Dying with the Enemy: Prisoners of War Deaths in First World War Britain

Abstract

During the First World War, enemy soldiers and civilians died not just on the battlefield, but also on the home front. This chapter considers the case of some 3,000 Germans who lost their lives in wartime Britain. Its starting point is the multiple ways that the enemy died at home. Some of these men died in direct combat, drowning on sinking ships or plummeting to earth on downed aeroplanes, while others succumbed to illness or disease in internment camps. This chapter argues that regardless of the cause, death had the effect of altering British perceptions of the enemy. Where the Germans had once been a threatening faceless mass, the subject of invasion literature or spy fever, death blunted these fears, and the British had to confront their subjugated enemy in a very different way. The Germans now gained an identity, receiving individual funerals, a grave and a wooden cross inscribed with their name. Once interred in local communities throughout Britain, the German dead gradually blurred into rural landscapes, no longer in opposition to this space, but at one with it.