My anecdote: My big, strapping, over six foot tall uncle spent the last couple years of the war in a German camp. Toward the end they weren’t fed much, with the result he was carried from the camp on a stretcher, weighing about 90 pounds. He did recover (it took several years) and lived into his 80’s.
Hate the Germans? Not collectively - his own father was a German immigrant to the US. But he sure as hell had a grudge against some of them. Then again, towards the end the camp guards were starving, too, and the only reason they weren’t over run by the prisoners was because the prisoners were just that little bit worse off. They offered no resistance when the allies arrived largely because they weren’t physically able to fight anymore and the allies had food.
How POW’s were treated depended on many factors - where and when they were captured, where they were sent, rank, who ran the POW camp… Same on the other side. The experience of a German POW sent to a Russian camp was markedly different from one sent to a camp in Iowa.
This may be the most delayed nitpick ever… Reach for the Sky while *about * Douglas Bader , was written by the same Paul Brickhill who authored * The Great Escape *.
Per a book I read from my local library, Jewish US POWs who were captured around and after the Battle of the Bulge --they’d be mostly ground soldiers (infantry, artillery, etc.) instead of airmen-- were segregated, ill-treated and sent to one of the notorious camps, maybe Buchenwald. It was easy for the Germans to sort them out from the other POWs because the US issued dog tags had a “J” for Jewish (and “C” for Catholic, “P” for Protestant, in case one was badly wounded and needed a clergyman). But the Germans didn’t always pay attention to the tagging, as they’d sometimes ask the POWs to self-identify, and one Jewish prisoner remembers being told by his non-Jewish peers to tell them he was anything other than Jewish. Sometimes the Gemans just decided who was Jewish based on looks, probably supposing that at least some POWs knew to lie about it. In at least one case a Hispanic-American was deemed “Jewish-looking” and sent away with the actual Jews. I believe he was in the medical corps orignially.
I suppose that since Germany had pretty well gone down the toilet by the end of 1944 (Battle of the Bulge time), the hard core Nazis had by then managed to override the call that the Heer and Luftwaffe had made earlier in the war as to treating all western POWs IAW the Geneva convention.
This raises the general, and fascinating, horrific point (if I understand you correctly) that when the war was surely lost, and the bare chance that Western forgiveness of their crimes might be entertained, Nazi barbarity was redoubled. After Hungary’s alliance with Germany became unreliable, it was invaded in March 1944. By the end of the war some 600,000 Jews were shipped to their death, often by diverting rolling stock and troop transport logistics of the non-Ss military command.
The Germans checked if you were circumcised and considered its presence de facto proof that you were Jewish (since circumcision for anything other than religious consideration was very rare until after the War).
Just to be clear, there were also incidents where German POWs captured by Americans were killed. I read a memoir written in the 50’s or early 60s where a company commander related sending a couple guys to take some German POWs on the 20-minute walk back to the Battalion HQ. Guys showed back up 10 minutes later, alone. A few moments of uncomfortable silence, everybody went back about there business. Author briefly mused about War Crimes, and went on to the next incident.
IIRC the TV version of Band of Brothers has a similar incident, though it leaves open what really happened.
I live in Kansas, right in the middle of the US, and there were German POW’s here in town during WWII. I don’t think they had it too bad, some were used as farm workers.
My great uncles, brothers of my maternal grandfather, were farmers west of town and the German guys would be trucked out to their place during the day to work. One of the reasons they were sent there was because my great uncles spoke fluent German, having spoken it in the home as young children. One of my great grandfather’s was from Germany, a draft dodger who lit out for greener pastures in the 1880’s.
US soldiers killed many SS “guards” when they liberated Dachau. The Wiki doesn’t have the quotation of General Patton when he was informed, but it was more or less “they deserved it.”
Here’s an interview with a German soldier captured in north Africa. He talks about how much he wanted to be captured by Americans rather than British. So much so that they escaped from their British captors to go surrender to Americans.
My Dad was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and spent the remainder of the war as a POW. He didn’t talk about it much. He spent Christmas day on a boxcar being shipped to the camp. He mentioned only having turnip soup to eat, but they knew the Germans were eating pretty much the same thing. He said when the area was undergoing Allied bombing they would be allowed out to take what cover they could and then would return to the camp because there was no where else to go. The guard would also take their pants from them to ensure their return to camp. The only other thing he waid was that all the guards were old men and young boys.
You think wrong, my friend. Stalag 13 has *never *had one successful escape. (See the documentary referenced above, personal eyewitness report from camp Kommandant, etc… for cite.)
This is thirdhand, but a friend’s father was an infantryman in WWII. When about to be captured, he and other Jewish soldiers used rocks to bash out the “J” on their dog tags…which of course was a giveaway. However, they received the same more or less decent treatment as the other American POWs in their camp.