How were non-Slavic soldiers treated in German POW camps during WWII?

Factual Questions
1

TMC showed The Great Escape this afternoon, and while I’m not dumb enough to base my impressions of history off of fiction my uncertainty inspired by that show was enough to lead to this thread.

So, how well did the Germans treat their captives lucky enough not to be Slavic? For the Russians and Ukranians and so on it was a living hell regardless of who got you first, but the Nazis didn’t seem to have special racial theories about English-speaking folk. The movie (not a good source, probably) showed the captives living in conditions not much worse than a regular barracks and significantly better than a chain gang back home. They weren’t even making munitions, and I think they mentioned the Red Cross dropping by.

What if they found out (or decided) an American, for example, was Jewish or otherwise ‘racially inferior’?

(As a secondary question, were any other groups of POWs singled out for harsh treatment? I kind of touched on Jews already, but I don’t know if I’ve missed anyone.)

2

[del]Must not make Hogan’s Heroes joke. :rolleyes: [/del]

3

My uncle was a soldier in WWII and was captured by the Nazis after Italy surrendered in 8 September 1943 and was detained in Germany. He would not talk very often about that time but sometimes he made some vague desciptions; I reckon he didn’t want to shock us.

Apparently he and other Italian prisoners were starved: he said he was lucky the Americans arrived when they did because he would not have survived much longer. They did not send people to the gas chambers, however: Jewish soldiers had been kicked out of the Army long before that. They shot a few officers, though.

Italy was condidered “a country of traitors” because of the surrender, so that might explain why they were so harsh. Just because, when the Nazis were, metaphorically speaking, saying “Ve belong dead” and play the Ridfe of the Valkyres, we had enough sense to kick the Fascists out and get out of Mussolini’s war. Well, actually the story is much more complex…

4

I have an uncle who was shot down over Hungary in late August, 1944. We has “interrogated” heavily for a couple weaks then sent to a Luftwaft Stalag. When the Russian Army closed in that winter, the airmen in the camp were sent across Germany on foot. He survived due to being young (over 25 was “old”), hardy and had outdoor survival skills. Here’s an article about “The Black March.” Not exactly Geneva Conventions treatment.

He hates Germans to this day.

5

Thanks for the anecdotes. Is there anyone with a larger viewpoint? That is, someone with a perspective on how things generally went for those captured by the Nazis who weren’t automatically singled out for being Slavic or Jewish (or, apparently, post-surrender Italian).

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Sorry, again just an anecdote, but I had a neighbor who had been captured by the Nazis. He was a WASP, didn’t resemble a Jew or anything. He had a number tattooed on his wrist and said he hardly had any food in the 3 months he was in captivity. He was forced to work, but not overtly tortured.

7

Well, to pick a nit here, The Great Escape wasn’t pure fiction. It was based on an actual prisoner escape from Stalag Luft III. I would imagine that much of the movie was fictionalized though. You can read a bit about it at the link below.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/greatescape/

8

What interests me is that tunneling requires time, privacy, energy, and tools. It would be very easy to deprive the POWs of all four elements, in the same way it would be easy to dump all POWs in mass graves the moment you have the chance. In fact, the only reason I can think of why the Nazis didn’t is because they expected to use prisoner release and exchange programs as diplomatic tools. Did such programs actually take place?

My real source of amazement is that any Nazi-held POWs survived more than a few days in captivity.

9

A special case, not involving prisoners of war:

In 1942 the British and other foreign-born residents of the occupied Channel Islands (including the American husband of the Dame of Sark) were deported to prison camps in Germany. Two of the camps were barracks and one was a castle, all belonging to the Wehrmacht, and the fourth camp belonged to the Hitlerjugend.

Bizarrely, one of the men deported and incarcerated under the order was a German who had been living in Jersey, and whose parents were interned in the Isle of Man.

It appears that while the Wehrmacht was very unhappy to be saddled with the care of a large number of civilians, including women and children, their captivity was not characterised by deliberate cruelty, although some died of cold or other privation. Conditions in Biberach camp improved by 1943 to the extent of providing a canteen where beer or soft drinks could be bought, a school was organised, amateur dramatics took place and country walks were allowed. Conditions declined again from early 1945.

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The Nazi party was ideologically crazy, not arbitrarily homicidal. Hitler, himself was quite the Anglophile and the Nazi attitude towards the US as far as I can gather is that they believed the Jews has too much power but aside from that it was a sterling example of what Aryan people could achieve when lesser races were in their proper place.

AFAIK there was never any perceived need or desire to kill Aryan folk who just happened to be fighting for the wrong side. Even the Stalag evacuation marches described by ftg seem to have been a result of the nasty blend of idealism, incompetence and the chaos of a besieged country rather than any deliberate attempt at killing the prisoners. I don’t know the details but as far as I know those were genuine attempts at evacuation performed by a disorganised and under resourced army in the face of a rapidly advancing enemy. The fact that wounded and ill prisoners were evacuated by train first should be the biggest hint that nobody wanted to kill the prisoners. That doesn’t necessarily justify the move in the first place, but the Nazis certainly had no particular qualms about actively working prisoners to death or simply mass executing prisoners outright as any surviving Russian POW could tell you.

I can’t see any reason why the Nazis would kill allied POWs any more than they would kill French civilians. Provided they belonged to an acceptable race and didn’t cause problems there was no reason why they wouldn’t be treated reaosnably well.

