The ABCs of Nazism: The Political Screening and Classification of German Prisoners of War in Britain in the Aftermath of the Second World War

Abstract Nearly half a million German prisoners of war were in Britain when the Second World War ended, all of whom were sorted into one of three categories: anti-Nazi, unpolitical, or Nazi, correspondingly known as A, B, C. This article focuses on the screening process that determined in which category an individual belonged. It traces the thinking that informed this process, the logic behind the assessment criteria used, and the impact it had on prisoners. Screening was conceived at a time when support for National Socialism was pathologised and blamed on a German ‘national character’. However, as the article shows, the process of screening POWs did not reflect such notions. Instead it reflected a recognition that Germans had consciously supported the regime for different reasons and to different degrees. Through a quantitative analysis of 400,000 screenings, it is shown that there was no tendency to see all Germans as Nazis, despite wartime rhetoric conflating the two. Instead, the criteria for classifying POWs were increasingly designed to achieve practical policy aims. Screening became a convenient tool through which to organise several policies that affected prisoners—re-education, denazification, labour and repatriation—rendering it a process that fundamentally shaped post-war internment.