Cooking arn

A watercolour depicting the cooking conditions at the prisoner of war camp Ruhleben. This camp's internal issues were administered by the inmates, the majority of whom where British. The prisoners were detained citizens of Allied powers who were in Germany at the outbreak of the First World War. The conditions of the camp were comfortable. In September 1914, about forty British "suspects" are transferred from Berlin to the racecourse at Ruhleben. They are the first inmates at Germany's new internment camp for British civilians. In the autumn of 1914, the British Government decided on interning a great number of Germans in Great Britain and the German government immediately, as a reprisal, interned all the British civilian men who, up to this time, had enjoyed comparative freedom in Berlin and other cities of the Empire. The British civilians were shut up in a race track about five miles from the centre of Berlin, called Ruhleben.