–17. 145. Rear Inspectorate of the Sixth Army to the Quarter Master General, 27 December 1916, in BayHStA-KA, Etappenformationen (WK) 172. 146. See also Supreme Commander of the Sixth Army to all army corps commanders, 12 November 1916, in BayHStA-KA, Infanteriedivisionen (WK) 4074. 147. Quarter Master General, ‘Neuaufstellung von Z.A.B.s und Einziehung von Ersatzarbeitern’, 2 January 1917, in BayHStA-KA, Etappenformationen (WK) 147. 148. Wyndham’s War—the Diaries of Thomas Wyndham Richards, a Cardiff Schoolmaster interned in Ruhleben and Havelberg, 1914–1918, edited by Derek Richards (Newport, 2014), p. 341 (diary entry for 17 December 1917). 149. See Hull, Scrap of Paper, p. 140; and Jones, Violence, p. 185. 150. For the relevant documents see BayHStA-KA, Stellvertretendes Generalkommando I. Bayerisches Armeekorps (WK) 678. 151. Inspectorate for POW camps of the first Bavarian army corps to the acting commander of the Bavarian first army corps, 19 June 1918, in ibid. On the proposed camp at Weilheim, and its link to the fight against ‘Arbeitscheue’, see also Stibbe, ‘(Dis)entangling’, forthcoming. 152. On hostile attitudes towards impoverished city-dwellers in southern Bavaria, both during and after the war, see Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923, trans. by Alex Skinner (Oxford, 2007) [1997], esp. pp.  191–209; and Martin H.  Geyer, Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation und Moderne. München 1914–1924 (Göttingen, 1998), pp. 184–6. 153. Anschütz to Lewenz, 23 January 1915. Copy in HLL, Ettinghausen Collection, Box 6, File 5. 154. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 33. 155. Ibid., pp. 36–7. 156. Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, pp. 26–7. 157. Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, esp. pp. 148–57 and 311.

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158. See Daily Mail, 16 February 1917; and the Times, 8 October 1918. Copies of both in HLL, Masterman Collection, Box 21. 159. Newton, Retrospection, pp.  264, 267 and 270–9. The amendment was unpopular with the right-wing press, because it offered certain protections to those aliens who had lived in Britain for a long period of time and ‘against whom no allegation [of disloyalty] had been made’. However, after some further parliamentary battles it was ultimately accepted by the House of Commons on 18 December 1919. 160. Katja Wüstenbecker, ‘Politik gegenüber ethnischen Minderheiten im Vergleich: die deutschstämmige Bevölkerung in Kanada und den USA im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Eisfeld, Hausmann and Neutatz (eds.), Besetzt, interniert, deportiert, pp. 263–82 (here p. 281). 161. Ibid., p. 276. 162. Newton, Retrospection, p. 277. 163. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 138–43. 164. Ibid., p.  118. On the Central Prisoners of War Committee, see also Durbach, ‘The Parcel is Political’. 165. British Red Cross Society, Central POW Committee, to Joseph Powell, 26 January 1917, in HLL, Ettinghausen Collection, Box 5, File 17. 166. Jan Vermeiren, The First World War and German National Identity: The Dual Alliance at War (Cambridge, 2016), p. 218. 167. Volksspende für die Deutsche Kriegs- und Zivilgefangenen, founding appeal, June 1916. Copies in BayHStA-KA, Kriegsministerium 13761 and BArch, R 67/1849. 168. Protokoll der am 26. Mai 1916 im Kriegsministerium abgehaltenen Sitzung zur Besprechung über die ‘Volksspende für die deutschen Kriegsund Zivilgefangenen’, in BayHStA-KA, Kriegsministerium 13761. 169. Mai, Die Marokko-Deutschen, p.  687. On ‘neutral’ internment in Switzerland, see also Chap. 5. 170. Stibbe, ‘Elisabeth Rotten’, p. 201. For more on Rotten, see also Chap. 5. 171. Stürgkh to Finance Ministry, 5 July 1916, in Österreichisches Staatsarchiv Vienna, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv (henceforth ÖStA-AVA), MdI., Allg., Sign. 19, Zl. 33334/1916. 172. See, for example, ‘Unsere Kriegsgefangenen und Internierten in Frankreich, England und den neutralen Staaten, Dezember-Bericht [1917]’, in ÖStA-KA, AOK/GZNB, Karton 3756, Zl. 4925. 173. Swiss Legation in Berlin to the Federal Political Department, Bern, 30 March 1918, in SBA, E2020, 1000/130, Bd. 73. 174. Bericht über die Sitzung des Hauptausschusses der Volksspende für die deutschen Kriegs- und Zivilgefangenen am 18. Januar 1918. Copy in BayHStA-KA, Kriegsministerium 13761.

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175. Swedish Legation (Austro-Hungarian division), report covering visit of inspection to the Nell Lane Military hospital in West Didsbury, Manchester, on December 14th, 1918, dated 8 January 1919, in TNA, FO 383/478. By this time, of course, the Habsburg monarchy no longer existed. 176. Louis Jacquet, Rapport concernant l’Universitaire Populaire du Camp du Holzminden, 9 March 1916, in BArch, R 901/82917. 177. Extract from an article in Le Matin, 9 April 1916. Translated into German by the ‘Auslandsnachrichtenstelle des Auswärtigen Amtes’ (foreign news service of the AA). Copy in ibid. 178. See here Peter Gatrell and Liubov Zhvanko (eds.), Europe on the Move: Refugees in the Era of the Great War (Manchester, 2016). 179. Manz, Constructing a German Diaspora, p. 263. 180. As Giovanna Procacci has recently shown, this also needs to be seen in the context of a more general failure of the Italian state to meet the wartime social welfare  needs of its citizens. See Procacci, Warfare-Welfare, pp. 58–61 and 78–9, n. 53. 181. See, for example, Italienische Zensurgruppe B, Spezialbericht, 11 September 1915, and Bericht der Italienischen Zensurgruppe B, 5 January 1918, in ÖStA-KA, AOK/GZNB, Karton 3732, Zl. 1917 and Karton 3756, Zl. 4936. 182. See Verzeichnis der zivilinternierten Triestiner und Trentiner in Frankreich, 7 August 1917, in AST, Direzione di Polizia, Atti Presidiali Riservati, no. 403/785–17. 183. Matthias Egger, ‘Gekämpft, gefangen und vergessen? Die k.u.k. Regierung und die österreichisch-ungarischen Kriegsgefangenen in Russland 1914–1918’, D.Phil dissertation, University of Salzburg, 2018, here esp. pp. 10 and 17. 184. Jones, ‘International or Transnational?’, esp. pp. 709–10. 185. See Durbach, ‘The Parcel is Political’, p. 105.

CHAPTER 5

Internment and International Activism: The Search for More Humane Alternatives

One of the big questions posed in the recent historiography of the First World War is the issue of whether it fractured or opened up spaces for internationalism and humanitarian engagement.1 On the one hand, the failure of cross-border networks of peace activists to prevent the outbreak of war in 1914, and/or to achieve a negotiated settlement between the belligerent countries before 1918, speaks for itself.2 On the other hand, historians of medicine, law, women’s movements, Leninist and non-­ Leninist strands of socialism and worldwide anti-colonial or black liberation ventures have all successfully sought a more nuanced view of the potential strengths as well as vulnerabilities of internationalist endeavour during this period.3 This is the first book to consider international activism in relation to civilian captivity, and vice versa, civilian captivity in relation to international activism. In the present chapter, it does so with particular emphasis on one of the central dilemmas facing campaigners against internment after 1914, namely that cross-border ‘medical and ­humanitarian concerns [often] remained tightly entwined with military rationales’.4 All but the most absolute pacifists had to grapple with this conundrum and what it meant in terms of balancing humanitarian ends and international political means. The conclusion reached is that international activism was by no means a complete failure when it came to mitigating the consequences of internment for individuals and families. However, while it took some steps forward, it failed to address the bigger human and existential questions thrown up by internment, especially as it remained trapped © The Author(s) 2019 M. Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57191-5_5

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within a set of values framed by hidden and not so hidden assumptions about race, empire, masculinity and military priorities, and interwoven with languages of colonialism and Orientalism. Some but not all of this pre-dated the war. What Glenda Sluga refers to as ‘international-mindedness’ and Daniel Gorman as the emergence of a ‘networked international society’ had indeed already begun to show some signs of life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 Much of the international activism before 1914 was motivated by a desire to provide answers to pressing political, military, scientific and security problems that could not be solved at the national or transnational levels alone. For instance, cooperation in protecting national borders, as well as monitoring cross-border networks of criminals, terrorists or revolutionary agitators, was becoming more systematised, with the First International Criminal Police Congress taking place in Monaco in April 1914.6 As Marco Duranti argues, there was also a romantic element to nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century internationalism, based on an idealised longing for an imagined past when older, cosmopolitan ideals of spiritual brotherhood between nations and ‘supra-national’ bonds of loyalty between the rulers of ‘Christendom’ had supposedly held sway, before they were ‘corrupted’ by modern, egalitarian mass democracy.7 Moving from the romantic to the practical, the medical needs of war victims were high up on the list of priorities for international cooperation in the early twentieth century.8 This marked a trend which went back to the 1850s and 1860s, particularly with the work of the Geneva-based businessman Henry Dunant, who founded the ICRC in 1863 after witnessing the human suffering caused by the absence of even the most basic standards of care for wounded soldiers at the battle of Solferino in 1859.9 Like its principal counterpart, nationalism, early twentieth-century internationalism was still very Euro-centric, elitist and male-dominated, but provided some spaces for the voices of educated, white women to be heard—especially in the fields of peace and medical activism. The Swiss campaigner Antonie Girardet-Vielle, for instance, saw the organisation she set up in Lausanne in October 1914, the Bureau international féministe de renseignements en faveur des victimes de la guerre or International Feminist Office for Making Inquiries on Behalf of Victims of War, as an important continuation of the work done by the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance before 1914 for the maintenance of world peace. The latter body was founded in 1904 and held its last pre-war congress in Budapest in 1913 where it issued a call for the universal right of married

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women to determine their own nationality irrespective of that of their husbands, and for the female vote ‘in all countries where representative governments exist’, meaning in effect Europe, the United States, South America and the white British Dominions. Girardet-Vielle herself worked with diplomats and jurists from around the world, and claimed to have established connections with ninety-five other international feminist groups, in order to help women and children who were held hostage, separated from their families or illegally deported in the course of military operations.10 Alongside sovereign states, private philanthropic organisations and voluntary networks of female activists, social scientists and specialist investigators also played an increasingly important role in international politics from the turn of the twentieth century.11 In 1914, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a body set up in Washington DC in 1910 by the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, sponsored the publication of a widely read report on the causes and conduct of the two Balkan wars of 1912–13, drawn up by an International Commission made up of an (exclusively male) group of experts from Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia and the United States. The Commission’s leader, the French Senator Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, made the following case for international inquiries such as this in his foreword to the report: It has been further asked: what are you going to do in the Balkans, you French, you Americans, you English, you Russians, you Germans? Have you not enough to do with Morocco to look after, with Mexico, with South Africa, India, Persia? Yes, we have plenty to do at home, but let us give up all exterior action if we pretend to wait until everything in our own house or conduct is reformed before we attempt to help others. I do not consider the French State more perfect than any other human organization but ­nevertheless my own imperfection need not prevent me from doing my utmost to be useful.12

Both the objective conditions (improvements in transport and communications) and to some extent the subjective political commitment (a desire to avoid a repetition of the mass population displacement and civilian suffering seen in the Spanish-American, Anglo-Boer and/or Balkan wars) were therefore already in place in 1914 to allow internment to become a focus of international campaigns. But neither of these factors are sufficient

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on their own to explain the growing impulse among activists towards the internationalisation of humanitarian aid for military and civilian internees after 1914, or towards the development of new scientific interest in the medical and psychological aspects of the camp phenomenon. More important was the realisation that internment, like the war itself, was not going to end quickly, and equally the recognition among some women activists and humanitarian groups that captivity was not just a phenomenon that affected soldiers in uniform or men of fighting age.13 As far as the international community as a whole is concerned, this realisation was remarkably slow in coming. The different sections of this chapter offer the first systematic examination of some of the individuals and organisations which fought to bring the plight of civilian internees to the world’s attention between 1914 and 1918. They will also seek explanations for the overriding failure of proposals for more humane alternatives to enemy civilian captivity, while recognising some partial successes—not least for the programme of neutral internment launched by Switzerland in 1916 and the Netherlands in 1917. Neutral internment, alongside international inspection of camps in belligerent states, in turn exposed the long-term negative effects of wartime captivity on the whole of European society, with barbed wire coming to symbolise a new state, or rather paralysis, of mind. The last section of the chapter will consider the invention and use of the phrase ‘barbed-wire disease’ as an internationally recognised (although far from universally accepted) term to describe a range of psychological side effects associated with wartime captivity. It will end by discussing the reception of an important book with the same title published by the Swiss Red Cross surgeon Adolf Lukas Vischer in late 1918, and the place of this publication in medical understandings of the captive phenomenon.14

Pre-war Precedents: Emily Hobhouse and the South African Camps At the time of the second Anglo-Boer war at the turn of the twentieth century (1899–1902), the British peace campaigner Emily Hobhouse did more than any other figure to bring to national and international attention the horrors of the British concentration camps, in which 28,000 white Boers, the vast majority of them women and children, as well as some 7000–12,000 black South Africans died.15 Hobhouse travelled to South

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Africa twice in 1900–01 as a leading representative of a nationally based charity she co-founded with Kate Courtney in September 1900, the South African Women and Children Distress Fund (SAWCDF).16 Her sensational report on the concentration camps, exposing widespread humanitarian suffering, was published in English by the SAWCDF in June 190117 and also appeared in other European languages, including a Dutch version in Rotterdam18 and a German translation put out in Berlin by the pro-­ Boer Deutscher Burenhilfsbund.19 Her activities were widely condemned at the time by British empire loyalists and by the War Office and Colonial Office at home, and she was deported from South Africa during her second visit there in October–November 1901. Nonetheless, her criticisms were at least partly vindicated by the findings of the ‘Ladies Commission’, appointed by the Unionist government in the wake of the publication of her report in June 1901 and headed by the then President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the Liberal Unionist (and pro-war) Millicent Garrett Fawcett.20 The negative publicity over the mistreatment of white Boer civilians damaged Britain’s reputation in international circles and created an unfavourable and lasting association between the British empire and the term ‘concentration camp’ with effects that can still be felt today. As Lord Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa, wrote to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain in December 1901: ‘The whole thing… has been a mistake. If we can get over the Concentration Camps, none of the other attacks upon us alarm me in the least’.21 In Europe, the Dutch, the Germans, the French and the Austrians were all extremely critical. The British were certainly keen to avoid repeating the same ‘mistake’ in 1914– 18, and, except in a few short-lived instances, studiously steered clear of interning enemy women and children.22 As an avid opponent of Britain’s involvement in the First World War, Hobhouse’s impact could be felt after 1914  in other ways too. Yet, somehow she lacked the political imagination and knowledge of the ­ changing nature of early twentieth-century humanitarian activism needed to move from campaigning against one particular instance of internment in one particular imperial setting to campaigning to publicise and mitigate its effects as an international, worldwide problem. In many ways, her approach was closer to the ‘romantic’ than the ‘Geneva’ tradition. ‘Humanitarianism’, for her, was thus associated with idealised, nineteenthcentury notions of (white) ‘Britishness’ and ‘civilised’ values, while the South African camps had been an act of ‘barbarism’ unworthy of Britain’s

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historic imperial mission in Africa and the rest of the world. However, she did not condemn the internment of black British colonial subjects during the Boer war, or at least not until long after that conflict had ended,23 and had nothing to say about the death camps for the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa in 1904–08. In June 1916, an unofficial trip she made to Germany and German-occupied Belgium ended in disaster when she was widely accused of acting as an apologist for the German military after refusing publicly to condemn the internment system and other abuses of enemy civilians there, and contrasting Ruhleben favourably with the British camps in South Africa.24 The Frankfurter Zeitung carried a report in November 1916 noting that she had been banned by the British Foreign Office from travelling abroad again during the war after ‘committing the sin of claiming that prisoners of war are well treated in Germany’ and in the same breath calling for a negotiated settlement between London and Berlin. As will be recalled, Miss Hobhouse offered a truthful account of her impressions of Belgium and Ruhleben [in June 1916] and thereby ‘did harm’ to the Entente’s cause by dismantling the lies that have been spread throughout the world about German atrocities… Miss Hobhouse expressed the wish that British statesmen might show the same courage as British soldiers and work towards peace.25

However, campaigning in public against the ‘lies’ allegedly told by one side or the other, or against governments that apparently refused to enter into peace talks, did not categorically help to mobilise large-scale humanitarian efforts for prisoners of war in a global conflict, and nor did it further the search for humane alternatives. Rather, what was needed—in Bruno Cabanes words—was the systematic cultivation of a new ‘ethics of reciprocity’. This could only be achieved by bringing together government and military representatives, NGOs, medical, legal and public relations experts, reliable financial donors, and sustainable networks of activists capable of operating at the national and international levels and in a multitude of overlapping jurisdictions.26 The ‘shift towards “scientific” philanthropy’ and the ‘professionalization of humanitarian aid’ happened quite rapidly in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and soon eclipsed the more geographically confined, single-issue relief campaigns of previous years. It was seen above all in the United States and its private/semi-­ official aid programmes run by wealthy Quaker businessmen like Herbert

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Hoover, which aimed to shift food and medicines around the world to meet the needs of vulnerable civilian populations, including victims of war, civil unrest and natural disasters.27 Humanitarian relief for civilian internees and their families was necessarily on a much smaller scale than Hoover’s wartime and post-war feeding programmes in blockaded Belgium, Central Europe and Russia, but it relied on similar cross-border, and increasingly internationalised, arrangements and principles.

The Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland One activist who was quicker to grasp the new political realities and ethical implications of global internment than Emily Hobhouse was the anti-war campaigner Elisabeth Rotten. Rotten was a Swiss national who had studied moral philosophy in Germany (Marburg) and England (Cambridge) before the war, and belonged to various international networks of neo-­ Kantian scholars. She was extremely well-connected with Quaker organisations in Britain, particularly the FEC, as well as with the Swiss federal government, the ICRC in Geneva and a number of other humanitarian groups based in wartime London, Berlin, Zurich, Lausanne and Bern. Exerting moral pressure via appeals to a supposedly benign public opinion in the warring countries above the heads of their militaristic, violence-­ prone rulers, she realised, would achieve less in the international arena than attempts to persuade national governments and military establishments to voluntarily agree to limitations on the length of civilian and military captivity and the age of captives on a reciprocal basis. Among other things, this is what her wartime organisation, the Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland, set out to do.28 Influenced by the FEC in Britain, the Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle (in English, Assistance Bureau for Germans in Distress Abroad and Foreigners in Distress in Germany) was founded in Berlin in October 1914 as a means of offering practical advice and financial support to individual aliens stranded in enemy territory when the war broke out. However, its emphasis soon switched to aiding women and children in particular once British and French alien males had been interned in Germany in November– December. The men were now relatively ‘safe’ inside the internment camps, but their wives and children, forced to struggle on without them, were much more exposed to the dangers of xenophobic prejudice and

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destitution, as were single women aliens—including those sacked from teaching, waitressing and other jobs at the start of the war or soon after. Even those with savings found that their funds soon ran out, especially as they were refused access to ‘patriotic’ charities in their country of residence. Travelling ‘home’, even if they could afford it, was not an option for many—particularly if it meant leaving husbands behind in internment. As she explained in a letter to Stephen Hobhouse, a leading member of the FEC in London (and a first cousin of Emily), on 26 April 1915: [O]ur wish to help foreigners in Germany arose from the spontaneous need brought home to us by individual efforts since the beginning of the war. But the knowledge of the wide and generous work in existence in England helped and furthered our efforts considerably. The organisations in foreign countries have in a real sense been our Stützpunkte  – point d’appui. One reason amongst others why we organised comparatively late in the day is that there are fewer persons in Germany of foreign nationality than Germans and Austrians in England. Contrary to the conditions prevailing in England, the foreigners here belong nearly all to the well-to-do classes, and these needed in the first instance more personal advice and protection than organised charity. The need for the latter arose only at the beginning of November when the English were interned who had up to then been at liberty. This gave the occasion for organising the work which had hitherto been done by individuals.29

By April 1916, the Committee provided assistance to up to 2500 destitute alien families in Germany, and was spending an average of 3000 marks each month on emergency welfare payments. This was in direct imitation of the work of the FEC in London, which was already assisting 700 enemy alien families in distress by October 1914, rising to 2650 by the end of 1914 and a further 3190 families by the end of June 1916.30 In addition, while the Society of Friends’ War Victims’ Relief Committee offered help to impoverished French and Belgian refugees who had escaped in 1914 to non-occupied France and the Netherlands,31 Rotten’s organisation soon became aware of the particular plight of their opposite numbers, namely women and children originally from non-occupied France and Belgium who were trapped, with no means of support, in the occupied territories following the German invasion in 1914 and/or who were deported to Germany itself and remained stuck in the Holzminden camp. In September 1915, she visited occupied Belgium, where she managed to persuade the Governor-General, Moritz von Bissing, to allow the repatriation of French

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children under the age of thirteen who had been stranded there since the invasion of August 1914.32 For much of the year 1916, her time was taken up dealing with enquiries about individual French, Polish and Russian women held as Zivilgefangene at Holzminden and Lauban, and Alsatian women of German nationality held as Schutzgefangene on grounds of suspected pro-French sympathies.33 Men, she came to understand, enjoyed certain protections in internment camps that women did not, especially as captor powers were reluctant to admit that they were holding any enemy females as prisoners of war. In June 1917, she brought to the ICRC’s attention the case of 200 French and Belgian women who had been convicted of various crimes against the occupation regime by German military courts and were serving their sentences in the women’s jail at Siegburg in the Rhineland, without access to Red Cross relief and without being able to communicate with their families in the occupied territories.34 And in November of that year, with the assistance of Reich Colonial Secretary Wilhelm Solf, she arranged the transfer of 200 Belgian women from Holzminden to non-occupied France in exchange for a similar number of German women seized by Belgian forces in East Africa eighteen months or so earlier.35 A key component of Rotten’s success was her ability to separate her work for the Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle from her other activities during the war, in particular her engagement with the anti-war organisation the Bund Neues Vaterland (BNV). As a foreigner living in a country under a state-­ of-­siege, she was permanently at risk of arrest and/or deportation, not least after she represented the BNV as part of the German delegation at the anti-war International Women’s Congress at The Hague in April–May 1915.36 Her Swiss passport certainly gave her the freedom to travel outside Germany; but she kept her trips, whether to Switzerland, the Netherlands, occupied Belgium or, at one point in the summer of 1915, to London, deliberately low key. Her aim was to make contact with like-­ minded bodies and expert individuals in neutral and Allied countries and to gather scientific information, not to draw wider public attention to her activities for propagandistic purposes. The BNV was in any case very carefully watched by the Berlin police, and another of its leading women campaigners, Lilli Jannasch, spent several months in protective custody (Schutzhaft) in 1916.37 But Rotten, who always kept a packed suitcase on stand-by in her Berlin office in case she was suddenly whisked away to prison or expelled to Switzerland,38 was careful never to mix anti-war agitation with her charitable work for foreigners in Germany and Germans

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abroad. She did not claim that ending the war was the only way of assisting enemy aliens in distress; nor, on the other hand, did she ever suggest that the war (and ‘Prusso-German militarism)’ could be made more palatable and less oppressive through charity work among internees and their families. In particular, like Jannasch, she believed that militarism and imperialism, whether of the German, French, British or any other kind, could never be rendered ‘ethical’.39 In this she differed quite markedly from Hobhouse. On the other hand, she believed that the principle of reciprocity could and should be harnessed to persuade militarist and imperialist governments to behave in a more ethical way towards their own and foreign civilians, particularly if such actions had tangible and measurable impacts on individuals and families. A second ingredient in Rotten’s success was her emphasis on gathering verifiable information about missing, detained and repatriated persons, and sending this on to their families. Indeed, in many ways she gave more priority to this than to providing material assistance to internees’ dependants.40 The expertise she acquired in this area—particularly through her contacts with the ICRC and other humanitarian organisations in Switzerland—earned her the grudging respect of some senior figures in the German war leadership. In particular, they recognised and valued her knowledge of the wartime treatment of German civilians brought through transnational contacts and travel abroad; her strong commitment to accurate record keeping; and her clear separation of humanitarian activism from anti-war and anti-militarist campaigns. Even so, in early 1916 her organisation was banned from making further public appeals for donations by the Prussian Ministry of War, partly as a result of the launch of the Volksspende as the new national body charged with channelling gifts to German prisoners abroad (see Chap. 4), and partly as a by-product of the ongoing campaign of harassment against the BNV.41 In June 1916, Rotten was nonetheless guest of honour at a party in Berlin-Grunewald hosted by the last German ambassador to Britain before the war, Prince Karl von Lichnowsky, and organised by the former Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg. Several leading German bankers—including Arthur von Gwinner, Paul von Schwabach, Hugo Simon and Max Warburg—together with the heads of the publishing houses Mosse and Ullstein and a host of other influential benefactors, now pledged to provide her committee with a secure income.42 The German Minister in Bern, Gisbert von Romberg, who got to hear of the Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle through his own work with Girardet-Vielle’s Bureau international

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féministe de renseignements en faveur des victimes de la guerre and the Basel-­based Hilfsstelle Geisel—Commision des otages, also recommended her to officials in the legal department of the AA in January 1917 as someone reputed to be trustworthy and ‘pro-German’ [deutschfreundlich].43 Wilhelm Solf, the head of the Reich Colonial Office who also briefly served as State Secretary for Foreign Affairs from October to December 1918 in the last Imperial cabinet led by Prince Max von Baden and the first republican administration led by Friedrich Ebert, identified her as a, and perhaps even the driving force behind international efforts to end state-sanctioned reprisals against military POWs and civilian internees through a process of rethinking the meaning of reciprocity.44 By allowing her a key role in the negotiations that led to the repatriation of the remaining British internees from Ruhleben in late November 1918, he also hoped to secure an early return home for the German internees in Britain and the British empire.45 The third reason for Rotten’s success was her ability to think internationally, particularly via a re-conceptualisation of the potential uses and abuses of reciprocity in wartime. In July 1916, she agreed to launch a joint campaign with the FEC and the Hague-based International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), involving writing letters to prominent persons in public life, to argue the case for abolishing the ‘present internment system for civilians… before the next winter’ and suggesting ‘as the most satisfactory alternative, that the older men should be exchanged, irrespective of numbers, and that men of military age be interned in neutral countries’.46 This was followed by her internationally minded response to a request from Dr Eric Higgins, head of the Art and Sciences Union at Ruhleben, to help him to negotiate the despatch of scientific equipment from London to Berlin for use in the Camp School. This request proved impossible to meet due to the Allied blockade of Germany, but instead, in March 1917, Rotten persuaded the FEC to purchase and send a spectroscope to the German scientists interned at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man. In return, a Berlin industrialist, Hans Heele, donated a Rubens-type spectroscope to the British scientists at Ruhleben.47 This was the first practical example of what became known as ‘reprisals of good’, drawing on a phrase used by Edward Winton, Bishop of Winchester, in a letter to The Times in September 1916. With Higgins’ help, Rotten organised similar ‘reprisals’ involving books and equipment donated by Berlin academics over the course of 1917, with the University

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of Leeds offering equivalent gifts to German men at Lofthouse Park near Wakefield.48 Wilhelm Solf, who as Colonial Secretary still hoped to retain and even expand Germany’s Central African colonies after the war, but favoured— perhaps unrealistically after 1916—a negotiated peace settlement to achieve this,49 first came into contact with Rotten during the discussions with Belgium and the Netherlands over the return of German internees from East Africa in late 1917. He also served on the organising committee of an exhibition held in the Prussian Herrenhaus (upper house of parliament) in Berlin in December 1917. Here objects made by German civilian prisoners at Knockaloe—including photograph frames, baskets, items of furniture, wooden objects of various kind as well as samples of knitting and weaving—were displayed and sold for the benefit of a new international charity, the Zurich-based Internationales Hilfskomitee für Zivilgefangene, run by a Dr Charles Hartmann.50 Through the latter’s help, as well as via her contacts in London and in the German Foreign and Colonial Offices in Berlin, Rotten had managed to secure permission for the objects to be transferred from Britain to Germany via Switzerland, and for similar objects to be sold in Switzerland itself. At a meeting of the FEC’s camps’ committee in London in March 1918: Letters from Dr Rotten and Dr Hartmann were reported, giving further particulars of the work at Ruhleben camp and of the sale of goods from the I.O.M. [Isle of Man, M.S.] held in Berlin. It was mentioned that Dr. Hartmann was sending £50 to Mr. Bailey for use among the prisoners at Knockaloe – part of the surplus of the Berlin sale – and that another £50 was being sent direct to Camp I.51

This represented a minor, but symbolic breach in the Allied naval blockade of Germany. Of course, it had no significance for wider questions of civilian suffering and hunger in the war, let alone for the possibility of a negotiated settlement between Britain and Germany, but was nonetheless an important, if small-scale triumph for the new ‘ethics of reciprocity’ that Rotten and her international collaborators were trying to promote. It also reflected Rotten’s personal commitment to neo-Kantian moral philosophy, which posited that because humans are rational beings with free will and awareness of their own mortality, they can never be regarded as mere objects or as means to achieve other, supposedly more worthy or long-­ term ends—whether that be peace or the recovery of national or imperial

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virtue, or the assertion of ‘civilised’ British or Germanic values. As Kant himself put it in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), humanity had to be seen as an end in its own right: Humanity itself is a dignity; for a man cannot be used as a means by any man… but must always be used at the same time as an end. It is just in this that his dignity (personality) consists, by which he raises himself above all other beings in the world that are not men and yet can be used, and so above all things.52

There were of course limitations to what ‘reprisals of good’ could achieve. Rotten made sure that her work, as well as the work of the FEC in London, was given low-key, but targeted and expedient publicity in relevant business and political circles, and—although this became more difficult after 1916—in the national and international press as well. However, she often expressed regret that she had been unable to make contact with like-­ minded organisations and circles in any of the other belligerent countries, including France and the United States.53 Apart from Britain, her only other main overseas networks were in her home country, Switzerland. Nonetheless, an important advance on the notion of what reciprocity might mean had been made. Rotten’s committee was indeed the first private organisation/NGO to have tackled civilian internment systematically as a global problem requiring an international humanitarian response— with the exception of her chief partner in Switzerland, the ICRC. It had also won her a measure of grudging respect from political, military and business leaders in both Britain and Germany.

The Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle and the ICRC Although in practical terms Rotten’s achievements were mostly restricted to Britain and Germany, in terms of internationalist intent her work approximated more to the ‘Geneva tradition’, in other words to the line of humanitarian engagement for the rights of prisoners of war (and their families) which sprang from the spirit, if not the letter, of the Geneva conventions of 1864 and 1906. Like many contemporary neutral observers, she perceived the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 as having largely failed to prevent prisoner abuse, and had reached the conclusion that these conventions were militarist in nature as (in Heather Jones’ words) they ‘had military and government needs at their core’ and did not have

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humanity as an end.54 The very requirement for an organisation such as hers, which put the needs of prisoners and their families above the needs of governments, while recognising that these needs could only be met through systematic encouragement of reciprocal cooperation between governments, was proof of this. Bilateral agreements, such as the ones negotiated between Germany and France at Bern in 1916–18, and later between Germany and Britain at The Hague in 1917–18, while useful, could only offer a partial solution to the prolonged human suffering and distress caused by wartime internment. Moreover, there was a danger that these agreements might be perceived as a regression to the period before the 1860s when, in the absence of established legal and humanitarian norms, romantic traditions—backed merely by threats of negative reprisals—were the only instrument available at international level to enforce hypothetical (and often contested) ‘usages and customs of war’ or notions of (Christian) morality.55 The fact that the ICRC was not only left out of the negotiations that led to bilateral agreements about prisoners at Bern and in The Hague in 1916–18, but that it even had to ask the Dutch Legation in Berlin to furnish it with copies of the agreements reached between Britain and Germany, is a powerful illustration of the ongoing disconnect between great power diplomacy and the categorical humanitarian principles that were embodied in the ‘Geneva tradition’.56 The only permanent answer, from Rotten’s point of view, was to campaign for the universal abolition of civilian internment and of reprisal measures against all occupied civilians, hostages and military prisoners of war. This was a goal that necessarily required displacing more power away from warring national and/or imperial governments, including their right to impose forms of abusive treatment on military and civilian prisoners and their families that were not explicitly outlawed under the Geneva and Hague Conventions—but it again also required pragmatic compromise and clear demarcation from absolute pacifist campaigns. It was an ambition that she also came to share with other bodies, including first and foremost the ICRC, as well as the Basel-based Hilfsstelle Geisel—Commission des otages, the Lausanne-based Bureau international féministe de renseignements en faveur des victimes de la guerre, the Internationales Hilfskomitee für Zivilgefangene in Zurich, the Bernbased Oeuvre universitaire suisse des étudiants prisonniers de guerre, the ICWPP and its various national branches in Europe and North America, and the Dutch pacifist organisation Vrede door Recht.57 The pinnacle of their campaigning came in May 1919, when the ICWPP’s post-war

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successor, the Women’s International League for Permanent Peace (WILPF), adopted a resolution at its Zurich congress condemning the ‘mass deportations’ of ‘suspect’ civilians from war zones and vulnerable frontier districts which it rightly noted had ‘become a worldwide phenomenon since 1914’ and had ‘inflict[ed] suffering and death in many forms on innocent people’. It also called upon the peacemakers in Paris to permanently outlaw this practice. Irrespective of the ‘security’ justifications cited by the military or political leaders of belligerent states, the resolution continued, ‘the expulsion of thousands of innocent people cannot be treated as an internal affair of any of the nations concerned’.58 Yet sadly, the statesmen who framed the new world order of the 1920s, although to some extent sharing the view that the Hague conventions had ‘failed’, were more focused on improving/furthering the internationalisation of the rights of (male) military POWs than in creating new protections for non-combatant, and in particular female and child victims of war. The Hague conventions were in fact not revised at all after 1918, even though the liberal victor powers framed the peace settlement around their ideology of a juridified (verrechtlichte) world order—a world order in which the proliferation, transparency and enforceability of formal law would necessarily hold abuses of political and military might in check.59 While the Geneva Convention of 1929 set out a number of new, and supposedly more effective, legal safeguards for military prisoners, just one protocol, enacted as part of efforts to limit the cross-border arms trade, directly benefited civilians as well as combatants—the global ban (still in force today) on use of chemical and biological weapons.60 It was not until the fourth set of Geneva Conventions, in 1949, that specific protections for all civilians caught up in international conflicts (and not just resident occupied populations) were enshrined in international humanitarian law.61 That these steps were only taken after the much greater civilian and military horrors of the Second World War must count as one of the great disappointments of the 1910s and 1920s. Even so, one organisation whose international reputation for humanitarian activism did grow during and after the First World War was the ICRC. Although it ultimately failed in its aim to outlaw civilian internment and the use of reprisals against civilian as well as military prisoners in the period 1914–20 and afterwards, it emerged from the war with its reputation as the world’s foremost protector of the ‘Geneva tradition’ greatly enhanced, its cooperation with the Swiss government and with national Red Cross societies across the globe still in reasonable shape, and its moral authority, in marked contrast to the

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situation in 1945, still intact.62 In 1917, it became the only organisation during the entire period of the First World War to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of its efforts proactively to extend the reach of international cooperation into the sphere of POW relief.63 And it did not cease in its determination to highlight the particular needs of civilian war sufferers. The civilian section or Bureau civil of its Agence internationale des prisonniers de guerre (AIPG), established in October 1914 and with a staff of around fifty volunteers, played a central role here.64 Headed by the physician Frédéric Ferrière, a veteran Red Cross observer of several European conflicts since 1870 and a frequent delegate to international conferences on war and medicine, it was determined to do much more than enforce existing humanitarian and legal norms, as important as this was. Rather, it took upon itself to ‘consider as prisoners of war all those civilians who have been retained and interned as nationals of enemy countries’, and to do this ‘in accordance with humanitarian principle’ over and above national interest.65 Furthermore, from 1916 at the latest—and against the backdrop of the longevity of the conflict and the growing evidence of significant breaches of international law, for instance in respect to collective punishments, hostage-taking and reprisals—Ferrière set himself the goal of campaigning for universal changes in the way that civilian and military captives were treated. In this respect, he also enjoyed the backing of the then President of the ICRC, Gustave Ador, and the acting (deputy) President, Édouard Naville.66 The ICRC recognised the importance of some of the bilateral agreements on prisoner treatment and prisoner exchange reached in 1916–17, including the initial arrangements for neutral internment in Switzerland and the Netherlands (see the next section). Yet like Rotten, it also questioned whether such schemes really represented an advance for the cause of international cooperation and humanitarian principles as opposed to a throwback to the secret great power diplomacy of the past. As Naville argued at a conference of neutral Red Cross societies hosted by the ICRC in Geneva in September 1917, while the Anglo-German Hague agreement of July 1917 and similar accords reached between Germany and France had provided for the exchange of some civilians of non-combatant age and sex, the problem still remained that the different national systems for civilian internment had ‘escaped… [international] regulation by treaty’.67 As a consequence, as the Swiss Red Cross delegate M.  Bohny also put it, ‘Civilian prisoners get a worse deal than their military

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counterparts, even when it comes to repatriation. Less interest is shown in them’.68 While the conference—which also included representatives of the Spanish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Red Cross societies— declined at this stage to endorse the ICRC’s demand for a complete outlawing of all forms of civilian internment, it nonetheless supported Ferrière’s contention that ‘repatriation is the foremost and best means of improving [their] condition’. While he could see the logic behind detaining civilians at the start of the war, Ferrière told the conference, ‘after three years of captivity they deserve to be released, indeed, they should have been released much earlier than now’.69 In the meantime, the conference also discussed, as option B, plans to ameliorate the conditions of civilian prisoners should internment continue beyond the end of 1917. Essentially, the warring powers would be pressed upon to agree to the following principles: a. civilians to be given the same rights as military prisoners in respect to privileges granted under the Hague Convention, notably the right to send and receive correspondence, and to accept relief in cash and kind; b. those civilians who are not repatriated before the onset of winter to be sent to dépôts or camps that are clean and spacious; small dépôts that are poorly laid out and poorly administered to be closed down; c. categories of illness and disability allowing repatriation or internment in a neutral country to be expanded; d. the agreement between Germany on the one hand, and Britain, France and Russia on the other, that no civilian internee be forced to work against their will, to be strictly adhered to, with the exception of essential maintenance work inside the camps; e. confinement—in other words permission to return to former occupations under police surveillance—to be reintroduced as an alternative to internment for trustworthy enemy civilians with a long period of residence in the countries concerned.70

Special consideration was also given to the particular fate of civilian deportees and civilian inhabitants of invaded territories. With regard to the former, the conference resolved to demand of the warring powers that ‘except in cases of force majeure’, deportations be limited to ‘adult males capable of bearing arms’, thereby anticipating some of the demands made by WILPF at Zurich in May 1919. Occupied civilians, meanwhile, should be offered protections that went beyond the current HLKO. This included the expectation that the occupiers should

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1. permit and facilitate the exchange of correspondence between the inhabitants of the occupied territory and their families living beyond it, subject to the requirements of censorship; 2. facilitate the shipment of relief in cash and kind in the largest amounts possible; 3. grant inhabitants of the occupied territory permission to leave said territory if they request this; 4. allow visits to the occupied territory by official representatives of the protecting powers, neutral Red Cross societies and the ICRC, as well by representatives of neutral aid societies.71

These were the maximalist, categorical demands put forward by humanitarian groups during the First World War, and of course they were almost entirely ignored by the belligerent states. As the ICRC concluded at its tenth international conference in 1921, each of the captor nations, even where they made efforts to follow international conventions, ‘worked towards securing advantages for itself rather than serving the cause of humanity’.72 The whole system of international protection for prisoners of war, it continued, was flawed because it operated according to ‘the principle of reciprocity’ as opposed to the ‘principle of justice’.73 However, it is important to note that the 1917 conference in Geneva failed not just because of the attitude of the warring powers but because neutral Red Cross societies themselves could not agree on a common programme beyond their maximalist demands. This was because they too were bound by national interest and loyalty to their own governments. For instance, the Spanish representative, M. Mille, declared that ‘internees in Spain are well looked after by the Red Cross. Most of them are [German] military personnel who escaped from Cameroon [into Spanish African territory in 1916, M.S.]’. Yet he did not feel able to recommend their unilateral release and repatriation to Germany because this might impinge on Spain’s sovereign status as a neutral.74 Humanitarian treatment without repatriation was all he could offer, in spite of Ferrière’s claim that, as the war entered its fourth year, failure to repatriate interned civilians had in itself to be seen as a breach of the humanitarian spirit behind the ‘Geneva tradition’. M. Didring of the Swedish Red Cross, on the other hand, ‘declared himself to be in complete agreement with the call for repatriation’, while the Norwegian Red Cross delegate, M.  Bull, merely commented that ‘Norway does not have any internees’.75 Here, then, national interests and differences were difficult to overcome even in the ‘internationalist’ setting of Geneva and even among neutrals as opposed to belligerents.

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A second area of disagreement was of a more practical nature and reflected a lack of knowledge and inability to predict the future as opposed to conflict between national priorities and internationalist spirit. Put simply, the delegates could not decide whether a demand should be made that civilian prisoners be treated according to exactly the same standards as military prisoners. This is because they were uncertain whether this would advantage or disadvantage them. If they were formally classified as prisoners of war, for instance, then they might enjoy the explicit protections offered under the 1906 Geneva Convention and the 1907 HLKO, and any breaches could be more robustly attended to. On the other hand, this might conflict with the conference’s demand that civilian prisoners not be required to do forced labour—as under the HLKO, this could be required of rank-and-file military POWs. It might also undermine, or at least complicate and slow down, the campaign to have all civilian prisoners released and repatriated on the grounds that three years in captivity was already long enough. If they were equal to military prisoners, then the same case would logically have to be made for military prisoners too. Naville in particular felt that any attempt at assimilation could be ‘dangerous’ and anyway was ‘just a means of passing the buck’ [pourrait être un oreiller de paresse] instead of addressing the discrete humanitarian needs of civilian prisoners head on.76 His views were finally adopted in a resolution passed at the twelfth international conference of the ICRC in Geneva in October 1925 which demanded that while ‘at a minimum’ civilian internees should be entitled to the same standards of treatment as other captives, ‘they should nonetheless be held separately from prisoners of war’.77 However, even this principle did not make it into the 1929 Geneva Convention, which, as we have seen, failed to mention civilian internees at all. A third area of uncertainty was what to recommend in the case of civilian prisoners who were offered repatriation by the captor power but refused to accept it. This was an issue that might also potentially impact on the rights of women who were not themselves civilian prisoners, but whose enemy alien husbands had been interned in camps and whose right to determine their own nationality and their children’s nationality was severely curtailed globally and domestically by existing citizenship laws. Was there a danger that the ICRC and neutral Red Cross societies could become complicit in forced repatriations carried out by belligerent states against enemy aliens, some of them long-term residents of the countries they were imprisoned in, if they continued to campaign for all-round releases? Naville, for instance, reported that, according to his information, there were already

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‘many internees who have objected to their proposed repatriation’, in spite of being eligible under already existing bilateral exchange agreements, including ‘5000 [cases] in Britain’.78 This was yet another reason for being cautious about making blanket demands for civilian internees to be treated in the same way as military prisoners, particularly as the latter were far less apt to refuse repatriation were it to be offered—mainly because they were less likely to have family ties or business interests in the country that held them captive. There was one final problem that the ICRC failed to resolve at the 1917 conference of neutral Red Cross societies, more because of a seeming lack of awareness of or interest in it, rather than an absence of agreement over it. This was the question of civilians interned by their own governments rather than by enemy states. Even the ICRC, at least implicitly, seemed to regard this as a ‘domestic’ issue that did not belong in the sphere of international humanitarian action (or in the sphere of international humanitarian law as it then existed). Specifically, there is no evidence of it having pressed belligerent states for lists of ‘internal enemies’ detained in camps. This meant that it missed the relatively large number of women, children and older men being held in Austria-Hungary in particular.79 In essence, states retained full freedom when it came to mistreatment of their own civilians on their own territory, whether on grounds of ‘military security’ or ‘public welfare’. Even the Turks were not formally indicted for their genocide against the Ottoman Armenians. As we have seen, it was to take the radical women’s organisation, the WILPF, to explicitly challenge this particular interpretation of state sovereignty in its May 1919 Zurich resolution demanding the outlawing of all, and not just some, forms of deportation and forced movement.80 And it was to take the western, male peacemakers at Paris to ensure both that this demand from representatives of the anti-war women’s movement was completely ignored, and that international protections for national minorities were applied to the new successor states in Central and Eastern Europe only—and not to their own, more ‘advanced’ and ‘civilised’ national polities.81 Equally, the ICRC does not appear to have given any thought to the particular humanitarian needs of black civilian internees, such as those held in Germany or Austria—including the additional difficulties that they had in getting relief from their home governments or establishing communications with their families. In its final report, published in 1921, it did note that when the war came to an end in 1918, ‘several thousand’

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white Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Turks were still being held in British camps in Africa, ‘from the Transvaal to Egypt’: The overall figure changed over time due to the capture of new internees (in Palestine etc.) and small-scale repatriations.82

It also made reference to the expedition that one of its own inspection teams had made to British camps in India in 1917, and the finding that the German and Austrian civilians held there ‘do not seem to have been… the most unfortunate victims of the war’.83 But there was no mention of the several hundred black and Asian British civilians who were interned as enemy aliens in central Europe—either as a result of being resident there in 1914 or because they were captured as merchant seamen. Indeed, the ICRC grouped wartime civilian captives according to their nationality only. The same applied to former soldiers who continued to be held as prisoners long after the end of the war. In November 1921, for instance, an ICRC inspection team praised the Italians for agreeing to hold as military internees a group of 571 First World War Turkish prisoners who had been repatriated from Vladivostok on board a Japanese ship, the Heimai-­Maru, earlier that year but had been intercepted by the Greek navy before completing the last leg of their journey to Constantinople, and were subsequently handed over to the Italians in the Dodecanese: ‘Major Manca told us that he had received no particular orders concerning the appropriate regime for the internees, but that he intended to afford them all the rights of the Italian soldier’. The racial discrimination that such prisoners might face as non-Europeans, particularly as Italy was still fighting North African rebels in Libya at this time, was not mentioned.84 When it came both to conducting camp inspections and writing up reports, then, the ICRC did not recognise race as a separate category, still less the existence of particular challenges facing civilian prisoners from non-white and non-European backgrounds. Implicitly at least, it regarded racial inequality as an issue for  European colonial powers to resolve internally. In this sense, it was typical of many other international organisations at this time, including those  female pacifist campaigners who spearheaded the International Women’s Congress at The Hague in May 1915.85

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Neutral Internment in Switzerland and the Netherlands When the ICRC held its conference with neutral Red Cross societies in September 1917, with the fate of civilian prisoners at the heart of its agenda, a small but growing number of (male) civilian internees had begun to benefit from a scheme primarily intended to help moderately sick and wounded military POWs. Neutral internment in this context should not be confused with the internment of deserters and other members of belligerent armed forces whom neutral states were obliged to intern for the duration of hostilities under the terms of the Geneva Conventions of 1864 and 1906. Rather, the type of neutral internment under discussion here was an innovation of the First World War, and in numerical terms benefitted far more combatant than non-combatant prisoners. The inclusion of a small number of civilians nonetheless opened up neutral internment as another possible ‘humane’ alternative to prolonged captivity for those enemy aliens caught on hostile territory when the war began. It was less perfect than repatriation to be sure, but even so it featured as part of the laboratory of new ideas that were being considered in the arena of (state-­ sponsored) international cooperation and humanitarian activism during the war.86 For some internees it was hoped, it would also be a stepping stone towards regaining their humanity, health and sense of living in the ‘real’ world. Calls for the exchange of the most sick and wounded military prisoners (grands blessés), and of women, children and men above military age among the civilian internees, had already been made by the ICRC and the Vatican, albeit acting separately, in 1914–15.87 In this respect, Pope Benedict XV and other high representatives of the Catholic Church appeared to subscribe to the more ‘romantic’ aspects of internationalism identified by Duranti.88 However, the Vatican did not have what other non-belligerent states had: territory through which prisoners might pass on their way home, and was therefore obliged to work in conjunction with the Swiss government and Swiss religious organisations, particularly the Mission catholique suisse en faveur des prisonniers de guerre.89 Its moral authority, while great, was also not universally accepted. Ludendorff, for instance, once referred to Benedict XV as the ‘French Pope’.90 And although the French and German governments reached an agreement for the exchange of grands blessés in February 1915, the British and German governments blamed each other for the failure to ratify a similar accord in

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May.91 Eventually, in September 1915, the first, very limited Anglo-­ German exchange agreement for severely sick and unfit civilian and military prisoners came into effect.92 By June 1916, some 394 British and 776 German internees had been released under this scheme, which, on approval by the War Cabinet in London, applied to the European theatre as well as to British overseas dominions, colonies and protectorates.93 The exchange of the grands blessés and severely sick civilians still left open the question of what to do with less seriously ill prisoners who were nonetheless unfit for military service and unlikely to recover from their aliments while in enemy captivity. One possible solution, which stemmed from two articles written by a Swiss journalist, Louis de Tscharner, for the Berner Tageblatt at the end of 1913, was that, in the event of war in Europe, Switzerland might agree to intern such prisoners and nurse them back to health. This would enhance its neutral status and its humanitarian credentials, while providing valuable experience and training to Swiss military doctors.94 While from late 1914 both sides in the First World War appeared broadly sympathetic to this project, as did the Vatican and the Swiss government itself, negotiations were long drawn out. Only in January 1916 was the first Franco-German accord on neutral internment finalised at Bern, with Britain, Austria-Hungary and Belgium joining the scheme later that year.95 Between then and 1919, Switzerland took in 67,700 military internees, albeit with no more than 30,000 at any one time.96 Alongside them were several thousand civilians: on 31 August 1916 the totals were 1626 French men, 439 Belgians, and 439 Germans, and on 31 October 1917, following the Habsburg Monarchy’s decision to join the scheme, the tally stood at 1491 French men, 809 Germans, 463 Belgians and 380 Austria-Hungarians.97 France agreed to include German and Habsburg civilians originally captured or held in its African colonies.98 However, there were no British civilians interned in Switzerland, as London only agreed to participate in the scheme in respect to wounded and sick military prisoners and, according to officials in Vienna, repeatedly ignored Austrian offers to include civilians.99 The internees without means, whether soldiers, officers or civilians, were housed in camps set up in cure resorts, sanatoria and guest houses throughout the Swiss Confederation, with belligerent governments promising to settle the bill for this after the war. Allied and Central Powers’ prisoners were kept well away from each other. Affluent persons or Wohlhabende among the internees were able to live in private accommodation, and could even invite their wives and children to join them in

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Switzerland, on condition that they reported three times a week to their local internment office or Internierungsbüro.100 From mid-1916, those who recovered their health were expected to engage in paid work, unless they were officers. Students among them were also able to enrol at Swiss universities. Figures for April 1917 suggest that of the roughly 15,000 internees in Switzerland at this time, 8000 were working, 1650 were studying, and the remainder had either used their status as officers to opt out of labour or study schemes, or were too ill to participate.101 Even so, as both German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats had recognised a year earlier, ‘the employment of internees is fraught… with difficulties, since it cannot give rise to any competition with Swiss workers’.102 The preferred option was to get as many internees as possible repatriated, since long-­ term neutral captivity was assumed to lead to the same kinds of problems with boredom and mental fatigue as long-term imprisonment in enemy countries. In addition, neutral internment carried with it the danger that soldiers might lose their sense of discipline and fighting spirit owing to an absence of danger and lack of proximity to a ‘hated’ enemy. Although the military prisoners outnumbered the civilians by around ten to one, both groups were in effect now internees and not POWs, as Switzerland was not at war with their countries of origin. The existence of this new kind of neutral captivity was not foreseen in the HLKO, or even in the 1906 Geneva Convention, and certainly the constitutional systems and laws operating in individual Swiss cantons offered no precedents of any kind. Instead, the treatment of such foreign captives was organised and regulated at federal government level, through principles laid down by Colonel Carl Hauser, the military doctor in charge of the Swiss army’s Sanitary Department. The day-to-day running of the camps was overseen by fifteen ‘directing medical officers’ under his command.103 Hauser in turn was answerable to the Political Department in Bern, which shaped overall policy, acted as an intermediary between Hauser and individual cantons, and made decisions on maximum numbers.104 The Swiss example also propelled the Dutch government into action. Between 1917 and 1919, it agreed to intern 16,000 British and German invalid military and civilian prisoners, albeit in barracks and private homes rather than in hotels, as in Switzerland. Of the 16,000 places, 2000 were reserved for civilians, and a further 6500 for officers and NCOs.105 Germany was granted 1600 of the civilian places, and Britain 400, reflecting the disparity in the overall number of civilians held by each side. The beneficiaries were selected ‘by the medical authorities of the captor state’, who were

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required to choose those ‘most in need of relief from captivity on medical grounds’. Those whose health did not improve significantly after three months of neutral internment would be allowed to go home after examination by a ‘Commission composed of two medical officers of the captor state and a representative of the same state in the country of internment’. The instrument authorising this process was the Anglo-­German accord reached at The Hague on 2 July 1917 through Dutch mediation and implemented in piecemeal style from January 1918 onwards.106 A nonbinding clause, signed by the head of the German delegation, General Friedrich, but not by his British counterpart, Lord Newton, called on the representatives on both sides to urge their own governments to give benevolent consideration to a further expansion of release programmes, and opportunities for neutral internment of civilian persons, especially in cases where the civilian persons are held in tropical countries or other disagreeable conditions.107

In addition, the accord called for the ‘resumption of [direct] repatriation under existing agreements’ for the most severely unwell military and civilian prisoners, that is, those unlikely ever to make a full recovery, with the Netherlands government now offering to permit and facilitate Anglo-­ German exchanges across its land and sea borders as an alternative to using Swiss territory.108 The economic advantages of this form of neutral internment were more obvious to Switzerland than to the Netherlands. In particular, it offered a welcome boost to the ailing Swiss hotel industry, which was suffering from a sharp drop in the number of overseas visitors since the outbreak of the war in 1914.109 Prisoners who were restored to reasonable health (and thereby became ineligible for immediate repatriation) also formed a cheap and seemingly willing pool of labour at a time when young native workers were in short supply. However, officially the purpose of providing mandatory work for the rank-and-file internees, as Colonel Hauser explained, was not to derive financial gain from their labour for Switzerland, but rather to aid their recovery by ‘ensur[ing] that they remained productive human beings’.110 To underline this point, in April 1918 he even granted permission to the Bild- und Filmamt Berlin to make a documentary, in conjunction with the Prussian Ministry of War, about German prisoners being trained for work in forestry and agriculture at a school for adults in Ermatingen in the northeastern canton of Thurgau.111

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At the same time, as Maartje M. Abbenhuis puts it, ‘by looking after POWs, …Switzerland… and the Netherlands could make themselves look humanitarian and useful’, thereby safeguarding and ‘justif[ying] their neutrality’ on new levels in response to the unexpected global challenges of twentieth-century warfare, not least the threat posed to neutral states by economic blockades.112 Considerations of national interest thus pushed them towards expanding their internment operations beyond what was required of them by international law. They were nonetheless concerned to place restrictions on numbers, both for reasons of military security and—given the growth in xenophobic feeling, particularly in the second half of the war—in order to reduce unwelcome domestic political tensions.113 Indeed, both countries were already holding other categories of ‘war guest’—deserters and draft-dodgers as well as significant numbers of civilian war refugees from German-occupied France and Belgium (in the case of the Netherlands) and Habsburg- and Bulgarian-occupied Serbia (in the case of Switzerland).114 Resentment caused by the fact that younger Swiss and Dutch men had to perform regular periods of military service as part of their nations’ duty to protect their self-declared neutrality, while foreign men of the same age sat idly in camps (or supposedly ‘took their jobs’ while they were away) grew as the war continued.115 Some Swiss military commanders worried that neutral internment would remove too many troops from service on the border to act as sentries inland, especially after the Federal Council took the politically controversial decision that periods spent guarding foreign internees would count towards the total number of days on which reservists might be expected to report for active duty in the Swiss army.116 On top of this, ‘food security’ became an increasing issue as the Allies sought to restrict imports to Switzerland and the Netherlands as part of their ever-tightening blockade of the Central Powers.117 For all of these reasons, neutral internment, however interesting and novel it was as an ‘experiment’ in POW treatment, did not expand into a mass system for the step-by-step repatriation of significant numbers of civilian (or military) internees. Rather, it acted as a partial substitute for the all-round exchange agreement which both the Vatican and the ICRC actively desired, but which was continually blocked by one side or the other—with the partial exception of the April 1918 Franco-German accord which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.118 In terms of actual rather than potential reach, then, neutral internment failed to offer a comprehensive humanitarian alternative to captivity in

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enemy countries. Moreover, its international advocates had to accept that Swiss benevolence was entangled with its own military interests and concern over border protection. The health benefits to prisoners were also open to some doubt. Dr A. Repond, the director of a psychiatric hospital at Malévoz in the Valais canton, was one of those Swiss practitioners who remained to be convinced. Between August 1916 and November 1917, he was forced to admit fifteen military and seven civilian internees, all of them French or Belgian, whose symptoms of ‘hysteria’ had only appeared after their transfer to Switzerland from German captivity. This represented more than half (twenty-three out of forty-four cases) of all the foreign internee patients who had been referred to his institution for psychiatric treatment of one kind or another since the beginning of the Swiss internment scheme.119 As he reported in an article in 1918, the prognosis for these patients was uncertain: ‘only those who are positively interested in being healed have a good chance of recovering’. Treatment was also rendered more difficult by the frequent lack of any obvious link to traumatic events taking place prior to arrival in Switzerland: Rather, the critical factors in the hysteria appear to have been: the monotonous nature of [Swiss] captivity, the appeal of the more pleasant life offered to those in hospital, fear of tough labour assignments and above all the desire for repatriation.120

This was a potentially damaging observation, as it undermined the medical case for neutral internment. Even so, the diplomatic advantages, and the boost to external prestige, were highly relevant to both Switzerland and the Netherlands. Swiss officials welcomed the numerous propaganda pamphlets promoting the humanitarian credentials of their work and bearing witness to the warm welcome which the internees received upon their arrival in various parts of the country. According to the Fribourg-based, ex-patriate French professor Max Turmann, ‘It is not just the small towns which show consideration of this kind, but also the big cities: at Lucerne our fellow [French] nationals were the object of all manner of affections, including sufficient funds, donated in just a few hours, to buy them thousands of small gifts’.121 The British Minister in Bern, Evelyn Grant Duff, claimed that all over Switzerland ‘thousands of people crowded the platforms’ to welcome the first group of British soldiers in late May 1916. The reception at Montreux in particular was ‘one of unbounded enthusiasm’.

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It is impossible to avoid the impression that this… was a national demonstration in favour of England. If William Tell had been reincarnated, and had made a triumphal procession through the country, I do not see what more could have been done.122

Once placed in accommodation appropriate to their needs, internees with ailments that were deemed ‘curable’ were nursed back to health through expert care, including surgical and orthopaedic treatments where needed, and through active encouragement to regenerate themselves, whether through sports, education or paid employment, where appropriate.123 ‘Whilst Europe is sweltering in blood’, wrote the Red Cross medical surgeon Adolf Lukas Vischer, ‘our country has demonstrated its will, even at this time, to cherish and foster humanity. Switzerland has thereby brilliantly justified her right to existence’.124 This was in spite of his admission, in the same book, that neither neutral internment and the expert medical care that came with it, nor ‘kind and just treatment’ in general, could act as an effective panacea for what he and others called ‘barbed-wire disease’,125 a theme which will be picked up in the next section. Dutch officials too extolled humanitarian activism as a moral duty and a (hypothetical) national as well as international good, while seeking to off-set any claims that the presence of foreigners was a threat to native workers.126 ‘Total war’ and economic blockades threatened the security of neutral countries in many different ways, but isolationism and a complete closing of national borders to the war’s civilian victims and even to foreign men in uniform was not seen as offering a viable solution. As the chief-of-­ staff, General Cornelis Jacobus Snijders, put it in a note to Dutch military commanders in October 1914, ‘it can never be our intention to act with hostility towards anybody belonging to the warring armies’, or, for that matter, to the citizens of warring nations in general.127 Instead, the Netherlands, like Switzerland, made a virtue out of what it saw as a military necessity by becoming voluntarily as well as involuntarily embroiled in the internment phenomenon as the war went on and by citing humanitarianism as its main motive. This was on top of its international legal obligations as a neutral to intern, house and feed the 35,000 or so foreign soldiers that crossed its borders on their own steam in the period after 1914, whether as deserters or combatants attempting to evade death or capture at the hands of the enemy by making a timely escape into Dutch territory.128

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Barbed-Wire Disease and the ‘Medicalisation’ of Internment One outcome of neutral internment, and the close involvement of networks of physicians as well as Red Cross workers, was the increased international attention that was now drawn to the mental distress caused to civilian as well as military prisoners as a result of long-term incarceration. In the words of Iris Rachamimov, the phenomenon of captivity-induced psychological depression, previously thought of as a diplomatic, legal, spiritual or ‘Christian’ problem, was now ‘medicalised’.129 This meant that in place of spiritual leaders like Abbé Devaud of the Mission catholique suisse, who had been one of the first campaigners to draw attention to the psychological impact of wartime captivity in a report sent to the ICRC in 1915,130 medical experts were now at the forefront of the internationalisation of the internment phenomenon. Furthermore, their involvement led to the creation of new, transnational and inter-disciplinary streams of knowledge which had potential implications for military science, international law and criminal justice as well as medical practice. A good example would be the work of the military doctor Édouard Favre who, under Hauser, served as head of the team writing the Swiss army’s official account of its experiences, the Service historique de l’internement. In 1917, Favre produced an initial report, which appeared first in French but was also published in English translation in a volume directed at American ­audiences (and tellingly introduced by two prominent members of the US National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor). Two further reports were published in Bern in 1918 and 1919, and in the late 1920s all three volumes were being used as part of the course taught at the Académie de Droit International in The Hague.131 In the 1917 study, after giving an outline of the history and legal dimensions of neutral internment, Favre argued strongly for an international agreement to categorise civilian and military prisoners of war selected for captivity in non-belligerent countries according to the seriousness of their medical condition and not just their nationality. In March 1917, 1615 internees were examined by Swiss military doctors and placed in the Sanitary Department’s ‘most severely afflicted’ category, meaning that they were considered unlikely ever to recover from their wounds or aliments and were destined to be shipped home as permanent invalids after

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three months in Swiss captivity. This situation was further represented by Favre in terms of a statistical table which allotted the ‘severely afflicted’ into one of six sub-categories: Classification of the afflictions of the interned, 6 March 1917 Germans Men with amputations Men with functional loss of limbs Epileptics Men afflicted definitely with nephritis Diabetes mellitus Mental cases including severe neurasthenia Totals

45 172 74 70 11 40 412

French

Belgians

English

80 330 113 225 76 165 989

2 18 29 17 1 24 91

24 49 24 11 1 14 123

Source: Édouard Favre, Swiss Internment of Prisoners of War: An Experiment in International Humane Legislation and Administration: A Report (New York, 1917), p. 36

The inclusion here of ‘mental cases’ also meant that internment was no longer simply cast as a wartime problem, and neutral internment as a challenge involving a search for new cures to battlefield injuries or ‘war psychosis’ alone. Rather, it gave rise to darker forebodings about what internment’s likely long-term negative effects would be, including on those who did not develop severe forms of mental illness or ‘hysteria’ requiring immediate hospital treatment (as in the case of Dr Repond’s patients at Malévoz)132 but who were nonetheless held to be in danger of being irreparably damaged by the much-feared impact of prolonged imprisonment and inactivity on the inner workings of the human mind. Favre was by no means the only medical professional to raise the issue or to place it in the international domain. In July 1917, the French Swiss Professor Charles Julliard, who had served for over two years on the mixed medical commissions appointed to examine severely wounded prisoners (grands blessés), made much the same point, albeit this time targeted at a more select audience of experts. Writing in the Revue médicale de la Suisse romande, the house journal of the Société médicale de Genève, he described the case of an individual Austrian civilian internee who had come to his attention while visiting camps in France in December 1915. The latter’s behaviour suggested ‘a particular mental state’ [un état mental particulier] for which he coined the term la captivitose:

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This man exhibited an extraordinary gift of the gab [une extreme volubilité] when it came to persuading members of the Commission of the seriousness of his condition. In all of his monologues he repeated one phrase over and again: ‘I am surely eligible for repatriation, aren’t I?’ This became almost an idée fixe.133

The closest parallels he had seen in peacetime, Julliard continued, were among psychiatric patients who had experienced long periods of absence from work, paid for by workers’ accident insurance schemes, owing to the supposed after-effects of an ostensibly trivial injury in their last place of employment. For such persons, it was the ‘thought of compensation’ that came to ‘completely take over their minds’.134 While Julliard was in effect raising the spectre of ‘shirking’, former internee Sir Timothy Eden made more sympathetic observations after his return to Britain from Ruhleben in October 1916. In a report for the Foreign Office he warned that an exchange ‘at whatever cost is imperative’ because ‘[t]he weak bodily condition and serious mental state of the prisoners’ meant that they could not stand another winter in internment. ‘The last words of the Civil Captain of the Camp, Mr Powell, to me’, he concluded ‘was: “If they ask what we want, we want nothing but release”’.135 James W. Gerard, the US ambassador in Berlin, who had paid regular visits to Ruhleben since March 1915, also noted a change of mood among the British civilians held there as they passed their first eighteen months or so in captivity. As he wrote in a report dated July 1916, the fact that small numbers had been exchanged had a far-reaching impact on the mood of the majority who were still left behind in a state of enforced idleness in the camp: ‘The long confinement will make many prisoners insane. Many old men at Ruhleben, living six to a horse stall, or in dim haylofts, simply turn their faces to the wall and refuse even to complain’.136 French camp newspapers had a word for this—cafard or melancholic homesickness137— which, like la captivitose, did not seem to catch on in other languages. Even so, German camp newspapers like the Isle of Man’s Knockaloe Lager-­ Zeitung frequently reported similar symptoms.138 And on 9 September 1916, Max T. Hayn, a spokesman for a Hamburg-based pressure group which sought to promote the idea of a bilateral exchange of prisoners between Britain and Germany, wrote in a petition to the AA in Berlin: My son, who has been held as a civilian prisoner at Wakefield Camp in England for over two years, and who is in as good a physical condition as

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the circumstances allow, nonetheless writes with increasing urgency that life in the camp is making the prisoners extraordinarily depressed and that they are gradually going mad, in spite of the many distractions, such as sports or theatrical and musical events, or [academic] lectures on offer.139

By 1917, the world had a new name for this condition, one which superseded the more introspective French notion of cafard and the Swiss expert Julliard’s grandiose term la captivitose by focusing on an external cause: ‘barbed-wire disease’. It is difficult to know who exactly invented this phrase, whether it emerged from one or several different sources, and whether it was camp inmates with personal experience or outside medical professionals looking after them who devised it. Panikos Panayi, in his study, found an early use of the term in the title of an article published in a camp newspaper at Wakefield (Lofthouse Park) in February 1916.140 Much anecdotal evidence nonetheless points to the Swiss origins of the term, where it was used to describe the poor physical and mental condition of the first wave of military and civilian internees entering the country under the 1916 exchange agreements, and appeared in French as well as German forms: psychose du fil de fer or StacheldrahtKrankheit.141 From here it entered the discourse of transnational medical networks, national and international charities and the print media in various neutral and belligerent countries. Swiss newspapers, for instance, were already beginning to use the term in early 1917.142 By the end of that year, it had reached both Turkey and India.143 The first official international mention came in the Anglo-German exchange agreement signed at The Hague on 2 July 1917, when it was explicitly recognised as one of the conditions that might qualify a prisoner, whatever their status (officer, NCO, rank-and-file soldier, civilian), for neutral internment, or, in the most severe cases, for full repatriation.144 Paragraph four of the treaty thus read: Prisoners of war who have been at least eighteen months in captivity and who are suffering from ‘barbed-wire disease’ shall for the future be recognised as being suitable for internment in Switzerland or another neutral country. If after being interned there for more than three months a considerable improvement in health is not observable, the disease will be treated as serious and the prisoner will be entitled to be considered for repatriation as provided in paragraph 8 hereof.145

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This was indeed a further step in the direction of the ‘medicalisation’ and internationalisation of this issue, for paragraph 8 placed legal responsibility for determining who might be eligible for repatriation in the hands of a ‘Commission composed of two medical officers of the captor state and a representative of the same state in the country of internment’.146 In other words, a cross-national group of doctors would have to agree in each case whether an individual was suffering from ‘barbed-wire disease’ or not, and if he was, whether three months in neutral captivity was likely to bring about an improvement in his condition. The prisoners’ state of health, not their nationality, was to take first priority. Even the right-wing Daily Mail in England accepted this view, making the ‘creeping paralysis of mind and body’ caused by what it referred to as ‘barbed-wire disease’ one of the key planks in its support for an all-for-all exchange of civilian prisoners with Germany, as opposed to the very modest programme of releases agreed to at The Hague: ‘If British military considerations prevail, may there not be another, and a tragic “Too Late” epitaph to be written?’.147 Meanwhile, the case for considering the term ‘barbed-wire disease’ as being both Swiss and medical in origin was strengthened with the publication of a book with that title by the above-mentioned Swiss Red Cross surgeon and future gerontologist Adolf Lukas Vischer—first in German in 1918, and then in English in 1919. The English version contained an introductory chapter by the highly acclaimed, American-British clinical neurologist Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson, which again suggests a cross-border interest in and exchange of knowledge about the neurological effects of internment. This was doubtless furthered by Vischer’s professional reputation as a surgeon working first in field hospitals during the 1912 Balkan war, and then, after 1914, ‘in prison camps of various countries’, including as a member of an ICRC mission to Turkey and Asia Minor in 1916–17 and then as special attaché to the German division of the Swiss legation in London in 1917–19.148 In Asia Minor, Vischer had already come across European and Indian military prisoners suffering from what he called ‘l’ennui et la dépression morale’ but interestingly at this point he still saw ‘one of the best remedies…in intellectual distractions’, including reading and engagement in educational classes.149 This was to change when he came to Britain in 1917 and was able to visit a wide variety of camps, camp hospitals and asylums, accompanied by a colleague, F. Schwyzer, including the POW hospital at Dartford, Kent; the London County Asylum at Colney Hatch, New Southgate; and the Nell Lane

