The first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp opened in rural England in 1797
For most of history captured soldiers were killed, enslaved or ransomed, so nobody needed camps to hold them. That changed after 1648, when a peace treaty ordered prisoners released without ransom, and the swelling numbers of captives eventually led Britain to build a dedicated compound at Norman Cross to hold French prisoners.
The Peace of Westphalia, signed between May and October 1648 to end the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War, is usually treated as the moment Europe began treating captives reasonably and freeing them at a war's end or on parole, a promise not to fight again. Parole itself dates back at least to Carthage. As armies and prisoner numbers grew, holding sites followed. After the British surrender at Saratoga in 1777, thousands of British and German troops, along with about 300 women and children, were eventually marched to barracks near Charlottesville, Virginia, where they built a theatre and hundreds slipped away because guards were scarce.
Norman Cross stayed in use from 1797 to 1814, its population ranging from 3,300 to 6,272 captives from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Later conflicts showed how badly camps could go wrong: about 56,000 soldiers died in prisons during the American Civil War, close to a tenth of all its deaths, mostly from hunger and disease.
International rules arrived gradually. The Hague conference of 1899 produced the first convention on prisoners, extended in 1907. During the First World War about eight million men were held, with the German army's total climbing from over 200,000 in September 1914 to 2,415,000 by the end. A Red Cross conference in Geneva in 1917 agreed to send mail, food parcels and medicine, and to move prisoners suffering from barbed wire disease, a form of mental breakdown, to neutral Switzerland.
The 1929 Geneva Convention required camps to admit neutral inspectors, to house prisoners in heated, lit buildings equal to the captor's own troops, and to bury the dead in marked graves. Enlisted men could be made to work if the job was safe and did not aid the enemy's war effort; officers could not. In American camps such labour earned 80 cents a day in scrip. Japan signed but never ratified the convention. In March 1944, 76 Allied airmen crawled out of Stalag Luft III in the Great Escape, and only three stayed free.
Source: Prisoner-of-war camp
