The History of Ruhleben - Joseph Powell

Excerpt from The History of Ruhleben: A Record of British Organisation in a Prison Camp in Germany
"You mustn't suppose that the camp was always like this. When the men were first brought here, the place wasn't fit to keep pigs in. All that you have admired in the camp they have themselves created.'
That is what Count Schwerin, Commandant of Ruhleben, said, some time in the summer of 1916, to a distinguished American visitor who had called on him with an introduction from the American Embassy. It was the generous tribute of an enemy whom Ruhleben men had ceased to think of as an enemy before he died. This book is written to set forth, in detail, the facts on which it was based, and to show how a number of Englishmen, raked in from the German cities, dumped in a swamp, and housed in stables, set to work to found a British colony and build a British city within a few miles of the enemy's capital, and to place on record the hard work done by many men in many different departments of endeavour.
Mr Powell was pressed to write such a book at the time of the Ruhleben Exhibition. Mr Gobble was, at the same time, contemplating the publication of his personal recollections of the camp in the early days when the great colonising effort was still in its infancy. Each of the two had amassed a great deal of material which would have been very useful to the other.
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