ABSTRACT
On 20 October 1914 the chief of the deputy German general staff, Baron Kurt von Manteuffel, wrote to his superior, the chief of the general staff at General Headquarters in Charleville, France, in order to solicit the latter’s support for a policy of interning all British men aged 17 to 55 years of age then resident in Germany at a specially-designated camp at Ruhleben near Berlin. As he made clear, this was to be a legitimate act of retaliation against anti-German measures in Britain:
Although some in the German war leadership had reservations about launching a policy of wholesale internment, Manteuffel’s letter did not appear out of the blue. In the late autumn of 1914 the German press was full of sensational accounts of the ill-treatment of Germans in Britain, a trend which had begun on 16/17 October with the publication of a series of revelations by the colonial
continued unabated following news of anti-German riots in Deptford and mass arrests of Germans across the UK on 18/19 October.2 On 2 November, the Berlin police president, Traugott von Jagow, noted in his weekly report on the public mood in the German capital that events across the Channel had stirred up an ‘underlying and deeply rooted hatred of the English’ to such an extent that ‘a policy of retaliation … is demanded from all sides’.3 And four days afterwards, on 6 November, police and army officials were given the go-ahead to arrest all British males of military age and prepare for their immediate transfer to Berlin.4
