Overview

During the final collapse of Nazi Germany (1945), between 3.4 and 5 million ^p-1 German PoWs fell into US hands. Thousands or tens of thousands would die of hunger, exposure, and neglect; many hundreds of thousands would barely survive 3-4 months of such conditions; and millions would still be imprisoned many months after the war was ended.

The German annual death rates in US hands (1%?) ^p-2 and French hands (2.6%) ^p-3 were a whole order of magnitude less than for US PoWs in Japanese hands (27%) ^p-4, German PoWs in Soviet hands (35-50%) ^p-5, or, worst of all, Soviet PoWs in German hands (60-80%). They were comparable to, but probably higher than, the annual death rate of US PoWs in German hands (1%). ^p-6

1. Hunger and excess deaths of German PoWs

2. James Bacque's worst charges rebutted by Bischof, Ambrose, et al.

Appendices: Sources

1 . Hunger and excess deaths of German PoWs

Following up on a casual remark by a German friend, I was surprised to learn how badly the U.S. (and France) treated German PoWs in 1945-48. Though not mass-murder, it was a jarring contrast to the warm image later cultivated by the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift.

Like most Americans who pay attention to WW II, I knew that German PoWs were treated reasonably well in the USA, 1942-1944. In part, this was to encourage other Germans to surrender (though few did voluntarily until the last weeks of the war), in part to encourage the German military to treat Western PoWs decently (as they did for the most part).

What I did not learn until recently, however, was that this changed radically in the last weeks of the war.

The Allied powers had decided at the highest level (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) to repudiate the Geneva Conventions, especially after the extinction of a German government able to negotiate with the Red Cross. (The Soviet Union, of course, had never signed the Geneva Conventions in the first place.)
(1) Detention after the end of war:
Under the Geneva Conventions, PoWs are to be sent home within months of the end of the war. The Allies instead decided to hold many PoWs (redesignated "disarmed enemy forces") as slave laborers, providing "labor reparations" to rebuild the damage inflicted by Nazi aggression. In the West, the demands of France were considered especially compelling -- the Germans had held millions of French PoWs as slave laborers, besides stripping France to the bone. After screening the PoWs, releasing the old men and boys of the "Volkssturm," and detaining Nazis for prosecution, the USA transferred 740,000 of the remainder (including some of those shipped back to Europe from the USA) to France . 1,000,000 German Pows remained in US camps in Germany at the beginning of 1946, but only 38,000 were still left at the beginning of 1947. The Western nations sent their last German PoWs home in 1948 (often under US pressure), while the Soviets kept theirs as late as 1956.
In the spring of 1945, when the US held 3.4 million German PoWs, Britain held 2,150,000 . Many were shipped as slave laborers to Britain, where 400,000 still remained at the end of 1946 . As a general rule, the ones in Britain were treated decently, in contrast to many in France.

(Parenthetical note: The French PoWs held by the Germans 1940-45 were treated reasonably decently, having an annual death rate comparable to British and American PoWs. In the early years of the war, their welfare helped guarantee economic cooperation by France's Vichy government; by the time Vichy's cooperation no longer mattered (1944), impending German defeat would have made mistreatment of French PoWs highly imprudent.)

(2) Reduced rations:
Under the Geneva Conventions, German PoWs should get the same ration as their Allied captors. Instead, designated as "disarmed enemy forces," they got no more rations than German civilians. Especially in April through July 1945, this meant starvation rations, though generally enough food came through to prevent mass deaths from starvation.

Hundreds of thousands of PoWs were kept for many weeks out in the open, with no shelter apart from what they might dig in the ground, and nothing to sit or lie on (above the mud and puddles) apart from their own helmets and greatcoats. This was during the spring and summer, when there was no danger of freezing; nevertheless, given Germany's cooler, wetter climate, these open barbed-wire "cages" were much more of a hardship than similar temporary expedients in North Africa and Italy.
The worst US temporary enclosures were the 16 "Rheinwiesenlager" ("Rhine meadow camps"). 557,000 PoWs were held from April to July 1945 in the six worst of these: Bad Kreuznach-Bretzenheim, Remagen-Sinzig, Rheinberg, Heidesheim, Wickrathberg, and Bьderich . The Maschke Commission would later tabulate 4,537 parish-registered deaths in these 6 worst RWLs, 774 from the others. They thought the actual death toll might be twice this, but were skeptical of an eywitness claim of 32,000 deaths.

As Bacque points out, it would be misleading to compare the perhaps 2% death rate in these RWL camps to the 1% annual death rate of US PoWs in German hands, because these camps were only open 3-4 months. Extrapolate 2% to a year and get 7% or so, which looks a lot worse.

Indifference, even hostility, of some US guards and camp officers:
Revelation of starved cadavers and mass murder in liberated concentration camps provoked hatred towards Germans in general. This was particularly notable among some (but by no means all) soldiers of Jewish background, and, with less excuse, among some new soldiers, lacking combat experience, who wanted to show toughness.

