The issue of prisoners of war (POWs) virtually became a blind spot after 1945, despite having been one of the key elements of humanitarian action during the First and Second World Wars of the twentieth century – especially that carried out by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of the belligerent or neutral countries.[1]See our article “Prisoners of war: high-intensity warfare’s blind spot?” in our review focus entitled “International humanitarian law: the great step… backwards?”, Humanitarian … Continue reading Admittedly, armed conflict has never gone away since then. In the seven decades that followed 1945, it has mostly taken the form of intrastate hostilities, with the notable exception of the Israeli-Arab, Iran-Iraq and Ethiopia-Eritrea wars.
Yet even in guerilla warfare, anti-colonial liberation struggles and armed insurrections, fighters have always been captured. But their fate has been pushed into the background. There are three main reasons for this. First, civilian protection has become the main focus of humanitarian programmes in war situations. Second, there has been limited public interest in the issue, either because the families of the captives had little freedom of expression or this was confined to the prisoners’ country of origin or, on the contrary, they could not get themselves heard in the country concerned. Third, captives have often been denied the protection status provided for by international humanitarian law for captured fighters.
Nevertheless, since 2022 – with the Russia-Ukraine war, which has now lasted longer than the First World War and the rise in high-intensity interstate conflicts – the POW cause has been expected to become, yet again, a top priority for humanitarian organisations in the near future. Their imprisonment should be high on their agenda, but so should the ever-complex and exploited issue of their release, as well as their repatriation once hostilities have been brought to an end.
Pioneering work
This is another reason why historical precedents are of interest, starting with how the issue of POWs – which affected millions of people in the years 1918-1922 – has been broached. In this regard, the pioneering work of Japanese historian Hazuki Tate, which the publishing house Presses universitaires de Rennes has just published, has already become an essential reference work. At first, the author’s nationality may surprise our readers, but that would mean underestimating the quality of social science research in Japanese universities, which are too often known solely for their success in hard sciences. Also, people often do not know that the Empire of the Rising Sun took part in the First World War on the side of the allies.[2]This enabled Japan to occupy archipelagoes in the German colonial empire in the Pacific, including the Mariana Islands, and to set up there, in the inter-war period, naval air stations, which were … Continue reading
Moreover, the book is original in that it is based on a thesis submitted as part of a French- Japanese partnership between the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris and Keio University in Tokyo and that the author wrote it in French, for which she deserves our praise.
The book, which includes eight chapters, first tackles the mass captivity of soldiers fighting for belligerent forces during the conflict, with several useful reminders. For example, we learn that the overwhelming majority of prisoners – except officers and soldiers unfit for work – contributed to war economies on either side of the front lines. In France, 400,000 German POWs were working in the country when the Armistice was signed on 11 November. In Germany, 95% of prisoners were required to work (p.36). For a sizeable number of them, this was tantamount to forced labour even though it meant an improvement in their daily life (compared with permanent internment in detention camps and subsequent inactivity). In other words, it was an additional burden imposed on the internees.
Indeed, in France and in United Kingdom, what is left of the collective memory on this topic only concerns POWs of the western theatre of operations. For instance, the man who was to become General de Gaulle, a captain at the time, made five attempts to escape (in vain) after he was captured at Verdun in 1916. Jean Renoir’s 1937 cult film, La Grande Illusion, is another example. But fighting on the eastern front led to many more being captured. When the Brest-Litovsk treaty was signed in March 1918 between Bolschevik Russia, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1.5 million Russian soldiers were being held in Germany and another 1.3 million on its ally’s territory, while Russia held more than two million Austro-Hungarians, close to 250,000 Germans and 50,000 Turks (p.49).
The historian then looks at the first months that followed the Armistice and the differences that emerged between the former belligerents regarding the rules and delays for the release of POWs and their return home. On the one hand, the victorious Allied Powers demanded a swift return of their POWs. On the other hand, they continued to detain the POWs of the defeated, starting with German nationals. In France, Clemenceau long obstructed their repatriation for political, diplomatic and economic reasons.
The French approach was twofold: to use the prisoners as a means of exerting pressure on the German negotiators during the Versailles peace talks; and to use them as an initial form of war reparations. This led to their redeployment to the formerly occupied regions of northern and eastern France, in order to carry out the initial clearance and reconstruction work. This was by no means a foregone conclusion and provoked fierce criticism. Indeed, the Secretary of State, Robert Lansing – one of the principal US negotiators for the Treaty of Versailles – used terms such as “forced labour” and even “a new form of slavery” to denounce this practice. France eventually abandoned the practice once the peace treaty had been finalised.[3]The repatriation of German prisoners held in France only began in January 1920, so fourteen months after the Armistice.
