Prisoners of war

The treatment of prisoners was governed by the 1907 Hague Convention: they were to be treated humanely, and the state holding them was responsible for their upkeep. The scale of captivity, however, overwhelmed its drafters. Germany alone held some 2.4 million prisoners, most of them Russians. The largest hauls were taken in the east, where whole corps and fortress garrisons, such as Przemyśl's in 1915, surrendered when surrounded. Prisoners were put to work in farming, industry and behind the lines, and hunger and epidemics, typhus above all, caused high mortality in the camps.

The International Committee of the Red Cross ran a prisoners-of-war agency in Geneva whose card index covered some 2.5 million people. Badly wounded men were exchanged and the sick interned in neutral Switzerland, later also in the Netherlands. Repatriation, especially from Russia, dragged on until 1922. There were many Poles among the prisoners of every army; prisoners from the German and Austro-Hungarian armies were among those recruited as volunteers for the Polish Army in France.