News of an agreement on prisoners in Switzerland

The British chronology of the war records under 26 April 1916 that an agreement was signed in Berlin on the transfer to Switzerland of wounded and sick British and German prisoners of war. According to the same chronology it was ratified in London on 13 May. Some historians give 2 May as the date the agreement was concluded, and the British officer Henry Picot, who later directed the care of the British interned in Switzerland, wrote simply that the arrangement was extended to Britain and Germany in May 1916. The discrepancies probably arise because the agreement was concluded in several steps. On 17 May the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, replied in writing to a question in the House of Commons that agreement with the German government had been reached.

The Franco-German model

The British were not the pioneers here. As early as February 1915, on the initiative of the Swiss Federal Council, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Holy See, France and Germany had agreed to exchange severely disabled prisoners who were no longer fit for service. According to Picot, by November 1916 more than 8,600 Frenchmen and more than 2,300 Germans had travelled home through Switzerland in this way. Soon the president of the ICRC, Gustave Ador, proposed a further step: that the Swiss mountains should also treat the less seriously wounded and the sick, especially those with tuberculosis (PL), who after recovery could return to the army and were therefore not eligible for exchange. The solution was to be internment: the prisoner stayed in a neutral country until the end of the war, and the Swiss made sure he did not escape to his own side.

The negotiations were long, because the Germans wanted both sides to send the same number of men, while the French wanted the state of health to decide. The Vatican helped: its envoy proposed that prisoners in the camps be examined by neutral medical commissions. Agreement was reached in December 1915, and in January 1916 the first sick men began arriving in Switzerland. By mid-February there were already more than 1,200 of them, mainly French, accommodated in resorts such as Leysin and Montana. From March commissions made up of two Swiss doctors and an officer of the detaining state toured the prison camps in France and Germany. Those selected were sent for a final examination to Lyon or to Konstanz. Once the system was working, the Swiss government offered the same hospitality to British prisoners and to Germans in British hands.

The first British in Switzerland

The agreement was carried out quickly. The first train of British prisoners from Germany left Konstanz for Switzerland on 28 May 1916. At the stations in Zurich, Bern and Lausanne it was greeted by crowds, even though the train ran late in the evening and through the night. On 30 May the soldiers reached Château-d’Oex, an Alpine resort in the canton of Vaud, where they were quartered in hotels and boarding houses. The British minister in Bern, Evelyn Grant Duff, noted that evening that he had never in his life seen such a reception. One of the soldiers told him that he felt as if he had “dropped straight from hell into heaven”.

Internment did not mean freedom. The prisoners were subject to Swiss military discipline, and their keep was paid for by their own countries. They did, however, have medical care, better food and contact with their families. At the end of 1916 there were some 1,900 British, more than 16,000 French and Belgians and nearly 8,500 Germans and Austrians in Switzerland. Under the Hague agreement of July 1917 British and Germans were also interned in the Netherlands, although the larger transports began only at the start of 1918. By the end of the war some 68,000 interned soldiers of both sides had passed through Switzerland.