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Home Rule within Enemy Lines

During World War I, about 400,000 “enemy aliens” were imprisoned by all sides in camps on nearly every continent. During that time, Germany’s only exclusively civilian prison camp, Ruhleben Gefangenenlager, became a model of civil functionality.

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Credit: HLS Historical and Special Collections Read Caption View of Ruhleben’s “Trafalgar Square, ”an attempt—like nearby “Bond Street”—to transform the camp on the outskirts of Berlin into a Little Britain within enemy lines

Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read Caption Black internees segregated in Barrack 12. Ruhleben’s Arab prisoners were also housed apart from Europeans.

Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read Caption Typescript of the Ruhleben Alphabet Song, an example of the literature—often humorous and subversive—written by internees and included in camp publications.

Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read Caption A boxing match at Ruhleben. Many sports were played, but only football (soccer) and cricket were wildly popular.

Credit: HLS Historical and Special Collections Read Caption Some internees were paid to work in food preparation or mail delivery at the camp. Others set up their own businesses.

Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read Caption At the Ruhleben Theatre, four actors in soldier costumes

Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read Caption Men line up at Ruhleben for parcels. Relief packages from Britain were a regular boon to camp life.

Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read Caption German guards at Ruhleben, all unarmed here, were seldom seen within the camp after September 1915. But as war privations increased in Germany, guards regularly went through prisoner garbage in search of food scraps.

Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read Caption Men passing through a gate in the camp. Later in the war, individual prisoners were sometimes allowed to leave the camp to go shopping in Berlin for a few hours, accompanied by a guard.

Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read Caption Cast members—three dressed as women—from a September 1917 performance of “The Ruhleben Empire,” one of the hundreds of productions put on by internees

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