JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This image was a little surprising to me when I saw it this afternoon--it occurs in the Illustrated London News for 1915 and even though I have been through all of the issues for that journal for WWI I had no recollection for it...and I certainly do not recall other similar pictures. And so there it is, a collection of photos of life inside Ruhleben Detention Camp, near Berlin, as published on December 14, 1915. (I don't think "Ruh" is a word in German, but if it was "Ruhn" then the camp would be "Resting Camp" or "Living Camp" or some such.) In any event the detention camps for Brits in Germany in WWI is something that is not commonly mentioned, so I thought I'd share this find. As it turns out, Ruhleben was a harness racing compound, with people housed in converted stalls--this is something I've encountered semi-frequently, this use of horse racing venues as detention centers, as with the internment camps for the Japanese in the western U.S. in 1942+.) Ruhleben seems to have been open and used for the duration of the war, and housed on average about 4-5,000 people at a time. (At one point one of those imprisoned here was James Chadwick, who would discover the neutron in 1932 and be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1935.)
I know that these places existed, of course, though I just do not recall seeing anything about it in the Illustrated London News or the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig).
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