With a casino, a football league featuring Steve Bloomer, the captain of England, an internal postal service and its own glossy news magazine, Ruhleben may just have been the most sophisticated prisoner-of-war camp in history.
Documents fully catalogued for the first time at the National Archives in Kew and released for Remembrance Day today show in astonishing detail the lives of the 200,000 or more British men and women held captive during the First World War.
They include a teamsheet from what must have been the most star-studded game of football played behind prison walls, on May 2, 1915 between "England v The Rest".
England were led by Bloomer, of Derby County and Middlesbrough, who played 23 times for his country and scored 28 times, enough for him to be still the ninth highest scorer of all time.
Joining Bloomer were two other England players, Fred Pentland (Middlesbrough and Norwich), and Sam Wolstenholme (Blackburn Rovers and Everton).
The opposing captain was John Cameron, a Scottish international who had scored for Spurs when they won the FA Cup in 1901.
Ruhleben, a camp outside Berlin built on a racecourse, housed 4,500 British prisoners, many of whom, like Bloomer, had been in Germany when war broke out and were interned.
They ran their own football league with headed notepaper, printed their own stamps and stationery and attended lectures on music and the arts given by well-known performers of the time such as the opera singer FC Adler and the Canadian musician Edward [later Sir Edward] Macmillan.
Compared with the drab, barbed-wire lifestyles of the 1939-45 camps, the prisoners of the First World War seem to have had an exciting time.
"At camps like Münster, they had a full-time entertainment troupe, headed by a music hall comedian named Jack Harris, a corporal in the Rifle Brigade," said Paul Stembridge, the leader of the Archives' experts who have spent 12 months producing detailed catalogues of the 547 files.
"Ruhleben's prison magazine, called Prisoner's Pie, which has articles, portraits, poems and drawings, was printed on very high quality glossy paper and it's hard to imagine it could have been much better done outside a prison.
"All in all, you get the strong impression that they had an easier time than the Second World War prisoners did."
In the first months of the war, conditions were very basic, but when American-led inspection teams began to visit the camps, things quickly improved.
Some camps were better than others, but many had wide choices for entertainment, sport and other cultural activities, the records show.
There are records also of the tens of thousands of German prisoners kept in British camps, including one of the inside of a camp in Islington which resembles a very cramped English boarding school dormitory.
But German officers, mostly held at Donnington Hall in Leicestershire, were allowed to keep servants, who lived in the stables.
The files show some fascinating details of the war.
In one debriefing of a Royal Flying Corps lieutenant named Geoffrey Harding, he gives an account of his brush with the Flying Circus of Baron Manfred von Richthofen over the Western Front near Vimy in spring 1917.
"We became detached from the others and then we were brought down by Richthofen himself with an explosive bullet in the petrol tank which set us on fire. We made quite a decent landing."
Unfortunately, it was behind German lines.
Documents fully catalogued for the first time at the National Archives in Kew and released for Remembrance Day today show in astonishing detail the lives of the 200,000 or more British men and women held captive during the First World War.
They include a teamsheet from what must have been the most star-studded game of football played behind prison walls, on May 2, 1915 between "England v The Rest".
England were led by Bloomer, of Derby County and Middlesbrough, who played 23 times for his country and scored 28 times, enough for him to be still the ninth highest scorer of all time.
Joining Bloomer were two other England players, Fred Pentland (Middlesbrough and Norwich), and Sam Wolstenholme (Blackburn Rovers and Everton).
The opposing captain was John Cameron, a Scottish international who had scored for Spurs when they won the FA Cup in 1901.
Ruhleben, a camp outside Berlin built on a racecourse, housed 4,500 British prisoners, many of whom, like Bloomer, had been in Germany when war broke out and were interned.
They ran their own football league with headed notepaper, printed their own stamps and stationery and attended lectures on music and the arts given by well-known performers of the time such as the opera singer FC Adler and the Canadian musician Edward [later Sir Edward] Macmillan.
Compared with the drab, barbed-wire lifestyles of the 1939-45 camps, the prisoners of the First World War seem to have had an exciting time.
"At camps like Münster, they had a full-time entertainment troupe, headed by a music hall comedian named Jack Harris, a corporal in the Rifle Brigade," said Paul Stembridge, the leader of the Archives' experts who have spent 12 months producing detailed catalogues of the 547 files.
"Ruhleben's prison magazine, called Prisoner's Pie, which has articles, portraits, poems and drawings, was printed on very high quality glossy paper and it's hard to imagine it could have been much better done outside a prison.
"All in all, you get the strong impression that they had an easier time than the Second World War prisoners did."
In the first months of the war, conditions were very basic, but when American-led inspection teams began to visit the camps, things quickly improved.
Some camps were better than others, but many had wide choices for entertainment, sport and other cultural activities, the records show.
There are records also of the tens of thousands of German prisoners kept in British camps, including one of the inside of a camp in Islington which resembles a very cramped English boarding school dormitory.
But German officers, mostly held at Donnington Hall in Leicestershire, were allowed to keep servants, who lived in the stables.
The files show some fascinating details of the war.
In one debriefing of a Royal Flying Corps lieutenant named Geoffrey Harding, he gives an account of his brush with the Flying Circus of Baron Manfred von Richthofen over the Western Front near Vimy in spring 1917.
"We became detached from the others and then we were brought down by Richthofen himself with an explosive bullet in the petrol tank which set us on fire. We made quite a decent landing."
Unfortunately, it was behind German lines.
From the Daily Telegraph
