That was Kolditz Strafelager. Pat Reid wrote several books about it, which have been collected as The Colditz Story. Although the movie ** The Great Escape** said that Staag Luft Drei as the place where they put “all the bad eggs”, Colditz really was the place for the hard cases. They had a number of extremely clever escapes. They made a movie, called, I think “The Colditz Story” aout it, starring John Mills. The TV movie The Birdmen was a highly romanticized and fictionalized story about the glidrer they built in Kolditz. A recent episode of **Nova[/B was about them rebuilding the Colditz glider and seeing if it actually would flu (the camp was liberated before they had a chance to try it). The reconstruced glider Did.
One point first:
To call the Jews “prisoners” in a thread about POW’s is a bit misleading. One million Jewish children were murdered by the Germans. It seems bizarre to talk about them in the same light as POW’s.
Now, with respect to the treament of allied POW’s, I’ll point out that some were sent to concentration camps. This site mentions how 168 allied airmen were sent to Buchenwald. The same site also sheds some light on the question of whether Jewish POW’s were treated differently than Gentiles.
Several posts intimate that the Germans didn’t treat the Russian prisoners well and that the Germans really, really didn’t want to become Russian prisoners. This leads naturally to the question, how did the Russians treat their German POWs?
No quarter was given on any side. Example: Out of 91.000 German POWs from Stalingrad, about 6.000 lived to see the end of the war.
S. Norman
That was Kolditz Strafelager. Pat Reid wrote several books about it, which have been collected as The Colditz Story. Although the movie ** The Great Escape** said that Staag Luft Drei as the place where they put “all the bad eggs”, Colditz really was the place for the hard cases. They had a number of extremely clever escapes. They made a movie, called, I think “The Colditz Story” aout it, starring John Mills. The TV movie The Birdmen was a highly romanticized and fictionalized story about the glidrer they built in Kolditz. A recent episode of **Nova[/B was about them rebuilding the Colditz glider and seeing if it actually would flu (the camp was liberated before they had a chance to try it). The reconstruced glider Did. **
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Also check out Douglas Bader’s Reach For the Sky. RAF pilot with both legs amputated before he flew and was shot down during the Battle of Britan. He was interred in Colditz, and all the POW’s did was try to make booze and escape. I read it years and years ago.
I’m too lazy to come up with the exact page numbers, but I have just finished Steven Ambrose’s “Citizen Soldiers”, about the Allied invasion of Europe. He does cite a story where Jewish POWs were separated and sent to work camps.
He also cites stories about how German POWs sent to the Deep South were shocked about how badly African Americans were treated there. Interesting perspective . . .
Oh, and I also remember hearing where Allied POWs including Pele, Michael Caine, and Sylvester Stallone created a soccer team and played the German national team.
But I would assume that was an atypical experience.
I have a relative (now deceased) who was in the prison camp that was the sight of “The Great Escape.” He was a fairly high ranking officer, so was instrumental in some of the planning. He stayed behind, and was apparently not well treated by the Germans afterward. He was not real sympathetic to the Germans, and in particular the guards at his camp.
Oh, and “Hogan’s Heros” really teed him off – making light of a pretty nasty experience of his life.
That being said, I think there is no question the Japanese were far worse captors. Just look at the Bataan Death March. Or the use of Allied prisoners for slave labor. I don’t think any Germans were hanged for war crimes around treatment of prisoners of war (as long as you don’t count the Holocaust as treatment of prisoners of war). I’m pretty sure quite a few Japanese were.
Go here for information on what the American camps were like here in the U.S.
The college I attended is a small college in the plateau area of Tennessee. Up until the 1970’s it was an all male college. When the U.S. entered the Second World War so many of the students joined the armed services that the college was closed down. Some German troops were kept on campus and I knew a professor that had taken them on work details. He liked to act like he didn’t like Germans and had given them a hard time. He still worked around the campus in the afternoons keeping up a garden area. He would use students and this is where I heard his stories about the German POW’s.
In fact, the Germans did use Allied prisoners for slave labor. Thousands of Soviet POWs were shipped to Norway and forced to construct roads under horrible conditions. Many died. The E6 highway crossing the Arctic Circle still follows much the same route as the road the POWs built; a little south of the Circle stands a memorial to the men who suffered and died to build it.
I agree, though, that for the most part the Germans treated their POWs better than the Japanese… although talk about damning with faint praise… 
I went to college for three years at Western Illinois University in Macomb, IL. I heard that more than a few German POWs wound up in west-central IL (and presumably other rural areas throughout the US) and made to work on farms.
The Germans’ treatment of POWs from the western allies differs greatly - for racial & ideological reasons - from their treatment of POWS from the USSR. According to Richard Overy’s recent book, Russia’s War, out of six million Russian POWs around 4 million died in captivity. And as Spiny Norman mentioned, this brutal treatment was reciprocated by the Russians.
The conditions for officers were better than those of the enlisted men ( or “other ranks”). Under the terms of the Geneva convention the Germans were allowed to put the non officers to work , as long as it was not directly helping the German war effort. These prisoner workers were just one step up the ladder from the slave workers and suffered almost as much. Because of the heavy work invlolved they suffered because of poor nutrition. Some British troops, who had been captured in 1940 endured five years of this treatment. In comparison many of the officers had a cushy life and even had their batmen and ordelies to wait on them.Most of the WW2 POW films concentrate on the officer class and ignore the “poor bloody soldiers”.
The reconstructed glider is currently on display at the Imperial War Museum in London.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Malmedy, where 81 American POW’s were massacred. It is my impression, however, that that incident was the exception rather than the rule. One could also make a case that American troops had a tendency not to take many Japanese prisoners either, but given the kamikaze threat it is arguable whether or not that policy was justified.
No argument there; I just happen to remember Malmedy. I haven’t done much research on this particular aspect, but I suspect similar incidents were far more frequent on the Russian Front… and possibly close to SOP for some German units.
My uncle Ray was a POW in a German camp and his hair fell out and his weight plummeted. Bear in mind he was 22 years old and in the best of health when this befell him. His youngest sister prayed to St. Joseph that if he ever came home alive and she ever got married she would name her first son Joseph in honor of St. Joseph. Ray did survive. And even though his sister hadn’t even met her future husband yet, when her first son was born she named him Joseph. I am that son. My question: Who were the first US POWs in WWII? Not those captured by our good friends the Japanese but those captured by the Germans.
They got windblown and rained on?
Don’t treat POWs badly or their zombies come back to haunt You…
I realize this is a zombie thread but still…
Treatment of POWs ran the entire gamut. In some battles there were incidents where American POWs were executed immediately. As mentioned above, enlisted soldiers could be subject to treatment only marginally better than a concentration camp.
On the other hand, a captured aviator was likely to be afforded every luxury. Some were treated extremely well, and treated to German pubs. Obviously, it was all in an effort to lower their defenses and loosen their tongues, but still…
So the correct answer is that the treatment of an American POW depended entirely on the circumstances of rank, branch, time, location, etc.