British reply on prisoner labour

The British chronology of the war states that on 29 May 1916 an agreement on the employment of British and German prisoners of war was signed in London, supplementing a supposed Berlin agreement of 10 May. In reality there was no signed agreement between the two sides. On 29 May the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, sent the United States ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, a note replying to the German announcement that 2,000 British prisoners would be sent to work in Russian territory occupied by the Germans. This was a reprisal for the transfer of German prisoners from Great Britain to work in the ports of France.

Grey did not protest against Berlin’s decision itself. Instead he recalled what London had promised concerning the Germans in France. As early as 4 April he had given Page a description of their work, carried out under British supervision, and had given a verbal assurance that the camps could be visited by representatives of the American embassy or of another neutral state representing German interests in France. On 15 May Page replied that the visits were being arranged by the American embassy in Paris, and on 25 May Grey announced that the British had already issued orders for the inspections to take place on the same terms as in Great Britain.

In return Grey expected the same of the Germans. He asked that the US ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard, inform the German government that London assumed full reciprocity: the conditions of internment and inspection of the prisoners transferred from Great Britain to France and from Germany to Russian territory were to be the same. He wanted to know to which districts the British would be sent, what work they would do and whether the embassy staff would be able to visit their camps. He hoped that an inspection would take place soon after their arrival. He even proposed that one of the doctors working for the embassy should reside in occupied Russian territory for as long as British prisoners remained there.

Visits by neutral observers were the only way to check whether the Germans were keeping their promise of “the same conditions” in the distant rear of the Eastern Front. At the same time London was discussing how better to use the labour of German prisoners in Great Britain itself. On 18 May in the House of Lords Lord Newton said that between 2,000 and 3,000 German prisoners were already working in France, and that others were to fell timber in Scotland. On 31 May the Under-Secretary of State for War, Harold Tennant, announced in the House of Commons nine camps in which prisoners were to work at felling timber, in mines and in quarries. None of them was yet ready.

In June 1916 the British government published the whole correspondence as a parliamentary paper on the employment of British and German prisoners in Poland and France. The matter did not end with the exchange of notes. According to the historian Heather Jones, the harsh German reprisals against prisoners on the Eastern Front in 1916 became the model for a much more notorious reprisal action on the Western Front in the spring of 1917.