This book brings together historians from Great Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Canada, Austria, and Latvia who have worked and published on fraternisation between Prisoners of War and local women during either the First or Second World War, providing the first comparative study of this multi-faceted phenomenon in different belligerent countries. By focusing on prisoners as wartime migrants and studying the nature and impact of their interactions with the local female population, this book expands the existing framework on prisoner of war studies. Its substantial scope and comparative approach make it an important point of reference in the growing research field of POW studies.

Approximately 9 million soldiers fell into enemy hands from 1914 to 1918, but historians have only recently begun to recognize the prisoner of war's significance to the history of the Great War. Examining the experiences of the approximately 130,000 German prisoners held in the United Kingdom during World War I, historian Brian K. Feltman brings wartime captivity back into focus. Many German men of the Great War defined themselves and their manhood through their defense of the homeland. They often looked down on captured soldiers as potential deserters or cowards--and when they themselves fell into enemy hands, they were forced to cope with the stigma of surrender. This book examines the legacies of surrender and shows that the desire to repair their image as honorable men led many former prisoners toward an alliance with Hitler and Nazism after 1933. By drawing attention to the shame of captivity, this book does more than merely deepen our understanding of German soldiers' time in British hands. It illustrates the ways that popular notions of manhood affected soldiers' experience of captivity, and it sheds new light on perceptions of what it means to be a man at war.