Turning Liabilities into Assets: British Government Policy towards German and Italian Prisoners of War during the Second World War

Abstract

By the end of the second world war, the British armed forces, in concert with their various allies, had captured or accepted the surrender of several million enemy service personnel. In the European and North African theatres of operation, the British alone had had to take responsibility for hundreds of thousands of Italian and German prisoners of war as victories were won and the Axis powers driven backwards. In theory, the treatment of prisoners had been codified by the 1929 Geneva Convention, a document signed by all the western European belligerents, albeit with some important qualifications. But as all the powers were to discover, this international treaty left many matters open to interpretation. While the British military authorities and their civilian masters in London were aware that they would have to meet the terms of this, as yet untried treaty, it does not seem that they were fully prepared for the scale of the problems which developed in the wake of the Allied victories. The primary purpose of this article is to survey the development of British policy on the imprisonment and subsequent use of Italian and later German prisoners of war in the United Kingdom and to highlight the main problems encountered in meeting the requirements of the Geneva Convention, military necessity and the demands of the home front. While prisoner memoirs and autobiographies abound, analytical studies of their history are something of a rarity. Perhaps because prisoner of war history is inherently about the losers rather than the winners in the major conflicts of the twentieth century, it falls uneasily between different branches of the discipline. The subject has been given little attention by writers of military history, and the social historians of the second world war have tended to concentrate on the day-to-day experiences and the relationships between captors and their charges rather than wider governmental policy issues.1 This is certainly true for the history of prisoners captured and imprisoned by the British forces in the European and North African theatres. Only a very few publications deal with the subject in any depth, most notably the two volumes