German note on prisoner labour

The British chronology of the war records under 10 May 1916 that an agreement on the employment of British and German prisoners of war was signed in Berlin, and under 29 May that the same agreement was signed in London. The documents which the British government published in June 1916 show something different, however. No agreement was signed that day. On 10 May the German Foreign Office handed the United States embassy in Berlin, which looked after British interests in Germany, a note verbale announcing a reprisal.

The dispute began with a decision in London. On 4 April the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, informed the US ambassador, Walter Hines Page, that some German prisoners from camps in Britain would be taken to France to work there. On 5 April 750 men sailed for Rouen, on 26 April another 700 for Le Havre, and a further 500 were announced for 6 May. Under British supervision they were to unload ships in the congested ports, except for munitions and other war material, and conditions in their camps were to be the same as in England. German prisoners in the British Isles had so far done almost no work outside the camps, whereas British prisoners in Germany had long been working. On 3 May the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Robert Cecil, listed in the House of Commons that they were employed in mines, ironworks, quarries and agriculture and on building roads and railways, for between 30 pfennigs and 1.50 marks a day.

Berlin decided to respond in kind. The note of 10 May stated that since the British government had taken a considerable number of Germans to France to work, the German military authorities had ordered 2,000 English prisoners to be moved from camps in Germany to Russian territory occupied by German troops, that is to the rear of the Eastern Front. There they were to work under the same conditions as the Germans taken from England to France. It was therefore not an agreement but a unilaterally announced reprisal. Formally it fell within the Hague Convention of 1907, which allowed prisoners other than officers to be employed, provided the work was not excessive and had no connection with the operations of the war.

The news reached London by a roundabout route, through American missions. On 15 May Page passed Grey a telegram from Berlin summarising the German decision, and on 22 May the full text of the note. At the same time the British were pressing in Berlin for better treatment of their prisoners and concluding the talks on the treatment of sick prisoners in Switzerland. The dispute over prisoner labour did not stop that agreement, but it showed how easily the fate of men in the camps became an instrument of pressure.

The British government replied at the end of May, demanding full reciprocity and the admission of neutral inspectors. The historian Heather Jones points out that the harsh German reprisals against prisoners on the Eastern Front in 1916 became the model for a much better-known reprisal action in the spring of 1917. British and French prisoners were then forced to work under fire just behind the German lines in the west, until London and Paris agreed to keep working German prisoners at least 30 kilometres from the front.