How Did The Germans Treat American POW's in WWII?

Factual Questions
61

Camp Ellis, about 15 miles from Macomb. In fact, the POW’s were supposed to have been happy to be allowed work on the farms, and they even became friendly with their American 3rd cousins. Many refused repatriation (smartly) after the war, married a farm girl and helped replace the soldiers lost in battle during the war.

The German soldiers there were treated properly and had plenty of food, warm quarters for winter, and enough clothes. They lived about as well as the surrounding farmers.

I honestly don’t think most Americans knew how badly their prisoner of war relatives had it in the control of Japan or Germany, or things might have been harsher for their Camp Ellis prisoners.

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:slight_smile:

63

Interesting (zombie) thread.

I’ve read that German POWs in the Jim Crow South were better-treated than black U.S. servicemen. Awful irony.

Anyone seen Hart’s War? Is it any good? Is there any record of actual courts-martial or other disciplinary proceedings among Allied POWs?: Hart's War - Wikipedia

Some other links that may be of interest:

64

Re American shooting of German prisoners. Two things. One, I remember reading a book on the Italian campaign years ago that mentioned this happening. As I recall (the book is a semi-fictionalized account of Anzio), the incident actually occurred along the Gustav Line during an attack, and part of the “reasoning” had to do with not wanting to slow the attack and peel off valuable manpower to guard the prisoners. This kind of thing happened in both world wars, and is indeed a “war is hell” kind of phenomenon.

Two, as in the Band of Brothers incident but not made clear there, U.S. soldiers by the time of Normandy had come to appreciate the nasty reputation of S.S. soldiers, who would often shoot their prisoners. As a result, S.S. prisoners were often treated worse than other German POWs, and were indeed often shot outright.

65

One of my uncles was a POW in Germany. He said that at first it wasn’t so bad . . . until they discovered that he was Jewish. He got shipped to one of the extermination camps, and was treated exactly like the other Jews. He once showed me a photo of himself, about a week prior to liberation, and he was basically a skeleton covered by skin.

66

I’ll have to look around for the title but I read an interesting book about allied air crews who bailed out of or crash landed in Switzerland. The Swiss per treaty, would then intern them in camps or facilities of there own.

Now the movies make Switzerland out to be some sort of safe zone and sometimes it was. But sometimes it wasnt. Alot depended upon what section of Switzerland you were in. If you happened to be in the German area, it wasnt good and they sometimes handed them over to the Germans. In other areas they were treated better. This was partly because that during the beginning of the war there was a real fear Germany would win and the Swiss wanted to be part of the winning side.

Note - When a POW was returned he got his regular pay plus a special POW pay. However those interned in Switzerland didnt get that.

Also early in the war it was feared, especially among British, that some air crews were deliberately trying a kind of AWOL and were deliberately landing their planes in Switzerland claiming mechanical problems when in truth, they were hoping to sit out the war in a Swiss chalet. Also Germans were often allowed to go in and haul away any allied aircraft.

As the war progressed and Germany began to lose things began to change. The Swiss began to refuse to cooperate with the Germans and treated allied POWs better.

One bad incident. An American was put in with some Russian POWs and was raped by the Russians.

67

Forgive this comment on “The Great Escape”

I think it was wrong what they tried to do. They were staying in about the best camp and with the best conditions one could have hoped for. The officers in charge of the escape must have know many of the men would be shot but they were arrogant and wanted to do so anyways. Also they knew the war would be over soon and they would win so their escape played no part in helping the allies win.

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Rather than anecdotes, one can look at statistics. The former Veterans Administration researcher Charles Stenger counted 93,941 US military personnel who became German POW’s of whom 1,121 died in captivity. The corresponding figures of US military prisoners of the Japanese were 27,465 of whom 11,107 died captivity. Other quoted figures are relatively similar. Being held captive by the Germans as an American might have been unpleasant but was unlikely to result in death. Captivity by the Japanese for Americans OTOH was quite likely to result in death.