Conditions remind me of the Andersonville GA prison camp of the US Civil War -- hunger; indifferent or incompetent camp administrators who wouldn't let prisoners help themselves. (The victorious Union tried and hanged Andersonville commandant Capt. Henry Wirz in 1865.) There probably was a dire shortage of food and shelter in the spring and summer of 1945; nevertheless, I suspect that German civilians in surrounding districts could have brought in some debris suitable for dry flooring if they had been asked. Two contrasts with Andersonville: in 1945, the horrible conditions only lasted 3-4 months, and sufficient medical measures prevented mass death from disease.

Even senior leaders like Eisenhower and Clay thought the Germans deserved an experience of the hunger they had imposed on everyone else:

"I feel that the Germans should suffer from hunger and from cold as I believe such suffering is necessary to make them realize the consequences of a war which they caused."
-- Lucius D. Clay to John J. McCloy, June 29, 1945

Nevertheless, the western commanders set limits to such suffering; they always pressed for enough food to "prevent disease and unrest."

Overcrowded, poorly-managed railroad transports were a sporadic, temporary problem. At Mailly le Camp on 16 March 1945, 104 German PoWs were dead on arrival. A further 27 were found dead at Attichy. Eisenhower apologized publicly, though expressing intense irritation privately about having to apologize to the Germans about anything.

Partial excuses:

Due to economic decline in the last months and especially weeks of Nazi Germany, many PoWs were malnourished even before the Allies captured them.

Short rations for both civilians and PoWs:

The collapse of Germany in the spring 1945 was also an economic collapse, especially of food production. Nitrogen and phosphates, the ordinary components of fertilizer, had since 1943 been diverted into weapons production.

German rail transportation and food factories had been heavily bombed.

Hitler did not want Germans to survive his defeat, and gave sabotage orders accordingly. (Some such orders were defied by Albert Speer and others, but not all.)

The slave laborers who maintained German agriculture while most Germans were in the army went home. They were not replaced by returning Germans.

Contributions could no longer be taken at gunpoint from occupied France, Denmark, etc.

10-13 million of refugees fled to western Germany from the East.

The Soviets blocked the normal peacetime delivery of agricultural surpluses from eastern Germany to the west.

In 1945, food shortages were a world-wide problem, not just for the Germans. Shortages had a special impact throughout Western Europe; in the most serious case, millions in the Netherlands were on the verge of death from starvation^p-7. Also, due to the continuing war with Japan, there was a global shortage of shipping.

Even "displaced persons" (DPs), victims of Nazi deportations and slave-labor schemes (7 million in Germany, 1.6 million in Austria) , were on short rations, despite the sympathy of Allied authorities.

Bacque retorts that one reason for hunger and poverty in 1945 Germany was deliberate Allied policy, the playing out of the Morgenthau Plan, to prevent Germans from earning their keep in manufacturing and trade. The hunger did not completely disappear until the establishment of a sound currency and capitalist economy in 1948.


Lack of shelter:
All Germans were short of shelter at the end of the war. Many (40%) of dwellings had been rendered uninhabitable by bombing or fighting.

Some PoWs were kept in the awful "Rheinwiesenlager" because Allies who wanted them as laborers weren't ready to receive them.

2. James Bacque's worst charges rebutted by Bischof, Ambrose, et al.

In 1989, a Canadian publisher issued James Bacque, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II. Bacque, a Canadian novelist, charged that US General Dwight Eisenhower, motivated by personal hatred of Germans and partly abetted by the French, caused the death (by neglect or worse) of 1 million(!) German PoWs in 1945-48. Bacque's theme sold well among certain anti-American fever-swamps in Canada, and even more among German Holocaust-deniers: if Americans killed a million helpless German PoWs from idle spite, then Nazi atrocities against Jews (which the deniers claim were exaggerated anyways) don't look so uniquely horrible.

Bischof and Ambrose (and the contributors to their book) shredded Bacque's "one million" claim, highlighting crude mathematical errors and distortion of sources. Among points brought out:

1 year after the last acknowledged German PoW was released by the Soviets (1956), the West German government set up the "Scientific Commission for the History of German Prisoners of War," (sometimes called the "Maschke Commission") . They spent the next 16 years tracking the fate of German PoWs in various countries, publishing their results in 22 books. They noted Western mistreatment of German PoWs in 1945, but, studying the 6 worst camps that held 560,000 PoWs, estimated deaths from 3,000-9000, in the range of 1%.
Bacque was aware of the Maschke studies, and dismissed them as a cover-up arranged between Cold War allies. He also claimed they were not released to the public at large. A limited edition (431 copies) was sold primarily to universities and research libraries.

The German Red Cross in 1974 reported 41,000 missing who were last known on the Western Front. Even if one assumes they all died in US PoW camps, and adds the 15,000 PoW dead listed by the US provost marshal , that yields a maximum of 56,000, 1.1% of the peak number of PoWs held by the US.

Where were the 1,000,000 bodies?