I know it’s very easy to get the impression that the Nazis were homicidal maniacs, (mostly because they often were). However they weren’t raving lunatics, they were raving idealists. The state position wasn’t to kill everyone who wasn’t German, it was to kill everyone who wasn’t appropriate. There’s no more reason to believe the Nazis would shoot all prisoners and dump them in mass graves than to believe the same of the US. The Nazis cared for prisoners because they were human beings. That’s all the reason that was needed. Those prisoners who weren’t viewed as human were treated like animals.

You don’t need to look for any ulterior motive in relatively good Nazi treatment of POWs. They did it for the same reason as the US or England treated their prisoners reasonably well. The fact that they could do that while simultaneously seeing other prisoners as subhuman is IMO far more sinister than simply believing they never kept any strangers alive without a reason.

Anyway, back to the OP. It’s going to be hard to get a ‘general’ overview better than you could get from Google. There are numerous descriptions of POW camps, descriptions of daily life and photos readily available. This seems to be a fairly good example: WWII B-24 Prisoner of War POW Stalag Lufts of the German Luftwaffe
Life wasn’t always like “The Great Escape”, but in air force officers camps it wasn’t too far from it during the early stages of the war. NCOs and enlisted men were not as well treated as the officers, but again treatment usually wasn’t to bad in the early stages of the war. POW camps for other sections of the military generally weren’t as good as for airmen, but once again officers were treated reasonably well on the whole, while enlisted men were treated less well but still generally humanely. Those men unfortunate enough to be put into a mixed POW camp with Slavic and Italian troops were not at all well treated and often got caught up in the brutality inflicted on their fellow prisoners.

As the war progressed the effect of allied bombing, the disorganisation caused by a disintegrating command structure and the transfer of POWs from evacuated camps onto already overcrowded camps further from the front made conditions gradually worse until by the last days all POWs were on starvation diets and wearing clothes that should have been thrown out 12 months earlier. However to put that in perspective, a good many Germans civilians and troops were also starving and ill-clothed by that point.

The annual mortality rate for US and British POWs was about 1%, which is comparable to the rates for German and Italian POWs. That might seem high but you need to consider that many POWs were wounded before capture. That seems to indicate that there was an effort being made to keep POWs alive no matter how unpleasant the conditions may have been. In contrast the death rate for US POWs in the Pacific was around 40%, while some Japanese POW camps interning Australians had death rates exceeding 80%.

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In addition, America found out that the Germans treated non-coms, i.e., Sergeant and above, differentl than enlisted and immediately promoted all enlisted fliers to the rank of Sergeant or above to ensure better treatment in the event that they were shot down.

Personal anecdote:

According to one of my uncle’s, when he was captured in 1943, they were given what food was available at the time. They were also given Red Cross packages. This of course changed in 1945 when the Germans were on short rations themselves. He says that they used to get a thin soup with some sort of green vegetable that could have been dandelions on top and that was it of the day. Once in awhile, there would be maggots in the soup and after awhile, the prisoners ate those too as it was the only protein they could get.

My other uncle was captured by the Japanese and hates them to this day with a passion. He won’t talk about the time he was in captivity except to say that he now knows wht hell would be like.

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Blake: That is precisely what I wanted to know. And you are right: It is difficult to imagine Nazis not being arbitrarily brutal.

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It does, and these are all somewhat hard to obtain in a POW camp. For an excellent description of how these difficulties were overcome, see a book called The Colditz Story. Colditz was a top-security prison where those who’d attempted to escape were sent.

Concentrating the escape “talent” in one place wasn’t the best decision the Germans ever made. Among other things, the prisoners (subject to close inspection several times a day) managed to build a radio with which they received Allied broadcasts (the guards knew they had this, but couldn’t find it). The most amazing episode involved the construction of a glider, in which they planned to launch two escapees from the roof of the old castle; it was completed, but by the time it was ready the war was near its end and staying put looked better than another escape attempt.

According to that book, the general treatment of prisoners wasn’t brutal. The food was nothing great and toward the end of the war it was in short supply. But the author made it clear that by then their guards understood what the outcome would be, and retained some interest in the prisoner’s welfare (lest they be held accountable).

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You may want to read “The Last Escape” (reviewed at these sites below).

http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2003/01/05/story734233528.asp
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_1648_282/ai_102747663

Other interesting reads include, of course, William L. Shirer’s books “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (all his other books are good too) or, for a change of pace, Manchester’s “The Arms of Krupp”.

Your question is hard to answer since conditions varied a great deal according to place, time, and the inaccuracy of stereotypes. Many Germans supported the Nazis and many of their goals, many Nazis were genuinely sadistic, many Germans feared the Nazis and their liberal use of “police” and concentration camps and, like others in totalitarian regimes, were less enthusiastic about things in private than in public. Germans reacted in different ways to complex events. Although the Versailles treaty was seen as harsh, it was likely less svere than agreements in 1870 or after the Nazis conquered France. Many Germans were happy to blame Westeners, and their soldiers, for the humiliations after the treaty of Versailles.

Many Allied POWs were treated humanely. Many were starved or given poor nutrition or medical care while being forced to do hard work. Treatment became much worse towards the end of the war when German food and resources were becoming more scarce. Much depended on where you were imprisoned (and the degree of sadism present there), who else you were imprisoned with, when you were imprisoned, where you came from, your rank, etc.

Many Germans tried to behave decently. Since treatment levels vary from reasonably good to summary executions, it is hard to give your question a definitive answer. Suffice to say, untermenschen were treated far less well, still, and treatment of POWs by Nazis is considered by some people to be less harsh than treatment of POWs by Japanese soldiers.