Internment in Switzerland During the First World War

Internment in Switzerland During the First World War PDF Author: Susan Barton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350037737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
In contrast to the plethora of works focusing on the tragic loss of human lives during the First World War, little is known about the more hopeful realities of thousands of prisoners of war from Britain, France, Germany and Belgium who were sent to Switzerland from 1916. This book explores the everyday lives of these prisoners and their impact on Switzerland. Internees were warmly welcomed by local people and given education, training and employment. Leading relatively free lives, they were able to engage in leisure activities and develop new relationships. However, they also contributed to the country's economy, helping to keep Swiss tourism alive at a time when businesses were struggling and alleviating Switzerland's labour shortage as Swiss men were called-up to defend their borders and preserve the country's neutrality. Drawing on a wide range of sources from official records to magazines and postcards, Susan Barton provides an absorbing account of the social and cultural history of internment in Switzerland.

Internment in Switzerland During the First World War

Internment in Switzerland During the First World War PDF Author: Susan Barton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350037737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
In contrast to the plethora of works focusing on the tragic loss of human lives during the First World War, little is known about the more hopeful realities of thousands of prisoners of war from Britain, France, Germany and Belgium who were sent to Switzerland from 1916. This book explores the everyday lives of these prisoners and their impact on Switzerland. Internees were warmly welcomed by local people and given education, training and employment. Leading relatively free lives, they were able to engage in leisure activities and develop new relationships. However, they also contributed to the country's economy, helping to keep Swiss tourism alive at a time when businesses were struggling and alleviating Switzerland's labour shortage as Swiss men were called-up to defend their borders and preserve the country's neutrality. Drawing on a wide range of sources from official records to magazines and postcards, Susan Barton provides an absorbing account of the social and cultural history of internment in Switzerland.

Prisoner of the Swiss

Prisoner of the Swiss PDF Author: Daniel Culler
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1612005551
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
A harrowing memoir revealing the horrors that occurred within a little-known prison camp in Switzerland, by a POW who survived it. During WWII, 1,517 members of US aircrews were forced to seek asylum in Switzerland. Most neutral countries found reason to release US airmen from internment, but Switzerland took its obligations under the Hague Convention more seriously than most. The airmen were often incarcerated in local jails, then transferred to prison camps. The worst of these camps was Wauwilermoos, where at least 161 US airmen were sent for the honorable offense of escaping. To this hellhole came Dan Culler, the author of this incredible account of suffering and survival. Prisoners slept on lice-infested straw, were malnourished, and had virtually no hygiene facilities or access to medical care. But worse, the commandant of Wauwilermoos was a diehard Swiss Nazi. He allowed the mainly criminal occupants of the camp to torture and rape Dan Culler with impunity. After many months of such treatment, starving and ravaged by disease, he was finally aided by a British officer. Betrayal dominated his cruel fate—by the American authorities, by the Swiss, and, in a last twist, in a second planned escape that turned out to be a trap. But Dan Culler’s courage and determination kept him alive. Finally making it back home, he found he had been abandoned again. Political expediency meant there was no such place as Wauwilermoos. He had never been there, so he had never been a POW and didn‘t qualify for any POW benefits or medical or mental treatment for his many physical and emotional wounds. His struggle to make his peace with his past forms the final part of the story. An introduction and notes from military historian Rob Morris provide historical background and context, including recent efforts to recognize the suffering of those incarcerated in Switzerland and afford them full POW status.

Internment during the First World War

Internment during the First World War PDF Author: Stefan Manz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351848356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Although civilian internment has become associated with the Second World War in popular memory, it has a longer history. The turning point in this history occurred during the First World War when, in the interests of ‘security’ in a situation of total war, the internment of ‘enemy aliens’ became part of state policy for the belligerent states, resulting in the incarceration, displacement and, in more extreme cases, the death by neglect or deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world. This pioneering book on internment during the First World War brings together international experts to investigate the importance of the conflict for the history of civilian incarceration.

Refuge from the Reich

Refuge from the Reich PDF Author: Stephen Tanner
Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
American Airmen and Switzerland During World War II

Barbed Wire Disease

Barbed Wire Disease PDF Author: Adolf Lucas Vischer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nervous system
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description


Prisoners in War

Prisoners in War PDF Author: Sibylle Scheipers
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199577579
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
"Result of a conference on 'Prisoners in War' conducted by the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War in December 2007 at Oxford University"--Acknowledgements.

The Art of Staying Neutral

The Art of Staying Neutral PDF Author: Maartje M. Abbenhuis
Publisher: Leiden University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Offers a comprehensive and insightful account of the history of the Netherlands and its neutrality in the First World War, taking into account domestic and international implications.

Surviving the Great War

Surviving the Great War PDF Author: Aaron Pegram
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108486193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Surviving the Great War is the first detailed analysis of Australians in German captivity in WW1. By placing the hardships of prisoners of war in a broader social and military content, this book adds a new dimension to the national wartime experience and challenges popular representations of Australia's involvement in the First World War.

Shot from the Sky

Shot from the Sky PDF Author: Cathryn J. Prince
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 9781612518336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Prince presents the complete story behind Swiss claims of neutrality, where they applied international law in an unfair manner. They detained and in some cases punished American airmen while allowing Nazi pilots to refuel at Swiss airfields.

Eleven Winters of Discontent

Eleven Winters of Discontent PDF Author: Sherzod Muminov
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan. In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home. The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to ÒreeducationÓ glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didnÕt survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state. Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archivesÑincluding memoirs and survivor interviewsÑto piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs.