Civil Resettlement Units

Civil Resettlement Units, or CRUs, were a scheme created during the Second World War to help British Army servicemen who had been prisoners of war (POWs) to return to civilian life, and to help their families and communities to adjust to having them back.

During the First World War and shortly afterwards, many psychiatrists including Sigmund Freud assumed that soldiers who had been captured were 'virtually immune' from psychological harm because they were at a safe distance from battle. This was linked with the belief that shell shock might be a way of escaping from danger. Around the time of the Second World War, this view began to change. Psychiatrists and psychologists such as Millais Culpin and Adolf Vischer argued that POWs were at risk of mental harm, and Vischer coined the term "barbed-wire disease" to describe this condition. Psychiatrists had been keen to look into these ideas, and the outbreak of war gave them the opportunity to conduct research. The 1929 Geneva Convention had changed how POWs were dealt with by setting forth rules for prisoner exchange which made it possible for POWs to be returned to their home nations before the end of the war.

In September 1943, Lieutenant General Sir Alexander Hood hosted an Army meeting at the Directorate of Army Psychiatry to discuss the repatriation of POWs, at which it was decided that British Army psychiatrists should investigate what difficulties POWs might experience on their return home, and how these difficulties might be dealt with. As with much British Army psychiatry during the Second World War, work on rehabilitating POWs was headed by a group who called themselves the "Invisible College" and who formed the after the war.

POWs experiencing the most apparently severe difficulties on repatriation were treated at military psychiatric hospitals such as Northfield Military Hospital. Psychiatrists Major Whiles and Alfred Torrie noted that patients were often 'markedly resentful of everyone and everything.' Psychiatrists suggested that these feelings could lead to civil unrest after the war if experienced by the significant number of POWs who would be returning.

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