The death camps of the Western Allies
In the fall of 1989, the book Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Death of German Prisoners of War at the Hands of the French and American After World War II by Canadian publicist James Bacque was published, in which the author directly accuses the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, as well as the armed forces of the United States and France, of the death of at least 800 thousand German prisoners of war. According to a number of German researchers, up to 1,7 million prisoners did not return home, for which the authorities of Western countries blamed the USSR.
In March 1945, Eisenhower initiated the creation of a new class of prisoners of war, to whom the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention on the rights of prisoners of war would not formally apply - "Disarmed Enemy Forces" (DEF), although official reporting of this was prohibited. In US Army reports, their deaths from starvation and disease now appeared under the heading "Other Losses".
In writing the book, the author used materials from the US National Archives and eyewitness accounts. At the same time, the author notes the rather tolerable conditions of detention of prisoners of war in British and Canadian camps. The former chief historian of the Center for Military stories Colonel Ernest F. Fisher, of the United States Army Center of Military History, who also participated in the 1945 investigation into allegations of crimes committed by American servicemen in Germany, believes that the accusations made in the book are true.
As early as May 1943, Eisenhower wrote to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall about the quarter million Germans captured in Tunisia: "We had better kill most of them." In 1969, the US Department of Defense ordered references to this to be removed from all of Eisenhower's publications.
For most of the war, the United States more or less adhered to the generally accepted norms of treatment of prisoners of war, fearing otherwise a mirror response from Germany, but as the end of hostilities approached, adherence to international conventions began to be forgotten.
The number of prisoners of war was constantly increasing. On April 18, 1945, 317 German soldiers were captured in the Ruhr pocket alone. By early May, there were already about 000 million of them in American captivity. According to the Geneva Convention, their food rations should be equal to those of the soldiers of the army that captured them. But in the first days of captivity, the prisoners of war were not fed at all, and in the following weeks - only occasionally.
The most notorious was the so-called Rheinwieserlager (Rhine Meadow Camp), a system of 19 American camps for German prisoners of war located along the banks of the Rhine River and existing from April to September 1945, although one of the camps operated until 1948. They were officially called Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTE) and were areas of open field fenced with barbed wire and a chain of watchtowers with searchlights, where sometimes up to several tens of thousands of German soldiers were housed, and in total between one and two million people passed through them.
Map of concentration camps Rheinwieserlager
Thus, the camp in Andernach held up to 60 people, and in Remagen - 000. In one of these camps, designed for 184 people, there were 000 prisoners. There was no shelter from the weather or basic sanitary facilities. Food was meager and episodic, not exceeding 8 calories per day. The prisoners often ate grass soup, suffered severely from thirst, although the Rhine flowed a couple of hundred meters from them, dysentery and other diseases. According to the memoirs of prisoners of these camps, the prisoners "died like flies", and American trucks took away mountains of corpses every day. Similar conditions reigned in the French camps.
Remagen prisoner of war camp
Sinzig prisoner of war camp
Here is how one of the American camps was described by US Army Colonels James B. Masen and Charles H. Beasley, who visited it:
"In April 1945, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, including hospital patients, amputees, women from auxiliary units and even civilians, were placed there (in the Rheinberg camp - author's note). ... One was 80, the other 9 years old. ... Constant hunger, excruciating thirst and death from dysentery were their inseparable companions. A merciless sky poured down torrents of rain on them for weeks. ... The amputees, like amphibians, with amputated limbs, slid through the mud, soaking wet and shivering. Day after day, night after night, people lay sadly on the sand under the open sky or sank into eternal sleep in their collapsing burrows."
Women's camp for German prisoners of war
At this time (April 1945), the American army in Europe had food reserves for 50 days for 5 million people at the rate of 4000 calories per day, while only 2 people were on food. A similar situation continued in the summer months. In addition, a huge amount of trophies fell into the hands of the Americans, including food and tents.
After Germany's capitulation, General Eisenhower issued the following order:
"...under no circumstances are attempts by the local population to collect food to feed the prisoners to be allowed. Those who attempt to violate this order or to pass food to the prisoners themselves expose themselves to the danger of being shot."
Former prisoner of war Hans Scharf describes a horrific incident in the Bad Kreuznach camp. A German woman with two children asked an American guard to pass a bottle of wine to her husband, who was on the other side of the barbed wire. The American soldier took the bottle, greedily drained it straight from the bottle and... shot the prisoner to death with five shots.
At a camp in Andernach, an American officer opened fire on a crowd of German women, declaring: “Target practice.” A plaque has been erected in the local church to commemorate the victims of this “training.”
One of the former prisoners of war recalled:
"Women from a nearby town brought food supplies they had collected to the camp. American soldiers piled them up, doused them with gasoline and set them on fire."
