Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle 5/2015, S. 63-91 © Südasien-Seminar der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ISBN: 978-3-86004-316-5 Indian Seamen in World War I Prison Camps in Germany1 FRANZISKA ROY
[email protected] This article deals with the experiences of internment, camp life, and work in the labour corps of Indian civilian prisoners of war in Germany during the First World War. We still do not know exactly how many civilian colonial prisoners were interned during the war, but the number of Indians among them exceeded 860 out of a total 2.5 million prisoners approximately in German camps (Oltmer 2006: 68; Davis 1977: 623). This may seem like an almost negligible number in terms of quantity but a study of these men can enrich our understanding of 63 the German ‘campscapes’ and of the structures that were constitutive in forming the experiences that Indian prisoners communicated to those outside the camps during and after the war.2 Among these are the shifting hierarchies and networks in the camps, the tension between German expectations of prisoners’ behaviour and their own life worlds, as well as their conscious adaptation to and subversion of German official knowledge about them. In the Great War as the first ‘total war’, propaganda played an important role, and technical advancements such as the advent of the cinema and cheap reproduction of photographs accelerated the propa- ganda war. Internally, many warring states endeavoured to influence their prisoners in some way, especially those from colonial back- grounds or ethnic minorities. For instance, while Germany publicly decried France’s and Britain’s supposed crime against civilisation by letting non-white, barbaric “half-monkeys” or “dogs” fight ‘white men’, it attempted to win over these colonial prisoners at the same time (Koller 2001: 101-24).