IT'S NOT OVER-PD

Barbed Wire Diplomacy examines how the United Kingdom government went about protecting the interests lives and wellbeing of its prisoners of war POWs in Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The comparatively good treatment of British prisoners in Germany has largely been explained by historians in terms of rational selfinterest reciprocity and influence of Nazi racism which accorded AngloSaxon servicemen a higher status than other categories of POWs. By contrast Neville Wylie offers a more nuanced picture of AngloGerman relations and the politics of prisoners of war. Drawing on British German United States and Swiss sources he argues that German benevolence towards British POWs stemmed from Londons success in working through neutral intermediaries notably its protecting power the United States and Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross to promote German compliance with the 1929 Geneva convention and building and sustaining a relationship with the German government that was capable of withstanding the corrosive effects of five years of warfare. Expanding our understanding of both the formulation and execution of POW policy in both capitals the book sheds new light on the dynamics in interbelligerent relations during the war. It suggests that while the Second World War should be rightly acknowledged as a conflict in which traditional constraints were routinely abandoned in the pursuit of political strategic and ideological goals in this important area of AngloGerman relations customary international norms were both resilient and effective.