Although the war against Nazi Germany was concluded sixty years ago, it is only in the past ten or fifteen years that scholars have turned their attention to the fate of the many millions of servicemen who were taken prisoner by their enemies during the conflict. Memoirs and films abound, but systematic and sober analysis of all the theaters of war has been sadly lacking. This book is therefore to be welcomed as an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which the two major Western liberal democracies dealt with the problems created by having numbers of their servicemen in Nazi captivity. Thematically organized, the text adopts a more or less comparative framework to discuss both the similarities and the differences in the attitudes and actions taken by London and Washington.

The book is divided into four sections. The first deals with the general problems faced by the Allied governments in negotiating with Germany on prisoner of war (POW) matters, and the second discusses the often tortuous negotiations on questions of reciprocal repatriation that took place throughout the war until they were overtaken by the collapse of the Third Reich. The third section deals with those final weeks of captivity that were potentially the most dangerous for the prisoners, as German behavior became more erratic, command structures broke down, and prisoners were moved away from the front, often in forced marches with little or no consideration for their welfare. The final section takes the story into the realms of the cold war and the deals that were struck between the Western powers and their Soviet ally for the return of prisoners liberated by the advancing Red Army. All four sections contain important debates, and the author is to be congratulated for his depth of knowledge, familiarity with the sources, and attention to detail.

The introduction makes the point that establishing the exact numbers of prisoners in German captivity at any given moment was problematic, but it might have been useful to discuss why this was the case. The technicalities of how the powers dealt with POW issues do shed some light on the wider decision-making processes, and some additional background might have been useful here. Likewise, there were many factors that impinged on both British and U.S. attitudes to their men in captivity, not least the questions of reciprocity. This comes out clearly in the discussion of the shackling crisis, but there were other complications. For good domestic reasons, the British government could not strike deals with the Germans without including the Italians, lest it was perceived at home that one group were more favored than another, and discussion with the Dominions was also essential, even though the Germans chose to regard the British Empire as a single entity for the purposes of the Geneva Convention.

The discussion of the challenges that prisoners posed to London and Washington is logical but does jump around chronologically and assumes a high degree of background knowledge on the part of the reader. There is extensive use of quotation from particular sources, and the extensive narrative does tend to undermine the impact of the analysis at times. The use of Red Cross reports and memoirs to give a flavor of what conditions in captivity were like is laudable but did not require the degree of restatement afforded here. The author is also prone to making unsubstantiated judgments. Thus he talks of German interrogators being “successful in extracting valuable information from both American and British POWs” (73) but provides no real evidence. He may well be right, as the appended footnote gives a series of sources, but given the contentious nature of the charge, it surely deserved more justification than this.

The second section examines the Byzantine negotiations on prisoner exchanges throughout the war and the repatriation of 10,000 British and 800 U.S. sick and wounded servicemen in exchange for around 13,000 Germans. It brings out clearly the innumerable political considerations that affected the progress of these discussions and the very real practical problems associated with the transfer of personnel. Prisoners who had been captured early in the war were less well served by this system. Although “older” prisoners had been exchanged in the previous war, the negotiations to create a similar scheme were fraught with difficulties and disagreements, even among the Allied powers, and were finally overtaken by the German surrender. An Allied victory thus became the main hope of salvation for the prisoners, but this final phase of the war was not without its dangers, as both they and their governments realized. The German execution of fifty recaptured escapees from Stalag Luft III (Sagan) showed that the Germans were rapidly abandoning the rules of international law they had (more or less) adhered to previously. There were fears that Nazi fanatics might murder the prisoners at the last minute or that the German leadership would use them as hostages against further bombing or as collateral in some sort of last-minute negotiation. The third section details the Allied discussions and plans to secure the welfare of their prisoners in this final stage of the war. This inevitably meant some compromises. There was an unwillingness to abandon whatever protection adherence the Geneva Convention might afford but also a desire to threaten local military and civil commanders with severe reprisals if prisoners were maltreated or murdered. The apprehension of London and Washington is brought out clearly here, and although the worst fears of Nazi retaliation were never realized, many of the prisoners nevertheless suffered the privations of forced marches. Often emaciated and sick at the end of their ordeal, most nevertheless survived to tell the tale.

The final section of the book deals with Anglo-American concerns about prisoners being returned from Soviet-held territory at the end of the war. The negotiations inevitably involved reciprocity and Moscow's request to have all its citizens repatriated from the West. The fact that they included many who had been captured wearing German uniforms and that Stalin was on record as saying that any Soviet soldier taken prisoner could expect only imprisonment and exile (or worse) on his return created the basis for the dilemma faced by the Western Allies. Were they prepared to send back unwilling Soviet citizens to ensure the safe return of their own men? This story has been told before but provides a further example of how complicated even the simplest of issues might become as it became entwined with other aspects of international diplomacy.

This book does an enormous service to historians of World War II by synthesizing the debates on Allied prisoners in German hands and how these fitted into wider diplomatic and domestic political agendas. It could be read with profit by all those interested in the conduct of the war by the two major Western powers.