Finally, there was public reaction in Britain. The person who
started it off was Peggy Duff, a marvelous woman who died a couple
of years ago. She was later one of the leading figures in the CND
[the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] and the international
peace movement during the 1960s and 1970s, but she started off her
career with a protest against the treatment of German POWs.
Incidentally, why only German POWs? What about the Italians?
Germany’s a very efficient country, so they’ve published volumes
of documents on what happened to their POWs. But Italy’s sort of
laid back, so there was no research on their POWs. We don’t know
anything about them, although they were surely treated much
worse.
When I was a kid, there was a POW camp right next to my high
school. There were conflicts among the students over the issue of
taunting the prisoners. The students couldn’t physically attack the
prisoners, because they were behind a barrier, but they threw
things at them and taunted them. There were a group of us who
thought this was horrifying and objected to it, but there weren’t
many.
ann
(Ann)
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