Allied treatment of German/Japanese POW's

[KarlGauss]

In this thread, on German treatment of Allied POW’s in WWII, mention was made of the massacres of American and Canadian prisoners by the Germans. And, although not germane to that thread, the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese on American, British, and Canadian POW’s (among others) are infamous.

I am curious to know if there are any verified accounts of Allied massacres of Axis prisoners. I feel pretty confident in stating that Allied treatment of their POW’s was generally good and in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Still, were their (m)any exceptions?

[Whack-a-Mole]

Frankly I have no idea or stats to cite.

My impression is that once a prisoner made it to an American concentration camp they weren’t too bad off.

That said I wouldn’t doubt that there were a whole bunch of people summarily executed or worse by American soldiers before they ever reached a camp.

Again, I have no cites for any of this…just a guess. However, being war, I think it’s safe to say all sorts of nastiness occurred from all sides.

[Slithy_Tove]

Admittedly cursory…

German prisoners who surrendered before VE day were shipped back to North America and had it pretty good. It was easier to ship one living body west over the Atlantic than to ship continuous food supplies east to maintain the POW’s in Europe.

Sadly, Germans who surrendered after VE day on their western front, expecting more lenient treatment than what the vengant Russians offered, faced deliberate stavation. Eisenhower’s name has been blackened by the accusation of vindictivness, but the facts show that he could either feed the civillians of Western Europe, or the army of its vanquished oppressor, but not both. The figure bandied about is approx. 60,000 starved fedlgraub (German G.I.'s)

As far as Germans killed while offering to surrender, Paul Fussell recounts a situation of this in his memoir “Doing Battle,” where a ravine of Germans were supprised and gunned down by a group of jovial Americans. I’ve never been in such a situation, so I’ll make no judgements as to where the line is drawn between slaughter and victory on easy terms.

[Boyo_Jim]

I’m sure a lot of German and Japanese soldiers never lived long enough to make it to prison camps. Frinstance I’ve read many places that snipers were pretty routinely killed out of hand, and SS troops as well.

The closest I’ve heard to this in an American camp, was the execution of 6 U-boat sailors for killing another German who ratted them out. Hardly counts.

I wouldn’t be surprised surprized if there was some Attica-like event, a riot or a breakout that ended up with killing lots of prisoners. But I’ve never heard of it.

In the end of the opening combat sequence of Saving Private Ryan, you see a few instances of Germans being shot without being allowed to surrender. I imagine this kind of thing happened pretty often too. When is the battle over? And you can hardly take a prisoner when the next guy along the trench is still shooting.

However, once a POW made it into the camp system, I don’t think any side ROUTINELY killed prisoners. After all, putting them in the camps also put them on prisoners lists, and subject to international oversight, lame as it was. That’s not to say they were safe; the Russians and Japanese let large numbers starve to death, and executed others for one petty reason or another. The Germans treated British and American prisoners significantly better that Russian ones.

Is mass slow starvation a massacre?

[Little_Nemo]

Another controversial policy in the allied treatment of Axis POW’s was the decision to ship all POW’s back to their nations of origin after the war. This seemingly benign policy was bitterly opposed by the hundreds of thousands of Russians or other Eastern Europeans who had fought on the Axis side and justifiably feared reprisals when they (and their families) were returned to Soviet controlled territory.

[Doug_Bowe]

I recall a story about a local Lutheran Church (Zion Lutheran, FTR) holding services for German POW’s during WWII.
You don’t hear much about POW stories in the U.S.