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military hospital in West Didsbury, Manchester.150 Near the beginning of his posting in London, in July 1917, he also crossed the Irish Sea to inspect the internment camp at Oldcastle, County Meath, which was then holding 494 civilian prisoners: 398 Germans, 95 Austro-Hungarians and one ‘of other nationality’.151 However, the main data for Vischer’s book came from his three solo visits to the Isle of Man civilian camps in May, August and November 1917, the latter trip lasting a good week and involving a five-day period, from 19 to 24 November, during which he lived among the then 18,441 enemy alien prisoners at sub-camps I to IV at Knockaloe. Both here and at the much smaller Douglas camp I, he found that ‘a great number of prisoners are badly affected by the “Barbed-Wire Disease”’, and that ‘the 3 years’ captivity’ meant that ‘the nerves of all are highly strung’.152 Background preparation for these visits also involved close work with British as well as Swiss colleagues, including officials of the Quaker-led FEC as well as members of the UK medical profession whom he knew from a stint working at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London before the war.153 This indicates an overlap between the scientific and humanitarian impulses behind his wartime and early post-war engagement with the medical-psychological sides of the internment phenomenon. Indeed, in early 1919 William R. Hughes, secretary of the FEC, was approached by the publishers of the English edition of Vischer’s book, John Bale & Sons, to see if he would be willing to read and comment on a draft of the manuscript from an experienced lay perspective. This makes it likely that Hughes was the author of some of the anonymous—and not altogether uncritical—footnotes added to the published text under the initial ‘X’.154 The chief causes of ‘barbed-wire disease’, Vischer argued in his book, were ‘lack of privacy’, ‘deprivation of normal sexual intercourse’, ‘the stale uneventfulness of camp life’, ‘enforced idleness’, ‘anxiety for the future’, ‘uncertainty as to the duration of imprisonment’ and ‘the never changing company of others’.155 Although ‘probably very few prisoners who have been over six months in the camp are quite free of the disease’, individuals could suffer to varying degrees.156 Civilians were particularly affected because ‘they are often people who have emigrated in order to strike out a new career and develop unrestricted their own individuality’. By contrast in military camps, among both officer and rank-and-file POWs, ‘the levelling influence of the uniform with its exclusion of individuality stands its bearer in good stead’.157 Vischer’s views on the ‘levelling’ impact of military life may partly have come from observations he made on the Serbian

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front during the first Balkan War in 1912. Serbia, he noted, was a largely peasant country without the sophisticated individualism and class differences of modern industrialised nations: ‘The officers and men are not separated by different life-styles or customs. There is no divide between them’.158 However, his encounter with the new phenomenon of ‘barbed-­ wire disease’ after 1916, and with numerous British military as well as civilian camps in 1917–19, led him to shake off his previous Orientalist assumptions. Now he concluded that national differences were not so important after all and certainly not as important as the camp environment itself. Indeed, after examining the poetry and prose reproduced in camp magazines across Europe, he found it ‘particularly remarkable that prisoners of various nations depict their fate in the same way, using the same similes’.159 The sheer length of captivity, in other words, had made it an international problem. In this sense, it was irrelevant to Vischer whether the term ‘barbed-wire disease’ was German, British or Swiss in origin, just as it was irrelevant what part of the world the prisoners observed came from. Symptoms of ‘barbed-wire disease’ included ‘sexual difficulties’, ‘excessive smoking’, a ‘taste for gambling’ or idle ‘gossip’, ‘sleeplessness’, ‘increased irritability’, ‘restlessness’, ‘difficulty in concentrating’, an inability to ‘stand musical and theatrical performances for any length of time’; ‘failure of memory’ and above all ‘a dismal outlook and pessimistic view of events around them’, a phenomenon that was specific to the camp environment and therefore went beyond the French term ‘cafard’.160 Improvements in the conditions of captivity—or transfer to neutral internment—might help lessen the outward signs of the disease, but the only long-term cure, Vischer asserted, lay in release and re-integration into civilian society and/or family life. Even then, recovery might not be complete, leaving many to ‘bear traces of the disease to the end of their lives’.161 This was in line with the thinking of his Red Cross medical colleague Frédéric Ferrière, and of the ICRC more generally, which issued an international appeal to the belligerent powers for the release and repatriation of all POWs on 26 April 1917, and a further appeal on 15 May 1918.162 It was also to all intents and purposes a profoundly pessimistic reading of the human cost of internment—on men and on their families (women and children were never cast directly as internees in the medical and humanitarian literature of this time, but only as the relatives of male internees, even though in practice they could end up in camps themselves). Vischer indeed conjured up an image of 4–5 million captives ‘return[ing] to their homes with a damaged mentality’, ending with a post-war European

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society significantly weakened by ‘infiltrat[ion] with individuals of abnormal psychical tendencies’. This would have a profound ‘influence on the collective psychology of the community’.163 Although by 4–5 million Vischer may have meant military prisoners in the first instance, such predictions were in line with the case made in September 1917 by the ICRC’s president, Gustave Ador, that civilian internees should become ‘the object of special consideration’ in international discussions of the POW problem, because of the peculiar intensity of their suffering.164 Significantly, Vischer was concerned to avoid any comparison of ‘barbed-wire disease’ with the mental depression felt by criminal convicts serving long sentences in jail, a phenomenon known colloquially in the US prison system as going ‘stir-crazy’,165 and in German and Swiss scientific literature as ‘prison psychosis’ (Gefängnis- or Haftpsychose).166 This is because, he wrote, ‘in dealing with convicts one is concerned largely with the mentally abnormal’, rather than with hitherto ‘mentally healthy individuals’.167 In a report for the German division of the Swiss Legation in London on his third visit to the Isle of Man internment camps in November 1917, he noted that at Knockaloe there are a considerable number of convicts and lawless characters of all sorts, probably numbering over 1,000. These men do not improve behind the barbed wire and on average one is sent to trial each week for offending against common law, such as stealing government property or robbing a fellow prisoner. These bad characters must have a most deteriorating influence on their fellow prisoners and conditions have become somewhat worse since, according to the Hague Agreement [of July 1917], all prisoners who were sentenced before August 1st, 1917, have now been set free from gaols and sent to this camp. I would suggest that those prisoners who, during their internment have been convicted for crimes against common law be segregated in a special compound, which ought to be quite separated from the rest of the camps, out of the shouting range or other means of communication… The sub-commandants should be given power to single out such cases as they consider fit for segregation.168

Criminals, in other words, could, and perhaps should be treated as objects, or in Kantian terms as things, as a means to an end: the maintenance of an orderly, rule-bound society. They were hostages to their own deviant impulses and had to be disciplined so that they learned how to control these impulses before being released back into society. By contrast for Vischer, prisoners of war were assumed to be rational human beings with

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free will and (hitherto) ‘normal’ psychology and ‘normal’ impulses. This is why, in his report on Knockaloe, he insisted that ‘transfer to the “criminal” compound ought, naturally, never to be used as a means of discipline in the case of offence against military law’.169 The parallels he drew were not with convicts but with more palatable, male-heroic prototypes, such as members of late nineteenth-century polar expeditions. In other words, it was the ‘abnormal’ circumstances, rather than the abnormality of the individuals affected, that caused the disease. In a long passage in his book, he quoted from the writings of the Norwegian explorer and diplomat Fridtjof Nansen, leader of the first successful crossing of the Greenland ice-cap in 1888–89 (and, co-incidentally, chief international organiser of POW repatriations from Russia on behalf of the League of Nations after 1920). What Nansen’s experiences had in common with civilian internees was lack of contact with the outside world, long periods of inactivity caused by lack of day light and adverse weather conditions, and uncertainty as to how long their journeys might take. Internment was similarly represented by Vischer as a new frontier in the field of human endurance, quite unlike serving a fixed sentence in a criminal jail.170 The individual prisoner kept his masculinity intact, and did not regress to childhood forms of narcissism or dependency, even if parts of his experience were repressed into the subconscious realm, with an unhealthy impact on the nervous system.171 This unease about comparing internees with criminal convicts, whatever Vischer’s personal motives may have been, is an important reminder that international ‘scientific’ engagement with the camp phenomenon in the First World War was open-ended and did not lead directly or inevitably to the de-humanisation, infantilisation or social marginalisation of inmates and former inmates. Alternative narratives, that cast internees as human beings with free will and called for greater public and international understanding of their experiences and even their individual or collective ‘achievements’ were on offer. On the other hand, this did not stop bodies like the US National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor from taking a direct interest in the internment phenomenon, as we saw in the case of Favre’s initial report on the Swiss system, published in an English translation in New  York in 1917. Here, Favre summed up the hypothetical redemptive and healing powers of labour in the opening sentence of chapter VII: ‘Work is a necessity for interned prisoners’.172 Furthermore, as in US state penitentiaries and ‘correctional facilities’, this work had to be closely supervised and rendered publically visible to Swiss citizens in a way

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that can only have stigmatised the internees and brought home to them their ‘unfree’, ‘alien’ status: The interned men… released for work [outside the Swiss camps] wear a uniform, but during their work may put on special clothes. At no time are they allowed to mix these two kinds of clothing. The interned men so far as possible are subject to military discipline and to the control of the local and cantonal police, and cannot go outside of a certain section. In some instances trusted non-commissioned officers are given charge of groups of these outdoor workers.173

William H. Hughes, the FEC secretary who was probably the anonymous ‘X’ whose opinions appeared in some of the footnotes in the English edition of Vischer’s book, also asserted the ‘good effect of productive labour’ on camp inmates and maintained, contrary to Vischer’s conclusions, that ‘much can be done by preventing idleness and maintaining a living interest in life among the men’.174 Unlike Favre, though, he did not seem to advocate compulsory labour, but voluntary effort—including the provision of the material resources needed for the development of camp culture, theatre, handicrafts and so on. This, he argued, was the best way of restoring the prisoners’ humanity and masculinity. The author of a contribution to a volume about the FEC’s work, published in 1926, repeated the same claims: The condition of mind resulting from long internment was a dangerous one, and many of the prisoners were in constant dread of losing their reason. A great many were removed to asylums, above the normal proportion, though not as many as our visitors had feared… Two factors saved the situation: the unsuspected powers of resistance of the human spirit, and the strenuous efforts made to find some occupation for a large number of the men. Our representative in the Isle of Man called attention to the fact that not a single prisoner who was a regular handicraft worker had been taken to an asylum.175

This was why, the contribution continued, ‘in a camp with plenty of work for prisoners’, Vischer’s ‘barbed-wire disease’ was found to be ‘almost non-existent’, whereas in camps with no opportunities for work, cases ran at ‘perhaps ten per cent’.176 Meanwhile, even the neuroscientist Kinnier Wilson, author of the introduction to the English translation of Vischer’s book, was sceptical about some of his more pessimistic claims, noting that

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‘Not enough has been made… of the amusing trifles of camp life and their power to distract materially from the searing and depressing monotony of camp existence – a power out of all proportion to the intrinsic importance of the incidents’.177 Furthermore, although he agreed with Vischer that there was enough empirical evidence to justify ‘speaking contingently, and for convenience, of a “barbed-wire neurosis”’, he was ‘still inclined to argue that there is nothing specific in the “disease”, that irritability, restlessness, etc are symptoms common to many abnormal conditions; [and] that it is not a well-delimited entity’.178 This was at best a partial and conditional endorsement of Vischer’s findings. Indeed, by asking whether ‘those who broke down under the strain [of prolonged wartime captivity] were in any way potentially neurotic or neurasthenic… or predisposed by hereditary or family background’ to mental instability, Kinnier Wilson fell back on a more familiar association of medical understanding of psychological disorders with culturally constructed notions of ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ forms of human behaviour.179 There are parallels here with the development of knowledge about ‘shell-­ shock’, given that both diagnostic categories belonged to medical cultures that only emerged in the specific context of the First World War but nonetheless—as Tracey Loughran has recently shown in the case of Britain— continued to demonstrate marked signs, at least until 1918, of earlier, nineteenth-century notions of ‘hereditary degeneration’ as the negative counterpart (or inevitable corollary) of Darwinian evolutionary ‘progress’.180 In Darwinian thinking, different environments could not in themselves be classified as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’—they were simply a given. The (psycho-biological) norm was to adapt in order to survive. Contrary to Vischer’s findings, ‘barbed-wire disease’, like ‘shell-shock’, appeared as ‘deviant’ when measured against this exacting standard, and thus slotted easily into broader early twentieth-century fears about the growing signs of ‘deficient’ masculinity in civilian as well as military life.181 Indeed, French prisoners of war, as Annette Becker notes, were reluctant to accept a diagnosis of ‘barbed-wire disease’ (psychose des barbelés) precisely because of its association with un-masculine ‘weakness’. Instead, they preferred the term cafard, but even this was something spiritual, to be fought against and mastered, rather than a medical condition to be ‘diagnosed’ and, in the more hopeful cases, ‘cured’.182 In a book published in Paris in 1918, two senior French military physicians, Louis Huot and Paul Voivenel, underlined this point when they sought to distinguish between the ‘healthy’, ‘positive’ version of soldierly melancholy, or what

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they called le cafard du soldat normal and its less common, ‘pathological’ or ‘unsoldierly’ variant, le cafard des anormaux. Nearly all civilian recruits suffered from le cafard as part of their spiritual adaptation to army (or camp) life, and learning to live with it was an important part of their social development as patriotic citizen-soldiers. However, ‘when it comes to the abnormal cases… the failure to adapt… is “constitutional”, or, if you prefer, hereditary in nature’.183 In a similar way, the Turkish medical expert Mazhar Osman, writing in 1941 but reflecting on the First World War experience, noted that those Ottoman prisoners who had succumbed to mental disorders during Indian and Russian captivity must have been genetically or biologically predestined not to respond ‘normally’ as men to the constant challenges of military life. In this sense, he argued, ‘what is called the “barbed-wire disease” or “captivity psychosis” is not any different from the pathological insanities we already know’.184 Partly overlapping, and partly competing with this Darwinian model— and equally problematic as far as the prisoners’ gendered identities as men is concerned—was the Freudian emphasis on the relationship between psychological disturbance in captivity and the more general surfacing of repressed, unconscious sexual desires during the war. The German medical practitioner and homosexual rights campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld was at the forefront of this paradigm from 1918 onwards, using psychological disorders among prisoners of war as another example of how important it was for (men’s) mental health to acknowledge, and openly and rationally to discuss, all aspects of human sexual desire. In particular, Hirschfeld sought to challenge the view that the camps themselves had led to an upsurge in ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour. Founding the Institute for Sexology in Berlin in 1919, he went on to publish his findings in a two-­ volume study in 1929–30 under the title Die Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges (The Sexual History of the World War).185 Homosexuality, he argued, was ‘neither a crime nor a vice, but an emotional tendency deeply rooted in the nature of many human beings’.186 It was also non-contagious and could not be spread from one man to the next, even within closed, all-­ male societies like prison camps: While it is perfectly true that the normally constituted person can occasionally have homosexual relations, it is totally untrue to conclude that in this way they can become homosexual. The relation that they attempt with a homoerotic is in such cases to be regarded as a form of dissipation. Where there is no homosexual constitution, there is no homosexual seduction. At

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any rate, no one who, before the war, was heterosexual, became a homosexual during the war as was reported occasionally.187

That ‘homosexual intercourse’ as well as ‘onanism’ (masturbation) featured in the sex lives of war prisoners was thus not surprising; it was one of the few ‘possibilities for sexual expression’ in the (presumed) all-male environment of camps. Rather, for Hirschfeld the ‘central problem of war imprisonment’—and a problem that effected civilian internees as well as military POWs—was ‘the intensity and scope of the sexual deprivations and the miserable substitutes for a healthy sex life’ that could be found in the camps. The experience did not create better individuals, still less war heroes, but a mass of neurotics robbed of any sense of satisfaction or pleasure in adult human relationships. ‘Those who survived their imprisonment’, he concluded, ‘are even today, for the most part, psychic invalids as a result of the morbid stamp that those years impressed upon their sex life’.188 Hirschfeld also saw the failure to end internment after the first one or two years of war, and the mental torture imposed on the majority of prisoners by not knowing when release would come, as a product of an unconscious and un-acknowledged sadism in world affairs.189 The notion that internment was a ‘rational’ response to wartime national/global security needs, based merely on a ‘consciousness of power’ and the responsible use thereof for the benefit of the nation or of mankind, showed how thin the veneer of ‘modern’ civilisation was. Underneath there existed a mass of drives and contradictions, largely governed by the discord between the Freudian sex and death instincts, or between libido and aggression, which were unknown to many of the actors involved—at least at the conscious level.190 Captor powers refused to see themselves as they really were: ‘modern slave holders’ unable to contain the violent emotions that having such power unleashed, except through a process of introjection. Likewise, internees could not admit their ‘sex hunger’ or their ‘utter dependence’ on their captors, instead turning the aggression that these feelings gave rise to in upon themselves.191 Unresolved or unfulfilled childhood drives, cravings and relationships were at the core of these ‘sadistic’ and ‘masochistic’ behaviours, as was denial and avoidance of all discussion of things sexual in the social and political spheres. Even humanitarian groups would only discuss such taboo matters, if at all, under diversionary or moralising headings such as ‘vice’ and ‘contagion’.192

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Hirschfeld’s views were starkly expressed. However, he was not alone in advocating a view of the captive experience in which ‘sexual difficulties’, and the reluctance to confront them openly, were placed centre-stage. Dr Eric Higgins, head of the Arts and Science Union (ASU) at Ruhleben had come into contact with Hirschfeld and his work during the war (even though his choice of words indicates that he did not fully understand Hirschfeld’s stance on homosexuality). In a report written for the British Foreign Office in March 1919 after his release and repatriation from Ruhleben, he noted that there were ‘a large number of cases of mental collapse among the young men (in the ASU), accompanied by “recurrence of vice” and a falling off of the student activities’ in the end phase of the war: That the sexual question was an urgent and terrible one in the lager is obvious, and for those of us who, while holding responsible positions possessed the necessary understanding to be made the confidante of the sufferers, there can be no doubt as to the origin of a great deal of the so-called ‘barbed-­ wire disease’. Against the consequences of unnatural sexual conditions there can be no ultimate remedy but the restoration of normal conditions, but much can be done by preventing idleness and maintaining a living interest in life among the men. Through Dr Rotten I was brought into contact with the great sexual specialist Dr Magnus Hirschfeldt [sic!], who placed his vast professional experience at my disposal without question of a fee. By his assistance I was enabled to differentiate the cases of inborn psychopathy which are more or less incapable of treatment under any circumstances from those much more numerous cases where the immediate circumstances were alone responsible… By concentrating on these latter it was possible in a large number of cases to affect reform and thus prevent, particularly among the young men yet imperfectly differentiated, an occasional and circumstantial vice becoming converted into a permanent inversion.193

Paul Cohen-Portheim, interned with fellow Germans and Austrians in Knockaloe and Lofthouse Park during the war, had probably read Hirschfeld’s Sittengeschichte and might well have been thinking about Freud’s latest book, Civilization and its Discontents, too when he wrote, in his 1931 memoir about the all-round ‘atmosphere of mutual dislike, suspiciousness, meanness [and] hatred’ bred by the camp environment: It is not the men of bad character or morals you begin to hate, but the men who draw their soup through their teeth, clean their ears with their fingers

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at dinner, hiccough unavoidably when they get up from their meal (a moment awaited with trembling fury by the others)… the man who lisps, the man who brags, the man who has no matter what small defect or habit you happen to object to… Desperate quarrels break out for the most improbable motives, but these motives are only apparent and the real causes lie deeper and are sub-conscious… It is not its privations, not is restrictions, not possible bad treatment by people in authority which are [prison camp life’s] worst features or its greatest dangers. Its true terror is that it has an indescribably degrading influence on the soul of man.194

Given this background, it is all the more remarkable that Vischer, in his book, did not pathologise those he diagnosed with ‘barbed-wire disease’ or dwell on their supposed ‘inborn’ traits to mental instability or love of authority or (self-) degradation. Nor was he tempted to adopt Darwinian or Freudian frameworks to explain their apparent inability to adapt to the hardships, uncertainties and isolation of captivity or their ‘regression’ into childhood dependency. The parallel drawn by Julliard with men seeking pay-outs from insurance companies after peacetime industrial accidents does not even seen to have occurred to him. Rather, he focused on the internees’ emotional suffering and their resilience against the odds. ‘Homosexual practices’, he noted ‘are probably not as frequent as might be imagined’, even though he also admitted that the reluctance of prisoners to talk about this issue made it ‘difficult to form an opinion’.195 What impressed him more was the enormous efforts that the men made ‘to keep the recollection of their womenfolk alive within them’, including attachment to pictures of women, interest in ‘sensual objects’, intimate but (mostly) platonic relations between pairs of heterosexual men, and ­fascination with female role-playing in camp theatre.196 This ‘image of women’, he argued, was created by the barbed wire, not by a reopening of childhood narcissistic wounds or a compulsion to repeat past erotic failures stemming from early years’ experience. With the passage of time the physical and mental presence of the barbed wire is ‘gradually supressed into the subconsciousness’, so much so that after release from captivity …contact with women is for many a soul-stirring event. An officer who had been interned in Switzerland related to me how the first time he spoke to a woman… he was indescribably moved and became embarrassed and confused.197

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In Germany, the left-liberal Berliner Tageblatt chose to focus on precisely this aspect of ‘barbed-wire disease’ in a review of Vischer’s book published towards the end of 1918. In particular it endorsed Vischer’s emphasis on the human suffering behind the ‘barbed-wire’ label, noting that it was the camp environment, and not the prisoners collectively or as individuals, and still less ‘modern’, ‘civilised’ man with all his repressed desires and urges, that was ‘abnormal’: Is it not wholly understandable that a group of young men, for the most part in good health and with strength behind them, who are locked up together for an unknown length of time and then left in a state of permanent hope and anxiety over when they will be released, without any of life’s comforts and with no means of finding the space to be alone, will react in agitated fashion [mit Reizerscheinungen].198

Nonetheless, unlike Vischer, the reviewer also saw hope in remedial international humanitarian action. In particular Internment in Switzerland has had a very positive impact, in that it has helped to counter the damaging impact of captivity on the nervous system of at least some of those held prisoner in enemy countries over long periods and has also made easier the transition towards permanent repatriation. This latter point is important since an all too sudden absorption into the old home environment from which one has become alienated through many years of absence whilst in captivity can also have a negative effect on mental recovery.199

Whether any of this new knowledge about the physical and mental strains of internment had much influence on policy makers at national or international level is extremely doubtful. Even those governments, like the British, French, Germans and Americans, who were more mindful of the national importance and domestic political desirability of showing concern for the plight of prisoners and their families, were not inclined to heed Vischer’s warnings. Instead, they took from Favre, Kinnier Wilson and others the optimistic view that it was possible to mitigate the negative impact of captivity without throwing away its important role as a tool of great power diplomacy or domestic security policy (or both). Thus, in 1917–18, they quietly ignored both the ICRC’s appeal for a universal end to wartime internment and similar campaigns at domestic level, while centralising and nationalising their relief systems to make them more efficient, more in line with current medical and dietary advice, and more likely to

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help keep to a minimum the number of prisoners who became ‘severely afflicted’ by the monotony of the camp environment and the daily reality of enforced idleness. They also adopted a more positive attitude towards the efforts of private relief organisations like the FEC in Britain or Elisabeth Rotten’s organisation in Berlin, while choosing to turn a pragmatic blind eye towards the links that both of these charities, and like-minded ones in Switzerland, had with radical anti-war and pacifist movements. More to the point, alongside the obvious humanitarian benefits of the Swiss and Dutch schemes for alleviating the suffering of those individuals for whom camp life had become unbearable, they saw neutral internment as a welcome opportunity to isolate the ‘severely afflicted’ from those who—it was hoped—with a bit of help from home, and the promise of a hero’s return, might be able to withstand the rigours of enemy captivity for a little while longer, until victory had been achieved and the opposing side had been overpowered. Whether this was simply a means of rationalising an unconscious sadism in world politics, as Hirschfeld suggested in his Sexual History of the World War, is impossible to answer at the empirical level. After all, to appreciate the Freudian view of human affairs requires a level of clinical judgement and/or a degree of ‘ironic detachment’ that goes far beyond what mere reliance on historical sources and methods can achieve.200 Even so, it is historically significant that Hirschfeld chose to make these startling claims about First World War captivity, and that he did so not in 1918 but some ten years later, at a time when internationalism was making a (short-lived) come-back in European and world affairs, seen particularly in the emergence of a ‘popular, mainstream fascination with international sociability and international minds’ and the simultaneous ‘spread of League of Nations unions, associations and societies’.201 Few of these expert minds and bodies, it should be noted, showed any interest in the question of civilian internment, which by the late 1920s had pretty much disappeared altogether from prevailing collective security, disarmament and medical-humanitarian agendas.

Notes 1. See in particular Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge, 2014). 2. David S.  Patterson, The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (London and New York, 2008).

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3. See, for example, Fiona Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe: Soldiers, Medics, Pacifists (London, 2017); Hull, A Scrap of Paper; Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds.), Women Activists between War and Peace: Europe, 1914–1923 (London, 2017); Bernard Degen and Julia Richers (eds.), Zimmerwald und Kiental: Weltgeschichte auf dem Dorfe (Zurich, 2015); Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge, 2017); Xu Guoqi, Asia and the Great War: A Shared History (Oxford, 2017); Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture; Adriane Danette Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge, MA and London, 2010); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 2011); R.  Craig Nation, War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL, 2008) [1989]. 4. Firth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism, p. 220. 5. Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, p.  39; Gorman, International Cooperation, p. 206. 6. Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation (Oxford, 2002), pp. 102–3. 7. Marco Duranti, ‘European Integration, Human Rights, and Romantic Internationalism’, in Nicholas Doumanis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 2016), pp. 440–58. 8. Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe, p. 8. 9. Henry Dunant, A Memoir of Solferino (Geneva, n.d.) [1862]. 10. See Antonie Girardet-Vielle, ‘Bureau international féministe en faveur des victimes de la guerre’, Jahrbuch der Schweizerfrauen, 1 (1915), pp. 68–73. I would like to thank the Gosteli-Stiftung—Archiv zur Geschichte der schweizerischen Frauenbewegung in Bern-Worblaufen for sending me a copy of this article. On the IWSA’s 1913 congress in Budapest, see also Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ, 1999), p. 135. 11. Reid, Medicine, pp. 149–62. 12. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington DC, 1914), p. 4. 13. Bauerkämper, ‘National Security and Humanity’, pp. 76–9. 14. A.  L. Vischer, Die Stacheldraht-Krankheit (Zurich, 1918). Translated into English as Barbed-Wire Disease: A Psychological Study of the Prisoner of War (London, 1919). 15. Seibold, Emily Hobhouse, p. 40. 16. Gill, Calculating Compassion, pp. 138–42.

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17. Emily Hobhouse, Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies (London, 1901). 18. Emily Hobhouse, Onthullingen uit de vrouwenkampen in Zuid-Afrika (Rotterdam, 1901). 19. Emily Hobhouse, Die Zustände in den südafrikanischen Konzentrationslagern (Berlin, 1901). There was also a version published in a French newspaper under the title Le Cri du Transvaal—see Seibold, Emily Hobhouse, p. 84. 20. Gill, Calculating Compassion, pp. 150–1. 21. Milner to Chamberlain, 7 December 1901. Cited in ibid., p. 152. 22. Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire; Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism, p.  221; Zoë Denness, ‘“A Question which affects our Prestige as a Nation”: The History of British Civilian Internment, 1899–1945’, Ph.D Dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2012, pp. 159 and 183–6. 23. Christoph Marx, ‘“Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht”: Kriegsgefangene im Burenkrieg 1899–1902’, in Overmans (ed.), In der Hand des Feindes, pp. 255–76 (here p. 274). Marx also notes that Hobhouse resorted to the standard racial tropes of the day regarding the dividing line between ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ forms of warfare when she cited ‘numerous examples’ of attacks by blacks on ‘defenceless white Boer women’ in her reports. Andrea Pitzer admittedly does mention a speech made by Hobhouse in 1913, at the dedication for a memorial to the dead of the South African camps, at which she made reference to the ‘many thousands of the dark race’ who also lost their lives whilst in British captivity—but her overriding emphasis remained on the suffering of white Boer families. See Pitzer, One Long Night, pp. 86–7. 24. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, p. 142. See also John V. Crangle and Joseph O. Baylen, ‘Emily Hobhouse’s Peace Mission, 1916’, Journal of Contemporary History, 14.4 (1979), pp. 731–43. 25. ‘Eine unbequeme Zeugin’ Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 November 1916. Copy in EZA, Bestand 51 C III l 13. 26. Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, p. 308. 27. Ibid., pp. 4 and 189–247. 28. Stibbe, ‘Elisabeth Rotten’. 29. Rotten to Hobhouse, 26 April 1915, in SFL, FEWVRC/EME/06. 30. Society of Friends, Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress, Reports for October 1914, December 1914 and Year Ending 30 June 1916 (London, 1914–16), pp. 3 and 6. 31. Society of Friends, Friends’ Emergency and War Victims’ Relief Committee: A Brief Outline of Relief Work in Europe, 1914–19 (London, 1919).

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32. Stibbe, ‘Elisabeth Rotten’, p.  200.  See also Souvenir du Bureau International Féministe de Renseignements en faveur des Victimes de la Guerre, Octobre 1914–Juillet 1919 (Lausanne, 1919), p. 12. 33. See the records in EZA, Bestand 51 C III g 2. 34. Stibbe, ‘Elisabeth Rotten’, p. 201. 35. Ibid. 36. On the International Women’s Congress, see Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 26–9. 37. Several leading members of the BNV, including Jannasch, appeared on a police list of known pacifist agitators living in the Berlin area on 31 January 1918. See  Ingo Materna and Hans-Joachim  Schreckenbach (eds.), Berichte des Berliner Polizeipräsidenten  zur Stimmung und Lage der Bevölkerung in Berlin 1914–1918 (Weimar, 1987), pp. 243–4. 38. Stibbe, ‘Elisabeth Rotten’, p. 200. 39. Lilli Jannasch’s views were expressed in her post-war pamphlet, also translated into English and French, criticising German occupation polices in France and Belgium. See Jannasch, Untaten des preussisch-deutschen Militarismus im besetzten Frankreich und Belgien (Berlin, 1924). 40. See, for instance, the correspondence between Elisabeth Rotten and Mrs Bridgewater of the FEC, mostly about missing persons and individuals repatriated from Germany to Britain, and vice versa, in SFL, FEWVRC/ EME/03. 41. Stibbe, ‘Elisabeth Rotten’, p. 201. 42. Ibid., p. 202. 43. Romberg to the legal department of the AA, 31 January 1917, in BArch, R 901/82917. See also Bureau international féministe de renseignements en faveur des victimes de la guerre to Romberg, 26 December 1914, in R 901/82914. 44. Solf to Prince Max von Baden, 31 October 1918, in BArch, R 901/82918. 45. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 148 and 156. 46. See minutes of meeting of camps committee held at 167 St Stephen’s House, 13 July 1916, in SFL, FEWVRC/CAMPS/1 M1. 47. Dr Eric Higgins, ‘Connection of Dr Rotten with Ruhleben’, six-page record of interview, 10 March 1919, in TNA, FO 383/524. 48. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 145–6. 49. On Solf, see also Stibbe, ‘The German Empire’s Response’, pp. 61–2; and Peter J. Hempenstall and Paula Tanaka Mochida, The Lost Man: Wilhelm Solf in German History (Wiesbaden, 2005), pp. 133–4 and 154. 50. Society of Friends, Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress, Report for Year ending 30 June 1918 (London, 1918), p. 7. See also Zweck und Ziele des Internationalen Hilfskomitee für Zivilgefangene (Zurich, n.d. [1917/18]), pamphlet in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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51. See the  minutes of the  meeting of camps committee held at 167 St Stephen’s House, 14 March 1918, in SFL, FEWVRC/CAMPS/1 M2. 52. Cited in Joanna Bourke, What it Means to be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present (London, 2011), p. 206. 53. Stibbe, ‘Elisabeth Rotten’, p. 200. 54. Jones, ‘International Law and Western Front Prisoners’, p. 31. 55. Ibid., p. 37. See also Roxburgh, The Prisoners of War Information Bureau, pp. 4–5. 56. Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Civilians’, p. 19. 57. See Turmann, La Suisse pendant la guerre, esp. pp. 1–37 and 111–26. 58. This was adopted as point 34 of the ‘Resolutions presented to the peace conference of the powers in Paris’—see http://wilpf.org/wp-content/ uploads/2012/08/WILPF_triennial_congress_1919.pdf 59. Marcus M. Payk, Frieden durch Recht? Der Aufstieg des modernen Völkerrechts und der Friedensschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 2018). 60. Hull, A Scrap of Paper, p. 274. 61. Jones, ‘International Law and Western Front Prisoners’, p. 47. See also John Horne, ‘Introduction: Wartime Imprisonment in the Twentieth Century’, in Pathé and Théofilakis (eds.), Wartime Captivity in the Twentieth Century, pp. 13–24 (here p. 16). 62. Reid, Medicine, p. 197. On the crisis caused by the ICRC’s alleged failures in respect to the promotion of humanitarian values during the Second World War, and its attempts to rectify this after 1945, see Gerald Steinacher, Humanitarians at War: The Red Cross in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Oxford, 2017). 63. Gorman, International Cooperation, pp. 147–8. 64. CICR, L’Agence internationale des Prisonniers de Guerre à Genève, 1914 et 1915 (Geneva, 1915), p. 47. 65. Ibid., p. 43. 66. Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Civilians’, p. 5. 67. Conférence des neutres à Genève, 10–14 septembre 1917, Protocole de Clôture, part V, in ACICR, C G1, A 09-10. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. ‘Le code du prisonnier de guerre: Rapport présenté par le Comité international à la Xme Conférence’, Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 26 (February 1921), pp. 100–28 (here p. 105). 73. Ibid. 74. Conférence des neutres à Genève, Protocole de Clôture, part V (as note 67 above). 75. Ibid.

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76. Ibid. 77. ‘Résolutions et voeux votés par la XIIe Conférence internationale de la Crox-Rouge, Genève, 7–10 octobre 1925’, Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 82 (October 1925), pp. 814–31 (here p. 824). 78. Ibid. 79. Stibbe, ‘Gendered Experiences of Civilian Internment’. 80. See note 58 above. 81. Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination’, p. 507; Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System’, pp. 1331–2. 82. CICR, Rapport général, pp. 157–8. 83. Ibid., p. 158. See also Rapports de MM. Thormeyer, Em. Schoch et le Dr. F. Blanchod sur leurs visites aux camps de prisonniers de guerre ottomans et d’internés autrichiens et allemands aux Indes et en Birmanie, février, mars et april 1917 (Geneva and Paris, 1917). 84. H. Cuénod, ‘L’internement en Italie des prisonniers du “Heimai-­Maru”’, Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 35 (November 1921) pp. 1094–7 (here pp. 1095–6). 85. See Rupp, Worlds of Women, esp. pp. 51–2. 86. As somewhat optimistically argued by Édouard Favre, Swiss Internment of Prisoners of War. An Experiment in International Humane Legislation and Administration: A Report (New York, 1917). 87. See ibid., p. 2. Also G. Vanneufville, ‘Intitiatives et interventions charitables du St. Siège pendant la guerre’, Revue Internationale de la Croix-­ Rouge, no. 7 (July 1919), pp. 800–34 (here p. 820). 88. Duranti, ‘European Integration’, pp. 441–3. 89. Alberto Monticone, La croce e il filo spinato. Tra prigionieri e internati civili nella Grande Guerra 1914–1918: La missione umanitaria dei delegati religiosi (Soveria Mannelli, 2013). See also Turmann, La Suisse pendant la guerre, pp. 67–82 and 144–6; Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg, pp. 115–16. 90. Annette Becker, ‘Religion’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich and Irina Renz (eds.), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 2003), pp. 192–7 (here p. 194); Thiel, ‘Menschenbassin Belgien’, pp. 184–5. 91. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, p. 34; ‘Civilian Prisoners in Germany—Promised Exchange Revoked—A Revengeful Pretext’, The Times, 20 May 1915. Copy in BArch, R 901/83952. 92. See Prussian War Ministry to acting military commands, 20 September 1915. Copy in LNRW, Abteilung Rheinland, Oberpräsidium Düsseldorf, No. 14996, Bl. 62. 93. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, p. 85; Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, p. 126. 94. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, p. 33.

