Enemy Aliens and Internment

The internment of enemy aliens in the First World War was a global phenomenon. Camps holding civilian as well as military prisoners could be found on every continent, including in nation-states and empires that had relatively liberal immigration policies before the war. This article focuses on three of the best-known examples: Britain, Germany and the United States. Each had its own internment system and its own internal threshold of tolerance for violence. Nonetheless, they were interconnected through wartime propaganda and diplomacy, and through constant appeals to the rules of war, the rights of "civilised" nations and the requirements of self-defence

Enemy aliens, deportees, refugees: internment practices in the Habsburg Empire, 1914-1918

This article explores both the historiography and history of civilian internment in the Habsburg Monarchy between 1914 and 1918, with particular emphasis on the Austrian half of the empire (Cisleithania). It is often assumed that Austro-Hungarian policies towards enemy civilians and «enemies within» were simply a milder variant of a common pattern of intolerant behaviour by belligerent states towards aliens, national outsiders and other minority groups during modern wars. But this assumption is misleading, and Habsburg policies have much to tell us both about the collapse of the Monarchy in 1917/1918 and about the relationship between empire building, ethnic nationalism and the pursuit of military security in border regions more generally

Women’s Mobilisation for War (Germany)

This article argues that the mobilisation of women in the German empire between 1914 and 1918 was almost wholly conditioned by male priorities and interests. In particular, the increase in the number of women employed in war-related industries represented a temporary relocation of female labour, not a permanent re-evaluation of women’s place in the workforce. There is, in addition, little evidence of a ‘self-mobilisation’ of working-class women. Nonetheless, the bourgeois and Social Democratic women’s movements were active in the construction of ‘mobilisation myths’ which are relevant to our understanding of the cultural history of the war and its aftermath

A forgotten minority: the return of the Auslandsdeutsche to Germany in 1919-20

This article examines the expulsion of Germans abroad (Auslandsdeutsche) from Allied countries and colonial empires in the aftermath of the First World War, and their somewhat negative reception in Weimar Germany in 1919-20. It does so against the background of what it identifies as a re-territorialisation of German national identity, beginning during the war itself and leading to an abrupt reversal of previous trends towards the inclusion of Germans abroad within broader transnational notions of Germanness (Deutschtum), rights to citizenship and aspirations to world power status. Re-territorialisation was not born out of the logic of de-territorialisation and Weltpolitik in any dialectical sense, however. Rather, its causes were largely circumstantial: the outbreak of global war in 1914, the worldwide economic and naval blockade of Imperial Germany, and its final defeat in 1918. Nonetheless, its implications were substantial, particularly for the way in which minority German groups living beyond Germany’s new borders were constructed in official and non-official discourses in the period after 1919-20

Introduction: women’s international activism during the inter-war period, 1919-1939’

This article explains why women’s international activism in the inter-war period should be a subject of scholarly interest, and also discusses the myriad and vibrant forms it could take. For some women campaigners, international work – whether through .established national women’s movements or via separate, radical pacifist organisations – was crucial for the prevention of war and the maintenance of world peace. However, this was not the only motivation. Others were interested in the scientific or professional advantages of combining knowledge at international or transnational level. Others still were keen to exploit international links in order to further political objectives closer to home, such as the achievement of women’s suffrage, the encouragement of inter-cultural understanding between women from different ethnic, religious or linguistic backgrounds, or the promotion of conservative values, anti-communism or physical fitness within particular national or multi-national settings. Examples of all of these kinds of activism can be found in the individual contributions to this special issue

Peace at any price: the visit of Nazi Women’s leader Gertrud Scholtz-Klink to London in March 1939 and the response of British Women Activists

In early March 1939 the Nazi women’s leader (Reichsfrauenfühererin) Gertrud Scholtz-Klink made a little-known visit to London at the invitation of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty and the Anglo-German Fellowship. Taking place against the background of intense efforts to maintain peace, and growing expectations of war, the visit prompted a variety of responses from British women activists. Through analysing these responses, as well as examining why this visit has been overlooked in historical writing, this article sheds new light both on women’s particular contribution to appeasement and on the gendering and feminising of internationalist activism in the aftermath of the First World War more generally. The German intentions behind accepting the invitation, the protests by a small number of London-based anti-fascist women and the reason why even some pro-appeasement women like Nancy Astor refused to meet Scholtz-Klink, are also explored