For no logical reason, Bacque reduced the generally accepted death toll of PoWs taken by the Soviets by 1,000,000 while adding the same figure to the US account.
Before one is too quick to blame the Soviets for their gruesome death toll (up to 50%), however, one should note that the Nazis, with greater economic resources than the Soviets, allowed a death toll of Soviet PoWs of 60% or more.

Eisenhower was under careful supervision by both the US and British governments, and could not have carried out a murderous conspiracy without their knowledge. His staff included many British officers, yet Bacque, for whatever personal motives, chose to claim the British were innocent.

Nevertheless, setting aside Bacque's inflated numbers and apparent vendetta against Eisenhower, there were enough truthful individual horror stories about the "Rheinwiesenlager" (USA) and French captivity to give his work some plausibility, especially to those coming across such information for the first time.

(Closing note) So how wicked was this mistreatment of German PoWs?

On a magnitude scale of 1 (most wicked) to 5 (least wicked), I would rate


The Holocaust	1
Nazi atrocities against Polish and Soviet civilians and PoWs	2
Anglo-American firebomb raids on German cities	3
Needless mortality and suffering of German PoWs	4

Reasons for rating it less than the other crimes include:
(1) The excess deaths numbered in thousands or low tens of thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.
(2) The serious American misconduct was temporary, largely ended by August 1945.

Appendix: Sources

Some sources cited by Bischof and Ambrose

Of 22 volumes published by the "Wissenschaftliche Kommission fьr deutsche Kriegsgefangenengeschichte" (hereafter WKDKGG) ("Scientific Commission for the History of German PoWs"), aka the "Maschke Commission" after lead scholar Erich Maschke:
Bцhme, Kurt, Die deutsche Kriegsgefangenen in Amerikanischer Hand: Europa (WKDKGG, Vol. 10, part 2) ("German Prisoners of War in American Captivity: Europe"), Munich, 1973.

Bцhme, Kurt, Die deutsche Kriegsgefangenen in Franzцsischer Hand (WKDKGG, Vol. 13) ("German Prisoners of War in French Captivity"), Munich, 1973.

James Bacque, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II, Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd., Toronto Canada, 1989; cloth 248 pp.
(The revisionist book disputed by Bischof, Ambrose, et al.)

Table of contents copyright (c) 1992 by Lousiana State University Press.

Section	title	author	page number
	Introduction	Gьnter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose	1
I	The United States and the German PoWs
	Eisenhower and the Germans	Stephen E. Ambrose	29
	The Diplomatic and Political Context of the PoW Camps Tragedy	Brian Loring Villa	52
	A Question of Numbers	Albert E. Cowdrey	78
II	Germany in 1945 and German POW Historiography
	Food Shortages in Germany and Europe, 1945-1948	James F. Tent	95
	German Historiography, the War Losses, and the Prisoners of War	Rьdiger Overmans	127
	Some Reflections on the Maschke Commission	Rolf Steininger	170
III	Conspiratorial History
	A British Variety of Pseudohistory HSC note: Analogy to Bacque's attack on Eisenhower? Nikolai Dmitrievich Tolstoy-Miloslavsky (aka Count Nikolai Tolstoy), in The Minister and the Massacres (1986), exaggerated the guilt in "Operation Keelhaul" of Brigadier A. R. W. "Toby" Low (later Lord Aldington), General Sir Charles Keightley, and Harold Macmillan. ("Operation Keelhaul" was the forcible deportation of Slavic DPs and PoWs to Communist territory.) Low/Aldington successfully sued Tolstoy for libel in a British court (1989), not defending "Operation Keelhaul," but disputing that it was a secretive plot by Macmillan, Keightley, and himself. Some on the Right still dispute the verdict, noting that British courts are far more accommodating to libel plaintiffs than US courts.	Thomas M. Barker	183
	Bacque and Historical Evidence	Gьnter Bischof	199
Appendices
A	Report on the Food Situation in Western Germany, 1945	(Official report to SHAEF)	235
B	Volumes of the Maschke Commission [reports]		241

p-1: BA, pp. 5, 145.

p-2: BA, p. 92.

p-3: BA, p. 155.

p-4: BA, p. 19.

p-5: BA, p. 18.

p-6: BA, p. 19.

p-7:
See, for example,
Van der Zee, Henri A. (Antony), The Hunger Winter: Occupied Holland 1944-1945, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE and London (UK), 1998.
The worst of the famine was in the densely populated coastal area around Amsterdam (about 4 million inhabitants), as declining Nazi military fortunes (and Nazi indifference) cut the urban Dutch off from agricultural areas in eastern Netherlands. According to Van der Zee (p. 304), the famine winter of 1945 saw an increase in the death rate from 1944's normal 10 per 1000 to 15.3 per 1000, meaning 18,000 excess deaths.

Further information:

On 2008/1221, I noticed extensive references in a Wikipedia article about "disarmed enemy forces.":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disarmed_Enemy_Forces