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95. Details of the Franco-German agreement can be found in a note from the Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Berlin to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, 18 May 1916. Copy in ÖStA-AVA, MdI, Allg. Sign. 19/1916, Zl. 33334. For the Anglo-German agreement, see Foreign Office (Britain), Correspondence with the United States Ambassador respecting the Transfer to Switzerland of British and German Wounded and Sick Combatant Prisoners of War (= misc. no. 17) (London, 1916). 96. Favre, Swiss Internment, pp. 3–7. 97. Turmann, La Suisse pendant la guerre, p.  151; Anja  Huber, ‘The Internment of Prisoners of War and Civilians  in Neutral Switzerland, 1916–­1919’, in Manz, Panayi and Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War, pp. 252–72 (here p. 256). 98. Mai, Die Marokko-Deutschen, pp. 686–7. 99. See the relevant correspondence between the Swiss and Habsburg authorities in SBA, E 2200.53, 1000/1758, BD: 1, 10. 100. Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Berlin to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, 18 May 1916. Copy in ÖStA-AVA, MdI, Allg. Sign. 19/1916, Zl. 33334. 101. Huber, ‘The Internment of Prisoners of War and Civilians’, pp. 257–8. 102. Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Berlin to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, 18 May 1916 (as note 100 above). 103. See Colonel Hauser (médicin d’armée), Organisation de l’internement des malades et blessés prisonniers de guerre en Suisse, 25 January 1916; and idem., Regulatif concernant l’administration de l’internement des prisonniers de guerre malades et blessés en Suisse, 25 February 1916. Copies of both documents in TNA, FO 383/244. 104. Huber, ‘The Internment of Prisoners of War and Civilians’, p. 256. 105. Evelyn de Roodt, Oorlogsgasten: Vluchtelingen en krijgsgevangenen in Nederland tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Zaltbommel, 2000), p.  280; Susanne  Wolf, Guarded Neutrality: Diplomacy and Internment in the Netherlands during the First World War (Leiden, 2013), p. 152. 106. A copy of the accord can be found in ACICR, C G1, A 09-08. The above figures come from paragraphs 12 and 13, and the quotes from paragraphs 12 and 8 of the accord. 107. Ibid., point 2 of 6 additional articles signed by Friedrich. 108. Ibid., paragraph 1. 109. Anja Huber, Fremdsein im Krieg: Die Schweiz als Ausgangs- und Zielort von Migration 1914–1918 (Zurich, 2018), pp. 207 and 212–14. See also Susan Barton, Internment in Switzerland during the First World War (London, 2019). 110. Huber, ‘The Internment of Prisoners of War and Civilians’, p. 257. 111. See the records in SBA, E 27, 1000/721, BD: 2921: Herstellung eines Films über die Internierung.

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112. Maartje M. Abbenhuis, The Art of Staying Neutral: The Netherlands in the First World War, 1914–1918 (Amsterdam, 2006), p. 110. 113. Huber, Fremdsein im Krieg, pp.  216–19; Wolf, Guarded Neutrality, pp. 143–7 and 177. 114. de Roodt, Oorlogsgasten, esp. pp.  137–209 and 339–55; Huber, Fremdsein im Krieg, pp. 167–9. 115. Wolf, Guarded Neutrality, esp. pp. 2 and 171. 116. Huber, ‘The Internment of Prisoners of War and Civilians’, p. 264. 117. On ‘food security’ see Abbenhuis, The Art of Staying Neutral, pp. 110– 11; and the various contributions to Daniel Krämer, Christian Pfister and Daniel Marc Segesser (eds.), ‘Woche für Woche neue Preisaufschläge’: Nahrungsmittel-, Energie- und Ressourcenkonflikte in der Schweiz des Ersten Weltkrieges (Bern, 2016). 118. See also Monticone, La croce e il filo spinato, pp. 248–54. 119. A. Repond, ‘L’hystérie chez les prisonniers de guerre internés en Suisse’, Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie/Archives suisses de neurologie et de psychiatre/Archivio svizzeri di neurologia e psichiatria, 3.1 (1918), pp. 128–46 (here pp. 128–9). 120. Ibid., p. 146. 121. Turmann, La Suisse pendant la guerre, p. 153. 122. Grant Duff to Sir Edward Grey, 2 June 1916, cited in Anon., The Reception of Wounded Prisoner Soldiers of Great Britain in Switzerland (London, 1916), pp. 1–5. 123. See, for instance, Favre, Swiss Internment, pp. 34–46. Also, Turmann, La Suisse pendant la guerre, pp. 171–203. 124. Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, p. 83. 125. Ibid., p. 57. 126. Wolf, Guarded Neutrality, pp. 175–6. 127. Abbenhuis, The Art of Staying Neutral, p. 103. 128. Wolf, Guarded Neutrality, p. 143. 129. Rachamimov, ‘Liminality and Transgression’, p. 89. 130. Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg, pp. 115–16. 131. Académie de Droit International, La Haye, Recueil de Cours 1928 (Paris, 1929), Vol. 21, p. 81, n. 2. 132. Cf. Repond, ‘L’hystérie chez les prisonniers de guerre’. 133. Prof. Ch. Julliard, ‘La Captivitose: Communication à la Société médicale de Genève, le 4 juillet 1917’, Revue médicale de la Suisse romande, 20 July 1917, pp. 464–6 (here p. 465). 134. Ibid. 135. Sir Timothy Eden, handwritten notes on Ruhleben, undated [October 1916], in Liddle Collection, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds (henceforth LC), RUH 18. Emphasis in the original.

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136. Foreign Office (Great Britain), Correspondence with the United States ambassador respecting the conditions in the camp at Ruhleben (= misc. no 3) (London, 1916). 137. Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre, pp. 133–4; Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg, pp. 11 and 115, n. 211. According to a textbook written by the German specialist Hans W. Gruhle, Psychiatrie für Ärzte, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1922) [1918], p. 82, the term cafard had its origins in a specific malaise known to members of the French Foreign Legion. See also Massimo Andreatini, Cafard (Rome, 1951), which is dedicated ‘A tutti gli Italiani che nella Legione Straniera Francese solfrono e combattono’—‘to all the Italians who have suffered and fought in the French Foreign Legion’. 138. Pöppinghege, Im Lager unbesiegt, p. 161; Ketchum, Ruhleben, p. 306. 139. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 128–9. 140. Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, pp. 126 and 158, n. 19. 141. See the Medical Record, vol. 95 (1919), p. 929, which tentatively suggests that its origins were Swiss. Also Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, pp. 52–3; Cohen-Portheim, Time Stood Still, pp. 84–5. 142. See, for instance, the newspaper clippings in SFL, FEWVRC/CAMPS/2. 143. Newton, Retrospection, p. 249. 144. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, p. 37. 145. An English-language version of this treaty can be found in ACICR, C G1, A 09-08. 146. Ibid. 147. ‘Ruhleben: The Third Anniversary’, Daily Mail, 6 November 1917. Copy in LC, RUH 31. 148. See Rapport de MM. Alfred Boissier et Dr. Adolf Vischer sur leur inspection des camps de prisonniers en Turquie, Octobre 1916 à Janvier 1917 (Geneva and Paris, 1917); Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, p. 24. 149. Rapport de MM. Alfred Boissier et Dr. Adolf Vischer, p. 14. 150. See Schwyzer and Vischer to the Swiss Minister in London, Gaston Carlin, 30 July 1917, in TNA, FO 383/277; Schwyzer and Vischer to Carlin, 1 July 1917, in ibid.; and Swiss Legation, London, ‘Report on a Visit of Inspection to Nell Lane hospital, West Didsbury, on February 21st, 1919’, dated 19 March 1919, in TNA, FO 383/506. This same report shows that Vischer and Schwyzer had visited Nell Lane on two previous occasions before the end of the war, on 11 December 1917 and 29 August 1918. 151. A. L. Vischer, Report covering a visit of inspection to the place of internment for civilian prisoners of war at Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland, on July 26th, 1917, dated 7 August 1917, in TNA, FO 383/277. 152. See A. L. Vischer, Report covering a visit of inspection to the place of internment for civilian prisoners at Douglas, Isle of Man on November 26th, 1917, dated 29 November 1917, p. 5; and A. L. Vischer, Report covering a visit of inspection to the place of internment for civilian

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prisoners at Knockaloe, Isle of Man, from November 19th to November 24th, 1917, also dated 29 November 1917, p. 12, both in ibid. 153. On Vischer’s time at Barts, see Avi Ohry and Zahava Solomon, ‘Dr Adolf Lukas Vischer (1884–1974) and “Barbed-Wire Disease”’, Journal of Medical Biography, 22.1 (2014), pp. 16–18 (here p. 17). 154. Egbert Edamland [medical editor of John Bale & Sons Ltd.] to W. R. Hughes, 19 February 1919, in SFL, FEWVRC/CAMPS/1 M2. 155. Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, pp. 35, 39–40, 45, 47, 49 and 53. 156. Ibid., p. 53. 157. Ibid., p. 55. 158. Vischer, An der serbischen Front, p. 150. 159. Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, p. 33. 160. Ibid., pp. 36, 42, 45 and 50–1. 161. Ibid., p. 60. 162. See Appel en faveur de rapatriement des prisonniers de guerre, 26 April 1917, and Manifeste relatif à l’accord sur le repatriement des prisonniers et des civils conclu à Berne entre L’Allemagne et la France, 15 May 1918, both reproduced in Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre, pp.  391 and 392–3. 163. Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, p. 25. 164. Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Civilians’, p. 5. 165. Carl Sifakis, The Encyclopedia of American Prisons (New York, 2003), p. 130. 166. Gruhle, Psychiatrie für Ärzte, pp.  96–7. See also Karl Wilmanns, Über Gefängnispsychosen (Halle, 1908). 167. Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, pp. 26–7. 168. Vischer, Report on Knockaloe, 29 November 1917 (as note 152 above), p. 13. 169. Ibid., p. 14. 170. Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, pp. 71–82. 171. Ibid., pp. 71–82. 172. Favre, Swiss Internment, p. 37. 173. Ibid., pp. 38 and 46. 174. Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, pp. 40, n. 21 and 84, n. 55. 175. Society of Friends, St. Stephen’s House: Friends’ Emergency Work in England, 1914 to 1920, compiled by Anna Braithwaite Thomas and others (London, 1926), p. 52. 176. Ibid., p. 53. 177. Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, p. 9. 178. Ibid., pp. 18–19. 179. Ibid., p. 14. 180. See Loughran, Shell-Shock, esp. p. 6.

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181. Ibid., p. 13. See also Jason Crouthamel, An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality, and German Soldiers in the First World War (Basingstoke, 2014), esp. p.  22; Pöppinghege, Im Lager unbesiegt, p. 156. 182. Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre, p. 134. 183. Louis Huot and Paul Voivenel, Le Cafard (Paris, 1918), p. 227. 184. Yücel Yanikdağ, Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914–1939 (Edinburgh, 2013), p. 195. 185. The following quotes come from a 1941 English translation, The Sexual History of the World War, republished in 2006 by the University Press of the Pacific. 186. Ibid., p. 124. 187. Ibid., pp. 134–5. 188. Ibid., p. 235. 189. Ibid., pp. 226–7. 190. Ibid., p. 31. Cf. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle [Jenseits des Lustprinzips], trans. by John Reddick, Penguin Modern Classics (London, 2003) [1920]; Civilization and its Discontents [Das Unbehagen in der Kultur], trans. by Joan Riviere (London, 1930) [1930]. 191. Hirschfeld, The Sexual History, p. 227. 192. Ibid., pp. 124 and 233. 193. Dr Eric Higgins, ‘Connection of Dr Rotten with Ruhleben’, six-page record of interview, 10 March 1919, in TNA, FO 383/524. 194. Cohen-Portheim, Time Stood Still, p.  89. Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents had appeared in 1930  in both the original German and in English translation—see note 190 above. 195. Vischer, Barbed-Wire Disease, p. 42. 196. Ibid., p. 40. 197. Ibid., p. 43. 198. ‘Die Stacheldraht-Krankheit’, Berliner Tageblatt, 21 October 1918. Copy in BArch, R 8034 II 7664, Bl. 1. 199. Ibid. 200. See Mark Edmundson, introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. viii.  Also Benjamin Ziemann, Gewalt im Ersten Weltkrieg: Töten,  Überleben, Verweigern (Essen, 2013), p. 15. 201. Sluga, Internationalism, p. 71.

CHAPTER 6

(Not) Ending Internment: The Years 1918–20

The field of First World War studies has been greatly enriched in recent years by the development of the ‘Greater War’ paradigm, which seeks to de-centre the western front in historical narratives by placing the period 1914–18 in the broader context of armed conflicts beginning and ending in the Balkans, North Africa and the Middle East between ca. 1911 and 1923. Above all, this can be seen in the work of Robert Gerwarth, including his Oxford University Press book series on the ‘Greater War’ and his co-edited volume, with Erez Manela, on ‘Empires at War’.1 The answers that he and his collaborators give to the question why the First World War ‘failed to end’ in November 1918 are wide-ranging, both methodologically and geographically. In particular, they are based on the examination of new forms of violence (especially of the paramilitary  and inter-ethnic kind) and/or are shaped by a strong focus on what are seen as the most unstable or strife-prone regions of the world at that time (notably the area referred to by Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz as the ‘shatterzone of empires’ lying in the ‘German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman borderlands’ of East-Central Europe, the Middle East and Asia Minor).2 This chapter develops a slightly different take on the notion of a ‘Greater War’ period by arguing that the failure to end war and the failure to end civilian captivity in November 1918 were mutually inter-dependent, each a cause and effect of the other. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates that this inter-dependency was not confined to particular regions. Rather, the global character of internment and its inter-connections with other kinds of © The Author(s) 2019 M. Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57191-5_6

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violence towards enemy aliens and ‘internal enemies’ continued, albeit under changing political forms and conditions, until 1920. The chronological starting point of this chapter also requires some explanation. Instead of beginning with the armistice of November 1918 on the western front, it opens at the turn of the year 1917–18, at a time when international efforts to reduce the number of civilians in wartime internment were stepped up a notch, albeit more through traditional forms of diplomacy than in response to the concerted humanitarian and medical activism of the ICRC and associated groups and individuals. At the same time, instances of strikes and labour disturbances across Europe, Asia and North America also reinforced older hatreds against foreigners and members of ‘suspect’ nationalities, and/or ignited new ones. Meanwhile, some of the internment systems set in place between 1914 and 1917 began to slide into chaos and collapse, as bureaucratic accounting systems and food supply chains were placed under growing pressure in the wake of ever-tightening external blockades, internal anti-war protest and impending military defeat. In Western Europe, one of the first big waves of foreign internee repatriations already took place in the summer of 1918, before the armistice signed that autumn. This was largely the result of the comprehensive exchange agreement reached between Germany and France at Bern in April 1918, which also gave rise to parallel accords later that year, for instance, between Austria-Hungary and Serbia in June 1918, Britain and Germany in July 1918 and Austria and Italy in September 1918. These agreements all differed to some extent in detail, but what they had in common was the equal but separate status given to civilian prisoners alongside military POWs.3 By and large the different parties concurred in affording priority for release not only to sick and wounded prisoners, but also to those who had been in captivity for at least twelve to eighteen months, those aged forty-five and over and those aged forty and over and who had three or more children. They also ruled out forced repatriation for released captives, a principle that did not last beyond the year 1918, at least for prisoners from the losing side.4 Interestingly the Austrian-Serb agreement, which came into effect on 15 July 1918, included among categories of prisoner eligible for exchange those suffering from ‘pronounced mental illnesses’ [sichere Geisteskrankenheiten]. Vienna also undertook to put pressure on Sofia to allow Serbs who had fled from areas occupied by Bulgarian troops to return to their homes if they so wished. Finally, Serb orphans and undernourished children who had been held in Austrian

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camps were to be allowed to travel to a neutral country where they would be fed by welfare organisations.5 Once again, the two leading European neutral countries, Switzerland and the Netherlands, were involved in these new accords in the sense that they offered access to their sovereign territories as transit routes and supplied physicians to work on the mixed-nationality commissions that decided which individuals might be eligible for exchange and in which order. This inevitably put further strain on their economic and public health resources, as well as their transport infrastructures and border troops. Significantly, the new Anglo-German agreement, agreed at The Hague on 14 July 1918, was only ratified by both sides in early November 1918, and was never actually put into effect, although more severely sick prisoners on both sides still benefited from the earlier agreement of July 1917.6 Furthermore, in spite of the ICRC’s best efforts, no exchange agreement was agreed between the Austrians and either the French or British.7 This meant that while thousands of long-term German detainees were released from French camps between May and October 1918, few of their Habsburg counterparts regained their freedom until well after the war (and therefore came to form a much higher proportion of the overall number of civilian internees in French camps in the immediate post-war period than they had in the years 1914–18).8 Indeed, according to the ICRC, in November 1919 there were 3000 German civilians and 7000 Austrians still in French captivity, as well as 3000 Hungarians.9 Between September and November 1918, the Swiss federal authorities in Bern hosted a new set of talks between the United States and Germany over prisoner releases, but agreements reached here were abandoned as soon as the armistice was announced on 11 November, and in practice the United States did not finish repatriating its 5200 or so German civilian prisoners until March 1920.10 On the eastern front, there were more moments of intense rupture as well as some (hidden) continuities. Earlier bilateral accords reached in September 1917 via Danish mediation for the exchange of ‘all civilian prisoners and all hostages’ between Austria-Hungary and Russia (the latter now under the short-lived, pro-Allied Kerensky regime) were slow to be implemented after repeated obstructions from the German naval authorities and the Swedish government, both of which sought to restrict the numbers of Austrians and Russians passing through their land and sea territories.11 The Bolsheviks unilaterally released all Central Powers’ prisoners shortly after they came to power in November 1917,

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but the outbreak of civil war in Russia in 1918 created huge logistical problems for former internees seeking to get home, in particular shutting down one of the key ‘evacuation lines’ via Vilnius, a city which itself changed hands several times after the withdrawal of the occupying German forces in late 1918. According to Gustav Miller, director of the Austrian Red Cross repatriation station (Abschubsstation) in Smolensk, in a report dated 14 July 1919, tens of thousands of (former) Habsburg subjects were still being held all over Russia, including an unknown number in harder-to-­reach places such as Siberia and Turkestan, which were then still under White control. Prisoners escaping from Siberia were reporting terrible abuses there: In Orenburg and surrounding areas [situated between Siberia and Turkestan, on Russia’s border with modern day Kazakhstan, M.S.] there are around 3,000 civilian prisoners, among whom even the women and children are forced into trench-digging work by the Cossacks. The misery and hardship have reached such heights that many are committing suicide out of despair.12

The ICRC estimated that up to 30,000 former German civilian prisoners and deportees were also still trapped in Russia in November 1919. Exactly how many of them were Reich Germans (citizens of the pre-1918 German empire, including the 13,000 deportees from East Prussia in 1914/15) and how many ethnic Germans (subjects of the former Tsarist empire who may have had a claim to German citizenship) is difficult to tell, however.13 The fact that the Swedish Red Cross had already ceased operations in Russia in January 1919, breaking off all contacts with the Bolsheviks, and closing its last remaining office in Petrograd, with the Danish Red Cross also withdrawing from Kiev around the same time, made it all the more difficult for the ICRC to gain accurate information.14 Outside Europe and Asia Minor, the last remaining prisoners held by the Central Powers—British and Belgian civilians in East Africa—had already been freed in 1916. The French had also largely cleared captured enemy civilians from camps in West and North Africa in the same year, bringing them back to metropolitan France and allowing some of them to proceed to neutral internment in Switzerland.15 But, according to a report drawn up by the Prussian Ministry of War in February 1919, 27,950 Germans remained as captives in Allied hands in the non-European theatres. At least 5000 were in the United States, 4000 in East Africa, Egypt and the Indian subcontinent, 4000 in Japan and 6000 in Australia, with

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the remainder scattered across Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, various Atlantic, Pacific and Caribbean islands and parts of Central and South America.16 The number of Austro-Hungarians held outside Europe is harder to gauge, but according to the Austrian State Commission, it still amounted to several hundred, even in October 1919.17 This chapter will examine in greater detail some of the key obstacles facing the captor powers in trying to end internment, as well as looking at the ease with which some of them continued to use camps, and/or created new camps, for holding persons they considered undesirable in the post-­ 1918 world. It follows Tammy Proctor in arguing that internment was a policy deliberately pursued by states in the interests of power.18 But it also moves beyond this by demonstrating that states could sometimes lose control of their own internment policies, especially in times of rapid socio-­ political upheaval and border changes caused by systemic military and/or imperial collapse. The chapter begins by exploring the situation in Russia before and after the Bolsheviks took power in November 1917. It then looks at how the camp systems that were created during the First World War were dissolved, or not dissolved, in four different but inter-related settings: Germany and Austria-Hungary; Britain, together with its overseas colonies and global trading partners; France with its newly found allies in East-Central Europe and, finally, the United States and countries in Central and South America that had fought on the Allied side.

Wartime Civilian Captivity in Russia from Tsar Nicholas II to Lenin During the years 1914–17, the Tsarist empire practised a policy of deportation and internment of enemy aliens and ‘internal enemies’ without the enclosed camps that had come to characterise civilian captivity in other parts of the world. Beginning in August 1914, hundreds of thousands of members of suspect nationalities were forcibly removed from border regions in the western parts of Imperial Russia, and later from cities like Petrograd and Moscow, to desolate areas in Siberia and Central Asia. Here, there was no need to place them behind barbed wire, as the sheer distances over which they would have to travel prohibited escape. They were simply left in unfenced camps or confined in remote areas under police supervision, in spite of demands by some military commanders in 1915 for the construction of ‘concentration camps’ to house all ‘enemy

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subjects’.19 Meanwhile, Central Powers’ propaganda tended to dwell more on the atrocities committed amid the deportations of their own subjects from East Prussia and eastern Galicia in 1914/15, and from Moscow after the riots of 1915, than the far larger-scale mistreatment and forced relocation of Russian-subject nationalities.20 The ICRC did not itself carry out any visits to Russia before 1917, and the Danish Red Cross—which acted for the ICRC when it came to enforcing international conventions in the Tsar’s domains and for these purposes established its own Agence des prisonniers de guerre de Copenhague21—did not publish any reports of its own. Instead, it relied on information from the Russian Red Cross’s Bureau de renseignements sur les prisonniers de guerre, based in Petrograd. The latter published a pamphlet in French in October 1915 in which it reported that the Tsarist military authorities were holding 12,144 German and 2545 Austro-Hungarian enemy alien subjects as civilian prisoners of war.22 The former figure may have referred to the deportees from East Prussia in 1914/15 and/or the expellees from Moscow some weeks later, although it is not clear whether either were included in this total. Meanwhile, the figure for Austro-Hungarians was much lower than the 60,000 to 80,000 estimated from Habsburg sources, and most likely did not include deportees from occupied eastern Galicia and Bukovina as Tsarist forces retreated in May 1915.23 In addition, the pamphlet mentioned that 490 Turkish civilians were arrested and deported to designated areas since late 1914.24 Beyond this publication, the little that was known before 1917 about civilian prisoners in Tsarist Russia tended to come from private philanthropic bodies, such as the New  York-based International Committee of the YMCA and its German branch in Berlin,25 and from a handful of Siberian relief expeditions undertaken by German and Austrian aristocratic women, among them Countess Alexandrine Uexküll and Countess Anna Revertera.26 As far as enemy alien prisoners were concerned, the Provisional Government between March and November 1917 sought a multi-lateral release agreement via diplomatic negotiations with the Central Powers, and indeed had some limited success as far as exchanges with Austria-­ Hungary were concerned, but not with Imperial Germany, Bulgaria or the Ottoman empire. For these purposes, and also to settle all other questions ‘relating to prisoners of war, civilian internees and hostages’ held in Russia and in enemy countries, the military authorities charged the Russian Red Cross with creating a new Comité Central pour affaires concernant les prisonniers de guerre. The new committee in turn sought contact with a

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number of outside bodies, including the Swiss government in Bern and the ICRC in Geneva.27 However, it does not seem to have published any new lists or statistics before Kerensky was overthrown in November, and it is difficult to see how it could have achieved much in the short period of its existence. Logistical, political and geographical challenges all worked to frustrate the Provisional Government’s good intentions. The Bolshevik regime preferred a more immediate solution, and simply ordered the release of all former enemy prisoners, civilian as well as military, without paying much attention to how they would get home. The route via Vilnius, Finland and Sweden seems to have been open for a while at the turn of the year 1917–18, at least for semi-legal forms of self-­ repatriation, but was soon closed off again by the outbreak of civil war in Finland and then in Russia itself.28 The same applies to other, more direct routes across the new armistice lines on the eastern front, such as the one via Kiev. This was opened when the Ukrainian People’s Republic unilaterally declared its independence from Russia on 25 January 1918 and signing a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers in February, before descending into ever-deepening chaos in the spring and summer.29 Austro-Hungarian nationals who did manage to get home before November 1918, civilians as well as former military POWs, were treated with a great deal of suspicion by the Habsburg authorities, with fear of Bolshevism a key factor alongside concern about the spread of medical and sexually-transmitted infections.30 Indeed, in April 1918 the AOK issued an order to the effect that all returning civilian prisoners of Austrian or Hungarian nationality were to undergo a period of quarantine in one of a number of specially designated Heimkehrlager (reception camps for civilian returnees, which were established separately from camps for returning military POWs). In the Austrian half of the empire, those with a secure place of residence to travel on to might be released after fourteen days, provided they passed the requisite health, welfare and political checks; those without anywhere to go would be obliged to have their future accommodation and employment needs determined for them by the wartime refugee fund (Kriegsflüchtlingsfürsorge) administered by the Austrian Ministry of Interior, which after the war continued as the Zentralstelle für Fürsorge für Kriegsflüchtlinge.31 Similar arrangements were made in Imperial Germany for returning Reich German nationals who were formally released after the signing of the Treaties of Brest Litovsk and Bucharest in March–May 1918 (or who came later, as refugees from the post-war violence in the east or the expulsion of Germans

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from Alsace-­ Lorraine after November 1918). They too were held in Heimkehrlager, often in former military POW camps such as the one near Regensburg in Bavaria, which was emptied of its French inmates as part of the ongoing implementation of the April 1918 Franco-German Bern accords and the November 1918 armistice, and subsequently handed over to the Bavarian Ministry of Interior.32 Ironically, then, the first time that many of the German and Habsburg enemy alien internees in Russian captivity saw the inside of an enclosed camp was when they finally got home in 1918–20. But the word ‘camp’— and with it the association with ‘concentrating’ people behind barbed wire—was now also entering the vocabulary of the new Bolshevik state. While former Russian-subject refugees, deportees and internees were more or less left to make their own journeys home, and to find their own solutions as far as transport, accommodation and employment needs were concerned, a new and entirely different internal and external security risk was identified by a series of party decrees: the so-called class enemy.33 As Karl Kautsky, the leading German Marxist theoretician and passionate critic of Lenin, put it soon after the war, the problem started in early 1918 when the Bolsheviks turned on the members of rival socialist parties— Anarchists, Mensheviks, Right and Left Social Revolutionaries—in order to create a one-party state. In other words, they ‘established their own dictatorship in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”’: It is here where their culpability can be looked for. From the moment they started on this path, they could not avoid terrorism. The idea of a peaceful and yet real dictatorship without terror is an illusion.34

What Kautsky failed to appreciate—as his main aim seemed to be to draw parallels between the possible fate of the new Bolshevik republic and Robespierre’s short-lived reign of terror by means of revolutionary tribunal in Paris in 1793–94—was the role of the camp as an instrument of violence in solidifying the Bolshevik regime after the first few months of its existence. Apart from the imprisonment or sending into administrative exile of fellow socialists, Kautsky’s main interest in his 1919 pamphlet was in the systematic murder of suspected pro-White populations during military punishment expeditions carried out by the Red Army in the areas of Russia that it now controlled. Such levels of violence, he argued, were unsustainable and unjustifiable, however good and noble the supposed ends were. They would lead to a new Thermidorian Reaction, with the

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implication that Lenin and Trotsky might meet the same fate as Robespierre and Saint-Just: Those who defend Bolshevism do so by pointing out that their opponents, the White Guards of the Finns, the Baltic Barons, the counter-revolutionary Tsarist generals and admirals, have not done any better. But is it a justification of theft to show that others steal? In any case, these others do not go against their own principles if they deliberately sacrifice human life in order to maintain their power; whereas the Bolsheviks most certainly do. For they thus become unfaithful to the principles of the sanctity of human life which they themselves openly proclaimed.35

However, the Bolsheviks did not just sacrifice human life; they also deliberately de-humanised and objectified those whom they regarded as their ever-expanding circle of social and political opponents. Placing them behind barbed wire in what both Trotsky and Lenin referred to, in June and August 1918 respectively, as ‘concentration camps’, was a key part of this process.36 Administratively, these camps came under the control of the Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission or secret police force set up by the Council of People’s Commissar’s in December 1917 under Felix Dzerzhinsky, and later renamed under a series of initials: GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB.37 Some were situated in former military POW camps or religious seminaries. Others were built from scratch under a decree issued by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of 17 May 1919, which demanded the creation of ‘at least one large camp in each province with room for a minimum of 300 people in every province’ in order to allow the round-up of ‘officials of the old regime… “social parasites”, pimps and prostitutes’.38 On 1 January 1920, there were 16,447 inmates in 21 camps, rising by 1 November 1920 to 59,636 inmates in 84 camps.39 Extra-judicial detention was placed on a legal footing on 17 February 1919  in the sense that the Cheka’s extraordinary powers to place suspect persons in ‘concentration camps’ were now ­ anchored in law by a special decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.40 Other than that, the early history of these camps was characterised by chaos and confusion, with some being used for forced labour and others for purposes of ‘political re-education’, depending partly on the attitude of local Cheka/GPU committees.41 The first inmates in June 1918 were Czech POWs who had aroused the ire of Red Army commander-inchief Trotsky by refusing to hand over their weapons. Two months later, on

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9–10 August 1918, Lenin dispatched a telegram to the Executive Committee of Penza ordering that ‘Kulaks, priests, White guardists, and other suspicious persons’ be placed in ‘concentration camps outside the main cities’.42 By May 1919, there were already at least three different types of camps, with some designated as ‘concentration camps’ for political opponents and ‘saboteurs’, others as POW camps for ‘White’ prisoners and others still as forced labour camps for ‘socially undesirable elements’.43 It is not even the case that all political opponents were placed in camps during this period: some Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were sent into administrative exile, as their forebears had been in pre-1914’ Tsarist times.44 More important was how the camp inmates were imagined from the outside. At the stroke of an administrative pen Russian/Soviet citizens could be turned into legal non-persons in their own country. This had little to do with independent police investigation or the nature of the actual offence(s) supposedly committed. A person arrested on charges of theft of state property might be classified as an ‘ordinary’ criminal and handed over to the courts and justice system; or they might be chosen by the Cheka as a ‘saboteur’ and sent to a ‘concentration camp’, even if there was no actual evidence of ‘intent’.45 Instead, the term ‘saboteur’ was used as an ‘objective’ or administrative label which could be applied to an ever-­ expanding group of people, as and when the party-state required.46 Against such higher claims, the ‘subjective’ question of whether an individual was guilty or innocent of ‘crimes’ against the revolution had to be put to one side.47 Those who dwelt on such questions, for instance by calling for the ‘rule of law’ to be applied in all criminal cases and to all Soviet citizens regardless of their class or political background, were themselves deemed to be ‘objectively’ guilty of spreading counter-revolutionary, ‘bourgeois’ ideas with intent to sabotage ‘work discipline’. And if they did so by making contact with, or allegedly seeking funding from, exiled dissident circles, prisoner support groups or anti-Bolshevik organisations outside of Russia, this was an even bigger offence—irrespective of whether there was any hard evidence, presentable to a court, of such contacts having been made with the deliberate intention of harming the state. Since the 1970s, many histories have drawn a link between these early camps and the Gulag which first officially emerged in 1929/30 as a facet of Stalin’s terror system.48 Others have compared them to the concentration camps set up by the Nazis in 1933.49 Both of these approaches, whatever their strengths and limitations, proceed from the assumption that

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there was something fundamentally new and unprecedented about the ‘Red Terror’ that began in the late summer of 1918, in the midst of the Russian civil war. Yet if camps and barbed wire are now recognised as a key feature of this ‘Red Terror’, then it is reasonable to ask whether there any links or similarities with the camps that had emerged in other parts of the world during the First World War era. In several important respects, the differences outweigh the similarities. While legally, culturally and territorially, the category ‘alien’ was not entirely stable, the category ‘saboteur’ was not even intended to be anchored in common law or customary practices. It was not a legally defined entity, was not bounded territorially and was not restricted to individuals or groups deemed to be a security risk in a situation where a formal state of siege or state of emergency existed. A ‘saboteur’ was not even afforded human qualities. ‘Saboteurs’ were ‘wreckers’, ‘idlers’, ‘speculators’, ‘parasites’, ‘scum’, ‘poisonous weeds’, ‘vermin’, ‘fleas’, ‘blood-suckers’ or ‘filth’.50 They were invisible until the Cheka uncovered them and made them visible and in so doing, turned them into administrative objects of the party-state rather than enlightened citizens and members of the new, superior branch of humanity created by the Soviet system. This identification of a ‘saboteur’s’ non-human status was even more important than other indicators of their supposed predisposition towards counter-revolutionary attitudes, such as class background, nationality, prior membership of non-Bolshevik socialist parties and so on. ‘Non-humans’ could be subject to extra-judicial executions carried out by the security police or left to die by neglect in camps. ‘Humans’, by contrast, would no longer have to fear the death penalty as a judicial sentence imposed by a Soviet court of law, whatever the offence that they had committed—as it had been abolished by party decree soon after the revolution had taken place, and was only formally reinstated, for cases of first-degree murder, in 1954.51 The political meanings applied to the term ‘alien’ during the First World War, on the other hand, while harsh and ugly, were at the same time all too human. ‘Aliens’ were a legal entity, defined as such by citizenship and naturalisation laws. ‘Subjective’ factors outside the sole executive control of individual (party-) states—such as the end of war or removal of enemy aliens to a neutral territory under international treaty or accord— might lead them to be reclassified as ‘non-enemies’. In time of war, or, after 1918, even in time of peace, stateless persons without papers might be interned on security grounds, or even deported, with the onus on them personally to prove their non-alien status, an important exception to the

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‘innocent until proved guilty’ principle in its own right. However, no individual could be arbitrarily charged with knowingly concealing their ‘enemy alien’ status, or of illegally entering the country, unless there was hard evidence that could be put before a court of law. As for deportations of enemy civilians from occupied territories, this was, as Arno J. Mayer concedes, a phenomenon that took place ‘in wartime, overseas, and as a concomitant of military operations’ rather than resulting from grand political or administrative decisions made at home.52 Any similarities between First World War internment and the use of extra-judicial detention in the early years of the revolutionary Bolshevik regime, especially during the civil war of 1918–20, in fact lie less in the legal foundations and more in the industrial scale of captivity during both conflicts. In neither instance were camps being used to persuade a rebel colonial population to lay down its arms—as had been the case, for instance, in Cuba and South Africa at the turn of the century. The Bolsheviks came up with an even more brutal method of achieving this aim: the seizure of ‘bourgeois’ hostages who were simply shot by the Cheka, either when White armies refused to surrender or in reprisal for real and imagined atrocities committed by the latter against the Reds.53 Families of ‘Tsarist’ military officers now fighting with Trotsky’s Red Army but suspected of being politically ‘unreliable’ might also be detained and held as a guarantee of their good behaviour. If they went over to the ‘Whites’, their wives and children would be executed.54 Either way, as Dzerzhinsky put it, the term ‘hostage’ was to be applied only to those ‘who are of some worth to the enemy’.55 ‘Saboteurs’, on the other hand, were considered worthless as individuals and only relevant as a ‘mass’ to be ‘erased’ from Bolshevik society. They were placed in purpose-built camps surrounded by barbed wire for the same purpose as the new Leninist regime used other modern, industrial-­ scale weapons of war: as an means of extending the reach of terror and violence to as many enemy civilians and ‘internal enemies’ as possible, regardless of their worth to the opposing White forces and their Allied backers.56 In this sense, the most significant of the Bolshevik decrees instituting the ‘Red Terror’ of 1918–20 was that of 17 May 1919, when every province was ordered to set up camps outside cities capable of housing at least 300 inmates.57 For this there was no precedent in Tsarist times. Rather, Bolshevik policy was based on the ‘prison camp’ model of incarceration borrowed from the west via the interaction of a variety of global, transnational and local networks and processes—including the presence of

