Fit for work, unfit for care: collapse and the carceral logic of German POW camps, 1914–1918

This article examines the psychological consequences of captivity for British prisoners of war in German-administered camps during the First World War, situating their experience at the intersection of trauma studies, carceral theory, and military psychiatry. While trench warfare and shell shock have received sustained scholarly attention as sites of psychiatric injury, the mental toll of captivity has been treated as secondary or conceptually benign. Drawing on prisoner testimony, inspection reports, repatriation records, and medical assessments, the article shows that psychological collapse in captivity was rarely recognised as illness. Instead, deterioration was routinely reframed as disciplinary deviance, malingering, or failure of character within administrative systems oriented towards labour extraction rather than care. Collapse is used here not as a clinical diagnosis but as a cumulative process through which sustained coercion, hunger, exhaustion, and moral pressure eroded prisoners’ capacity to endure captivity. This deterioration was experienced internally long before it became visible in the archive, appearing only when diminished capacity could no longer be absorbed within regimes of work, punishment, or neglect. By demonstrating how captivity generated psychological breakdown while simultaneously rendering it administratively invisible, the article repositions the prisoner of war at the centre of the history of wartime psychiatry and exposes the entanglement of discipline, productivity, and care in modern military medicine.

Citation

Bremer, S. (2026) Fit for work, unfit for care: collapse and the carceral logic of German POW camps, 1914–1918. First World War Studies. DOI: 10.1080/19475020.2026.2644927

Type

Journal article

Language

en

Description

© 2026 The authors. Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1080/19475020.2026.2644927

ISSN

1947-5020

Collections

Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences