| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Vasilis Vourkoutiotis. Prisoners of War and the German High Command: The British and American Experience. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. Pp. xi, 266. $69.95.

Vasilis Vourkoutiotis has set out to buck the historical trends of the last fifty years by telling the story of British and American prisoners of war in Germany during World War II not from the "bottom up" but from the top down: that is, from the perspective of the German High Command (Oberkommando des Wehrmacht, or OKW). He correctly argues that most interest in the subject (both scholarly and popular) has focused on the experience of the prisoners themselves, particularly on a few dramatic episodes such as the escape from Colditz and the "shackling crisis" of 1942. Instead, he seeks to understand the nature and evolution of Germany's policy toward Anglo-American prisoners by comparing the day-to-day administration of policy with the provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1929 and considering whether, and why, policy changed over the course of the war. This is, then, fundamentally an administrative history of the OKW's policies, although a final chapter on Red Cross reports seeks to assess the actual treatment and conditions of prisoners in the camps.

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