Enemy Aliens and Internment

The internment of enemy aliens in the First World War was a global phenomenon. Camps holding civilian as well as military prisoners could be found on every continent, including in nation-states and empires that had relatively liberal immigration policies before the war. This article focuses on three of the best-known examples: Britain, Germany and the United States. Each had its own internment system and its own internal threshold of tolerance for violence. Nonetheless, they were interconnected through wartime propaganda and diplomacy, and through constant appeals to the rules of war, the rights of "civilised" nations and the requirements of self-defence.