The bulk of US POW’s of the Japanese were those captured at Bataan. So their treatment involved the specific events of the Bataan Death March, and they were held for a long time in either unhealthy climates or on perilous sea voyages (due to US submarines) to Japan or Manchuria later in the war. OTOH the bulk of US prisoners of the Germans were either airmen captured during 1944, when the scale of the US air effort was much larger than previously, though loss rates were lower; or ground troops captured at the Battle of the Bulge which represented the bulk of US ground prisoners for the whole European war (a couple of 1,000 were captured at Kasserine in Tunisia in February 1943; there was no other significant single ‘bag’ of US ground prisoners in the European war till the opening stages of the Ardennes Counteroffensive, ~15,000 captured). However even accounting for those differences it’s obvious from all data statistical and anecdotal that Japanese treatment of US prisoners was much worse than German on average, with known exceptions where the Germans executed US prisoners, put them in general concentration camps, etc.

However as is well known the survival rate of Soviet prisoners in German hands was far lower, only in the range of 50-some % survived.

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I just finished Philip Short’s A Taste for Intrigue, a 2013 biography of French President Francois Mitterrand. Mitterrand was serving in the French Army at the outbreak of WWII, and was captured and sent with many of his comrades to a POW camp in Ziegenhain, Germany, in August 1940. Short writes on p. 52:

French prisoners, like British and Americans, were treated in accordance with the Geneva conventions. For Russians and Serbs, it was different. When they began arriving in the camp, Mitterrand remembered, “they were so exhausted, starved and ill-treated that we tried to smuggle them food. The Germans forbade [it]… and beat with rifle butts those of us who disobeyed… It soon became quite usual to find corpses on the pathways through the camp…”

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Not so. Americans and British both were almost universally circumcised for the first half of the 20th century.

cite

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Anyone?

And here’s the story of a heroic American POW sergeant who told the Germans, “We are all Jews”: http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/21/europe/us-pow-holocaust-hero/

72

My father was a POW, and although he didn’t give any great detail about exactly what it was like, it was clear that by and large the Germans treated British, like other prisoners of the western Allies, more or less according to the Geneva Conventions. The camps were visited (not frequently) by representatives of “the Protecting Power” (Switzerland in the case of the UK) and of the Red Cross. To judge by the reports I’ve read in our National Archives on the camps where I know my father was, the Swiss were rather more inclined to believe what they were told by the German commandants, and the Red Cross rather more sceptical and inclined to report complaints by the prisoners (for example, they reported on complaints that anti-aircraft guns had been installed within the perimeter of one camp, and the concern among prisoners in another camp about the way one named British POW was trying to get himself made their “man of confidence” or authorised representative vis-à-vis the Germans - IIRC the name was that of a known prewar Fascist, which the British authorities might well have picked up on receipt of the report).

The Geneva Conventions allowed for “other ranks” to be put to work on civilian (non-military) work, so my father was for a time working in railway marshalling yards in Munich and later in a coal mine in Poland. German and Italian POWs in the UK were frequently put to work on farms, often with minimal supervision, and were held on to for some years after the war (and quite a few were given the option to stay in Britain, and took it up). Officers weren’t required to work.

Food and boredom were a constant problem, but they did get mail and parcels of food, clothing, books, games, musical instruments and records and the like. But these could be intermittent depending on the fortunes of war affecting transport, not to mention the whims of the authorities and individual martinets in the administration. If, for example, it was found (as on occasion it was) that the materials in parcels were being used to smuggle in escape maps and similar equipment, that could trigger off group punishments, as could escapes and other infringements of rules (hence the highest level authorisation for the group escapees from Sagan to be shot as commandos on recapture). And as the war went bad for Germany, so the civil administration went from bad to worse, for POWs as for civilians, and food supplies suffered particularly badly towards the end of the war - the final report of the Red Cross on my father’s last camp in Bavaria in early 1945 is particularly eye-opening about this.