As for the issue of Russian prisoners in Germany after the Bolschevik party took power in Russia, it gave rise to developments that are of the utmost interest. Tate presents several phases, notably linked to diverging options regarding repatriation – that may or may not have been compulsory – to the brand new Soviet Union of many Russian POWs who were reluctant to leave for the new state (pp. 59–60).
An issue caught between humanitarian and political considerations
Generally speaking, and at first, repatriation was closely monitored by the states, under the responsibility of the military, with the setting up of a subcommission within the Permanent Joint Armistice Commission headquartered in Spa, Belgium (p. 56). Humanitarian organisations, including the ICRC, played a very limited role at the time. As for Russian prisoners, their fate was no longer a matter for the military but for the political sphere. The status of those whose nationality changed when the First World War ended (because of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Tsarist and Ottoman empires) also became a political issue (independence of Poland and the Baltic states, birth of Czechoslovakia, etc.).
One of the features of the repatriation issue, which already existed during the First World War, became even more significant once hostilities ended: the conflict between a purely humanitarian approach to the problem and its exploitation by the political and military authorities. The author mentions on numerous occasions how the latter often prevailed over the former.
In the months that followed the 11 November Armistice, the ICRC and the Red Cross Movement did wonder whether to continue with their humanitarian work (p. 83–87). The ICRC, which had been boosted by the International Prisoners-of-War Agency (IPWA) having been set up as early as in the first weeks of the conflict and by the multiple missions of its delegates in the camps (often accompanied by material and health assistance), had an identity crisis. It sought a new positioning, especially as it faced the activism of the major national Red Cross societies, starting with the United States Red Cross, “whose relief efforts” during the First World War and “material scope [were] not comparable with the ICRC’s” (p.84). This led to the establishment, in May 1919, of the League of Red Cross Societies, which later became the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The ICRC’s desire to be involved in the repatriation of POWs resulted from a combination of the humanitarian and institutional systems, with the organisation’s future in mind. This desire led to the ICRC gradually playing a major role once again (chapters 4, 5 and 7).
Meanwhile, the issues took on an international dimension because of the particular situation of some groups of POWs, including German nationals, still being held in Siberia in early 1920 and whose health, food and housing conditions were disastrous, especially because of the civil war. Although nothing in its statutes provided for this, the League of Nations took advantage of the situation to enter the stage over time and become a vital player. A few months after its inception (in April 1920), Norwegian explorer and statesman Fridtjof Nansen was appointed High Commissioner for the Repatriation of Prisoners[4]Nansen later became the first High Commissioner for Refugees and created the famous “passport” named after him for stateless persons. (p. 215, 216).[5]The historian does not mention the case of some 5,000 German POWs imprisoned in Japan, where they were treated very well indeed (contrary to what happened to allied prisoners during the Second World … Continue reading
Returning home …
In this complicated and chaotic context, the author tackles – with a lot of subtlety – how, from 1921 onwards, the matter was gradually, albeit quite quickly, closed. The main reason for this was that, three years after the conflict ended, “the notion of prisoner of war became increasingly vague, not only in theory, but also in practice […]. Some of the states holding captives no longer called them “prisoners of war” but simply “former prisoners” or “inmates”. Some were even no longer held in camps (p. 285).
The author concludes that “compared with other humanitarian crises that occurred in the inter-war period, the issue of prisoners of war and their repatriation is one of the few that are sufficiently clearly defined and that are solved in accordance with the wish expressed by most prisoners: to return home” (p. 329).
Yet we can regret that Tate makes no mention of another significant phenomenon at the time: the mass internment of civilians in areas occupied by the belligerents, especially on the German side, as more than 800,000 civilians were held captive for all or part of the period from 1914 to 1920.[6]Germany and the Central Powers held more than 400,000 civilians, especially because of the mass deportation to Germany of civilians from occupied territories in France and Belgium for forced labour. … Continue reading But it is true that this was not her focus – POWs were. This issue may be an opportunity to bring up, in future research, these aspects of the First World War that are even less known, with a similar focus on the rules governing prisoner release and repatriation.
In any case, this book, which is remarkably well documented and elegantly written, is certainly not reserved for a restricted audience of historians and should also be of interest to researchers working on subject areas other than humanitarianism, as well as humanitarian practitioners. They will find food for thought and for comparison with situations in crisis zones today and others they may face in the more or less near future.
Translated from the French by Béatrice Murail
