Epilogue: the legacy of First World War captivity in 1939–45

Summary

It is beyond the scope of this study to compare the nature of captivity and violence against prisoners of war in the two world wars; any such comparison requires a book in its own right. The purpose of this epilogue, however, is simply to suggest that hidden influences from the First World War played a role in shaping prisoner of war captivity in Britain, France and Germany during the 1939–45 conflagration, although the widespread interwar amnesia that developed by the 1930s in these three countries regarding First World War prisoner treatment makes it extremely difficult to trace this process. To what extent the previous conflict was a factor in determining Second World War captivity still remains largely unexplored in the existing historiography. Recently there has been a major upsurge in historical studies on prisoners of war in 1939–45, with new work by Bob Moore, Rüdiger Overmans, Simon Paul Mackenzie and Frank Biess, among others. Yet we still know too little about the legacy of First World War captivity upon prisoner treatment during the Second World War, the extent of continuities and discontinuities between the two conflicts or indeed the links between civilian and prisoner of war captivities. In addition, whether First World War captivity may have influenced interwar incarceratory systems, in Soviet Russia or Francoist Spain for example, also remains unexplored.