Evidence shows New Zealand’s first world war soldiers killed both surrendering and wounded German soldiers. Their actions, condoned at the highest level, cast a long shadow.
Thousands of teddy bears with candles on display at a protest in Brussels in February 2023 represented abducted Ukrainian children.
Nicolas Maeterlinck/Belga MAG/AFP via Getty Images
The International Criminal Court issued its first arrest warrants for Russians allegedly responsible for war crimes in Ukraine.
Detained: Vjekoslav Prebeg (Croatia), Dylan Healy and John Harding (UK), Mathias Gustafsson (Sweden) and Andrew Hill from Britain, during a court hearing in Donetsk, August 2022.
Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters/Alamy stock photo
Five British nationals were part of a prisoner swap with Russia recently. Here’s what international law tells us about the detention and treatment of people taken in time of conflict.
Russian soldier Vadim Shishimarin at a May hearing in Kyiv where he was given a life sentence for killing a civilian.
Getty Images
Both Russia and Ukraine are signatories to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war – how much it is being observed is another matter.
The leaders of France, Germany, Italy and Romania meeting with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Putin, in Kyiv on June 16.
EPA-EFE/Ludovic Marin/pool
An Afghan soldier convicted of murdering three Australian soldiers is among six prisoners who could be released as part of a peace deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
The burial of some of the Japanese prisoners of war who lost their lives in the mass outbreak from B Camp, (the Japanese section), at No. 12 Prisoner Of War compound in the early hours of August 5, 1944.
Australian War Memorial (073487)
It’s one of the largest prison escapes in world history and it’s through fiction we can understand the tragedy, from both an Australian and Japanese perspective.
Rupert O’Flynn with Rudolf Marcuse’s bronze bust of Douglas Grant, December 2016.
Photograph courtesy Tom Murray.
In 1918, in Wünsdorf prisoner-of-war camp, a German sculptor created a bust of Indigenous soldier Douglas Grant. For decades, the whereabouts of this nationally significant sculpture were unknown - until now.
Guantanamo Nay detainees sit in a holding area at Camp X-Ray on Jan. 11, 2002.
Reuters/Shane T. McCoy/Handout
On Dec. 10, 1903, the US military leased 45 square miles of Cuban territory to build a naval base. How did Guantanamo Bay become an infamous prison for alleged terrorists?
A display of acrobatics by German internees at the prisoner of war camp at Newbury Racecourse in Berkshire in October 1914.
Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia
Jasper Heinzen, Institut d'études avancées de Paris (IEA) – RFIEA
During First World War, the rhetoric of chivalry counteracted the inhumanity of the conflict in sometimes surprising ways.
German prisoners of war at Sutton Bonington during the period when it was a PoW Camp, 1916-19.
Courtesy of the University of Nottingham, Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections
Many thousands of Germans got through internment by performing farces, dressing up as women and clapping along to the can-can.
An ex-8th Division prisoner of war is reunited with his family at Ingleburn POW reception camp in New South Wales, November 1945.
Ernest McQuillan/Australian War Memorial
Over 20,000 former POWs returned to Australia at the end of the second world war. Archival research sheds light on those who struggled to readjust to life here - and the impact on their wives.
Plotting a route out? German prisoners in Britain during WWII.
Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographe
How French memories of the Dunkirk evacuation differ from those of the British.
At the United Nations’ prisoner-of-war camp at Pusan, North Korean and Chinese prisoners are assembled in one of the camp compounds.
Wkimedia/Larry Gahn/US State Department
There are about 59,000 cards in archival boxes from the Red Cross’s WW2 enquiry service. While their language is impersonal, the golden rule was to provide solace to soldiers’ families, and fast.
Liberated prisoners distributing rice rations to campmates. Pakanbaroe, Sumatra, 1945. AWM 019382.
Courtesy of Australian War Memorial.
One ceremony on V J Day announced that the Sumatra railway had been completed, the construction of which had cost more than 80,000 lived and that 70 years later is still a little known story.
The UK’s detainee abuse scandal was more than a matter of bad apples.
EPA/Nigel Iskander
The report published by the al-Sweady Inquiry has found that charges of murder levelled at a number of British troops by Iraqi prisoners were “without foundation”, but that nonetheless there were instances…