[casdave]

There are plenty of allegations with claim and counter claim about the treatment of Germen soldiers, post surrender, but this site seems to be more objective than some

http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html

from which

REMAGEN
After the capture of the Remagen Bridge, the US Army hastily erected dozens of Prisoner of War cages around the bridge-head. The camps were simply open fields surrounded by concertina wire. Those at the Rhine Meadows were situated at Remagen, Bad Kreuznach, Andernach, Buderich, Rheinbach and Sinzig. The German prisoners were hopeful of good treatment from the GIs but in this they were sadly disappointed. Herded into the open spaces like cattle, some were beaten and mistreated. No tents or toilets were supplied. The camps became huge latrines, a sea of urine from one end to the other. They had to sleep in holes in the ground which they dug with their bare hands. In the Bad Kreuznach cage, 560,000 men were interned in an area that could only comfortably hold 45,000. Denied enough food and water, they were forced to eat the grass under their feet and the camps soon became a sea of mud. After the concentration camps were discovered, their treatment became worse as the GIs vented their rage on the hapless prisoners. In the five camps around Bretzenheim, prisoners had to survive on 600-850 calories per day. With bloated bellies and teeth falling out, the died by the thousands. During the two and a half months (April-May, 1945) when the camps were under American control, a total of 18,100 prisoners died from malnutrition, disease and exposure. This extremely harsh treatment at the hands of the Americans resulted in the deaths of over 50,000 German prisoners in the Rhine Meadows camps, in the months just before and after the war ended.
It must however be borne in mind that with the best will in the world it proved almost impossible to care for the prisoners under the strict terms of the Geneva Convention. The task of guarding these prisoners, numbering around 920,000, fell to the 40,000 men of the US 106th. Infantry Division. The Remagen cage was set up to accommodate 100,000 men but ended up with twice that number. On the first afternoon 35,000 prisoners were counted through the gate. About 10,000 of these required urgent medical attention which in most cases was completely absent. All roads leading to the camps were clogged with hundreds of trucks bringing in even more prisoners, sent to the rear by the advancing 9th.US Army. Tourists, cruising down the Rhine today can pick out a small memorial and plaque built on the site of the former POW cage. In the Remagen cemetery there are 1,200 graves and at Bad Kreuznach, 1,000 graves.

---

THE BIG LIE Just how many German POWs died in Allied camps?. For over forty years we have been told that many hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had died in Soviet prison camps while at the same time keeping quiet about the number of prisoners who had died in American, French and British camps. In 1997, around 1.1 million German soldiers were still officially listed as missing. According to the recently opened Soviet archives, which have been proved to be extremely precise and detailed, the Red Army captured 2,389,560 German soldiers. Of these, 423,168 died in captivity. In October, 1951, the West German government stated in the United Nations that 1.1 million soldiers had not returned home. In other words, we were led to believe they had died in Soviet camps. If we subtract the proven number of deaths in Soviet camps from the missing in Germany we arrive at the figure of around 677,000. Where are these men?. They must have been interned by the western Allies, the greatest majority being held in American and French camps where they died in their hundreds of thousands through deliberate starvation, disease and hard work.

---

The standards set by the Geneva Convention were, in most cases, totally ignored by the Americans and French in relation to their treatment of German prisoners-of-war. The French deliberately starved many of their POWs in order to force them to join the French Foreign Legion. Thousands of Legionaires who fought in the Viet Nam conflict were Germans handed over by the Americans to the French in 1945/46 to work as slave labourers in the rebuilding of France’s war damaged cities. Conditions in the French camps were just as bad if not worse than in the American camps. It is estimated that at least 167,000 German soldiers died in French captivity between 1945 and 1948.

[geepee]

There was a story on TV Channel 4 called ‘Hell in the pacific’ Japanese troops and airmen were sometimes captured
from nearby battles and taken to Australian camps , they were filmed playing baseball all day and eating pretty good. They interviewed a survivor from(japanese) from this camp and asked him about the experiences which were baseball
and good food , but he also told about thier obligation to the emperor where they one night tried to escape and or commit suicide.

[minty_green]

casdave, I would seriously question the objectivity of a site that concludes 677,000 German soldiers became Allied prisoners and died at Allied hands because 1.1 million were eventually found missing and only 423,000 died in Russian hands. That’s not logic–that’s an agenda.

[galen_ubal]

FWIW, I can recall my dad talking about German POW’s working the fields in central Michigan. I don’t recall him saying anything about them being mistreated or appearing malnourished.

[Yeah]

My father spent some time in France after D-Day and saw a lot of things that disgusted him, one being the murder of German POWs by GIs during a forced march.