Hague conference on prisoners of war

In June 1918, for the second time during the war, representatives of the British and German governments sat down to talks at The Hague. They were to settle disputed questions concerning prisoners of war and interned civilians. The chronology of the war records the conference under 9 June, but according to the historian Bennett Strange, who draws on Lord Newton’s memoirs, the sessions began on 8 June. A year earlier, in July 1917, the same parties had concluded the first prisoner agreement at The Hague, and its implementation had since brought more mutual recriminations than relief.

This time London sent a higher-ranking delegation. Alongside Lord Newton, Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office and head of its prisoners of war department, and Lieutenant-General Herbert Belfield of the War Office, the Home Secretary, George Cave, went to the Netherlands. Andrew Bonar Law announced his appointment in the House of Commons on 3 June, explaining it by the importance the government attached to the matter. The delegates, he said, had “very wide” powers.

The dispute over exchange

Newton recalled that in the spring of 1918 the troubles over prisoners began to multiply: food was short, exchanges were delayed, and both sides accused each other of atrocities. It was the Germans who demanded a new meeting. The great offensives on the Western Front had brought them tens of thousands of British prisoners, and the British complained that German camp doctors too rarely sent the sick before the medical boards that decided on internment in a neutral country. The disputes concerned above all the seventh paragraph of the 1917 agreement, on the examination of sick candidates for internment.

In Britain a fierce debate had been going on for weeks. Some MPs and part of the press demanded a broad exchange, pointing to France: according to a question put by the MP Albion Richardson in the House of Commons, the French and the Germans had begun negotiations in Bern in the second week of April, and by 26 April their agreement had already been concluded and ratified. The army was opposed. On 5 June, as the delegates were preparing to leave, the Parliamentary Secretary of the War Office, Lord Stanhope, said in the House of Lords that he had no objection to interning prisoners of both sides in neutral countries, but that every fit German sent home strengthened the enemy and prolonged the war. Lord Lamington added that an exchange of civilians would be very unequal: about 30,000 Germans interned throughout the Empire for 4,000 Britons. The War Cabinet nevertheless instructed the delegates to seek a “broad scheme of exchange”, broadly modelled on the recent Franco-German agreement.

Five weeks of talks

The talks were hard going. The delegations were larger than the year before, and the atmosphere was tense. Newton later complained in the House of Lords that they had not been helped by the campaign against enemy aliens being waged in Britain at the same time. At the beginning of July the War Cabinet recalled Cave to London. MPs who wanted an exchange accused the government of putting the alien question before the fate of the prisoners, and Bonar Law replied that the state of the negotiations had allowed it. Newton himself said later that the minister had been called back to help with the campaign against aliens, and that he and Belfield regretted his departure more than anyone. The two of them carried on the talks alone.

The agreement was not signed until 14 July. On 25 July Cave set out its main provisions in the House of Commons: the repatriation of all military prisoners after 18 months of captivity, exchanged man for man and rank for rank, and the return home of all interned civilians who wished it. The surplus of German civilians was to be balanced by the repatriation of additional British prisoners. The agreement also covered prisoners interned in the Netherlands and Switzerland and improved the conditions of captivity, among other things concerning work in mines and the holding of prisoners in the zone of operations. According to Cave, by August 1919 about 120,000 men on each side would have become entitled to repatriation. The agreement, however, required ratification, and the Germans entered a reservation to it. In the autumn Berlin refused to ratify it, setting new conditions, among them concerning Germans interned in China. According to Strange, the agreement was not ratified until November 1918, as the war was coming to an end, and it did not have time to bring about the great exchange envisaged in June.