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many of the leading Bolsheviks in the west as political exiles in the years before 1917—which it then tailored to an internal war against the Soviet people which arguably lasted for several decades, or at the very least into the late 1950s.58

Germany and Austria-Hungary One of the more obvious and important differences between First World War internment and the post-1917 Soviet camp system was the much greater longevity of the latter. Yet as Khrushchev’s decade-long experience at the top of the Soviet leadership from 1953 to 1964 shows, emptying the Gulag, just like ending internment in 1918, was not and never could be achieved in one clear, decisive and uncontested move.59 Leaving political and ideological differences to one side, but sticking with the issue of economic function of camp systems, the situation facing the First World War captor powers in Central Europe in 1917–18 was not too dissimilar to this, even if the numbers involved were of course much smaller, and the time-frame much shorter. From 1915 at the latest, internment camps were imagined in Germany and Austria-Hungary as a potential source of labour for the war effort, and even in 1918 attempts were still being made to turn this potential into reality. However, in that same year, both countries also made strenuous efforts to reduce the number of enemy alien prisoners they were holding, partly because of the failure in reality to mobilise many of them for labour, but also because of the ever higher costs of having to feed them while at the same time managing the growing food shortages caused by the increasingly effective Allied economic blockade. There were various ways of achieving this reduction in prisoner numbers. One was through the exchange agreements noted above. Another was by trying to persuade neutral Switzerland to take more, although given the latter’s decision in spring 1917 to set a maximum of 30,000 foreign internees that it could hold at any one time, this also meant allowing some already in Switzerland to make the full journey back to their native countries.60 The same applied to British and German civilian and military prisoners transferred to neutral Dutch captivity in early 1918, under the July 1917 Hague agreement, which stipulated an even tighter maximum head count of 16,000.61 All of these solutions had some impact on helping to reduce overcrowding in the camps, with the additional advantage that most of those exchanged in 1917–18 were the older and sicker internees—or, in the

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mind-set of some German military officials, the ‘useless eaters’ who were unable to pay their own way in the camps by working. However, the one hidden disadvantage was the reciprocal nature of these exchanges, which meant that the German and Austro-Hungarian empires also had to cater for their own subjects coming back from internment in France, Britain and elsewhere. Although officially, their return was a cause for celebration, behind the scenes they were looked upon with great suspicion. In the same way that those returning from Russian captivity were suspected of potentially being ‘infected’ with communism, those coming from western Allied countries were seen as possible spies (particularly if they had lived abroad for many years) or as destitute persons who might become an unwelcome burden on the public purse.62 Certainly their loyalty and patriotism were not taken for granted. And there was always the fear that one set of enemy alien ‘useless eaters’ might simply be replaced with another set of ‘useless eaters’, this time of the equally undesirable ex-patriate variety. On 19 March 1918, for instance, the German consul-general in The Hague, Friedrich Rosen, wrote to the Unterkunftsdepartement of the Prussian War Ministry warning officials there that the 600 German civilian internees so far released from Britain and sent to Holland were in a poor state of health and were displaying ‘all the heinous effects of long-term captivity’, including ‘complete nervous exhaustion and barbed-wire disease’.63 This was followed by a letter on 26 April to the Reich Chancellor Georg von Hertling, in which Rosen expressed his concern that there are many inferior elements [minderwertige Elemente] among the German civilian prisoners currently interned in the Netherlands… The great majority of them… were resident in England before the war; many of these have become very anglicised and, in spite of their obligation to register for military service [in Germany], have never given a thought to serving the Fatherland in uniform. Only a handful of them belong to that group of Germans who were seized on board neutral ships while trying to reach home from distant lands at the start of the war… in order to serve the Fatherland in its hour of danger.64

Rosen’s recommendation was that Berlin try to arrange the exchange of more of this ‘better sort’ of German, possibly by offering to send all remaining British civilian prisoners at Ruhleben to the Netherlands. This was in effect the position that German negotiators tried, and partly succeeded, in pushing Britain to accept at the second Anglo-German POW

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conference at The Hague in July 1918. However, as we have seen, the exchange agreement reached here was only ratified in November 1918, and then immediately nullified by the armistice. Meanwhile, the German military found that a much better way of reducing numbers in camps was to release enemy alien internees into Germany or German-occupied territory in return for their signing legally enforceable work contracts with private employers. This was also a solution increasingly tried by Austria-Hungary in 1918, particularly in the wake of the Central Powers’ victory at Caporetto, which brought with it a fresh influx of 16,000 Italian deportees into the camps in the western parts of the Austrian Interior.65 In both countries, though, there were increased signs of resistance on the part of enemy civilian labourers, manifested above all through escape attempts. In the last months of the war, for instance, police officials in Upper Austria regularly drew up wanted notices, complete with photographs, of fugitive Italian civilians who had absconded from work placements in that part of the Austrian interior, or from the parent camp at Katzenau.66 While the Austrians responded to escapes with appeals for public assistance in recapturing the culprits, the Germans often reacted by deporting unruly civilian prisoners back to occupied territories, particularly in northern France and Belgium, where some of them were forcibly recruited into the ZABs or civilian worker battalions.67 Indeed, as we saw in Chap. 4, the German Supreme Command was still refusing to rule out deploying ZABs inside the thirty-kilometre fire zone on the western front even after British and French military POW labour gangs began to be withdrawn again from May 1918.68 Even so, there is little evidence that the labour of ‘released’ civilian internees was an asset to the German or Habsburg war economies, whether at home or in occupied parts of Europe. As Alexander Watson suggests, ‘the primary lesson of the 1914–18 conflict was that forced labour did not work terribly well. The more violent the compulsion, the more miserable and recalcitrant workers became, and the less was achieved’.69 Given the conditions by 1918, those who fell ill from exhaustion or malnutrition were unlikely to recover to the point where they might be ‘useable’ as workers again, and were good only for repatriation. Italian prisoners in Austrian captivity suffered more than most—except perhaps the Serbs. A Swiss medical team that met a train carrying 803 Italian internees, together with one Greek national, who had been unilaterally released from the Katzenau camp in September 1918 reported that upon arrival in Buchs in the eastern canton of St. Gallen

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the passengers were in a horrific state. The doctor estimated the number of sick at around 90; 11 persons had to be transported lying down, including a woman who had given birth a few hours earlier; two prisoners with tuberculosis were close to death… Due to the lack of dedicated hospital carriages, pregnant women had to be accommodated alongside prisoners suffering from a variety of diseases. Among them were cases of pleurisy in both lungs with accumulation of pus in the pleural cavity. There were also numerous cases of swelling of the lower body parts, probably caused by hunger.70

Propaganda claiming that Britain, France and Italy were well-fed, and that they were deliberately withholding food from their enemy alien internees in order to torment and punish them, although largely true in the Italian case, was not a credible response to Red Cross concerns about the slow collapse into chaos of the Central Powers’ prison camp systems from the summer of 1918.71 Indeed, from censorship reports and other channels, the Habsburg and German military authorities were both well aware that their western European enemies too were having to cut food allocations to civilian internees and military POWs, not out of malice or criminal intent, but out of necessity.72 Resources everywhere were scarce—including in neutral countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands which had foreign internees and refugees as well as their own increasingly tetchy domestic populations to feed.73 In late 1918, for instance, the body in charge of poor relief in the canton of Zurich turned down a request from the Internationales Hilfskomitee für Zivilgefangene for emergency funding on the grounds that it had to prioritise the city’s indigenous inhabitants and had no money to spare to help ‘international’ war victims who were travelling through, or temporarily stranded in, Switzerland while trying to get home.74 When the war finally ended in the west on 11 November 1918, the rapidly dissolving German and Austro-Hungarian empires were forced to agree to hand over all their remaining captives without any guarantee of reciprocal treatment for their subjects still in Allied hands.75 Ruhleben was one of the first camps to be dissolved in Germany, its inmates being repatriated—with the help of Elisabeth Rotten and a team of British Red Cross workers—to Britain via Copenhagen in two batches on 22 and 24 November.76 The remaining civilian camps on the German home front— Havelberg, Schloss-Celle, Holzminden and Rastatt—were all dissolved by 13 December and their inmates sent home or released into Germany.77 Indeed, the Allies insisted as one of the Armistice conditions that there

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was to be no forced repatriation of former civilian internees in German hands. Of the 2300 still in Ruhleben in late November 1918, for instance, 800 opted to remain in Germany, at least in the first instance.78 This right was also extended to other released internees in an order from the Prussian War Ministry on 29 November. The camps themselves were not closed but remained in use either as reception centres for German soldiers and civilians returning from enemy captivity or as temporary accommodation for the many Tsarist Russian POWs, particularly officers, still waiting—or unwilling—to go home.79 The 200 or so British and French internees in Austria who opted to leave the country upon being released from Katzenau in November 1918 (and in a few cases from confinement stations in Waidhofen an der Thaya) were provided with a special train to Switzerland on 25 January 1919.80 Yet, this was not the end of camps for civilians in Austria either. There were still a number of Heimkehrlager for Austrians returning from abroad,81 and on top of this, numerous camps for Habsburg-subject war refugees from across the empire, all run by the Ministry of Interior.82 Refugees from the east, and especially Habsburg-subject Jews from the former Austrian crownlands of Galicia and Bukovina, were considered a particular problem, both during the 1914–18 period and after.83 New tensions were raised by news of the outbreak of war between Poland and Ukraine in early November 1918, lasting until June 1919. Acts of anti-­Semitic violence were committed by both sides in this conflict, particularly in West Galicia and in and around the city of Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv in eastern Galicia, which naturally made Jewish refugees in Austria even more reluctant to return to their pre-war homes.84 Already on 4 November 1918, one day after Habsburg forces officially surrendered to the Allies, the Ministry of Interior had written to the district commissioner of Vienna announcing that it was now shutting the borders of the (yet to be officially declared) state of German-Austria to further Jewish refugees, including those who had previously been held in camps in the Hungarian half of the empire or in Bohemia-Moravia (now part of the emerging state of Czechoslovakia). This measure was being taken, the Ministry explained, because in view of the anti-Jewish mood reigning in Slav areas and recent information from the Hungarian Ministry of Interior that it no longer has any funds to support destitute refugees from Galicia and Bukovina living in the territories under its jurisdiction, there is good reason to fear that a further influx of Galicians and Bukovinians [into Austria] is imminent.85

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The persons concerned, the note continued, may well once have been Habsburg subjects but they did not ‘belong to the [new] state of German-­ Austria’ and, particularly given the ‘acute food and housing shortages’ in Vienna, they could not be permitted entry, even if they faced destitution or worse in Hungary or Czechoslovakia.86 This notion was reinforced on 25 November when the Ministry of Interior announced that henceforth government assistance would be paid only to ‘destitute refugees from former Austrian lands who are of German nationality and Christian confession’.87 What was to happen to those other Austrian war refugees—numbering 310,000 in early November 1918, according to the Ministry of Interior’s official estimates88—who did not meet the new ethnic and religious criteria was at first unclear. Certainly, the expectation was that they should leave, and leave soon, not least if they were no longer able to support themselves financially. Some were living in refugee camps already established in the Austrian interior before November 1918, others were placed there from late 1918 pending deportation and others still were left in a ‘homeless’ limbo, wondering whether their previous protected status in the Austrian interior as vulnerable subjects of the empire in need of support and shelter would be recognised by the new state.89 Among these refugees, Jews were the most vulnerable to statelessness and thus to what the Galician-born Austrian writer and journalist Joseph Roth later referred to as a ‘flight without end’ across the less-than-welcoming cities of inter-­war Europe.90 In April 1920, the populist Christian Social politician Leopold Kunschak made a speech in the Provisional National Assembly in which he called upon the government immediately to place all Jewish refugees who had entered GermanAustria since 1914 and now refused to leave in ‘concentration camps’ as a prelude to their expulsion, a proposal dismissed by one Social Democrat deputy as a ‘cultural disgrace’.91 In the end, the Austrian authorities did not resort to this particular instrument of coercion. Instead, a combination of enforced destitution for the refugees, many of whom lost their jobs and businesses as well as their residency rights in the immediate post-war period, and international/ League of Nations pressure on Poland in particular to admit them across its borders, led more of them to go home ‘voluntarily’ in the years 1920– 23.92 Nonetheless, the very notion of using ‘concentration camps’ as a discriminatory tool against a particular group of (war) migrants was significant and represented a new departure for Austria, culturally and politically. The intended targets were loyal subjects of the Habsburg Emperor who had, seemingly overnight and as a result of arbitrary administrative

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decisions made in November 1918, suddenly found themselves cast as ‘fremde Staatsangehörige’ or, in effect, aliens without rights.93 Furthermore, these measures had been taken without reference to the Provisional National Assembly for German-Austria as legal successor to the old Reichsrat, or even to Habsburg-era laws protecting minorities such as the 1867 Staatsgrundgesetz, which was still technically valid, at least in the sense that it had never been formally repealed.94 The ‘camp’, already known to officials in Vienna as a tool of war and internal repression since 1914, had now also become part of a broader political imaginary which combined populist ethno-national ‘expulsion fantasies’ emanating from the war itself with a more open-ended search for scapegoats—both for the loss of empire and imperial grandeur, and for the material hardships of everyday life in the post-war world.95 Germany also had ‘collection camps’ in the immediate post-war period for persons dislocated by ongoing fighting in the East. As early as spring 1919, for instance, plans were being discussed in various Reich and Prussian ministries for the ‘internment’ of ‘undesirable’ foreign refugees, especially Ostjuden (eastern Jews), and the voices in favour of this grew louder in late 1919 and 1920, particularly when it came to dealing with those non-German refugees who had been convicted of crimes while on German soil.96 These proposals in fact grew out of the same prejudices that had led right-wing groups in pre-war and wartime Imperial Germany to demand a complete closure of the border in the East to Jews and other ‘non-Germans’ or ‘non-Christians’.97 In Prussia, four separate internment camps were set up by the Ministry of Interior in 1921 to house ‘alien’ persons who had refused to go home voluntarily following the denial of leave to remain and/or the issuing of expulsion orders: at Stargard in Pomerania, at Cottbus-Sielow in Brandenburg province, and at Eydtkuhnen and Preußisch-Holland, both in East Prussia.98 The location of these post-war camps, which were not closed until the end of 1923, suggests that those marked out for forced repatriation came principally from Poland, the Baltic states and Russia, and that the decision to expel them was connected with rising anti-Semitism. Complaints were made along these lines by SPD and USPD deputies in the Prussian Landtag in July 1921, who called—without success—for the camps to be immediately dissolved.99 Nonetheless, Jochen Oltmer emphasises that Jews were not identified specifically as targets in the Prussian deportation programme, which was largely managed by the pro-republican Social Democrat Minister of Interior Carl Severing.100 The situation was different in Bavaria,

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where the hard-line conservative Minister President from March 1920 to September 1921, Gustav von Kahr, tried to secure the expulsion of all non-naturalised Jews from Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe who had entered German territory since the start of the war. Although he was blocked on this occasion by reservations expressed by some of the more moderate ministers in his centre-right coalition government, he did manage to organise the summary expulsion of several dozen Jewish families arrested and held in a ‘collection camp’ under emergency decrees issued while he was General State Commissioner of Bavaria between September 1923 and February 1924.101 Aside from this, there were two lesser known instances of use of extra-­ judicial camps in Germany in the first two years after the war, both for ‘foreign’ internees. In early 1919, two former POW camps—one at Sagan (today Żagań) in Silesia and the other the erstwhile civilian camp at Havelberg—were used to house a number of recently demobilised German-Polish members of the wartime German military forces who had allegedly refused to hand in their weapons to their superiors and were suspected of conspiring to assist the armed Polish national uprisings that had recently begun in these two provinces. Both camps were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. The legal case made for holding the inmates as ‘unlawful combatants’ was very flimsy, however, particularly as the majority were unarmed when arrested, and there was no evidence of criminal ‘intent’. The Swiss army medic Major Léderry, who visited Havelberg camp in April 1919 as a delegate of the ICRC and found 490 prisoners being held in extra-judicial detention there, did not mince his words In my previous experience I have come across no other case of a country which regards itself as civilised permitting itself to pass laws which allow a person to be punished for a crime that he might commit… No self-­respecting country can simply wait for the other side to act… before agreeing to release innocent persons.102

Of the 490 prisoners, Léderry continued, only 85 were irregular Polish fighters who had been captured by German security forces with gun in hand. The remainder consisted of fifty-seven civilians, including six women and a child, and 348 demobilised German soldiers of Polish origin who had committed no offence and had merely been detained under the pretext ‘that if they are allowed to go home, they might take up arms

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against Germany’.103 How long they remained at Havelberg is unclear from the records, although it is likely that they were released either just before or soon after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, when Poland’s de facto acquisition of Posen and West Prussia was formally recognised by the German government. By 1920, if not before, both Havelberg and Sagan had been permanently reassigned by the Prussian Ministry of Interior as one of several Heimkehrlager for ethnic Germans opting to leave territories in the East now legally under Polish rule.104 The second incident of internment in early post-war Germany took place in August–September 1920 when an unknown number of Red Army soldiers crossed into German territory, presumably in order to evade capture by Polish troops as the tide turned in the Polish-Soviet war following what the Poles called the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’. Under the Geneva Convention of 1906, Germany, as a neutral party, was obliged to disarm and intern them for the remainder of the conflict, that is, until the Treaty of Riga in March 1921. Exactly where and when these troops crossed into German territory (presumably East Prussia), how many there were, and whether they were held in one or several places, is unclear from the records. However, 3000 disarmed Red soldiers did arrive at the former POW camp at Erlangen in Middle Franconia on 7 September 1920, ironically just a few weeks after the last Tsarist Russian POWs captured during the First World War had left and the remaining camp personnel dismissed. In compliance with international law, these Red Army soldiers were classified as military ‘internees’, not enemy prisoners of war. As far as the files reveal, they were also treated well, and a special team of Reichswehr paramedics were brought in to cater for their health needs.105 Possibly this also had something to do with the fact that the chief of staff of the Reichswehr, Hans von Seeckt, made no secret of his preference, on military-strategic grounds, for a Soviet victory over the new, supposedly anti-German, pro-­French and pro-Versailles Polish army. At the former ‘crescent camp’ at Wünsdorf-Zossen, on the other hand, Gerhard Höpp notes that an unknown number of Red Army soldiers were held in the autumn of 1920 alongside remnants of the volunteer Bermondt-Avalov army, which had fought on the White side in the Russian civil war before seeking refuge in Germany as anti-Bolsheviks and advocates of a new, Prussian-inspired conservative-­ nationalist Greater Russia.106

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Imperial Britain and Its Allies in Africa, Asia and the Atlantic Ocean In 1918, the Central Powers held no enemy prisoners outside Europe and the Middle East and had not done so since 1916. The same applied to France, at least as far as its colonies in North and West Africa were concerned: here, as we saw in Chap. 4, German reprisals against French prisoners and civilian internees in Europe had forced France’s hand. Britain, by contrast, was not fighting a ‘national’ war on its own soil or for its own territorial integrity, and, as will be argued in this section, this also influenced its decisions on internment after the end of 1917. In an example of what Jörn Leonhard refers to as the ‘imperial logic’ behind its pursuit of cast-iron safeguards against a possible revival of German power overseas after the war,107 it continued to expand the number of enemy civilians it was holding globally, for instance via the capture of Palestine in late 1917 and the removal of Germans found there to camps in Egypt.108 In February 1918, it encouraged Siam to send its Germans for internment in India and was rumoured to be making plans to encourage the Chinese to do the same.109 It was also behind expulsions of Germans from Portuguese East African territories.110 As far as prisoner exchanges were concerned, Britain did allow the two Anglo-German agreements of July 1917 and July 1918 to be extended to its global empire. This meant in effect that the Knockaloe camp on the Isle of Man continued to function as the foremost hub for the transfer of civilian (and some military) prisoners from across the world back to Europe, while other hubs included Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.111 At no point, however, was the Imperial War Cabinet in London willing to countenance an exchange deal that was as broad in scope as the Franco-German Bern accord of April 1918. And, as we have seen, the second Anglo-German agreement was not actually implemented, although it was formally ratified just before the 11 November 1918 armistice. British civilian internees returning from Germany in 1918 were held for a very brief period (one to two days at most) at various reception centres, including the military camp at Ripon in Yorkshire, although this was probably largely for purposes of health and ID checks.112 Political screening had already been carried out via Foreign Office interviews with individual prisoners released via exchange agreements before 1918. The interviewees were induced, among other things, to say who the pro-Germans were at Ruhleben,113 or were requested to give information about particular

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individuals who might try to come back to Britain after the war, even if they had accepted German naturalisation or had agreed to work for Germany whilst in wartime internment.114 Irish returnees were also sometimes quizzed about their own or fellow internees’ republican sympathies,115 and Eric Higgins, former head of the Arts and Science Union at Ruhleben, was asked, among other things, about homosexuality among the younger men in the camp in an interview with officials at the Foreign Office in March 1919.116 British women arriving back from Germany or Austria in 1919 do not seem to have been interrogated in the same manner or to have attracted much interest from officials, but British-born widows of German men were only permitted entry to the United Kingdom if they could prove that they their husbands were indeed dead and if they were willing to ‘apply… for British naturalisation as soon as possible after arrival’. Any children that they might have who were German nationals would not be allowed to accompany them.117 The ‘imperial logic’ and gendered assumptions behind such policies and lines of questioning are not hard to identify, and again mirror the empire’s strategic priorities and working assumptions at this time. Meanwhile, the repatriation of the last British prisoners from Ruhleben in late November 1918 did not generate an immediate need to release the remaining Germans in British hands, as the armistice had created a situation in which reciprocity was no longer required in the interests of British prisoners in German hands. Nonetheless, other factors did put pressure on the coalition government in Westminster, which from February 1919 took the lead in coordinating policy in all the British self-governing dominions, colonies and mandated territories across the world, backed by the Imperial War Cabinet. One pressure point was the rekindling of xenophobic sentiment at home, with the ‘coupon’ general election campaign in December 1918 and the passing of the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act (AR(A) A) in December 1919, a piece of parliamentary legislation that remained in force until 1971 and essentially extended the wartime emergency powers granted to the Home Secretary in 1914 into the peacetime era, doing little to quell violent outbreaks of populist racism  aimed not only at Germans but at Black and Irish residents in particular.118 A second factor, pushing in a slightly different, more empire-focused direction, was pressure to expand notions of imperial citizenship and ways of belonging by extending the vote and other democratic rights to a number of previously excluded groups. This applied not just to women, but to white working-class men; newly naturalised aliens (typically not Germans

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or other former enemy subjects); and even some black and Asian British subjects who had fought for the empire during the war and, having done what was expected of them in terms of ‘gallantry’ and ‘endeavour’, were seen as worthy of enhanced forms of ‘subjecthood’.119 The AR(A)A indeed made no mention of any racial bar to British nationality; the only UK residents automatically excluded were those of ‘former enemy alien nationality’. Furthermore, Section 15—based on an amendment to the original draft bill successfully moved by Lord Newton as it passed through the House of Lords in November 1919—also recognised the pro-British stance of some erstwhile subjects of the German, Habsburg and Ottoman empires by explicitly excluding from the ‘expression “former enemy alien”… any woman who was at the time of her marriage a British subject’ as well as any (assumed male) person who has changed his allegiance as a result of the recognition of new states or territorial re-arrangements, or been naturalised in any other foreign state or in any British Possession in accordance with the laws thereof and when actually resident therein, and does not retain according to the law of his state of origin the nationality of that state.120

A third point was the constant references made by leading British statesmen—not only Lloyd George but the Foreign Secretary Balfour—to the notion that Germany had forfeited its moral right to possess colonies overseas.121 This meant that German internees still held by Britain in the colonies and dominions where they were captured would have to be expelled permanently; and that expellees—for instance, those sent from East Africa to India or from German Samoa to New Zealand or from West Africa to Knockaloe or from Palestine to Egypt—would have no right of return. Instead, they were gradually transported back to Germany in 1919–20. Furthermore, whereas during the war global internment of Germans was never officially presented as an act of collective punishment, but rather as a security measure, in 1919 and 1920 the expulsion of Germans from all corners of the formal and informal British empire was held up as just retribution for a host of German crimes committed in Europe and the wider world. The one exception to this was in former German South West Africa, captured by pro-British and pro-Boer forces in June 1915. Here the new South African colonial administration established in Windhoek allowed German settlers to return even before the end of the war, under the so-­called ‘Articles of Capitulation’ signed at Khorab

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on 9 July 1915.122 The Union government in Pretoria also continued to pursue a somewhat detached policy from Westminster after the worldwide German surrender in November 1918. Thus, it refused to grant any rights to (former German-subject) black South West Africans, even though the terms of the mandate granted by the League of Nations in 1920 required this. At the same time, whites of German background came under increasing pressure to apply for British nationality as a mark of loyalty to the new regime, and many, but not all, did so in the 1920s and 1930s.123 With the significant exception of South West Africa, and, as we shall see in the last section of this chapter, the partial and more complex anomaly of Canada, Germans and other ‘former enemy aliens’ released from internment in the British empire in 1919 were usually expelled and returned to continental Europe in 1919–20 under the terms of the Aliens Restriction Act, 1914, the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act, 1919 and related Orders in Council. Already on 10 January 1919 the Home Office in London assured Lord Newton, who was then still Secretary of the Prisoners of War Department, that ‘civilian enemy subjects’ would be repatriated from all parts of the empire ‘as rapidly as shipping can be obtained’.124 Over the next few months, more than 6150 were sent back from Australia, including first-generation immigrants, denaturalised Australian-born Germans and Germans who had been deported to Australia from Singapore, Hong Kong, Ceylon, Fiji and erstwhile German colonial possessions such as New Guinea and Nauru during the war itself.125 As R.  A. Paterson observes, ‘the numbers involved rank in the scale of ethnic deportations from Australia with those of Chinese goldminers in the 1890s and Kanaka sugar plantation workers in the early 1900s’.126 A total of 410 former internees and their families were also expelled from New Zealand in May 1919, with several senior German colonial officials and residents from Samoa, not least the former Governor, Dr Erich Schultz, among them.127 They were on board the Transport Willochra, which called first at Australia on 26 May, picking up over 600 deportees there, and was due to arrive at Plymouth on 12 July and Rotterdam on 14 July.128 In South Africa, while roughly half of the 2116 internees were eventually granted leave to remain, just over 1000, together with 210 women and 240 children, were sent back to Germany after their release, again by sea and again in May 1919.129 Those departing from Durban in Natal province on HMT Imgona subsequently found, upon arrival in Rotterdam, that a portion of their luggage had been left behind, apparently because,

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although they had been given an allowance of 200 lb each, ‘insufficient space had been left in the holds’ for it all. Whether this was the result of a deliberate mistake or genuine miscalculation is difficult to tell.130 Others, numbering several thousand in total, were forced to leave Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar, Cyprus, East Africa and various British Caribbean and Atlantic Islands (Barbados, Trinidad and Bermuda) at roughly the same time, although the War Office in London—which found itself somewhat at odds with the Colonial Office and Home Office on this issue—voiced the opinion that some civilian prisoners should be retained in East Africa until after formal peace treaties with Germany, Austria and Hungary had been signed.131 In fact, 404 ‘enemy repatriates’ had already left German East Africa, now a British mandated territory, on HMT Chepstow Castle on 24 May 1919, with Rotterdam as the intended destination. Only ‘a few enemy subjects were prevented from embarking at the last moment, owing to the illness of themselves or their children’. These were the last of the once sizeable civilian German colony in Dar-es-Salaam, before 1918 the administrative centre of German East Africa and today the largest city in Tanzania.132 In June 1919, the AA in Berlin informed the Swiss envoy there that a number of Germans in China, mainly representatives of German banks and trading houses, having somehow escaped internment or rumoured deportation to India or Australia during the war itself, had been forcibly rounded up and expelled under an order issued by the President of the Republic in February. They had been sent home on three British steam ships that had left Shanghai in March 1919, and had reached Rotterdam after several stop offs, including at Singapore, Hong Kong and Port Said. Complaints had been made about the ‘heavy-handed and humiliating treatment… that was meted out to them by the British authorities at the time of embarkation in Shanghai and during the journey’, even though women, children and older men had been among the passengers: The steamers were completely over-filled and utterly unsuitable for carrying a large number of Europeans on a week-long voyage through tropical climates. The behaviour of the British authorities in Singapore, where the ships were moored for a further week in the glaring sun while goods were loaded, was grossly inhumane. Even the severely sick were refused permission to go on land in search of healthier accommodation. There were a number of deaths in consequence.133

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Why the Chinese government agreed to these expulsions is not clear from the available documents, but it is reasonable to speculate that one of its motives may have been to curry favour with the British in the hope of regaining the former German port concession of Qingdao, which was now in Japanese hands, under the peace settlement. Back in September 1914, the Japanese had decided to free all German civilians after it had occupied the concession, taking 4800 military personnel only into captivity in camps on its home territory.134 On the face of it, nationalist China appeared to be far more ready to enact anti-German policies at home in 1919 than did Imperial Japan, whose leaders had long ceased to regard Germany as any kind of economic or military threat to its colonial ambitions in the Far East.135 But in the end, Britain and the other western victor powers, doubtless with their own imperial interests as well as various secret agreements made before 1917 at the front of their minds, opted to support Japan’s claim to the Qingdao concession, part of Shandong province. This in turn led China to stand alone as the only (ex-) Allied country to refuse to sign the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June (the United States, an ‘associated power’, did initially approve the treaty, only for the US Senate to reject it in subsequent votes on ratification on 19 November 1919 and 8 March 1920).136 Meanwhile, returning to the situation in Britain’s formal overseas empire after the war, the last group of 2500 ‘ex-enemy alien’ internees, who had been held in India for all or part of the fighting, were shipped back to Europe together with their dependants in two batches in December 1919 and October 1920, with various stops on the way. Those departing Bombay on 30 December 1919 arrived in Rotterdam on 6 February 1920 and then made their own way to the border with western Germany; and those leaving in October 1920 arrived in Liverpool on 18 December, from where they were allowed to travel to Grimsby and then on to Hamburg.137 In Britain itself, the number of residents of German heritage fell from 57,500 in 1914 to 22,254 in 1919, through a combination of internment, denaturalisations, ‘voluntary’ repatriation and expulsions, the latter mostly carried out between February and April 1919.138 Although plans were laid to grant exemptions from denaturalisation and/or forced repatriation to a not insignificant number of individuals via a government-appointed committee chaired by a Judge of the High Court, especially to British-born women who had acquired German or Austrian nationality through marriage,139 the overall effect  of wartime and post-war anti-alien measures was to rip families apart and destroy once substantial German-speaking communities in cities

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such as Bradford, Glasgow, Leeds, London and Manchester. Some complained of being violently robbed or verbally and physically abused by British merchant sailors on board the ships taking them from Harwich to Rotterdam.140 Such accusations are rendered more plausible by the fact that the expulsion of Germans occurred at the same time as a wave of post-war riots against black, Arab, Asian, Irish and other ‘foreign’ sailors in nine British sea ports including Cardiff, Hull, Liverpool, South Shields, Harwich and London’s Canning Town. The Colonial Office even briefly asked the government to consider whether it should intern, for their own safety, the targets of the riots, who were mostly black British subjects, prior to their repatriation (which, it proposed, might follow the repatriation of Germans).141 Through the Colonial Office’s response to these riots, as well as the extension of voting rights to some white subjects and the decision not to intern (white) Irish sailors or pressure them to accept repatriation as a means of appeasing the mob, hierarchies of Britishness were reinforced and at the same modified according to the principle ‘white Britishers first, next black Britishers, [and] last of all Aliens’.142 Meanwhile, beyond the metropolitan country, the same ‘imperial logic’ that mandated that ‘former enemy aliens’ could not be subjects or even residents of the British empire also dictated the denial of self-­determination to native peoples under British colonial rule. This principle was violently enforced in face of nationalist revolts in India and Egypt in 1919, and also in post-war Ireland until the implementation of the partition agreement in May 1921 and the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922.143 There are also parallels and overlaps here with Portugal, which brought its own imperial agenda into the mix, including a focus on crushing black rebellion in its African colonies. Like Britain, but unlike France or Italy, this country was not fighting on its national soil or to protect its territorial integrity in Europe. It too was battling against Germany at global level, and in particular in East Africa albeit at a ‘subordinate’ level to Britain and France.144 Yet its formal entry into the war in March 1916 had already become highly unpopular at home by 1917, and became even more so after the huge losses experienced by the Portuguese Expeditionary Force (Corpo Expedicionário Portugês) in its only major engagement on the western front at the Battle of the Lys on 9 April 1918.145 Militarily, Portugal did not play any significant role in the defeat of the Central Powers in Europe, or, for that matter, overseas. After November 1918, however, failure on the western front could be transformed into victory at global level through the relatively straightforward expedient of following

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Britain’s lead in expelling all or nearly all German and Austro-Hungarian subjects from Portuguese colonial territories. This in turn could serve what Felipe Ribeiro de Menses refers to as the ‘first priority’ of the Portuguese delegation at the Paris peace conference in 1919–20, namely the ‘preservation of the empire’ in the new, uncertain, liberal world order of League of Nations mandates and national self-determination. More particularly, it might help to ward off any international condemnation of ‘abuses’ committed against indigenous populations in the course of quelling native uprisings, an important consideration for Lisbon.146 In brief, the last German and Austrian internees and their families were expelled from Mozambique and Goa in late 1919, because their post-war presence in these territories was still seen as a ‘real threat’ to Portuguese imperial interests.147 This added up to 180 civilians from Goa and around 600 Germans held in Mozambique, 17 of them military POWs and the rest former German settlers and missionaries. The situation in the Azores, or rather at the camp at Angra do Heroismo on the island of Terceira, where 736 Germans and Austrians had been sent from mainland Portugal and Portuguese Atlantic territories in May 1916, was a little more complicated, but again shows close parallels with the British case. The internees here were told that they had no automatic right to stay in Portugal, but that exemptions from permanent exclusion might be granted to some individuals. In total, eighty-six were permitted to re-enter Portuguese territory in May 1919, most of them going back to the mainland although twenty-seven were allowed to reside in Madeira, one in Africa and two in the Azores. Long-term residents who were considered trustworthy, as well as Portuguese-born women who had married Germans, especially if they were now widowed, are likely to have been favoured over others. A further 254 were allowed to travel to neutral Spain, presumably to join family members who had fled there from mainland Portugal in March to May 1916, while most of the rest were shipped to Germany at the Portuguese government’s expense.148 Even so, in October 1919 eight-eight German civilians were still being held in the camp/sanatorium at Caldas da Rainha, some of them having been transferred there from Angra pending a final decision on their application for permission ‘to take up residency in Portugal or one of its colonies following their release’.149 Among the forty-three cases that were turned down for leave to remain in Portuguese territory when the Caldas camp finally closed in January 1920, those from mixed-nationality families were now faced with the terrible choice of whether to agree to split up,

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perhaps in the hope of being reunited at some unknown point in the future, or whether to stay together come what may, meaning in effect that they would have to restart their lives in the social and economic maelstrom of post-war Central Europe.150

