On 12 Dec 2011, at 7:09 AM, Pat Frykberg wrote: > Lynn There was a POW camp for German troops captured in and around > the then > German South West Africa 1915. It was at Aus on the Keetmanshoop/ > Luderitz > railway. I have a list of some of them. Many died in the 1918 flu. > I got > this small booklet from Germany and later found it is available in > Namibia. > Patricia Frykberg > > -------------------------------------------------- > From: "Lyn Oakes" <lynne.oakes@virgin.net> > Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2011 9:55 PM > To: <south-africa@rootsweb.com> > Subject: [SOUTH-AFRICA] concentration camps/ WW1 POWs > >> I have been following the thread on the Boer War concentration camps. >> Like >> Pat, I enjoy learning history from real, "on the ground", stories >> to get a >> better idea of how people lived aside from official history. >> >> Are there any such records available (on line, hopefully) of First >> World >> War >> POW camps in South Africa? My German grandfather, arrested in >> what was >> Southern Rhodesia, spent the war in a pow camp in Pietermaritzburg. >> Grandpa >> is a major brickwall in my research and as I am retiring shortly I am >> looking for anything to help knock a few chinks into his family. >> >> Season's greetings from a rapidly chilling UK >> >> Lynette >> Surrey There is a distinction between Concentration Camps. during the Boer War and later, and POW camps, in the first (and second) world war and before and since. As I understand it, a concentration camp is where civilian enemy aliens are interned for the duration to ensure that they cannot convey intelligence to their home countries, but also because for the last 100 years and more it has been considered anomalous to have such individuals wandering around at liberty when their country is one's enemy in a declared war. It was not always thus, of course: there are many instances of aliens wandering around without regard to the war in earlier times. At some stage the concept of "total war" came into being, probably because of the increasingly strong part played by ideology in war, especially the ideologies associated with absolutist governments like those of the Fascist and Communist stripes (which has fascinating parallels with today's increasing isolation of Islamism as both sides harden their attitudes). There are suggestions of the beginning of this in Dickens' account of the French Revolution, "A Tale of Two Cities", and it reached its peak (so far as Communism and the West were concerned) in the Cold War, and in the Gulags. Prisoners of War are military personnel who are detained to deprive the enemy of their services. These are supposedly governed by the international laws of war known as the Geneva Convention, though both sides broke the rules now and then, the Germans (I think) more than the Allies in WWs I and II. An example from WW I concerned the sinking by a German U-Boat of a clearly marked Hospital Ship, en route from Canada where it had taken wounded British personnel, to pick up a fresh batch in the UK; this took place off the Fastnet (south of Ireland), and my wife's uncle Charlie FULTON was one of those lost, whether from the ship itself or from the life-boats which the U-Boat commander also directed should be destroyed, we don't know. (Some boats were missed, and that is how we know what happened; the second officer was tried at the ensuing War Crimes Tribunal, but the commander, who had claimed to suspect that the ship was carrying fresh troops, but knew full well that he had broken the law, wisely decamped to Poland before he could be arrested; Poland, newly independent, had no extradition treaty with either Germany or the UK.) And Guantanamo Bay could be cited as an example from the Western side in a much more recent conflict . . . My grandmother, Josephine Maria HAARHOFF, was a nurse with the neutral German Ambulance in the Boer War, and treated men from both sides; later, she was a medical missionary in the Chinsali District of what is now Zambia, where she met her husband, Robert Donald MacMINN, who was working for the Church of Scotland and founded Lubwa Mission. He gets a (not very flattering) mention in "The Africa House" by Christina Lamb; their only child was my mother, born in 1911. Her story brings home to me that one cannot really geberalize in questions such as those raised in this long discussion. Yes, the British committed atrocities in several conflicts -- and so did their enemies. Yes, Islamist extremists have done some terrible things -- but Islamists have suffered terrible things too. Sadly, because of such generalization, the innocent (so far as anyone is innocent, but remember St Paul's assertion that ALL men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God) have suffered along with the guilty; that is the nature of policy motivated by revenge. So I'm with those Listers who are urging the parties to this dispute to cool it, and refrain from indulging in abuse. Let's all just calm down, and discuss it (if we must, and if we have something constructive to contribute) calmly and rationally. BTW, I have been wondering where our estimable List-Owner has been in all this -- on holiday? Andrew Rodger rodgera@audioio.com