From law and forgiveness to politics and the integrity of the Supreme Court to an insider’s view on foreign policy, HLS faculty tackle big issues with scholarship, candor, and compassion
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.
Credit: HLS Historical and Special Collections Read CaptionView 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 linesCredit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read CaptionBlack internees segregated in Barrack 12. Ruhleben’s Arab prisoners were also housed apart from Europeans.Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read CaptionTypescript 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 CaptionA boxing match at Ruhleben. Many sports
were played, but only football (soccer) and cricket were wildly popular.Credit: HLS Historical and Special Collections Read CaptionSome 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 CaptionAt the Ruhleben Theatre, four actors in soldier costumes Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read CaptionMen line up at Ruhleben for parcels. Relief packages from Britain were a regular boon to camp life.Credit: HLS Historical & Special Collections Read CaptionGerman 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 CaptionMen 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 CaptionCast members—three dressed as women—from a September 1917 performance of “The Ruhleben Empire,” one of the hundreds of productions put on by internees