France, Italy and the ‘Little Entente’ (Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) The end phase of First World War internment in France is also best seen as beginning at the turn of the year 1917/18 as opposed to the November 1918 armistice. Whereas all German prisoners had been removed from French North and West African territory in 1916, in metropolitan France, as Mahon Murphy writes, ‘prisoners of war had become part of the local economy’ by early 1918.151 The same applied to some extent to civilian internees, as Simon Giuseppi has shown for Corsica.152 However, like officers, enemy civilian prisoners could not be required to work, and in particular they could not be drafted into the POW labour battalions that the Allies had come to rely on in the zones des armées. This may explain the French government’s willingness to sign up to the extensive exchange agreement reached with the Germans at Bern in April 1918, which allowed the reciprocal exchange of almost all civilians as well as officers and rank-­ and-­file military POWs who had been in captivity for more than eighteen months. For Raymond Poincaré, the French President, these repatriations in the midst of war were proof that it was possible to ‘reconcile the necessities of national defence with the principles of justice and humanity’.153 Even so, conditions were clearly deteriorating for those awaiting their turn on the exchange lists in the French camps. Farcy has shown that discipline became much harsher in the mainland camps, with reduction in bread rations and frustrations caused by delays in implementing the Bern accords leading to riots in a number of dépôts in August and September 1918.154 Austro-Hungarians were hit especially hard by fact that the accords did not apply to them.155 With the armistice itself, the Bern agreement became void, as did the reciprocal agreement with the Germans not to use civilians as forced labour. As the ICRC reported in January 1919, around 2500 German civilians were still in French captivity, and a date for their release had not been set.156 Some were now forcibly recruited into labour gangs to clear up the debris and war damage left behind by the departing German troops

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in the former zones des armées. The number of Austro-Hungarian civilians still in French captivity was larger (7000 Austrians and 3000 Hungarians), but they were not treated as badly and some 2833 were allowed to go home by train on ‘humanitarian grounds’ in May and June 1919, with the rest following later that year.157 The first group of Turkish civilians were released in July, with the French Ministry of Interior sometimes having problems in distinguishing between those who were still of Turkish nationality and those who were now Greek, Serb or Albanian. Macedonians likewise may have been interned as Bulgars in 1915 but were often released after the war as Greeks.158 In November 1919, according to another ICRC report, the final group of 3000 German enemy civilians, concentrated for this purpose in camps at Lyon, Brest and Nantes, and presumably including some (non-interned) women and children, were deported on four trains in the direction of Strasbourg, Mainz and Frankfurt-am-Main.159 By now, the only internees left in mainland France were ‘a few hundred Austrians and Hungarians’ and a handful of ‘German residents who do not wish to return to Germany and are awaiting decisions on their applications for release pending a final resolution of their status’.160 In Corsica too, the tiny number of Germans and Austro-Hungarians who had requested permission to remain on French soil after the dépôt at Corbara was closed down in mid-1919 had to ‘await… the individual treatment of their case files by the French Interior Ministry’, with many living in uncertainty until well into 1920.161 Yet, this was not in fact the end of France’s interest in the internment question as a supra-national problem. Like Britain, it had ended the war with its overseas empire enlarged through the granting of League of Nations mandates in Africa, the Pacific and the Middle East. However, its post-war vision was guided more by the perceived requirements of national security in Europe than an all-encompassing ‘imperial logic’ at global level. Having failed to achieve its maximum demand in 1919 of a permanent French border with Germany on the Rhine and/or an Anglo-­ American guarantee of France’s territorial integrity (including newly reacquired Alsace-Lorraine), it looked to Eastern Europe to create buffer zones against German and Hungarian ‘revanchism’. Here, strong support for Poland in its war against the Soviet Union in 1920–21 went hand in hand with a kindling of the so-called ‘Little Entente’ between Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia—all of them pro-Allied and pro-­ French states—during the same period.162

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The origins of the ‘Little Entente’ can be located in Paris towards the end of the first round of peace talks leading up to the Treaty of Versailles,163 but it also received a boost through events in Hungary in August–November 1919, including the involvement of the Inter-Allied Commission in ending the Romanian occupation there and allowing the return of Admiral Milkós Horthy as right-wing dictator (from 1920 Regent). Shifting French attitudes towards use of internment as a weapon of war featured strongly in this conflict. In April 1919, Romania had invaded Hungary beyond the demarcation line negotiated by the French general Louis Franchet d’Espèrey in late 1918, and on 4 August 1919 Romanian troops entered Budapest and deposed the Soviet regime of Béla Kun.164 During the course of this fighting, the Romanians interned up to 900 Hungarian civilians at a camp at Brassow (today Braşov) in Transylvania, alongside several thousand ‘Red’ officers and soldiers.165 The French were broadly sympathetic to the Romanians, and indeed Franchet d’Espèrey had helped direct the Romanian military campaign. But the decision to hold the prisoners, especially beyond the fall of Kun’s regime, was controversial. The ICRC reported in September 1919 that ‘the Hungarian prisoners have been repeatedly transferred from one camp to another. These movements have been frequent enough to make it almost impossible to keep tabs on the whereabouts and overall numbers of prisoners currently being held in Romania’.166 In October 1919 a Swiss medical commission sent by the Federal Council in Bern and the Swiss legation in Bucharest complained about conditions at Braşov and at two other camps, Arad and Făgăraş; at the latter, Romanian soldiers were accused of stealing ‘clothes, boots and private property’ from the prisoners.167 Czech Social Democrats also demanded that the 2700 ethnic Hungarian ­prisoners deported by the regional Slovak authorities in 1919 on suspicion of being supporters of Kun, and interned at a camp in the former Habsburg fortress at Theresienstadt (now Terezín) be released, noting that the treatment of these internees conjured up painful memories of the Thalerhof camp near Graz during the First World War.168 According to Todd Huebner, ‘many of the internments were ordered not by Czech or Slovak officials in any case, but by officers of the French military mission in Czechoslovakia, who also routinely ordered the taking of civilian hostages to discourage sabotage’.169 How far up the chain of command these orders came from, and whether they emanated directly from the general staff or the War Ministry in Paris, is not known. Certainly from August 1919, France was officially concerned,

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like other members of the Inter-Allied Commission in Budapest (Britain, Italy, the United States) to end the Romanian occupation of Hungarian lands beyond the demarcation lines negotiated by Franchet d’Espèrey in November 1918, and to secure the release and repatriation of prisoners, a goal achieved by November 1919.170 However, it was perhaps more sympathetic to Romanian and Czechoslovak anxieties about Hungarian revisionism than Britain and Italy, especially once the Treaty of Trianon had been signed in June 1920 with the Horthy regime, which confirmed that substantial Hungarian minorities would be obliged to live outside the country’s new borders. Franco-Romanian relations in particular remained good throughout the Paris Peace Conference and beyond, in spite of the substantial political differences between republican France and the deeply authoritarian, conservative-monarchical regime in Bucharest.171 At least on the question of Hungary and Romania there seemed to be broad agreement between the western ‘victor’ powers. When it came to frontier settlements, citizenship and belonging in the Adriatic, however, France was less happy with the Italians’ treatment of erstwhile Habsburg subjects of Slovene or Croat nationality in the former Austrian littoral territories of mixed Slav/Italian population. This area, which included the Istrian peninsula together with the port of Trieste and its hinterland, had been annexed by the Kingdom of Italy in 1918/19 and added to the Julian Venetia region. Almost from the get-go, local Slav politicians and clergymen were treated as suspect persons (‘elementi pericolosi’).172 This was the case even as the Italian military administration established in November 1918 gave way to a (hardly less severe) system of civilian rule in summer 1919.173 In August 1920, as tensions flared post-Trianon between Italy and Yugoslavia over the still disputed status of the former Hungarian port of Fiume (today Rijeka), plans were laid by the Secretariat General for Civilian Affairs in the Julian Venetia region, in conjunction with the local military command, for the internment of ‘suspect elements among the Slovene and Croat population’ in case of ‘possible Yugoslav moves to expand beyond the [post-1918] armistice lines’.174 Meanwhile, ironically as a Royal Commission in Rome began preparing a volume of documents about Austrian atrocities against the Habsburg-subject Italian-­ speaking population during the war,175 the victims of these atrocities were themselves looked on with a great deal of mistrust by their new Italian masters. Acting on instructions from the Ministry of Interior, the Secretariat General for Civilian Affairs for the Julian Venetia region had already begun screening internees, expellees and refugees returning from the Austrian

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interior in 1919 to Trieste and other parts of the former Habsburg Littoral for any signs of ‘pro-Austrian or anti-Italian sentiments’ [sentimenti austriacanti o sentimenti ostili all’Italia].176 In fact, this was in line with plans already laid by the Secretariat General during the Italian military occupation of (Austrian) Slovene lands between 1915 and 1917. Prior to the Italian defeat at Caporetto in October–November 1917 and the evacuation of large parts of Friuli, this body anticipated victory against Austria and permanent incorporation of these hitherto ‘unredeemed’ lands into the Kingdom of Italy. The Allied victory in November 1918 merely revived such ambitions, and with them, suspicions of lingering Austrian loyalties among the local Slovene population. When a majority of Slovenes in the disputed southern parts of the neighbouring Austrian provinces of Carinthia and Styria voted to remain in Austria, rather than accept incorporation into Yugoslavia, in League of Nations plebiscites held in 1919 and 1920, the Italians again came to suspect ‘their’ Slovenes of pro-Austrian sentiments, paving the way for the brutal assimilationist policies pursued by the Mussolini regime in the Julian Venetia region after 1922.177 France made no secret of the fact that it was unsympathetic towards post-war Italian policies in the Adriatic region, including towards Slovene minorities. Its leading statesmen and diplomats regarded Rome’s attempts to enforce the 1915 Treaty of London with a ‘condescension tinged with contempt’, partly because they felt that the main threat to European stability came from German and Hungarian ‘revisionism’ rather than Pan-­ Slav nationalism or South Slav forms of Habsburg nostalgia, and partly because they was in denial about France’s own minorities problems.178 As we have seen, during the Paris peace talks, and later in the League of Nations General Assembly, France steadfastly insisted that it had no national minorities, only French citizens who accepted membership of a common (republican) political community as a mark of their belonging, and individuals whose national political loyalties lay elsewhere and who therefore represented an alien presence on French soil. Germans who were interned between 1914 and 1920, or expelled from Alsace-Lorraine during the épuration measures just after the war, were not defined as a national minority who could be assimilated through authoritarian measures aimed at forcibly changing their behaviour or belief systems. Rather, their political loyalty to another nation, Germany, a nation defined now in Manichean terms as the very embodiment of ‘barbarism’ and the arch-enemy of ‘law and civilisation’, quite simply rendered them unassimilable into the French nation—with only a handful of exceptions allowed by the Ministry of

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Interior in 1920.179 This is why such a small German community remained permanently in France after 1920, compared to other parts of continental Europe, such as Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland), Poland (former provinces of Posen and West Prussia), Romania (Transylvanian Saxony) and Italy (South Tyrol). It is also why republican France actually ended up in a quite similar place to Imperial Britain when it came to enacting expulsion measures against former enemy alien internees on its home soil and in its overseas possessions. However, on another level, the two powers diverged more than they had during the war, namely in relation to internment and expulsion measures beyond their own sovereign territories. Here, Britain retained a global vision of its supposed security needs right up to 1920 and beyond, whereas France’s sights were now more clearly centred on its strategic interests and political position in continental Europe.

The ‘Red Scare’: The Americas On 29 November 1918, the Prussian Ministry of War issued orders that citizens of the following states were to be released from German civilian camps and—if they so wished—furnished with exit visas to allow them to travel home: Great Britain, Serbia, Montenegro, Japan, Portugal, Italy, the United States of America, Panama, Cuba, Costa Rica, Liberia, China, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti.180 The long list of Central and South American countries cited here, alongside the United States, is a reminder of just how many nations in that part of the world had entered the war against Germany in its final phase in the years 1917–18. Alongside them, several more had broken off diplomatic relations with the Central Powers without formally declaring war, such as Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay and Ecuador; and others, while remaining neutral, had still been obliged to intern some German naval personnel serving on battleships as part of their obligations, under international law, to preserve their own neutrality. This applied in particular to Chile and Argentina.181 Germans and Austrians interned in the Americas were among the last to be able to return home after the war, and this section will explain why. Whereas Britain and France had more or less released all internees between January and November 1919, for instance, it was only in March 1920 that the Swiss legation in Washington DC was able to announce the end of internment in the United States, with the 2300 Germans still in camps in November 1919 now reportedly set free.182 Even then, the last 214 enemy aliens were not actually released until sometime between April and June

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1920.183 Sailors interned in Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay had to wait nearly as long, until October 1919.184 There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, there were logistical problems to overcome. Detained seamen and civilians had no finances of their own, and it took time to get a response from the AA in Berlin to requests for a guarantee that they would underwrite the costs of charting ships.185 Haiti gave up waiting for an answer and in the end simply paroled its German internees in July 1919, pending their repatriation.186 Panama had anyway sent all its Germans to the United States in 1918, as had the Philippines and other US Pacific islands.187 Secondly, when it came to practices of war governance, the different administrative categories of civilian prisoner had tended to be kept more separate in the Americas compared to other parts of the world, making negotiations for the ending of internment more difficult. As the US diplomat Joseph C. Grew wrote in September 1917 to his colleague Ellis Loring Dresel, the key problem in any future negotiations with Germany over prisoner repatriation would be that the United States—and some of its key Central and South American allies—were holding enemy civilians ‘under the jurisdiction of three different Departments’: These are first the officers and crew of the German auxiliary cruisers, regarded as prisoners of war and held under the War Department. Then there are the officers and crew of German merchantmen, not actually prisoners of war, but held by the Department of Labor on the technical charge that they have never complied with the immigration regulations and can therefore not be admitted into the country. As they can also not be deported under present circumstances, they have to be held… Finally there are the enemy aliens held by the Department of Justice under the provisions of the President’s proclamation of April 6, 1917 – that is, all those Germans who are under suspicion or who are regarded as dangerous to the safety of the country.188

On top of this, the post-war ‘Red Scare’ helped to reinforce a pre-existing association of Germans (as well as Russians) with revolutionary agitation. In November 1919 and January 1920, the so-called ‘Palmer raids’, named after US Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, and carried out in association with future FBI chief and then head of the Intelligence Division inside the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover, led to the arrest of up to 6000 alien suspects across thirty-three cities in twenty-three American

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states.189 This was accompanied by a claim made by Palmer to the New York Times that the Department of Justice had a ‘list of 60,000 radicals in the nation’.190 While the US took the lead in persecuting ‘Reds’, its allies across the New World followed closely behind.191 As Jörg Nagler puts it, many Germans in the Americas, especially those marked out as members of the Industrial Workers of the World, ‘were considered to be radicals and too dangerous to be paroled’ from internment camps after the end of the war.192 Yet blanket expulsion was not regarded as a serious option either. Indeed, the reverse side of this coin is that whereas in 1919 Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal, and their respective colonies, routinely expelled released internees except those granted exemptions, in the New World the default position seems to have been against expulsion, except for those individuals singled out for such measures by the security services or the Department of Labor on a case-by-case basis. Why was this? One reason, in post-colonial countries like the United States and Brazil which were heavily dependent on migration from the Old World, was a preference for (forced) assimilation over exclusion. There were already huge German migrant communities in both countries, and these could not be expelled en masse without upsetting the existing ethnic balance in favour of what were considered to be racially or culturally ‘inferior’ groups (blacks, Asians and/or southern Europeans). In 1917–20, German communities were therefore erased in the United States, Brazil and other parts of the Americas not by a policy of complete or near complete exclusion, but by pressure to abandon use of German language in schools and newspapers (in the United States), by an outright ban on all publications in German (in Brazil), by the renaming of German foods such as Sauerkraut, which in America became ‘Liberty Cabbage’, and by the closure of German clubs, cultural associations, cafés and businesses, especially in urban areas.193 Apart from a handful of ‘dangerous’ radicals (in the United States, seventy-eight from Fort Oglethorpe and thirty-two from Fort Douglas), the only ex-civilian prisoners forcibly sent home were merchant seamen who anyway were technically not civilians or immigrants and were not likely to want to put down roots in the countries that had detained them during the war.194 Likewise, of the 6000 or so ‘dangerous’ alien radicals arrested and held in ‘detention centers’ during the Palmer raids of 1919– 20, only 556 were deported. Contrary to the wild speculation in the press about a palpable ‘Red threat’ only just about held at bay by the Department of Justice and vigilant members of the public, most of those expelled were in fact charged by Department of Labor officials with ‘immigration

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violations that had nothing to do with Bolshevism or anarchism’.195 Indeed, Assistant Secretary Louis F. Post even defended his Department after receiving a critical letter from the Attorney General for Washington state, site of the notorious Seattle general labour strike of February 1919: Your criticism of the Department for not having made an effort to discover facts affecting members of the I.W.W. who have guilty knowledge of the lawless acts attributed to it, is misdirected. You apparently do not know that the Department is wholly without funds for detective purposes. All it can do is to issue warrants for such aliens as may, by its immigration agents, happen to be found acting in contravention of the alien expulsion statutes and as such may be reported to it with evidence of probable cause by municipal or State authorities or private citizens.196

Furthermore, Post rejected the claim that mere membership of the IWW might be grounds for expulsion, whether under the February 1917 Immigration Act or the tougher, supplementary Act of October 1918: As I understand your position, it is that every alien member of an organization whose laws are innocent but whose officials divert its activities into unlawful channels, is intended by Congress to be deported. This view is so distinctly at variance with American principle of government regarding personal rights that it seems that it should not be adopted by administrative officers unless Congress uses language that forecloses any other interpretation.197

The case of Canada is also interesting in this respect. On the one hand, it self-consciously acted very much as part of the British empire in 1917–20, with all the implications this had for a shared vision of the German threat to imperial security and for the way in which ‘sacrifice’ in the war was remembered and commemorated.198 On the other hand, in its actual dealings with ex-enemy internees it had more in common with other, non-­ colonial countries in the American world than with equivalent self-governing white British Dominions such as Australia and New Zealand. Ignoring a request from veterans groups in November 1918 to expel all enemy aliens, the federal government in Ottawa instead established a set of administrative and legal processes to vet individuals identified by immigration officials or members of the public as ‘objectionable’.199 This had the advantage of summarily isolating those aliens held responsible for fomenting postwar labour unrest, while meeting the twin pressures to appease nativist

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sentiment at home and at the same time act in accordance with international standards of justice. Only those whose continued presence in Canada was demonstrably not to the public good could be deported against their will—a position very similar to that pertaining in the United States. Even so, as Bohdan S. Kordan points out, ‘deportation… was not about justice; it was about eliminating a problem [labour strikes] and punishing [foreign strike leaders] for their political transgressions’.200 Meanwhile, most ‘unobjectionable’ Habsburg-subject alien internees were in fact paroled before the end of the war, although 2100 remained in captivity  in Canada in February 1919, and the final group was  not released  until  February 1920.201 Even then, the Internment Operations Office in Ottawa remained open until 20 June 1920.202 Among those who were not repatriated in 1919–20, some still wanted to be regarded as Austrian (even if post-imperial Austria now rejected them if they were not German); some were willing to align themselves with one or other of the Habsburg successor states; some wanted to go to America or another non-­European destination; but most were nationally indifferent and simply wanted to stay in Canada, preferably as naturalised citizens.203 Even those of German or Hungarian rather than Slav origin had at one time been seen as ‘desirable immigrants’. The Canadian government was reluctant to lose them and their skills, even if its processes for separating the ‘desirable’ from the ‘undesirable’ were often arbitrary and open to administrative abuse or error. Indeed, the system was now being driven by the same anti-­communist political fears that had led immigration officials in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to temporarily detain Leon Trotsky and a handful of his Russian travelling companions at the German internment camp in Amherst in April 1917, even though they were in fact nationals of an allied country.204 Those former enemy alien internees marked out for involuntary deportation in late 1919 and early 1920 were typically described as ‘Bolsheviks’ or ‘radicals’.205 In theory they had access to the courts but in practice were often too poor to mount effective legal challenges. Again, this was very similar to the experience in the United States, especially as the general strike at Winnipeg in Manitoba province in May–June 1919 was widely reported in the American and Canadian press as having been ‘financed and led by radical labor groups from the United States’ who had fled across the border to avoid arrest and/or deportation at the hands of the US Department of Justice following the Seattle general strike.206 The forced expellees from Canada were among a larger group of ex-enemy

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civilian prisoners eventually repatriated to Europe on two ships, the first leaving Quebec City on 27 October 1919 carrying 438 persons, and the second leaving on 27 February 1920 with a further 112 passengers on board.207 In this way, Canada joined the United States and Brazil in being one of the last belligerent countries to formally close its internment operations stemming from the First World War. However, discontinuing wartime internment operations was not the same thing as ending the camp phenomenon as an exercise in thought experimentation. Like many of the other forms of industrial-scale violence towards civilians which had made their first appearance during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and the early months of the First World War, .the internment phenomenon, both in the Americas and globally, also had no neat closing point. Rather camps for enemy civilians, internal enemies and refugees left an ongoing mark on the post-war world. This was particularly the case as the logistical complexities of repatriation and the heavily nationalised politics of peace-making continued to thwart a quick international solution for those still trapped in former enemy countries. On top of this, imperial, colonial, paramilitary and ethnic conflicts continued to rage in Ireland, Egypt, Eastern Europe, Asia Minor and the Indian subcontinent for some time after 1920. It was in the course of that year, however, that the transnational and international networks and processes that had held First World War internment together as a European and global phenomenon since 1914 began to wither away. What was left, at least until the 1930s and 1940s, was a tiny number of active but fragmented and ­nationally inward-looking remnants of what had once been a worldwide chain of camps, together with a broader, but less tangible set of disconnected memories, unhealed resentments and thwarted expectations.

Notes 1. See https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/g/the-greaterwar-tgw/?cc=gb&lang=en&. Also Gerwarth and Manela (eds.), Empires at War. 2. Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London, 2016); Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (eds.), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe After the Great War (Oxford, 2012); Omer Bartov and Eric D.  Weitz (eds.), Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2013).

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3. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, p.  37; Monticone, La croce e il filo spinato, pp. 253–4. 4. For French-language versions of the texts of the agreements, see ACICR, C G1, A 09-23–A 09-28. 5. Cited from the German-language version of the Austro-Serbian accord on prisoners, Bern, 1 June 1918, in ÖStA-HHStA, Karton 571, 28 1/a, Zl. 114 articles 2, 10 and 11. 6. Prussian War Ministry to all acting military commands and the supreme commander in the marches, 3 November 1918, in GLA, Bestand 456, No. 269. See also the relevant documents and newspaper cuttings in ACICR, C G1, A 09-26. 7. See, for instance, Frédéric Ferrière to Baron Slatin of the Austrian Red Cross, 15 May 1918, forwarded to Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 28 May 1918, in ÖStA-HHStA, Karton 556, 26/2a, Zl. 75. 8. Giuseppi, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens in France’, p. 121. See also Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 122. 9. ‘Le repatriement des prisonniers’, in Revue Internationale de la Croix-­ Rouge, no. 11 (November 1919), pp. 1323–34 (here p. 1326). 10. See Conférence Etats-Unis-Allemagne, Berne, Sept. to Nov. 1918, in ACICR, C G1, A 09-29. Also WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, pp. 757–8 and 822; and Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, p. 629. 11. On the agreement reached at Stockholm in September 1917, and the difficulties in implementing it, see Jahresbericht der Auskunftsstelle für Kriegsgefangene des Gemeinsamen Zentralnachweisbureaus sowie des österreichischen Fürsorgekomitees für Kriegsgefangene für das Jahr 1917 (Vienna, 1918), p. 2. Copy in ACICR, C G1, A 15–10. 12. Gustav Miller, Leiter der Abschubsstation Smolensk, ‘Bericht über Evakuationsverhältnisse’, 14 July 1919, in ÖStA-AdR, Kriegsgefangenenund Zivilinterniertenamt (henceforth KGF), Karton 15, Zl. 13125, pp. 1–6 (here p. 6). 13. ‘Le repatriement des prisonniers’ (as note 9 above), p. 1331. 14. Croix-Rouge suédoise to the President of the ICRC, 27 January 1919, in ACICR, C G1, A 15–33. According to Miller, ‘Bericht über Evakuationsverhältnisse’, p.  2, the Austrian Red Cross had taken over from the Danish Red Cross in Kiev at some point in the first half of 1919. 15. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, p.  177; Mai, Die Marokko-Deutschen, pp. 686–7. 16. WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, p. 822. 17. ‘Kriegsgefangenenstand’, in Mitteilungen der Staatskommission für Kriegsgefangenen und Zivilinterniertenangelegenheiten, No. 17–18, Vienna, 11 October 1919, p. 7. 18. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, p. 204.

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19. Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, pp. 125–7. 20. See, for instance, Ruth Leiserowitz, ‘Population Displacement in East Prussia during the First World War’, in Gatrell and Zhvanko (eds.), Europe on the Move, pp. 23–44 (here esp. p. 29). 21. ICRC, Rapport général, pp. 48 and 138. 22. Croix-Rouge Russe, Bureau de Renseignements sur les prisonniers de guerre (Petrograd, 1915), p. 12. Copy in ACICR, C G1, A 15–33. 23. Egger, ‘Gekämpft, gefangen und vergessen?’, p. 17. 24. Croix-Rouge Russe, Bureau de Renseignements, p. 10. The pamphlet also gave the following figures for combatant prisoners of war: 3968 Turks, 103,173 Germans and 805,983 Austro-Hungarians. 25. See Deutsches Komitee der Kriegsgefangenenhilfe der Christlichen Vereine junger Männer. Report dated 30 March 1917, in ACICR, C G1, A 15–06. Also ‘War Prisoners’ Aid’ of the International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, New York, to Robert Vansittart, 5 March 1919, in TNA, FO 383/517. 26. Alon Rachamimov, ‘“Female Generals” and “Siberian Angels”: Aristocratic Nurses and the Austro-Hungarian POW Relief’, in Nancy M.  Wingfield and Maria Bucur (eds.), Gender and War in TwentiethCentury Eastern Europe (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2006), pp. 23–46. 27. See Russian Legation in Bern to the Swiss Political Department and the ICRC, 5/18 August 1917, passing on Note Verbale from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Copy in ACICR, C G1, A 15–33. 28. Miller, ‘Bericht über Evakuationsverhältnisse’, p. 2. 29. Reinhard Nachtigal, ‘Die Repatriierung der Mittelmächte-­ Kriegsgefangenen aus dem revolutionären Rußland: Heimkehr zwischen Agitation, Bürgerkrieg und Intervention 1918–1922’, in Jochen Oltmer (ed.), Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkriegs (Paderborn, 2006), pp. 239–66 (here esp. pp. 242–8). 30. See Hannes Leidinger and Verena Moritz, Gefangenschaft, Revolution, Heimkehr: Die Bedeutung der Kriegsgefangenenpolitik für die Geschichte des Kommunismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa 1917–1920 (Vienna, 2003), esp. pp. 453–86. 31. See Ministry of Interior to the Zentralstelle der Fürsorge für Kriegsflüchtlinge, 28 April 1919, in ÖStA-AdR, KFL, I/49. On Heimkehrlager for military returnees, see also Judson, The Habsburg Empire, pp. 425–6. 32. Ministry for Military Affairs, Operations Department, to General Commander of the second Bavarian Army Corps (and copied to the Bavarian Ministry of Interior), 23 July 1919. Copy in Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Munich, Abt. II: Neuere Bestände (henceforth BayHStA-NB), MInn 66273.

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33. Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, p. 13. 34. Karl Kautsky, Terror and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of Revolution, trans. by W. H. Kerridge (London, 1920) [1919], p. 209. 35. Ibid., p. 210. 36. Anne  Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London, 2004), p. 31. 37. Michel Heller, Stacheldraht der Revolution: Die Welt der Konzentrationslager in der sowjetischen Literatur, trans. from the French by Joachim Nehring (Stuttgart, 1975) [1974], p. 50. 38. Nicolas Werth, ‘A State Against its People: Violence, Repression and Terror in the Soviet Union’, in Stéphane Courtois et al. (eds.), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA and London, 1999) [1997], pp. 33–268 (here p. 80); Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, p. 133. 39. Wladislaw Hedeler, ‘Zur Vorgeschichte des sowjetischen Gulag-Systems: Die Kadarschmiede Solowki’, in Jahr and Thiel (eds.), Lager vor Auschwitz, pp. 215–33 (here p. 222). 40. Heller, Stacheldraht der Revolution, p. 53. 41. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London, 1996), p. 643. 42. Werth, ‘A State Against its People’, p. 73. 43. Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, pp. 132–3. 44. Applebaum, Gulag, p. 37. 45. Heller, Stacheldraht der Revolution, p. 59. 46. Felix Schnell, ‘Der Gulag als Systemstelle sowjetischer Herrschaft’, in Greiner and Kramer (eds.), Welt der Lager, pp. 134–65 (here p. 139). 47. Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, p. 14. 48. See Figes, A People’s Tragedy, esp. pp. 649 and 723. 49. Gerhard Armanski, Maschinen des Terrors: Das Lager (KZ und GULAG) in der Moderne (Münster, 1993). 50. Applebaum, Gulag, pp.  21 and 36; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p.  524; Kotek and Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager, p. 132; Werth, ‘A State Against its People’, p. 90; Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 283–4. 51. Hedeler, ‘Zur Vorgeschichte des sowjetischen Gulag-Systems’, p. 222. 52. Mayer, The Furies, p. 240. 53. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 643. 54. Geoffrey Swain, Trotsky and the Russian Revolution (London and New York, 2014), pp. 67–8. 55. Heller, Stacheldraht der Revolution, p. 51; Mayer, The Furies, p. 296.

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56. Armanski, Maschinen des Terrors, pp. 19–20. 57. Heller, Stacheldraht der Revolution, p. 55. 58. Applebaum, Gulag, p. 4. 59. See Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, NY and London, 2009). 60. Huber, ‘The Internment of Prisoners of War and Civilians’, p. 264. 61. See paragraph 13 of the Anglo-German accord on prisoners of war, The Hague, 2 July 1917, in ACICR, C G1, A 09–08. 62. This was also the case after the war. See, for instance, the Mayor of Graz to the Zentralstelle der Fürsorge für Kriegsflüchtlinge in Vienna, 7 July 1919, in ÖStA-AdR, KGF, Karton 15, Zl. 13173. 63. Rosen to the  Unterkunftsdepartement, 19 March 1918, in BArch, R 901/83978. 64. Rosen to Hertling, 26 April 1918, in ibid. 65. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, p. 61. 66. See the records of 185 escapees from Katzenau camp and related work placements between February and September 1918, in Oberösterreichisches Staatsarchiv Linz (henceforth OÖStA), Bestand BH Freistadt, Schachtel 256, J 567–1918. This can be compared with only thirty-eight escapees between May 1916 and September 1917—see the records in ibid., Bestand BH Freistadt, Schachtel 236, J 4977–1917. Also the further evidence of escapes and escape attempts provided in a file containing complaints from employers between June and October 1918, in ÖStA-KA, MK-KM, Karton 281, Zl. 40128. 67. Stibbe, ‘(Dis)entangling’, forthcoming. 68. Hull, Scrap of Paper, p. 140; Jones, Violence, p. 185. 69. Watson, Ring of Steel, p. 385. 70. Schweizerisches Gesundheitsamt, Rapport über die sanitarische Inspektion eines Repatriiertenzuges in Buchs am 7. September 1918, in SBA, E27#1000/721#13969. 71. These concerns were recorded in detail in Bulletin International des sociétés de la Croix-Rouge, no. 196, October 1918. For an example of German propaganda accusing the British in particular of continuing to deliberately mistreat and under-feed German civilians in its hands—as well as in camps in its overseas dominions and colonies—see the article ‘Staatssekretär Erzberger über die deutschen Zivilgefangenen in England’, Germania, 5 November 1918. Copy in BArch, R 8034 II 7664. 72. See, for instance, the Austrian report, ‘Unsere Kriegsgefangenen und Internierten in Frankreich, England und den neutralen Staaten’, April-­ Bericht, 4 May 1918, in ÖStA-KA, GZNB, Karton 3758, Zl. 5084. Also an undated note [Aufzeichnung] written up by the legal department of the AA in response to a request for information from the German

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Consul-General in Bern dated 1 March 1918, and approved for despatch by the Prussian War Ministry on 5 June 1918. Copy in BArch, R 901/82918. 73. On refugees as well as internees in Switzerland and the Netherlands, see Huber, Fremdsein; and de Roodt, Oorlogsgasten. 74. See Director of Poor Relief to the Finance Department of the canton of Zurich, 12 December 1918, in Staatsarchiv Zurich, M 26.16. I would like to thank the Staatsarchiv Zurich for sending me a copy of this document. 75. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War, pp. 174–5. 76. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, p. 156. 77. Unterkunftsdepartement to the acting general commands, the chiefs and deputy chiefs of the army general staff and admiralty and the AA, 6 December 1918, in WHStA, Bestand M 77/1, No. 880, Bl. 18. 78. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, pp. 156–7. 79. Prussian Ministry of War to all acting general commands, 29 November 1918, in WHStA, Bestand M 77/1, No. 880, Bl. 58, 80. Office for Transport to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 10 January 1919, in ÖStA-HHStA, Karton 556, 26/2a, Zl. 93. 81. See, for instance, Austrian Ministry of Interior to the Zentralstelle der Fürsorge für Kriegsflüchtlinge, 28 April 1919, in ÖStA-AdR, Kriegsflüchtlingsfürsorge (KFL), Karton 15, I/49; and German-Austrian Foreign Office to the Kriegsgefangenen- und Zivilinterniertenamt, 3 July 1919, in ibid., KGF, Karton 15, Zl. 12536. 82. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithanien’. 83. Beatrix Hoffmann-Holter ‘Abreisendmachung’: Jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge in Wien 1914 bis 1923 (Vienna, 1995); Marsha L.  Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford, 2001). 84. Alexander Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and anti-­ Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2005); Christoph Mick, Lemberg, Lwów, and L’viv 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City (West Lafayette, IN, 2016), pp.  137–207; William W. Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 123–72. 85. Austrian Ministry of Interior to the state governor of Vienna, 4 November 1918. Copy in OÖStA, Statthalterei 1850–1926, Schachtel 40. 86. Ibid. 87. Interior Office of German-Austria to the state government of Upper Austria, 25 November 1918, in OÖStA, Statthalterei 1850–1926, Schachtel 41. 88. Mentzel, ‘Weltkriegsflüchtlinge’, p. 39. 89. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, pp. 66–7 and 135.