My father always attributed some part of his later problems with his spine and vertebrae to having been hit with a rifle butt by a German guard; and on his return to the UK he reported to the war crimes investigators on an incident happening to someone else, where a guard had got into a scuffle and punch-up with a POW and shot him, the bullet passing straight through and also killing another prisoner behind him.

But there was nothing like the deliberate starvation, indifference to disease and maltreatment, excessive forced labour, and so on, that the Germans applied to Soviet prisoners or the Japanese to just about all their prisoners.

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The Russians had not signed the Geneva Convention. I’ve read that only 10% of German prisoners taken by the Russians returned home. Is that true?

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The worst was the case of Chinese POWs held by Japan. Only 56 were released at the end of the war.

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As a contrast, I read a memoir several years ago in which a soldier (American? British?) was captured by the Italians and sent to one of their camps. They were not maltreated for the most part and apparently security was lax in all their camps so many prisoners were able to escape. Most went to the mountains and worked on farms. It was an open secret amongst the farmers.

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IIRC, Kurt Vonnegut was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and much of his experiences for a part of the SF novel “Slaughterhouse Five” - the name of his POW camp, because they were kept in underground meat lockers of an old slaughterhouse in Dresden; which saved their lives, since it was deep underground.

The book starts with him remarking about sitting around the table with his buddies swapping war reminiscences, and his wife says “why don’t you write a book about it?” The movie does an interesting job of showing the contrast of before and after the bombing. He does not suggest their treatment was harsh, except some incidents I assume are based on real life - one fellow has his boots stolen by German captors during the Battle of the Bulge and eventually dies of gangrene from frozen feet; another finds an intact Delft statuette in the rubble exactly like the one he gave his wife back home; he puts it in his pocket and is immediately shot for looting. An American turncoat on a visit tries to persuade the POW’s that the Communist are the real enemy and to join him fighting with the Germans on the eastern front.

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This is completely incorrect for Britain - it has never been anything like universal. The best figures for the pre-WW2 period seem to be from a survey of recruits to the forces (during a period of conscription) done in the early 50s - so boys born in the 30s - which showed a around a third were circumcised.

78

One of my favourite books is François Cavanna’s autobio of his time in the STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire, French civilians who got shipped to Germany for de facto slave work). He did mention that the food was barely above sustenance level (typically watery soup with a couple kohlrabi or similar tuber floating in it, and mayyybe some weird, chemical and bitter gravy on top) and most of them supplemented with Red Cross or family care packages. In terms of mistreatment, he roughly identified three types of guards and SchuPos (schutzpolitzei, soldiers affected to street police) :

  • old guys, often WW1 veterans. Those were generally nice enough, often compassionate and/or lazy in their tasks
  • wounded from either front. Typically also kinda cool, in a “fuck this fucking war” kind of way ; but some could be fucked up
  • young ones who hadn’t made the cut for “real” soldier for one reason or another. Those were the worst. Many True Believers, and even more gummi-happy assholes (the gummi was THE discipline tool. A length of firehose filled with solid rubber or lead).

Incidentally, their workcamp was right next to a camp for Russian POWs, including women & other civilians. They had it much, *much *worse according to him… and yet the women once dared to stage a strike in protest against the food situation (they only got the broth from the soup, not even the lone veggie).
It didn’t end well for the strike leaders. The Gestapo was immediately notified.

79

I seem to remember my father said he hated kohlrabi (not that it’s particularly common in the UK anyway), and he wasn’t too keen on black bread when it started to make an appearance as something exotic in health shops and delicatessens. And he insisted on the fattiest ham.

But they did occasionally get things like canned condensed milk in Red Cross parcels, and developed the habit of cooking it, which he occasionally tried at home well into my childhood. The end results were rather like the Argentinian dulce de leche.

80

I believe so. The Russians hung on to the last of them till 1955 or thereabouts, and there may have been a handful or so who lived on in the Soviet Union.