As well as home front camps, the German army also established prisoner of war labour companies for other rank prisoners in the front hinterland areas Etappen in occupied French, Belgian and Russian territory. The first prisoner of war labour companies on the Western Front were established by the German army in , containing Russian prisoner of war labourers transferred to the west.
By , German prisoner of war labour companies at the Western Front and its hinterland contained multiple prisoner nationalities, including British and French captives. In total, German prisoner of war labour companies on the Western Front contained over , prisoner workers by These prisoners were often mistreated and generally endured worse working and living conditions than their counterparts in Germany.
In , conditions in German army prisoner of war labour units on the Western Front deteriorated badly, due to food shortages and the strain of incorporating over 70, British captives taken in the first weeks of the Ludendorff Offensive, the majority of whom were sent directly into front line labour companies, where they endured frequent beatings and did not usually have access to food parcels or post from home.
Prisoner of war labour companies on the Western Front were used by the German army for heavy manual labour, maintaining roads and railways, lines of communication and loading and unloading supplies.
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Total death rates for prisoners of war in these Western Front labour companies remain uncertain but witness evidence suggests they were high in The management of prisoner of war labour varied between the front and the home front captivity systems. In the prisoner of war labour company system, operating at the front line and Etappen areas in the hinterland to the front, a variety of different military levels and army administrative departments controlled the treatment of prisoners. Although aware of Prussian Ministry of War general directives on prisoner of war treatment emanating from Berlin they had considerable leeway to ignore them and the prisoners in their charge were effectively under the complete control of the German army in the field.
Within Germany proper, however, captivity administration was organized differently, by over twenty regional district army commanders and their subordinate administrative departments, with considerable local powers, working together with a number of Prussian Ministry of War sub-departments in Berlin, as well as the regional Ministries of War, where one existed, such as in Bavaria or Saxony. Although the Unterkunftsdepartment at the Prussian Ministry of War led by General Emil Friedrich was theoretically meant to oversee the system, this administrative complexity led to confusion, as well as overlap, in terms of who had competence to manage particular aspects of prisoner treatment.
Uta Hinz has referred to how this complex administrative system suffered from "bureaucratic fragmentation," something which increased as the numbers of prisoners employed in the German war economy rapidly rose. The military authorities within Germany responsible for prisoner treatment stated that prisoners of war were subject to German military law and German army disciplinary regulations, which was in accordance with international law. This legal status continued until the end of the war, although the implementation of these legal controls on the ground was far from uniform, particularly during the early years of the war.
In sum, between , Germany developed a very sophisticated home front system of captivity which utilised technological advances such as barbed wire and improved hygiene knowledge, logistical advances in railways and bureaucratic advances in maintaining records, to distribute and manage a forced labour cohort of over 2 million men, the vast majority of whom survived the war, although death rates were significantly high for Romanian and Italian prisoners in German captivity.
There was relatively little disease in German prisoner of war camps, with the exception of a major typhus outbreak in and the Spanish influenza outbreak in Indeed, the major organizational challenge which the German authorities faced with regard to prisoners was not disease but food supply. According to international law, set out in The Hague Conventions , prisoners of war were to be fed the same rations as the troops of the captor army. However, as early as , the German military administration, aware that in a long war with an on-going Allied maritime blockade Germany would face a shortage of food supplies, introduced measures to economise on food provided to prisoners.
Initially in , the quality of prisoner food was reduced and the prisoner of war bread ration was made equivalent to that provided to German civilians, not German troops; a break with international law. From , in many of the main home front prisoner of war camps the minimum calorie ration set by the German administration was no longer being provided to prisoners.
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Those working outside the camps in prisoner of war working units in Germany often fared better, receiving better food. However, during the war, all prisoners, in camps or working units in Germany became increasingly dependent on food parcels from their home state in order to survive. German prisoners of war in enemy hands also benefited as the parcel system was allowed on a "reciprocal" basis. In addition, parcels helped to alleviate the increasing economic difficulties that Germany faced in feeding its prisoners of war as the conflict went on.
German captivity in the Great War thus combined forced labour with relatively high survival rates for most prisoner nationalities, presenting historians with a conundrum: For historians this paradox lies at the heart of Great War captivity in Germany. There is generally the consensus that between and captivity underwent fundamental changes. Yet the causes of these radicalisation processes, as well as the extent of their impact, have been emphasised in different ways by historians.
One interpretation situates German prisoner of war policy in terms of an increasing process of ideological and economic totalisation of both war practices and imagery. Uta Hinz contends that an ever-widening definition of what constituted wartime necessity led to radicalisation processes, [11] whose impact, however, did not affect all areas of prisoner of war treatment to the same degree. Elements of such totalisation are identifiable in Germany from on.
The original purpose of captivity, to weaken the enemy militarily by reducing its combatant numbers through capture, decreased in importance.
A shift from seeing prisoners in military terms to seeing them in economic terms took place. Until , enemy prisoners were perceived in largely military terms, held in extremely provisional, military-run camps and the German authorities saw prisoners in terms of captive soldiers rather than labourers; illustrated by the fact that one of the main problems that the German captor army focused on up to this point was how to maintain military "discipline" among captives. From on, however, other rank soldiers from the over main prisoner of war home front camps in Germany were employed in agriculture and, from on, increasingly in industrial working units where in some cases working conditions were very poor as wartime output demands led to the attenuation of peacetime safety norms in mines and factories.
The classifications regarding who was fit enough to work and what kinds of work they could do became increasingly broad as the war continued and ministerial instructions regarding how to increase worker output became successively harsher.
Even though the food situation in Germany was precarious in , and progressively worsened in the following years, no major exchange of prisoners of war who were capable of working took place, nor did the separate Brest-Litovsk peace agreement with Russia in lead to the repatriation of Russian prisoners of war from Germany as these were too important a labour resource to lose. The status of captured soldiers was increasingly defined by their utilization in the war economy. This structural totalisation proceeded in stages and even by it did not affect all parts of the fragmented German prisoner of war system to the same extent.
Two-thirds of all prisoners of war employed in Germany worked in agricultural working units where military control was weakest and the food supply situation remained tolerable. This latter fact was crucial for prisoners of war who received little or no material support from their home states, particularly the over 1.
Both civilian employers and the military were forced to recognize that incentives improved prisoner work performance more than repression or punishment. A second approach by historians sees prisoner of war treatment in the context of a comprehensive wartime cultural brutalisation with regard to the treatment of non-combatants. Jones also considers the extensive development of a prisoner of war labour company system by Germany in as part of a "drive to extremes" and argues that radicalisation processes were not only economic but were also driven by military cultural attitudes and practices, which in the German case remained beyond the limits of civilian political control.
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