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90. Joseph Roth, Die Flucht ohne Ende: Ein Bericht (Munich, 1927). 91. Hoffmann-Holter, ‘Abreisendmachung’, p. 166. 92. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, pp.  163–5; Hoffmann-­ Holter ‘Abreisendmachung’, pp. 242 and 276–7. 93. Mentzel, ‘Weltkriegsflüchtlinge’, p. 39. 94. Carlo Moos, Habsburg Post-Mortem: Betrachtungen zum Weiterleben der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, 2016), pp. 33–4. 95. Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, p. 311. 96. Kristina Heizmann, ‘Fremd in der Fremde: Die Geschichte des Flüchtlings in Großbritannien und Deutschland, 1880–1925’, Ph.D dissertation, University of Konstanz, 2012, pp. 110–12. 97. Grady, A Deadly Legacy, p. 94. 98. Heizmann, ‘Fremd in der Fremde’, p. 114. 99. Ibid., p. 115. 100. Jochen Oltmer, Migration und Politik in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 2005), p. 66. 101. Ibid., pp. 253–4. 102. Bericht über den Besuch im Lager für posensche Gefangene zu Havelberg, 26 April 1919, von Major Léderry, Delegierter des Internationalen Komitees des Roten Kreuzes, in BArch, R 901/84319. 103. Ibid. 104. Oltmer, Migration und Politik, p. 115, n. 84. 105. See the records in BayHStA-KA, Kriegsministerium 15489. This file concerns the unsuccessful attempt by a former army paramedic working at Erlangen, Hermann Danzer, to sue the Bavarian War Ministry for wrongful dismissal. Danzer had been made redundant in August 1920, and was angered that the War Ministry, instead of rehiring him, had recruited a new team of paramedics to cater for the 3000 Red Army personnel who had unexpectedly arrived at the former camp on 7 September. 106. Höpp, Muslime in der Mark, p. 142. 107. Jörn Leonhard, Der überforderte Frieden: Versailles und die Welt, 1918– 1923 (Munich, 2018), p. 126. 108. Manz and Panayi, ‘The Internment of Civilian “Enemy Aliens”’, p. 23. 109. On the Germans from Siam, see SBA, E2020-1000-130, Bd. 63, DE 95 005; and on the China-Deutschen see SBA, E2020-1000-130, Bd. 63, DE 96 004. 110. As testified by the article ‘Erlebnisse in Angola: Von einem Internierten’, Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 July 1918. Copy in BArch, R 8034 II, No. 7663, Bl. 142–4. 111. Manz and Panayi, ‘The Internment of Civilian “Enemy Aliens”’, pp. 24–5. 112. Stibbe, British Civilian Internees, p. 156. On use of Ripon as a ‘reception centre’ for repatriated British military POWs (indeed, it had a capacity to

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hold 21,000 returnees at any one time), see also Wilkinson, British Prisoners of War, p. 276. 113. See, for instance, the record interview conducted by Lord Robert Cecil (Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs) with released prisoners Mr. L.G. Beaumont, Vice-Captain of the Camp, and Mr. H. J. N. Hawkins, an official of the South African Union Government, on 7 April 1916, in TNA, FO 383/140; and Cecil’s notes on a meeting with Messrs Boss, Cohen and Cailleau, all of them released from Ruhleben on 6 June 1916, at the FO on 10 June 1916, in TNA, FO 383/141. 114. See, for example, the ‘Memorandum on Dr. Pohlman’, written by an unnamed repatriated civilian from Ruhleben, n.d. [March/April 1919], in TNA, FO 383/517. 115. See, for example, Minute by Lord Robert Cecil, 30 October 1915, in TNA, FO 383/69; and Metropolitan Police, Special Branch to Lord Robert Cecil, 14 October 1918, in TNA, FO 383/425. 116. Dr Eric Higgins, ‘Connection of Dr Rotten with Ruhleben’, six-page record of interview, 10 March 1919, in TNA, FO 383/524. 117. See Secretary, Prisoners of War Department to Sir Edward Goschen, 29 March 1919, in TNA, FO 383/517. 118. See Bosworth, Inside Immigration Detention, p. 29. 119. Laura Tabili, ‘We Ask for Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY and London, 1994), pp.  31–5; Smith, Jamaican Volunteers, p. 117. 120. Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act, 23 December 1919, section 15, at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1919/92/pdfs/ukpga_ 19190092_en.pdf 121. Stibbe, ‘Ein globales Phänomen’, p. 172; Hempenstall and Mochida, The Lost Man, p. 134. 122. See the relevant documents in TNA, FO 383/539 and 541. 123. Daniel J.  Walter, Creating Germans Abroad: Cultural Policies and National Identity in Namibia (Athens, OH 2002), p.  155; Martin Eberhardt, Zwischen Nationalsozialismus und Apartheid: Die deutsche Bevölkerungsgruppe Südwestafrikas 1915–1965 (Berlin, 2007), pp. 99–116. See also Murphy, Colonial Captivity, p. 188. 124. Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, to Secretary of Prisoners of War Department, 10 January 1919, in FO 383/478. 125. Fischer, Enemy Aliens, pp. 301–2. 126. Paterson, ‘Aspects of internment in Australia’, p. 81. 127. Francis, ‘To be Truly British’, p. 255. 128. Minister of Shipping to Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office, 3 July 1919, in TNA, FO 383/541. 129. Manz and Dedering, ‘“Enemy Aliens”’, p. 555.

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130. See Foreign Office minute, 10 June 1919, in TNA, FO 383/502. 131. War Office to Secretary, Prisoners of War Department, 17 June 1919, in TNA, FO 383/478. 132. Acting Administrator, Government House, Dar-es-Salaam, to Secretary of State to the Colonies, 12 June 1919, in TNA, FO 383/541. 133. AA to Swiss consulate in Berlin, 13 June 1919, in SBA, E2020-1000-­130, Bd. 63, DE 96 004. 134. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, p. 95; WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, p. 759. 135. See also Murphy, ‘Brücken, Beethoven and Bumkuchen’, p. 125. 136. Tooze, The Deluge, pp.  321–9. See also Leonhard, Der überforderte Frieden, p. 1178. 137. Panayi, The Germans in India, p. 218. 138. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst, p.  97. See also German consulate in Rotterdam to AA, 23 April 1919, in BArch, R 901/83959, and Under-­ Secretary of State at the Home Office to Secretary of Prisoners of War Department, 8 April 1919, in TNA, FO 383/501, who noted that there were only roughly 5000 internees left in British camps by that date. This had fallen to below 4000 by 12 May (see Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office to Secretary of Prisoners of War Department, 12 May 1919, in TNA, FO 383/517). Even so, as documents in the same file show, small groups of internees were still being deported throughout the summer of 1919, some as late as the beginning of August. 139. Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, to Secretary of Prisoners of War Department, 20 May 1919, in FO 383/478. 140. See the complaints from German internees in TNA, FO 383/501-2. Also the evidence of similar complaints from Austro-Hungarian subjects likewise repatriated via Rotterdam, in TNA, 383/478, esp. Swedish Legation, London, Austro-Hungarian Division to the Secretary of the Prisoners of War Department, 22 March 1919, and various appendices. 141. Jenkinson, Black 1919, pp. 159–60; Smith, Jamaican Volunteers, p. 116. According to Smith, a number of Jamaican sailors were repatriated between August and October 1919 in the wake of the riots—see ibid., pp. 143–4. 142. Jenkinson, Black 1919, p. 5. 143. Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’, p. 32. 144. Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘The Portuguese Empire’, p. 190. 145. Maria Fernanda Rollo, Anna Paula Pires and Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘Portugal’, in 1914–1918 online, edited by Daniel et  al., https:// encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/pdf/1914-1918-Online-portugal-2017-08-30.pdf 146. Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘The Portuguese Empire’, p. 192. 147. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, pp. 154–6.

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148. All of the above figures come from the statistical information provided by the Lisbon-based Comissão Central de Informacões sobre Prisioneiros de Guerra, in AHM, PT/AHM/DIV/1/35/0436/01. 149. See the petition sent to the Spanish embassy in Lisbon, 3 October 1919, and forwarded from there to the AA in Berlin, in BArch, R 901/83531. 150. See the statistical information on Caldas da Rainha provided by the Lisbon-based Comissão Central de Informacões sobre Prisioneiros de Guerra, in AHM, PT/AHM/DIV/1/35/0436/01, Bl. 3. 151. Murphy, Colonial Captivity, p. 197. 152. Giuseppi, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens in France’, pp. 93–4. 153. Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre, p. 263, n. 180. 154. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, pp. 337–41. 155. Ibid, p.  122; Giuseppi, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens in France’, p. 121. 156. Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 1 (January 1919), p. 50. 157. ‘Le repatriement des prisonniers’ (as note 9 above), pp. 1333–4. 158. Farcy, Les camps de concentration, p. 122. 159. ‘Le repatriement des prisonniers’ (as note 9 above), p. 1333. 160. Ibid. 161. Giuseppi, ‘The Internment of Enemy Aliens in France’, p. 121. 162. Leonhard, Der überforderte Frieden, pp. 1160 and 1208–9. 163. Ibid., pp. 738–9. 164. Şiperco, ‘Internment in Neutral and Belligerent Romania’, p. 245. 165. ‘Prisonniers de guerre hongrois en Roumanie’, Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 9 (September 1919), pp. 1119–20 (here p. 1120). 166. Ibid., p. 1119. 167. Şiperco, ‘Internment in Neutral and Belligerent Romania’, p. 246. 168. Todd Huebner, ‘The Internment Camp at Terezín, 1919’, Austrian History Year Book, 27 (1996), pp. 199–211. 169. Ibid., p. 210. 170. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York, 2002), p. 268. 171. Ibid., pp. 128–9. 172. Telegram, Ministry of Interior to Ministry of War, 26 July 1920. Copy in AST, Reale Commissariato Generale Civile per la Venezia Guilia, Atti Generali (1919–1922), 2039/116. 173. Svoljšak, ‘The Sacrificed Slovenian Memory’, p. 227. 174. See Ministry of Interior to the R. Commissariato Generale Civile per la Venezia Guilia, 1 August 1920; and Commissario Generale Civile to the Commando Generale RR.  Truppe della Venezia Guilia in Udine, 13 August 1920, both in AST, Reale Commissariato Generale Civile per la Venezia Guilia, Atti Generali (1919–1922), 2039/116.

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175. Relazioni della reale commissione, Vol. 3. 176. See the files on individuals in AST, Reale Commissariato Generale Civile per la Venezia Guilia, Atti di Gabinetto (1919–1922), No. 29, Cat. 15/2 (Internati—Rimpatrio) 177. Svoljšak, ‘The Sacrificed Slovenian Memory’, pp. 227–8. 178. Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 289. 179. Stéphane Auodin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918: Understanding the Great War, trans. by Catherine Temerson (London, 2002) [2000], p. 116. 180. Prussian Ministry of War to all acting general commands, 29 November 1918, in WHStA, Bestand M 77/1, No. 880, Bl. 58. 181. Stefan Rinke and Karina Kriegesmann, ‘Latin America’, in 1914–1918 online, edited by Daniel et al., https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online. net/pdf/1914-1918-Online-latin_america-2015-11-05.pdf 182. WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, p. 757. 183. Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, p. 665. 184. See German envoy in The Hague to AA, 1 October 1919; Hamburg-­ Südamerikanische Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft to AA, 6 October 1919; and Swiss envoy in Berlin to AA, 29 October 1919, all in BArch, R 901/83616. 185. See Hamburg-Südamerikanische Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft to AA, 7 August 1919; and German envoy in The Hague to AA, 19 September 1919, both in ibid. 186. Swiss Legation, Port-au-Prince, to Political Department, Bern, 24 July 1919. Copy in BArch, R 901/83614. 187. WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, pp. 757–8. 188. Grew to Dresel, 23 September 1917, in HL, b MS Am 1549 (160). 189. Hagedorn, Savage Peace, p. 421. 190. Ibid., p. 422. 191. Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis, MN, 1955). 192. Nagler, ‘Victims of the Home Front’, p. 214. 193. Wüstenbecker, ‘Politik gegenüber ethnischen Minoritäten’, pp. 276–81; Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, pp. 509–28; Luebke, Germans in Brazil, pp. 175–201. 194. Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten, p. 664. 195. Hagedorn, Savage Peace, pp. 421–2. 196. Post to L. L. Thompson, Attorney General, Washington State, n.d. [May 1920?], in NARA, RG 174, Box 177, 167/255. 197. Ibid. 198. See, for instance, Jonathan F. Vance, Death so Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver, BC, 1997).

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199. Bohdan S. Kordan, No Free Man: Canada, the Great War, and the Enemy Alien Experience (Montreal, QC, 2016), pp. 264–6. 200. Ibid., pp. 255–6. 201. WUA, Reihe 3, Bd. III/2, p.  822;  Kordan, ‘Internment in Canada’, pp. 175–6. 202. Lubomyr Y.  Luciuk, A Time for Atonement: Canada’s First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914–1920 (Kingston, ON, 1988), p. 27. 203. Ibid., pp. 22–3. 204. Swain, Trotsky, p. 38. 205. Luciuk, A Time for Atonement, p. 27. 206. Murray, Red Scare, pp.  112–14 and 211–12. On the 1919 Winnipeg general strike, see also Vance, Death so Noble, pp. 230–2. 207. Kordan, No Free Man, p. 256.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion and Epilogue

This study has located the historical specificity of First World War internment in its worldwide geographical reach, the vast numbers and extended period of time involved, and the unprecedented spectacle of both sides in a global conflict developing overlapping, inter-linked and seemingly durable or semi-permanent ways of thinking about enemy civilians and ‘internal enemies’. It is the political and cultural manifestations and implications of this inter-connection between rival mass internment systems—whether ‘friendly’, ‘hostile’ or ‘neutral’—and the ties that all of them had to other forms of violence against civilians in the years 1914–20, that have been at the centre of investigation, rather than the conditions or experience of captivity itself. We can learn a lot more about international politics, inequalities and global power shifts during this period, it has been demonstrated, when we try to understand the internment phenomenon from the perspective of policymakers and other ‘experts’ looking at camps from the outside, as opposed to focusing on the ordeal of inmates trying to make sense of life, loss of liberty and boredom on the inside. Civilian captivity in the years 1914–20 took place within an international system that privileged certain Euro-centric forms of war governance and relations of power, particularly along the axes of race, gender and class. How these relations of power manifested themselves, and how they overlapped with issues of citizenship and national belonging, varied enormously across the different localities, regions, nations and empires. No single dominant model of internment emerged during this period, and © The Author(s) 2019 M. Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57191-5_7

291

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although networks of civilian camps were established across Europe and the wider world, there was as yet no concentration camp system. Nor was there a unified set of goals or understandings among international activists campaigning on behalf of the victims of internment, namely the civilian prisoners and their families. Some wished to promote its worldwide abolition, whether through legal or political means, while others focused more on trying to mitigate its consequences, or ending the ordeal for particular groups of prisoners. Transnational understanding of the impact of long-­ term captivity on the physical and mental health of civilian internees increased in leaps and bounds, and had a demonstrable impact on international negotiations over releases and exchanges. However, there was still no common agreement on whether the camp environment itself was the direct cause of breakdowns and nervous conditions, as seen in the mixed, and largely sceptical, response to Adolf Lukas Vischer’s work on ‘barbed-­ wire disease’—a term which reverberated around the world in 1917–18 but did not catch on in medical circles to the same extent as ‘shell shock’. In spite of these many disconnections and ruptures, it has been possible to identify some of the multiple, overlapping meanings that internment came to have for external decision-makers, humanitarian activists and ‘neutral’ observers in the years 1914–20. The relative weight given to each of them varied according to time, place and political or military context. To borrow from C. A. Bayly, global manifestations and understandings of internment emerged in a manner that was more interactive than synchronous.1 They are listed here in no particular order of priority. To begin with, internment was something not entirely unprecedented in 1914, but wholly new in terms of scale, duration and demand on resources. As previous studies have indicated, it was a mechanism by which belligerent nation-states and empires persecuted enemy alien minorities as part of their war on the home front and in occupied and overseas colonial territories. However, it was also a means of waging war on all manner of social and political outsiders, and laid bare gendered, class and racial hierarchies as much as it did national, ethnic, religious and regional differences. It involved movement of people and goods within and across state borders, and was entwined with other forms of war migration, voluntary and forced. At international level, it was used a tool of retaliation or a method of exacting reparation, and as an accompaniment to expulsions, expropriations and denaturalisations. Yet it could equally reveal or become entangled with local war cultures, as we saw, for instance, in the case of the Habsburg imperial police in the Austrian port city of Trieste in using

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internment orders ‘from above’ to expel not just enemy aliens and political suspects, but unwanted social outcasts. Finally, for non-belligerent countries, international organisations and humanitarian activists working across borders, internment could be a means either of asserting and safeguarding their ‘neutrality’, exhibiting their philanthropic credentials and medical expertise, and/or signposting particular religious or political agendas (albeit usually not all three of these at the same time). In sum, between 1914 and 1920 internment had been thought of in a wide variety of overlapping political, diplomatic, legal, economic, security and medical terms, and in the one, so far isolated, case of Ottoman Turkey, had been linked to a deliberate act of genocide. None of this is to deny agency to the internees themselves, many of whom—as much of the previous scholarly work has shown—came up with highly creative and imaginative solutions to combatting the challenges of living behind the barbed wire and coping with the aftermath of the captive experience for themselves and their families. This study has nonetheless shifted the debate by examining the First World War internment phenomenon from the viewpoint of state and non-state actors looking at the camps, and constructing their purpose, or criticising their existence, as imagined political spaces. The change in perspective that has allowed these new insights and conclusions has been achieved by employing theoretical and methodological approaches that have not previously been applied to the study of First World War captivity—or to civilian internment in other recent conflicts. In particular it is indebted to writings on European and global history that challenge the notion that modern wars necessarily impede movement of goods, ideas and people, or stimulate more long-lasting ruptures than continuities and connections.2 The outbreak of the First World War in particular is still commonly thought of as a point when contacts across regional and international borders were closed down after an unprecedented spurt of globalisation in the period from the 1860s to the 1900s.3 But in fact, internment was predicated on wartime mobility and migration, across land borders, continents and oceans, and by foot, train and steamship. This is a significant finding, which also tallies with recent work on refugees and other civilian and military migrants during the First World War era, while expanding the theoretical and empirical range of vision from Europe to the rest of the world.4 Methodologically, the study has demonstrated that comparative and entangled histories are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but equally it has shown that comparison without consideration of entanglements means that we can miss the full global picture

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and end up in a fog of false equivalences that may invigorate empirical content but delivers less by way of far-reaching analytical force. This does not apply—at least not to the same extent—when examining the relationship the other way around. Comparison and entanglement, in other words, are connected to each other as methods of historical research in mutually inter-dependent but asymmetric ways. In the past, this asymmetry has not always been acknowledged by the advocates of comparative history.5 It nonetheless offers an important way forward for those interested in writing global histories of the First World War as a war of movement, both human and non-human, voluntary and forced, civilian and military, and within and between belligerent, occupied and neutral territories.6 * * * After 1920 a kind of selective amnesia descended on the world in respect to civilian internment and its use as a tool by belligerent (and neutral) states in the recent war. National governments and movements continued to complain about the supposed mistreatment of their own subjects at the hands of their former enemies.7 However, the illness and death of some of the world’s leading campaigners against internment, including Frédéric Ferrière in 1924, Édouard Naville and Emily Hobhouse in 1926 and Gustave Ador in 1928, as well as Adolf Vischer’s career switch after 1919 towards gerontology, allowed it to fade from public attention. The last time that the issue was mentioned as a matter of global concern in an international forum was at the ICRC’s second post-war conference in Geneva in October 1925, which adopted the principle, non-binding on national governments and Red Cross societies, that in future wars ‘any civilian who is detained by an enemy state should, as a bare minimum, benefit from the protections then in force for prisoners of war’.8 And the last time it featured as part of a more general political critique of war and its impact on civilians, including women and children, was at the WILPF congress in Zurich in May 1919.9 In the inter-war period, the two Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 continued to frame understandings of the rules and customs of land warfare in a legal sense, but were superseded politically by efforts to condemn war altogether as a means of solving international disputes, whether through the League of Nations’ brand of ‘collective security’—a highly popular notion in Britain, judging by the several million voters who supported it in the so-called ‘peace ballot’ of 1934–35—or the Kellogg-Briand

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Pact of 1929. As Alan Kramer argues, this represented a marked shift in interest from jus in bello to jus ad bellum.10 Where jus in bello still came into play in international fora, the primary cause of concern—especially after 1925—was how to police the global ban on use of chemical and biological weapons in future conflicts, a question which formed the subject of two world conferences of experts, in Brussels in February 1928 and Rome in January 1929.11 Parallel to the 1929 conference, the Ligue internationale des femmes pour la paix et la liberté held its own congress in Frankfurt-amMain, in which it resolved to inform the world about ‘the seriousness and the extent of this threat’ and cast doubt on the ability of male experts to provide ‘fail-proof safeguards’.12 Meanwhile, the revised Geneva Convention of 1929 included new provisions building on the rights of military captives already enshrined in the HLKO and making abuses easier to deter and ‘far harder to… excuse’, but still offered no explicit protections for civilian prisoners.13 Astonishingly, even the international commission appointed in 1929 to draw up an official report for the conference of diplomats charged with revising the POW clauses of the 1906 Geneva Convention did not consider civilian prisoners as part of its terms of reference. Rather, the report’s chief author, Georges Werner, who was both an ICRC member and professor of law at the University of Geneva, simply noted that the Commission had been mandated to draw up regulations to apply ‘to persons who belong to the armed forces of belligerent states… [and] who are captured by the enemy in the course of military operations’. The conference, he concluded, ‘is not qualified to go beyond this remit’.14 As far as civilian war victims were concerned, the existing regulations contained in the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions—buttressed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting use of chemical and biological warfare—were considered sufficient. Revising them was simply not a priority for western diplomats, League of Nations bodies or international legal experts in the 1920s and 1930s, in spite of the lessons that might have been drawn from the Armenian genocide in particular. Admittedly, the ICRC and other humanitarian organisations continued to make attempts to help those individuals who had been rendered stateless by post-1918 border changes and/or by the growing number of instances of religious, racial or political persecution around the world in the inter-war period. This was based on the understandable but, as things turned out after 1939, partly erroneous assumption that those without citizenship of any state were the most vulnerable to internment or other forms of non-judicial detention in the event of future wars.15

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However, none of these efforts got anywhere before the outbreak of the Second World War, as symbolised above all by the failure of the thirty-two countries represented at the Evian conference in July 1938 to foster international agreement on how to help stateless Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Central Europe.16 One result of this selective amnesia over the question of internment was that almost until the end of the twentieth century, civilian camps were associated in the collective international mind with the violence of the Boer War and the Second World War, but not with the First World War. To take one example among many, in a speech delivered in 2003, Pope John Paul II (the former Cardinal Bishop of Kraków, Karol Józef Wojtyła, 1920–2005) offered what was both a very Polish and equally universal reflection on the violence inflicted on civilians in the 1939–45 war, a war that for him shifted all of humanity into a new place in historical time in terms of its unprecedented horrors: The sheer magnitude of the losses, and even more the sheer scale of the suffering experienced by individuals, families and selected groups, is truly difficult to comprehend… The war not only took place at the fighting fronts, but developed into a total war enveloping whole societies. Entire social milieu were deported. Thousands of people fell victim to imprisonment, torture and executions. Populations far from the main battle fields faced death as targets of aerial bombing raids or as victims of the systematic terror at whose centre lay those concentration camps which eventually became extermination camps.17

The association of concentration and death camps with the crime of genocide is also very much a phenomenon of the mid-twentieth century, based on the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin’s important definition of 1943–44.18 Among other things, this underpinned the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948.19 As Lemkin intended, it also eventually brought the Turkish extermination of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915–16 back into international political consciousness as the first genocide of the twentieth century and a precursor of the Holocaust, but somehow detached it from the First World War (another example of selective amnesia).20 Indeed, in the 1940s and 1950s (and beyond) the dead and the survivors of twentieth-century camps were rarely depicted as victims of war or militarism. The language around them

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had changed. They were victims of Nazism, fascism, Stalinism, anti-­ Semitism, western imperialism, Ottoman imperialism, Soviet imperialism or, especially in the 1950s, following the work of Hannah Arendt, Carl J. Friedrich and others, of ‘totalitarianism’.21 When ‘totalitarianism’ went out of fashion in the 1970s and 1980s, it was replaced by other, equally influential but ultimately unsatisfactory concepts, such as ‘biological politics’22 and ‘modernity’.23 In respect to medical-psychiatric discourses around survivors and returnees, the language had also changed by the mid-twentieth century. The term ‘barbed-wire disease’ was not used to the same extent during or after the Second World War, partly because its chief advocate, Adolf Lukas Vischer, had always intended it to be a means of understanding the mental distress of prisoners of war who were actually treated quite well by their (largely law-abiding) captors and yet still faced long-term damage to their health and happiness as a result of indefinite captivity. What he had not foreseen or catered for was the shift towards deliberate and large-scale cruelty, starvation and/or neglect in subsequent wars.24 In mid-twentieth-­ century German and Swiss literature on POWs, for instance, Stacheldrahtkrankheit became Heimkehrerkrankheit (‘returnees’ disease’) or, in expert neurological and bureaucratic circles, ‘dystrophy’.25 The focus was now on the dehumanising and emasculating, if not murderous, intentions of captor states, not on the physicality of the barbed wire and the way it slowly seeped into the mind.26 Interestingly, though, the reported symptoms were often the same, including sexual dysfunction and apathy, as was the assumed remedy: ‘work’. As one medical expert put it in a conference report delivered at Bad Homburg, West Germany, in June 1957: The returnee is no longer the same person as the man who left his wife some ten, fifteen or even nineteen years ago… His cognitive abilities are weakened in multiple ways, with the ability to concentrate and to perform more than one task at the same time particularly affected. His thought processes are laboured and he is often unable to make decisions. He is easily tired and lacks physical strength, impacting on his productivity. He lacks motivation and appears depressed, while equally he is easily excitable, lacks self-control and is often given to sudden outbursts of anger.27

The gendered assumptions around ‘normalcy’ and ‘deviance’, and fears regarding the ‘permanent damage’ done to a whole generation of young

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men held in long-term captivity, were also reminiscent of the First World War era.28 Furthermore, in spite of the understandable political focus in 1950s West Germany on the ‘extreme living conditions’ and exceptionally prolonged wait for release experienced by German soldiers and civilian deportees held in Soviet POW camps, the actual symptoms of Heimkehrerkrankheit—namely ‘despair’ and ‘listlessness’—were more often to be found among those returning from ‘captivity in the West, where the treatment had been relatively good’, as James M. Diehl notes.29 Once again, the expert medical studies written during and after the Second World War tended to ignore the fact that women too could be held in internment camps—whether in Europe, Asia or North America.30 Even when this was acknowledged—and again taking West Germany as an example—women were considered not to have suffered as much as men from the internment experience. Rather, ‘on the whole’ the ‘returnee women’ were considered ‘to have come through captivity in better shape, to be less damaged physically, and to exhibit fewer problems with adjustment’ to the post-war world.31 Heimkehrerkrankheit, like ‘barbed-wire disease’, was thus labelled male, while women were more usually depicted as having fallen victim to other aspects of wartime and post-war violence towards civilians, including ‘bombing raids, lack of sleep, long hours working in munition factories or in air-raid protection’, and last, but not least, the ‘large number of rapes’ committed—for the most part—outside camps.32 On the plus side, Convention IV of the 1949 Geneva Convention for the first time recognised the civilian prisoner of war as a potential victim, if not of prolonged or indefinite detention, then at least of unacceptable abuses at the hands of their military captors.33 For the ICRC in particular, this, together with additional protocols drawn up in 1977, was an important milestone in the broader development of international humanitarian law after the horrifying experience of the Second World War.34 Articles 41 and 78 of Convention IV thus provided that where internment of non-­ combatants was deemed necessary by a belligerent state ‘for imperative reasons of security’—this being by implication the only legitimate grounds under which civilians could be held—then the conditions of detention ‘must in all circumstances respect human dignity’ and ‘by and large’ follow the rules applying to military POWs.35 Admittedly, what ‘by and large’ meant in this context was, and still is, unclear, not least as it was rarely tested by international observers during the Cold War era. Civilian prisoners in major conflicts like the Vietnam War of 1959–75, the India-Pakistan

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Wars of 1965–71 or the various Arab-Israeli wars since 1948 still faced the prospect of ‘double marginalization’, with any focus on treatment of captives, and memory of the same, ‘tending to privilege the military dimension’.36 According to Jonathan F. Vance, for instance, when the Pakistani military ended the war of November—December 1971 by surrendering to Indian and Bangladeshi troops on 16 December, the ICRC was able to intervene on behalf of the soldiers captured on both sides, to ensure that they were well treated, but, in spite of the provisions of Convention IV of the 1949 Geneva Convention, interned civilians ‘did not [in practice] benefit from the same protection’.37 To take another example, from 1967 successive Israeli governments have repeatedly sought to justify their ongoing use of ‘administrative detention’ against Palestinian civilians seized in the occupied territories—including children—by quoting the provisions of article 78 of Convention IV: ‘imperative reasons of security’.38 But Israel is not alone in this. In numerous other international and civil conflicts during the Cold War and beyond, belligerent states have also been able to violate with impunity article 49 of Convention IV, which expressly prohibits ‘individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country… regardless of their motive’.39 In terms of international awareness and intervention, things only began to change in the 1990s and the early part of the twentieth-first century. There were three reasons for this. First was the return of the civilian prison camp to European soil, and to the European imagination, during the Bosnian war of 1992–95. The physical and sexual violence committed in these camps, particularly against women, children and older men, and especially by the Bosnian Serb side, meant that for the first time in the twentieth century, as John Horne puts it, ‘the civilian won a degree of visibility that was equal, if not superior, to that of military prisoners’.40 The fact that this was happening in the heart of Europe, less than fifty years after the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, rather than in a less affluent or supposedly less ‘civilised’ part of the world, undoubtedly had an impact on international opinion too. As Florence Hartmann puts it, in Bosnia [t]he evidence of concentration camps, systematic rape, massacres, torture and mass deportation of civilians was undeniable, and in February 1993, largely at America’s behest, the [UN] Security Council set up an ­international

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war crimes tribunal in The Hague. But the major powers did not get around to naming a chief prosecutor until July 1994, and they gave no support to the Bosnian government when it brought a case for genocide against Serbia at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Instead, Western governments repeatedly urged Bosnia to drop that case, which was finally decided in 2007. The Court ruled that Serbia was not responsible for genocide, but was guilty of failing to prevent and punish it.41

If Serbia itself was not found guilty of genocide, the UN-mandated International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) has nonetheless put on trial, and in some cases convicted, individuals accused of that most grievous of offences, as well as other extremely serious violations of international humanitarian law. According to the official UN website, ‘more than a third of those convicted by the ICTFY have been found guilty of crimes involving sexual violence’ following its ‘investigations… into reports of systematic detention and rape of women, men and children’. This, the Security Council notes, was a major step forward in developing international consciousness of the mistreatment of civilian detainees in war: The first international treaty implicitly outlawing sexual violence, the Hague Convention of 1907, did not end impunity for these crimes: after World War II, for instance, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg did not expressly prosecute sexual violence, and the Tokyo Tribunal ignored the Japanese army’s enslavement of ‘comfort women’. In 1949, the landmark Geneva Conventions stated: ‘Women shall be especially protected… against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault’. The wars in the former Yugoslavia revealed the urgent need to bring these historic international laws out of theory and into the courtroom.42

The second major development that marked a new phase in international awareness of the issue of civilian captivity was the US-led ‘global war on terror’ launched following the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on 11 September 2001. International jurists have come up with divided, but generally very critical, opinions of the Bush administration’s use, from January 2002 onwards, of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as an extra-territorial detention ­centre to hold close to 800 al-Qaeda and other foreign terror suspects beyond the jurisdiction of the Geneva Convention and US domestic law and for varying lengths of time, on the grounds that they are, or may be, ‘unlawful

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combatants’43 and ‘agents of a stateless terror network’.44 The subsequent Obama and Trump administrations have also been criticised for continuing to keep an admittedly gradually dwindling number of prisoners there. Even though the former had promised to close the camp, then holding 242 inmates, during his first month in office in January 2009, 107 persons were still languishing there after his first term, and forty-one at the time that his presidency ended.45 Under Trump, just one prisoner has been transferred to date, being handed over to Saudi Arabia in 2018, and there seems to be little prospect that the camp will close any time soon.46 The position of the ICRC vis a vis Guantánamo is slightly different to that of the campaigning human rights lawyers who have repeatedly filed suits in US courts on behalf of individuals in an effort to challenge the legality of their continuing detention under American habeas corpus and international humanitarian laws. Instead, it has accepted US permission to inspect the camp’s facilities and visit the detainees in its capacity as a neutral body without any executive, legislative or judicial decision-making rights of its own. Nonetheless, on one question of international humanitarian law it has been entirely clear and consistent: all prisoners of war, whatever their status, military, civilian or otherwise, enjoy the right to have that status determined under internationally-agreed procedures set out in the Geneva Conventions, and have done so since at least 1949. The ‘war on terror’, in the ICRC’s view, did not justify the US’s decision to unilaterally waive the obligation to follow such procedures in the case of Guantánamo Bay. Its behaviour in this respect has left ‘people’s lives and the integrity of the rule of law hang[ing] in the balance’ at local and global level.47 Meanwhile, in more recent years the ‘war on terror’ has developed a new dimension, only now beginning to come to the attention of international opinion, namely the Chinese government’s detention of up to one million Uighurs in camps in the north-western province of Xinjiang. The difference with Guantánamo, apart from the obvious massive disparity in numbers, is that the inmates, while accused of membership of stateless Islamic terror networks, or at least labelled as vulnerable to recruitment by the same unless ‘re-educated’ in a manner prescribed by the ruling communist party, are Chinese, not foreign citizens. In theory they may enjoy some limited protections under international humanitarian law, meaning that in certain circumstances the Chinese government could be held legally responsible in an international criminal court if the detainees were to come to any demonstrable harm while in captivity. However, they do

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not fall under the ICRC’s definition of prisoners of war, and in its eyes are therefore not covered by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Neutral observers can only visit the detainees with permission of the Chinese authorities. So far, the latter have refused all requests from the UN and other bodies, while at the same time setting up well-policed exclusion zones around the camps in order to deny even very distant access to the international media—unless by official invitation.48 The third major development is the growth of, and increased international attention drawn towards, conditions in refugee camps and immigration detention centres all over the world. In this kind of camp, inmates might not be internees or prisoners in a formal sense, because they are supposedly ‘free’ to leave if they ‘voluntarily’ accept repatriation or forced removal to another country. However, they are still required to live surrounded by barbed wire and in circumstances in which they cannot realistically make free decisions, and the evidence of the impact of this on their physical and mental health is overwhelming. Today, the largest refugee camps tend to be in developing countries, such as Dadaab, opened in 1992 on the Kenya-Somali border and unsuccessfully targeted by the Kenyan authorities for closure in 2016. In the first quarter century of its existence, it became home to tens of thousands of Somalis whose lives would be endangered by ongoing civil war if they went home, but who found it all but impossible to access legal routes out of the camp into Kenya proper, still less the wider world. Some were born into the camp or similar camps, and were still living there by the time they become adults.49 Others did and still do fall victim to attacks by hostile armed gangs and/or exploitation at the hands of rogue employees of the international aid agencies that have been sent to help them. Immigration detention has likewise become a big issue in the domestic politics of many western countries, particularly where separation of families and forced deportations are involved. Since the global financial crash of 2008, and more particularly since the onset of the civil wars in Syria in 2011 and Libya in 2014, increasing numbers of richer nations are threatening to build walls to stem the flow of refugees; to withdraw from international conventions protecting the human rights of asylum-seekers; to hold those denied leave, including pregnant women, families with small children and victims of torture and sexual violence, in detention centres regardless of the impact on their mental and physical health; and to find numerous other means of creating what former British Home Secretary Theresa May, speaking to the Daily Telegraph in May 2012, described as a ‘really hostile environment for illegal migration’.50

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Indeed, in Britain under Prime Ministers Cameron, May and Johnson, to take one example, the number of migrant detainees has remained high—almost as high as the number of enemy aliens arrested in 1914– 15—even if the latest figures suggest a declining trend since 2015 relative to a steady increase between 2010 and 2015. Thus the Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons noted in a report published on 21 March 2019 that 24,748 suspected ‘illegal’ immigrants entered the ‘detention estate’ during the year 2018, while 25,487 left it. Of the latter, 43.8% were deported, 54.7% were released on conditional bail, 0.2% were granted unconditional leave to remain, and 1.3% were either transferred into other kinds of detention (usually to serve criminal sentences following conviction, or to receive compulsory treatment in mental health institutions) or were recorded as having escaped, disappeared or died while in Home Office custody.51 The report did not give an exact figure for the average stay in immigration detention, but did note that 42% were held for under twenty-eight days (up by 5% compared to 2015); 46% for twenty-­ nine days to six months (down by 7%); and 12% for longer than six months (disturbingly, up by 2%).52 Between July 2016 and June 2017, more than 4000 of the persons detained for immigration control purposes were women. The government did consent in 2017 to limit the length of time that pregnant women can be held to seventy-two hours. But so far it has not taken up the recommendation made by an All-Party Parliamentary Group in 2015 that no-one be held in immigration detention for longer than twenty-eight days.53 The fact that some of those undocumented immigrants being detained without trial in Britain or other western countries are ex-convicts, in other words foreign-national criminals who are contesting their deportation after coming to the end of judicially-imposed prison sentences, does not diminish the stress caused to them by dint of not knowing how much longer their ordeal will last. Moreover, as two US campaigners have also recently argued, the danger is that ‘with poor oversight’ of the private and state agencies responsible for running immigration and border detention centres, and with public debate increasingly focused on the conditions of detention rather than questioning whether it is actually needed in most cases, we will see not only a rise in violence towards, and self-harm among, detainees in the worst facilities, but also, more generally, the creation of a post-liberal world order in which ‘prolonged detention periods for [‘illegal’] migrants will become normalised’.54

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The global ‘war on terror’ has simultaneously created new ways of defining ‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’, and a repositioning of the obligations and boundaries of citizenship and guaranteed free entry rights as understood, legally and culturally, in many parts of the (non-Islamic) world.55 The UK would be one example among many. Although it has thankfully not sought to replicate the disastrous internment policies introduced in Northern Ireland under the 1922 Special Powers Act at the height of the ‘Troubles’ in the early 1970s,56 it has adapted pre-existing legislation on citizenship and human rights to meet new security policies in response to the post-2001 terror threat. The British Nationality Act of 1981, for instance, placed restrictions on the automatic right of citizenship granted to those born on British soil. This would now only apply if at least one parent was a British citizen or was permanently ‘settled’, rather than merely ‘resident’ in the UK at the time of their birth. In retrospect it was a late twentieth-century move that separated out a far wider pool of aliens in Britain than would or could have existed under the nationality laws in place at the time of the original Aliens Act of 1905 and Aliens Restriction Act of 1914. This pool of aliens would potentially be vulnerable to new restrictions in the event of wars, major terror incidents or other national emergencies. The 1981 Act also empowered the Home Secretary to … deprive any British citizen… of his citizenship… if [he] is satisfied that that citizen

(a) has shown himself by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected towards Her Majesty; or (b) has, during any war in which Her Majesty was engaged, unlawfully traded or communicated with an enemy or been engaged in or associated with any business that was to his knowledge carried on in such a manner as to assist an enemy in that war; or (c) has, within the period of five years from the relevant date, been sentenced in any country to imprisonment for a term of not less than twelve months.

