Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Propaganda representations of violence against prisoners
- Part II Violence and prisoner of war forced labour
- Part III The end of violence? Repatriation and remembrance
- 6 Contested homecomings: prisoner repatriation and the formation of memory, 1918–21
- 7 La Grande Illusion: the interwar historicisation of violence against prisoners of war, 1922–39
- Epilogue: the legacy of First World War captivity in 1939–45
- Conclusion
- Glossary of foreign terms
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Contested homecomings: prisoner repatriation and the formation of memory, 1918–21
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Propaganda representations of violence against prisoners
- Part II Violence and prisoner of war forced labour
- Part III The end of violence? Repatriation and remembrance
- 6 Contested homecomings: prisoner repatriation and the formation of memory, 1918–21
- 7 La Grande Illusion: the interwar historicisation of violence against prisoners of war, 1922–39
- Epilogue: the legacy of First World War captivity in 1939–45
- Conclusion
- Glossary of foreign terms
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is completely natural that the tombs of your compatriots, as those of all the Allied soldiers, should receive the same consideration as our own. Although fate wished it that these comrades should rest in foreign soil, they will find fraternal hands to decorate their sanctuary and piously remember them. Our only wish is that, as a mark of thanks and recognition, those of our own whom we had to leave behind us should also receive from their Allied comrades this mark of friendship.
Extract from a letter sent to the French Consul in Nuremberg by the Association of Ex-Prisoners of War, Nuremberg Branch (Vereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener, Ortsgruppe Nürnberg), explaining why they had laid wreaths on the tombs of French prisoners of war, 29.11.1921.Introduction
Just days before the signing of the Versailles Treaty, the French artist René Georges Hermann-Paul, a well-established illustrator whose work appeared in leading journals such as Le Figaro, Le Rire and Les Droits de l'Homme, drew the striking depiction of a German prisoner of war which appears in Figure 14. Hermann-Paul portrayed the prisoner as evil and malevolent, a preying figure lurking in the background to destroy French happiness as symbolised by the French mother and her daughter. The title of the picture, ‘Bocherie’, draws upon the derogatory name for the Germans, ‘Boche’, and is an obvious pun on the French word ‘boucherie’ or butchery.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World WarBritain, France and Germany, 1914–1920, pp. 257 - 314Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011