Business education in First World War captivity: German officers as unrecognised pioneers

Abstract

First World War military prisoners devised a wide range of cultural, physical and educational activities within the camps in Britain. This article focuses on the business education courses at the Skipton German officers’ camp in 1918–19 and applies modern knowledge management (KM) concepts to recontextualise the camp as a zone of knowledge production and transfer, and to re-evaluate the knowledge acquired as a military resource. The circumstances unique to the Skipton camp, the skills and motivations of the participants, and the freedom permitted to them to organise their courses as they wished, gave rise to a pioneering business education programme. The purpose of the courses was not only to expand the formal knowledge base of the participants, but to convey future-orientation, sustain morale, inspire an outlook characterised as a global mindset, and reset their identity for civilian life. Scrutiny of the courses has revealed that their content, enhanced by interactive learning processes, constitutes a significant point of intersection between German traditions of business education and more recent trends in United States thinking and practice. In particular, the experimentation with the curriculum and use of case studies were elements ahead of their time compared with business programmes in Germany, but were in line with developments in the US.