Two safeguards were applied to this, in order to keep Britain within the bounds of international law, but also with significant implications for those with parents born abroad who potentially might have a legal claim to citizenship of another country—as this could make them second-class citizens in Britain. Under the safeguards, the Home Secretary

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(a) shall not deprive a person of British citizenship under this section unless he is satisfied that it is not conducive to the public good that that person should continue to be a British citizen; and (b) shall not deprive a person of British citizenship… if it appears to him that that person would thereupon become stateless.57

Both of these provisions—concerning the right to citizenship of those born on British soil and the powers of the Home Secretary to deprive persons of British citizenship in certain ‘exceptional’ circumstances—were conceived in very different times, when the Cold War was still on, but nonetheless have been used more recently to deny or revoke the citizenship of persons who in effect are ‘home-grown terrorists’, radicalised while living or growing up in Britain and going on to commit acts of violence at home or abroad. Under provision 1, a non-citizen is an alien, and loses various protections and rights under British law. These rights might be further restricted in the event of a national emergency. Some citizens are more vulnerable than others to facing such jeopardy, even if the offence that they are suspected of having committed, or of preparing to commit, is the same. Under provision 2, a person who may not be rendered de jure stateless if deprived of British citizenship might nonetheless find themselves de facto stateless if the country of their or their parents’ birth does not recognise any legal obligation towards them. Alien status and statelessness are problematic in the sense that they both make individuals more vulnerable to a number of abuses that existed in the twentieth century and continue to affect people all over the world to this day: deportation; internment without trial; trial and imprisonment abroad without adequate legal safeguards such as consular visits and diplomatic representation; finding oneself trapped in refugee camps or immigration detention centres for an indefinite period of time; and/or falling victim to trafficking gangs and modern-day slave traders. * * * What links all of these developments with the historical experience and legacy of the First World War? Annette Becker is quite right to argue that although the years 1914–20 saw the rise of the ‘camp phenomenon’, it was still too early to talk of a ‘concentration camp system’.58 This finding is most relevant when our sights are set on uncovering the origins of the Nazi and Stalin-era Soviet terror systems, and above all, the Holocaust.

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The creation of camps whose sole purpose was the industrialised mass killing of Jews thus distinguishes the second half of the year 1941 and the beginning of 1942 as the critical ‘vanishing point’ in modern German and modern European history.59 It was in the 1940s, as Jan Kott notes in his introduction to the English translation of Tadeusz Borowski’s essay collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, that the existential limit of the camp phenomenon and its potential to shape human destiny was revealed to those who experienced it. In this new universe, ‘Auschwitz is no exception but the rule’ and the only authentic accounts are those (that cannot be) given by the millions worked to death in slave labour gangs, wiped out through deliberate exposure to hunger, vermin and disease, or systematically murdered in the gas chambers.60 When it comes to explaining the historical origins of present-day developments in the twenty-first century, however, the emergence of civilian camps on all sides and on all continents during the First World War era reveals itself as an important turning point in its own right, rather than as a mere prelude to what came later, and uniquely to Europe, in the 1930s and 1940s. In this sense, the rise of the civilian internment phenomenon has to be seen as an integral part of what Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the ‘process of barbarisation that has gathered strength in the world since the First World War’.61 Hobsbawm’s observation is particularly apt in the sense that those nation-states and empires that developed the most sophisticated and inter-connected networks of camps during the 1914–20 period were the victorious liberal states whose world view separated humankind into two starkly separate entities: those who would uphold the rule of law and civilised values, and those, friend or foe, who belonged, supposedly, to a different realm, beyond civilisation. Britain in particular played the leading role in turning internment into a worldwide phenomenon, using its command of the seas to coordinate a globally effective strategy from Whitehall and take charge of anti-German measures not only in its own empire, but in several otherwise independent European and non-­European countries. This is not to suggest the absence of counter-veiling forces, which must be acknowledged as being present in the very same liberal states whose laws and political institutions had allowed wartime internment in the first place. As this book has shown, the camp phenomenon brought forth a range of humanitarian responses and new schemes for international and transnational cooperation which were a significant advance, politically as well as in terms of geographical reach and significance, on earlier

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interventions made during the Boer War. Neutral countries, especially Switzerland and the Netherlands, played their part in mitigating the worst consequences of internment—and in imagining what the camp phenomenon was and could be. Britain’s good record with the ICRC was not faked, but the result of conscientious efforts by a variety of governmental and non-­governmental actors at local, national and international level, as well as hard scientific evidence on matters of diet and opportunities for mental and physical exercise collected by Red Cross and other neutral inspectors.62 Imperial Germany’s bad record with the same was largely deserved, especially in the final year of the war. The study published by Wilhelm Doegen in 1919 on behalf of the (formerly Prussian, now Reich) Ministry of War in Berlin, was, as Heather Jones rightly notes, a ‘whitewash defence of Germany’s prison camp system’ which hid a lot more than it revealed, including, as this study has shown for the first time, in relation to treatment of civilians.63 In Austria-Hungary, conditions in confinement could be as bad as in internment, while the worst abuses were reserved for Serb and Italian deportees whose pleas for help went ignored or at least unaddressed. Certainly the Dual Monarchy’s behaviour towards enemy civilians and internal enemies does not merit the label ‘lenient’: many of its abuses remained hidden from the ICRC and neutral countries, and were further concealed beneath the wave of ‘Habsburg nostalgia’ that emerged later on in twentieth-century Europe.64 Bolshevik Russia’s refusal to work with the ICRC at all, and the de facto enforced withdrawal of the Danish and Swedish Red Cross from areas of the former Tsarist empire under its control in 1919, must stand as a terrible indictment of its utter disregard for human rights and international conventions, and a warning of far worse to come. Even so, republican France’s decision not to honour its April 1918 Bern agreement with Germany after the latter surrendered in November 1918; Imperial Britain’s expulsion measures in 1919 which inspired imitation from Brazil, China, Portugal, South Africa and others; the all-round denial of racial equality, self-determination to colonised peoples and a voice to international women activists at the Paris peace talks; and the anti-communist ‘Red Scare’ in the United States and Canada in 1919 also did their part to undermine what had been partially achieved in terms of the creation of a new ‘ethics of reciprocity’ and respect for international law during the 1914–18 period itself.65 Finally, leaving these political and ethical dimensions to one side, an imperative for future research on First World War internment is to explore its entanglement—again at local, regional and global as well as

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national level—with a range of other forms of violence against civilians and non-­combatants, including the sick and the wounded, ‘internal enemies’ and enemy aliens, and men, women and children, undertaken during the course of military and paramilitary operations. Such an agenda would need to avoid normative assumptions about the ‘mutual exclusivity of violence and nonviolence’ in order to explore instances where structural or institutional violence was reproduced ‘even under the banner of nonviolence’.66 It would also need to examine a range of actions, from genocide (in the case of Ottoman Turkey); to non-deliberate starvation of prisoners and internees (in the case of Habsburg Austria); to hostage-taking, deportations and forced labour among occupied and ‘suspect’ border populations (with many instances in Europe and further afield); to revision of citizenship laws to denaturalise former citizens, or conversely, to pressure aliens into accepting citizenship; to enhancement and extension of secret surveillance methods, including use of POW and internee correspondence for such purposes (Habsburg Austria was probably not alone in this); and last but not least, to new ways of imagining and experimenting with internment as a means of solving a variety of social problems, not least destitution among migrant workers from poorer countries and ‘work-­ shy’/ ‘criminal’ elements within the indigenous population. As all of these examples suggest, internment and other forms of First World War violence against non-combatants were so deeply connected that in future it might make more analytic sense to look at them together rather than reduce the question of state- or military-led targeting of civilians to one of these dimensions only. But for this to happen, we must first move, as this study has done, beyond the largely nation-state-oriented framework in which many previous studies of First World War and twentieth-century internment have been framed. Only then will we better understand the local, imperial, transcontinental and global dimensions of the camp phenomenon, and its relevance to understanding the ever-changing world we live in today.

Notes 1. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 5. 2. A full list of all these writings is not possible here, but would have to begin with Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution and include, among others, Bayley’s book mentioned above as well as Conrad’s Globalgeschichte, Reid’s Medicine in First World War Europe, Rupp’s Worlds of Women and Tooze’s The Deluge.

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3. See, for instance, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, ‘1914—Vom Versagen und Nutzen der Diplomatie’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 January 2014, who writes: ‘Der Kriegsausbruch 1914 beendete die erste Globalisierung’ (‘the outbreak of war in 1914 ended the first [wave of] globalisation’). On-line version available at https://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Namensbeitrag/2014/01/2014-01-25steinmeier-faz.html 4. See, for example, Gatrell and Zhvanko (eds.), Europe on the Move; Huber, Fremdsein im Krieg; Schrover, ‘Migration and Mobility’. 5. Important exceptions include  Haupt and Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond’; Leonhard, ‘Comparison, Transfer and Entanglement’. 6. See, among others, Daniel Marc Segesser, Der Erste Weltkrieg in globaler Perspektive (Wiesbaden, 2010). Also Anja Huber, ‘Migration im Krieg: Ausländerinnen und Ausländer in der Schweiz—Schweizerinnen und Schweizer im Ausland 1914–1918’, D.Phil dissertation, University of Bern, 2017. 7. In addition to works cited in chapter 2, see Egor Lykov, ‘Opfernarrative der “russophilen” Ruthenen und ihr nachhaltiger Einfluss auf gesellschaftspolitische Diskurse’, Studi Slavistici, 15.2 (2018), pp. 105–24. 8. ‘Résolutions et voeux votés par la XIIe Conférence internationale de la Crox-Rouge, Genève, 7–10 octobre 1925’, Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 82 (October 1925), pp. 814–31 (here p. 824). The issue was not raised at the thirteenth conference at The Hague in October 1928 or the fourteenth conference in Brussels in October 1930. See ‘Résolutions et voeux adoptés par la XIIIe Conférence internationale de la CroixRouge’, Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 119 (November 1928), pp. 1015–30; ‘Résolutions et voeux adoptés par la XIVe Conférence internationale de la Croix-Rouge’, Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 142 (October 1930), pp. 837–69 (here esp. pp. 861–2). 9. See http://wilpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/WILPF_triennial_ congress_1919.pdf 10. See Alan Kramer, ‘Kriegsrecht und Kriegsverbrechen’, in Hirschfeld, Krumeich and Renz (eds.), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, pp.  282–91 (here p. 290). Also Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–45 (Manchester, 2011), pp. 28–35. 11. See ‘Protection des populations civiles contre la guerre chimique; IIe réunion de la Commission internationale des experts (Rome 1929)’, Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 121 (January 1929), pp. 21–8. 12. ‘Congrès international de Francfort contre l’emploi des gaz asphyxiants’, in ibid., pp. 28–9. Between 1925 and 1930 virtually none of the monthly editions of the Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge appeared without

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containing a lengthy discussion of ‘la protection des populations civiles contre la guerre chimique’. 13. Wylie, ‘The 1929 Prisoner of War Convention’, pp. 102–3. 14. Georges Werner, ‘Rapport présenté à la Conférence diplomatique de la IIme Commission, chargées de l’élaboration du code des prisonniers de guerre’, Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 127 (July 1929), pp. 523–41 (here pp. 529–30). 15. See, for instance, K. de Drachenfels, ‘Le Comité International et le problème des “Heimatlosen”’, Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 95 (November 1926) pp.  870–7; ‘Comité consultative pour les réfugiés’, Revue internationale de la Croix-Rouge, no. 105 (September 1927), pp. 636–40. 16. Jochen Thies, Evian 1938: Als die Welt die Juden verriet (Essen, 2017). 17. Pope John Paul II, speech in 2003, cited in Paweł Machcewicz, Der umkämpfte Krieg: Das Museum des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Danzig, Entstehung und Streit, trans. from the Polish by Peter Oliver Loew (Wiesbaden, 2018) [2017], p. 164. 18. Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (London, 2016), pp. 178–9. 19. Ibid., p. 377. 20. Ibid., pp.  143–4. See also Steven L.  Jacobs, ‘Raphael Lemkin and the Armenian Genocide’, in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003), pp. 125–35; Diane F. Orentlicher, ‘Genocide’, in Roy Gutman, David Rieff and Anthony Dworkin (eds.), Crimes of War, 2nd ed. (New York and London, 2007) [1999], pp.  191–5; Dominik J.  Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Introduction’, in Dominik J.  Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer (eds.), The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence (London, 2009), pp. 1–8. 21. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951); Carl J.  Friedrich and Zbigniew K.  Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA, 1956). 22. See, for example, George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (London, 1978); Tim Mason, ‘Open Questions on Nazism’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981), pp. 205–10 (here esp. pp. 207–8); Gisela Bock, ‘Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany’, in Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann and Marion Kaplan (eds.), When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984), pp.  271–96; Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, 1989).

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23. See, for instance, Zygmont Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1989); and idem., ‘Das Jahrhundert der Lager?’, in Daban and Platt (eds.), Genozid und Moderne. Band 1, pp. 81–99. Also Detlev J.  K. Peukert, ‘Die Genesis der “Endlösung” aus dem Geist der Wissenschaft’, in Peukert, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne (Göttingen, 1989), pp. 102–21. For a critical examination of both the ‘biopolitical’ and ‘modernity’ paradigms, see Edward Ross Dickinson, ‘Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on our Discourse About “Modernity”’, Central European History, 37.1 (2004), pp. 1–48. 24. Josep. L. Barona, The Problem of Nutrition: Experimental Science, Public Health and Economy in Europe, 1914–1945 (Brussels, 2010), pp. 125–37. 25. See, for instance, Verband der Heimkehrer (ed.), Extreme Lebensverhältnisse und ihre Folgen: Berichte über die Ärztekongresse für Pathologie, Therapie und Begutachtung der Heimkehrerkrankheiten (Cologne, 1959), here in particular the address given by Dr Gauger at a conference in Bonn in October 1953 under the title ‘Die Dystrophie als Gesamterkrankung’, pp. 12–21. The one attempt to revive the notion of ‘barbed-wire disease’, stemming from Vischer’s Basel colleague Hans Christoffel, proves the point, as Christoffel tried and failed to get a five-page manuscript on this subject published in the Basler Nachrichten in 1944. The manuscript survives in Christoffel’s papers, but never saw the light of day. See here Willi Kaiser, Leben und Werk des Basler Psychiaters und Psychoanalytikers Hans Christoffel (1888–1959) (Zurich, 1982), pp. 57–8 and 230. 26. See also Frank Biess, ‘Men of Reconstruction—the Reconstruction of Men: Returning POWs in East and West Germany, 1945–1955’, in Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford, 2002), pp. 335–58 (here p. 338). 27. Dr. H.  Kilian, ‘Die seelische und soziale Situation des Heimkehrers’, in Verband der Heimkehrer (ed.), Extreme Lebensverhältnisse, pp.  274–88 (here pp. 275–7). 28. Biess, ‘Men of Reconstruction’, pp. 338–9. 29. James M. Diehl, The Thanks of the Fatherland: German Veterans after the Second World War (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1993), p. 70. 30. For recent attempts to correct the historical record in this respect, see, for example, Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese: A Patchwork of Internment (London, 2004); Charmian Brinson, ‘“Loyal to the Reich”: National Socialists and others in the Rushen Women’s Internment Camp’, in Richard Dove (ed.), ‘Totally Un-English’? Britain’s Internment of ‘Enemy Aliens’ in Two World Wars (Amsterdam and New  York, 2005), pp.  101–19; Christina Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two (Cambridge,

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2007); Precious Yamaguchi, Experiences of Japanese American Women during and after World War II: Living in Internment Camps and Building Life Afterwards (Lanham, MD, 2014); and various entries in Jonathan F. Vance (ed.), Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, 2nd ed. (New York, 2006). 31. Kilian, ‘Die seelische und soziale Situation des Heimkehrers’, p. 288. See also Barona, The Problem of Nutrition, p. 130. 32. Prof. Dr. Kirchhoff, ‘Körperliche und seelische Störungen bei der Frau durch spezielle Schäden der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit’, in Verband der Heimkehrer (ed.), Extreme Lebensverhältnisse, pp. 46–63 (here pp. 46–7). 33. H.M.S.O., Final Act of the Conference, Geneva, 21st April to 12th August 1949, with Resolutions, Conventions and Annexes (London, 1950). 34. See Miriam Bradley, Protecting Civilians in War: The ICRC, UNHCR, and their Limitations in Internal Armed Conflicts (Oxford, 2016), pp. 70–1. 35. ICRC, Basic Rules of the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols (Geneva, n.d.), p. 50. 36. Horne, ‘Introduction: Wartime Imprisonment in the Twentieth Century’, p. 23. 37. Jonathan F. Vance, ‘India-Pakistan Wars’, in Vance (ed.), Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, pp. 192–3 (here p. 193). 38. Gideon Levy, ‘Due Process’, in Gutman, Rieff and Dworkin (eds.), Crimes of War, pp. 167–70 (here p. 169). 39. ICRC, Basic Rules of the Geneva Conventions, p.  47. For an up-to-date investigation of the difficulties of enforcement, including in the case of Myanmar’s recent violent onslaught on the Rohingya Muslims, see Bradley, Protecting Civilians, esp. pp. 48–9, 147–8 and 161–2. Further examples can also be found in Vance (ed.), Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, including, among others, entries on the ‘Biafran War’, pp.  39–41; the ‘Chechen Wars’, pp.  70–1; the ‘Guatemalan Civil War’, pp. 164–5; the ‘Mozambican Civil War’, pp. 270–2; the ‘Rwandan Civil War’, pp.  347–50; the ‘Uganda-Tanzania War’, pp.  415–16; and the ‘Vietnam War’, pp. 421–3. 40. Horne, ‘Introduction: Wartime Imprisonment in the Twentieth Century’, p. 17. 41. Florence Hartmann, ‘Bosnia’, in Gutman, Rieff and Dworkin (eds.), Crimes of War, pp. 66–72 (here p. 69). 42. All the above quotes taken from http://www.icty.org/en/features/ crimes-sexual-violence 43. ‘Unlawful combatants who seek to destroy our country and our way of life’ was the phrase used by George W. Bush in early 2002 to describe the ‘nonUS citizens’ now assigned by the Department of Justice, acting on his

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executive order, to Guantánamo, without first having entered US soil and thus the jurisdiction of US courts—see Ronald Dworkin, ‘The threat to patriotism’, New York Review of Books, 28 February 2002, on-line version available at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/02/28/thethreat-to-patriotism/ 44. Andrew Young, ‘Guantánamo Bay Detention Center’, in Vance (ed.), Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, pp. 162–4; Jess Bravin, ‘Guantanamo’, in Gutman, Rieff and Dworkin (eds.), Crimes of War, pp. 198–204. The figure of ‘nearly 800’ comes from Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law (London, 2010), p. 146, who also points out that ‘[t]he number of people rounded up and detained in Afghanistan, Iraq and other unidentified “black sites” around the world is not known’—although it is likely to be many times higher. 45. Jonathan Hafetz, ‘Introduction’, in Hafetz (ed.), Obama’s Guantánamo: Stories from an Enduring Prison (New York, 2016), pp.  1–9 (figures on p. 1). 46. See ‘U.S. Transfers First Guantánamo Detainee under Trump, Who Vowed to fill it’, New York Times, 2 May 2018, on-line version available at https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/us/politics/guantanamo-detaineetransferred-trump-al-darbi.html 47. Gabor Rona (legal adviser at the ICRC’s law division), ‘“War” doesn’t justify Guántanamo’, originally published in the Financial Times, 1 March 2004, reproduced on the ICRC’s official website at https://www.icrc. org/en/doc/resources/documents/article/other/5wvfb4.htm. See also the verdict offered by Bingham, The Rule of Law, p. 127. 48. See ‘China’s Muslim Detention Camps’, The Guardian, 14 January 2019, reproduced as podcast at https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/ 2019/jan/14/china-muslim-uighur-detention-camps-podcast. For more detailed background and context on China’s persecution of the Uighur minority, see Nick Holdstock, China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State (London, 2015). 49. See Murithi Mutiga, ‘Kenya urged to rethink camp closure plan that would lead to “mass death sentences”’, The Guardian, 13 May 2016, on-­line version available at https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/ 2016/may/13/refugees-urge-kenyan-leaders-to-rethink-closure-of-dadaabcamp. Also Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp (London, 2016). 50. James Kirkup and Robert Winnett, ‘Theresa May interview: “We’re going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception”’, Daily Telegraph, 26 May 2012, on-line version available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/immigration/9291483/Theresa-May-interview-Were-going-togive-illegal-migrants-a-really-hostile-reception.html

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51. House of Commons, Home Affairs Committee, ‘Immigration Detention: Fourteenth Report of Session 2017–19’, at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmhaff/913/913.pdf, published 21 March 2019, p. 12. 52. Ibid., pp. 13–14. 53. Helena Kennedy, Eve was Shamed: How British Justice is Failing Women (London, 2018), pp. 218–23. 54. Brianna Rennix and Nathan Robinson, ‘It’s not migrant conditions that are wrong—it’s detention itself’, The Guardian, 4 July 2019, on-line version available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/ jul/03/migrant-dentention-centres-us-border-patrol 55. Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, esp. pp.  35–8, 88 and 93–4. 56. Michael Cunningham, British Government Policy in Northern Ireland, 1969–2000 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 9–10 and 20–22. 57. The above quotes are taken from the British Nationality Act, 1981, available at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/61/pdfs/ ukpga_19810061_en.pdf. On this act, see also Bosworth, Inside Immigration Detention, pp. 31–2. 58. Becker, ‘Captive Civilians’, p. 281. 59. Helmut Walser Smith, ‘The Vanishing Point of German History: An Essay on Perspective’, History and Memory, 17 (2005), pp. 269–95. 60. Jan Kott, introduction to Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. by Michael Kandel, Penguin Classics edition (London, 1976) [1959], pp. 11–26 (here p. 25). 61. Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, p. 125. 62. This is also the conclusion reached by Panayi, Prisoners of Britain, p. 26. 63. Jones, Violence, p. 307. Cf. Doegen, Kriegsgefangene Völker. 64. The notion of an ‘especially lenient’ Austro-Hungarian policy was first put forward by Garner, ‘Treatment of Enemy Aliens’, p. 52. 65. Cabanes, The Great War, p. 311. 66. Peyman Vahabzadeh, Violence and Nonviolence: Conceptual Excursions into Phantom Opposites (Toronto, ON, 2019), pp. 3 and 6.

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Unpublished Dissertations Denness, Zoë, ‘“A Question which affects our Prestige as a Nation”: The History of British Civilian Internment, 1899–1945’, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2012. Egger, Matthias, ‘Gekämpft, gefangen und vergessen? Die k.u.k. Regierung und die österreichisch-ungarischen Kriegsgefangenen in Russland 1914–1918’, D. Phil. dissertation, University of Salzburg, 2018. Farrar, Martin John, ‘The Illusory Threat: Enemy Aliens in Britain during the Great War’, Ph.D. dissertation, King’s College London, 2016. Haller, Oswald, ‘Das Internierungslager Katzenau bei Linz: Die Internierung und Konfinierung der italienischsprachigen Zivilbevölkerung des Trentinos zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges’, Dipl. Arb., University of Vienna, 1999.

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Heizmann, Kristina, ‘Fremd in der Fremde: Die Geschichte des Flüchtlings in Großbritannien und Deutschland, 1880–1925’, D.Phil. dissertation, University of Konstanz, 2012. Huber, Anja, ‘Migration im Krieg: Ausländerinnen und Ausländer in der Schweiz – Schweizerinnen und Schweizer im Ausland 1914–1918’, D.Phil. dissertation, University of Bern, 2017. Mentzel, Walter, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithanien im Ersten Weltkrieg’, D.Phil dissertation, University of Vienna, 1997. Mundschütz, Reinhard, ‘Internierung im Waldviertel: Die Internierungslager und –stationen der BH Waidhofen an der Thaya, 1914–1918’, D.Phil. dissertation, University of Vienna, 2002. Papaioannou, Stefan Sotiris, ‘Balkan Wars between the Lines: Violence and Civilians in Macedonia, 1912–1918’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 2012. Stampler, Katharina, ‘Flüchtlingswesen in der Steiermark, 1914–1918’, Magisterarbeit, University of Graz, 2004.

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Index1

A Ador, Gustave, 198, 218, 294 Algeria, 2, 44, 58, 68n74, 83, 85, 136, 147, 149 Aliens Act 1905, UK, 90, 92, 304 Aliens Restriction Act (ARA) 1914, UK, 33, 91–93, 304 Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act (AR(R)A) 1919, UK, 261–263 Angola, 40–42 Argentina, 36, 65n32, 80, 273, 274 Armenian genocide, 1915–16, 56, 112, 115, 116, 130, 295 Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland, Germany, 15, 189–195 Australia, 36, 45, 50, 93, 94, 99, 242, 260, 263, 264, 276 Austria(-Hungary), 32, 41, 46–56, 77, 79, 83, 85–87, 102–112,

133, 137, 140, 165, 202, 205, 240, 241, 243, 244, 251–259, 307 Auswärtiges Amt – German Foreign Office (AA), 45, 47, 55, 101, 132, 133, 135–138, 144, 151, 152, 167, 168, 193, 213, 264, 274, 282n72 Azores, 2, 40, 42, 267 B Balkans, 2, 11, 56–62, 76n173, 185 Balkan wars, 1912–13, 27n55, 56, 60, 185, 215, 217, 278 Barbed-wire disease, 15, 186, 210–227, 252, 292, 297, 298, 311n25 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 113, 131, 132, 135, 151, 152, 167

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Boer war, 1899–1902, 10, 94, 188, 296, 307 Bolsheviks, 21, 116, 241–243, 245–247, 250, 251, 277 Brazil, 2, 21, 33, 36, 38–40, 43, 273–275, 278, 307 Bulgaria, 16, 56–62, 74n148, 80, 109, 244 Bureau international féministe de renseignements en faveur des victimes de la guerre, Lausanne, 184, 193, 196 C Cameroon, 80, 96, 149, 151, 152, 200 Canada, 1, 21, 36, 46, 50, 57, 58, 87, 96, 97, 99, 141–144, 147, 155, 161, 166, 243, 260, 263, 276–278, 307 Chile, 36, 65n32, 80, 273, 274 China, 2, 6, 21, 36, 48, 264, 265, 273, 307 Cohen-Portheim, Paul, 95, 224 Corsica, 2, 35, 42, 83, 85, 88, 268, 269 Cuba, 10, 12, 250, 273, 300 D Dahomey, 1, 44, 147, 149 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) 1914, UK, 91, 93, 103, 159 Douglas camp, Isle of Man, 216 E Egypt, 46, 69n86, 69n87, 203, 242, 260, 262, 264, 266, 278

F Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), USA, 274 Ferrière, Frédéric, 97, 100, 198–200, 217, 294 Forced labour, 18, 31, 44, 77, 87, 96, 101, 110, 142–144, 151, 162, 163, 201, 247, 253, 268, 308 Forced migration, 33, 86 Fort Douglas camp, Utah, 36 Fort Napier camp, Pietermaritzburg, 35 Fort Oglethorpe camp, Georgia, 36, 37, 65n33, 159–161, 275 France, 1–3, 8, 9, 11, 17, 18, 35, 37, 39, 42–45, 48, 56–58, 77, 79–90, 92–94, 96, 98–100, 102, 103, 105, 110–112, 131, 133, 137, 138, 143, 147, 149–152, 157, 158, 162, 164, 165, 169–171, 185, 190, 191, 195, 196, 198, 205, 208, 212, 240, 242, 243, 252–254, 260, 266, 268–273, 275, 307 Freud, Sigmund, 224 Friends Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress (FEC, UK), 15, 94, 189, 190, 193–195, 216, 220, 227 G Geneva conventions (1864, 1906, 1929, 1949), 60, 138, 195, 197, 201, 204, 206, 259, 295, 298–302 German East Africa, 41, 49, 97, 150, 264 German Samoan Islands, 46 German South West Africa, 40, 188, 262

 INDEX 

Germany, 2, 11, 12, 21, 33, 34, 36, 39–43, 46–48, 50–55, 77, 79–81, 83–87, 90, 91, 98–103, 105, 133, 135, 138–144, 146, 148–151, 154, 158, 161, 163, 167, 169, 170, 185, 188–191, 193–196, 198–200, 202, 206, 213, 215, 226, 240, 241, 243, 251–267, 269, 272–274, 307 Gibraltar, 46, 264 Goa, 42, 267 Greece, 2, 36, 44, 45, 57, 80 H Habsburg empire, see Austria (-Hungary) Hague conventions (1899 and 1907), 10, 11, 137, 195–197, 199, 294, 295, 300 Haiti, 37, 66n36, 273, 274 Havelberg camp, Germany, 52, 162, 258 Hindenburg, Paul von, 145 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 222–224, 227 Hobhouse, Emily, 186–189, 229n23, 294 Hobhouse, Stephen, 119n67, 190, 192 Holzminden camp, Germany, 47, 139, 149, 190 Hungary, 47, 108, 109, 256, 264, 270, 271 I India, 1, 6, 10, 37, 40, 42, 46, 48, 50, 58, 70n88, 93, 94, 97, 154, 185, 203, 214, 260, 262, 264–266 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, Geneva), 14, 19, 20, 33, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61,

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63n10, 69n76, 74n151, 82, 97, 100, 102, 109–111, 135–138, 141, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 154, 184, 189, 191, 192, 195–204, 208, 211, 215, 217, 218, 226, 240–242, 244, 245, 258, 259, 268–270, 294, 295, 298, 299, 301, 302, 307 Internationales Hilfskomitee für Zivilgefangene, Zurich, 194, 196, 254 Italy, 2, 34, 36, 48, 84, 99, 104, 106, 109–111, 171, 203, 240, 254, 266, 268–273 J Japan, 47, 79, 81, 242, 265, 273 Jews/Jewish prisoners, 36, 54, 58, 90, 93, 112, 116, 165, 255–258, 306 K Katzenau camp, Austria, 29n75, 48, 106–107, 110, 253–255, 282n66 Knockaloe camp, Isle of Man, 35, 57, 94–96, 107, 155, 193, 213, 224, 260 L Lofthouse Park camp, Wakefield, UK, 35, 95, 194, 214, 224 Ludendorff, Erich, 144, 204 M Malta, 2, 46, 50, 57, 58, 264 Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB, UK), 90 MI5 (The security service, UK), 90–92, 275

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INDEX

Morocco, 1, 44, 68n74, 86, 136, 147, 149, 185 Mozambique, 40–43, 267 N Naville, Édouard, 97, 198, 201, 294 Netherlands, 1, 20, 40, 100, 131, 135, 186, 190, 191, 194, 198, 204–210, 241, 252, 254, 307 New Zealand, 2, 36, 46, 50, 58, 93, 97, 99, 243, 260, 262, 263, 276 O Ottoman empire, 56, 93, 112, 130, 244, 262 P Palestine, 46, 203, 260, 262 Panama, 2, 36, 37, 160, 273, 274 Paris Peace Conference, 1919–20, 267, 271 Philippines, 10, 26n50, 36, 160, 274 Poland, 36, 55, 65n28, 73n137, 154, 255–257, 259, 269, 273 Polish-Soviet war, 1920–21, 20 Polish-Ukrainian war, 1918–19, 20 Portugal, 2, 14, 16, 36, 40–43, 67n57, 79, 80, 99, 266, 267, 273, 275, 307 Prostitutes/prostitution, 12, 17, 32, 108, 139, 158–160, 247 R Refugees, 7, 15, 21, 33, 58, 106–108, 110, 112, 170, 190, 208, 245, 246, 254–257, 271, 278, 293, 296, 302, 305

Romania, 16, 36, 48, 54, 61, 79, 80, 99, 268–273 Rotten, Elisabeth, 150, 168, 189–196, 198, 224, 227, 254 Ruhleben camp, Germany, 100, 138, 164, 194 Russia, 2, 6, 20, 21, 32, 33, 36, 54, 55, 79, 80, 110, 111, 116, 152, 154, 163, 185, 189, 199, 219, 241–251, 257, 259 Russian civil war, 1918–20, 20, 249, 259 Russo-Japanese war, 1904–05, 9 S Serbia, 18, 34, 57, 59, 61, 79, 80, 104, 105, 109, 111, 117n9, 146, 149, 208, 217, 240, 273, 300 Siam (Thailand), 2, 36, 37, 260 South Africa, 10, 12, 26n50, 28n66, 35, 43, 46, 50, 58, 65n26, 94, 99, 185–188, 243, 250, 260, 263, 307 Spain, 10, 41, 67n56, 84, 200, 267 Spanish-American war, 1898, 10 Switzerland, 1, 14, 20, 40, 59, 84, 98, 100, 110, 168, 170, 186, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198, 204–210, 214, 225–227, 241, 242, 251, 254, 255, 307 T Tahiti, 1, 2, 44 Thalerhof camp, Austria, 34, 270 Togo, 44, 80, 96, 149, 151, 152 Trieste, 50, 51, 53, 107, 108, 110, 111, 171, 271, 272, 292

 INDEX 

U United Kingdom (UK), 10, 13, 37, 58, 79, 90, 96, 154, 155, 159, 169, 216, 261, 262, 304 United States of America (USA), 2, 6, 8, 10, 14, 21, 36–38, 51, 53, 56, 59, 77, 79, 82, 85, 97, 130, 133, 140–142, 147, 155, 159–161, 166, 169, 185, 188, 195, 213, 218, 219, 241–243, 265, 271, 273–275, 277, 278, 299–301, 303, 307

V Vischer, Adolf Lukas, 15, 20, 60, 61, 186, 210, 215–221, 225, 226, 292, 294, 297, 311n25 W Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF, Geneva), 197, 199, 202, 294

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