Ratification of the prisoner agreement on Switzerland

On 13 May 1916 the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey sent the United States Ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, a note that concluded the negotiations with Germany on transferring sick and wounded prisoners of war to Switzerland. A British chronology of the war calls this step the ratification of the agreement in London. It was not, however, a treaty signed by both parties, nor a ratification in the strict sense. The agreement arose from an exchange of notes transmitted through the American embassies in London and Berlin, and the note of 13 May was the final British acceptance of the German terms.

From proposal to agreement

The first reports of the agreement appeared at the end of April, but the road to it had been longer. On 25 March Grey proposed to the Germans an arrangement modelled on the Franco-German agreement. Prisoners suffering from illnesses on an agreed list, but not ill enough to be sent home, were to go to Switzerland. Each government was to pay for the maintenance of its own men and to return escapees to the Swiss, and the camps and hospitals were to be visited by commissions of Swiss doctors. Berlin was long silent, and London pressed in notes of 12, 22 and 29 April. The German reply was dated 26 April: Germany agreed to transfer prisoners on the same terms that applied between it and France, and proposed starting the transports around 17 May. Page passed on a summary of this consent on 1 May, and the full text of the German note on 11 May.

What was settled on 13 May

In reply Grey accepted the German proposal that prisoners should first be examined in the camps by Swiss doctors. The final decision, according to the German note, was to be taken by commissions of both sides, organised in the same way as for the Franco-German exchange. Grey announced that the Swiss government had been asked to send doctors to Great Britain as soon as possible. The German date could not be kept: according to the Swiss, the transport of German prisoners from the British Isles could not begin before 25 May. The Germans were to be handed over to the Swiss authorities at Lyon, and the French government had no objection to their passage through France. Grey also pointed out that malaria had been omitted from the list of illnesses received from Berlin, presumably by oversight.

The list itself was broad. It included tuberculosis (PL), even at an early stage, chronic diseases of the heart, lungs, nerves and digestive system, blindness, deafness, serious after-effects of wounds, the loss of a limb by an officer or non-commissioned officer, and any condition that rendered a soldier unfit for service for at least a year. Excluded were the seriously mentally ill requiring a special institution, alcoholics, and those with contagious diseases during the infectious period.

First steps

A few days later Grey informed the House of Commons that on 20 May four Swiss medical commissions of two doctors each would set out for Great Britain, and that on the same day a commission would leave Bern to examine the British in Germany. The British were to be accommodated in the Alpine resort of Château-d’Oex. For the Germans the Swiss had already earmarked, among other places, the area around Davos and Lake Lucerne. Grey also publicly thanked the Swiss government for its help. Soon afterwards the correspondence that made up the agreement was published as a parliamentary paper. The first British prisoners reached Switzerland on 30 May.