The treatment of western prisoners of war in Nazi Germany: Rethinking reciprocity and asymmetry

Abstract

Given that the Geneva Convention of 1929 placed prisoners of war under the laws of the detaining state, Nazi courts martial could sentence prisoners of war for offences that did not exist in the western democracies, such as insults to the Führer, or severely punish them for acts leading only to mild disciplinary sanctions in Britain or America. Moreover, convicted prisoners of war had to experience the singularly brutal German prison system. These asymmetries, which influenced the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war of 1949, challenge the paradigm of reciprocity and symmetry in prisoner of war regimes between Germany and the western countries in World War II.