| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Confronting Captivity: Britain and the United States and Their POWS in Nazi Germany. By Arieh J. Kochavi. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. x, 382 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2940-4.)

During the course of World War II, every nation had to hammer out its policy for dealing with the occasional reality of large numbers of incoming enemy prisoners as well as the care and protection of its own captured soldiers in enemy hands. As in negotiations between any two or three parties, the United States and Great Britain and Germany greatly mistrusted one another and formed policies based on a number of factors. According to Arieh J. Kochavi, history chair at the University of Haifa, the first factor was the number of prisoners held by each country at any particular moment, since all parties viewed the prisoners and their treatment as potential bargaining chips. For instance, Britain's misadventure at Dunkirk in the spring of 1940 provided Germany with thirty-four thousand British prisoners. The scale tipped when the Allies captured some three hundred thousand Afrikakorps men in Tunisia in April 1943; still more German prisoners poured into Allied hands following the Normandy invasion, and so it went until the war came to an end. As a general rule the Germans knew that the United States and Britain intended to respect the Geneva Accords of 1929, and while Allied POWS in German hands were starved and tormented, they were relatively safe. Not so the several million Russian prisoners in German hands, whose "subhuman" status in Nazi racial ideology rationalized their savage treatment. Thus, "race" was the defining factor in behind-the-scenes pow negotiations.

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