Until April 1945, most of the German prisoners of war (390) were sent to the United States, where they were used for agricultural work. With the end of military operations in the European theater, the transfer of American troops, weapons, and various types of supplies to the Pacific Ocean, where the war with Japan continued, began. Since this required a huge number of transport ships, the prisoners now remained in camps in Europe, whose resources were supposed to support them. In addition, tens of thousands of prisoners were kept on starvation rations in American concentration camps for people "subject to denazification" (in Bavaria alone, 000 people were in such camps at the end of 1945).
According to the Allied command, the existence of such concentration camps also reduced the likelihood of the emergence of a large-scale partisan movement (the so-called Werwolf) in the occupied territory.
In the first months after the end of the war, representatives of the International Red Cross were not allowed to inspect the camps, and humanitarian aid from the IRC to prisoners of war was only allowed in February 1946.
At this time, severe food shortages were felt throughout Germany, both as a result of military action and because the territories east of the Oder-Neisse, which produced 35% of Germany's food, had been ceded to Poland. Due to the lack of chemical fertilizers (the raw materials for their production were used to make ammunition), agricultural yields fell by 30%. There was a severe shortage of labor in agriculture, a significant part of which had previously been prisoners of war and foreign workers.
While in January 1945 the German civilian population received an average of 1625 calories per day, in the summer in the American zone of occupation of Germany this figure fell to 840 calories, and in Austria to 906. At the end of 1944 the diet of Dutch workers consisted of an average of 500 calories. This led to an unprecedented decision by the German authorities - they gave their consent to the release of Allied aviation food and medicine for the Dutch. And in neighboring Belgium at the same time they "ate" an average of 1450 calories. The diet of American servicemen in the European theater was 3612 calories, and that of German prisoners of war in the American occupation zone in the summer of 1945 was no more than 1200-1500.
To save the population of the western occupation zones from starvation before the harvest, at least 600 thousand tons of wheat were needed. At the same time, in 1944, the wheat harvest in France exceeded its consumption by 400 tons. The USA and Canada had huge food reserves.
On May 1, 1945, the Wehrmacht had 7 servicemen. On June 590, 000, 22 people were in American and British captivity. In the summer of 1945, 7 American concentration camps were transferred under the control of Great Britain and France. In total, in the summer of 614, prisoners of war were housed in 794 American camps. 1945 German soldiers passed through 11 French camps. At the end of 1945, 200 prisoners of war were in the hands of the British, 1600 in the hands of the French, and about 1 million in the USSR, while the Americans tried to get rid of this burden as quickly as possible, handing them over as slave labor to other Western allies or releasing them from captivity.
In 1992, the Eisenhower Center published a book by outraged opponents of James Bacque, Eisenhower and the German POWs. Facts Against Falsehood, in which they tried to refute the arguments of the Canadian publicist.
The book provides interesting, although very dubious and contradictory data on the mortality of prisoners of war of different armies. In the camps of the "humane" Americans on the territory of Germany, only from 3 to 56 thousand (according to various estimates, the official American figure is 15 people) German prisoners of war died, the mortality rate of American prisoners of war in German and Italian camps was 285%, the allies in Japanese captivity were worse - 4%, and the "hardest" fate befell the Wehrmacht soldiers in Soviet captivity, where allegedly more than two million died, the mortality rate was about 27%. And according to other data, given in this book, completely fantastic figures are given: 80 million prisoners, of whom 5,7 million died. At the same time, rumors are circulated about some "secret" prisoner of war camps. According to the data of the Main Directorate of the Military-Industrial Complex of the NKVD of the USSR, out of 2,4 German prisoners of war, 2 (733%) died.
Naturally, the actual number of deceased prisoners of war was somewhat higher, since some of them died before reaching the GUPVI camps (in front-line prisoner of war collection points, then in temporary army camps and during transport).
In the West German sources cited in the book, when calculating the number of German soldiers taken prisoner by the Red Army, they often refer to publications in the newspaper Pravda, although it is quite clear that it is always customary for the official media to overstate enemy losses. An example is the number of enemy troops encircled at Stalingrad (330 thousand people), which is still used in Russian sources, although in fact this figure did not exceed 220 thousand.
Isn't this discrepancy between the number of German prisoners of war who died in Soviet captivity and their total number one of those "Other Losses" in the Western occupation zones? In addition, most of those released from Soviet captivity returned to the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR, which hardly exchanged information with the West. The USSR's refusal to sign the Geneva Convention and cooperate with the International Red Cross also played a negative role - it was accused of concealing information about the condition of prisoners of war and their cruel treatment.
Bibliography
1. James Bacque. Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Death of German Prisoners of War at the Hands of the French and American After World War II. Toronto, 1989
2. Eisenhower and the German POWs. Facts Against Falsehood. Louisiana State University Press, 1992
3. Boris Khavkin. German prisoners of war in the USSR and Soviet prisoners of war in Germany. Statement of the problem. Sources and literature. Forum of the newest Eastern European history and culture - Russian edition. No. 1, 2006
4. Internet
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