At the end of WW II, with the allies advancing on both fronts, I imagine feeding and securing POW’s was a low priority… I’m not talking about the concentration camps, but the regular ones, where soldiers who were captured were kept.
Did the Germans begin abandoning the camps when enemy troops approached, leaving everyone to fend for themselves, or was it organized better than this? I imagine the end of the war was chaotic at best, and guards were in a prime position to go AWOL and maybe escape the country and any punishment that would be heading their way after the war.
I have not heard of any instances where the POW camps were purged either, like they did with the concentration camps.
Does anyone know? Did they simply walk away and let the prisoners fend for themselves?
At Colditz there were guards until the end. As I recall food supplies got shaky and Red Cross parcels stopped coming but order never broke down. The prisoners did try and take precautions against any attempt to masacre them but in the end they were not required. I seem to rember that POWs from other camps in the east were marched away from the oncoming Russians but I cannot find a cite at the moment.
As to guards fleeing, remember the POW camp guards were from the Army or Air Force, not the SS, and mostly had reasonable relationships with the prisoners and were not likely to be responsible for war crimes. Staying at the camp was probably the best option. A prison camp is not likely to be shelled or bombed and a guard on his own in the chaos of April/May 1945 was at risk of being shot by either side.
ETA Should have said: one reason for going on with the building of the famous Colditz gliderin 1945 was to have a means of getting out of the castle and making contact with the advancing Allied forces if it looked as though things were going pear shaped.
I have an uncle that was a POW in a Luft Stalag camp in then eastern Germany. When they started to hear the Russian artillery, the goons got everybody up and out and marched them west. These men had not had any excerise and were already on starvation rations. 90 days, 550 miles including some doubling back when they got too close to the advancing Americans. All in the bitter winter of 1945, all on foot, sleeping outdoors with hardly ever any food.
They were called death marches or black marches and for good reason. My uncle says that the it was the “old men” who died the most. I.e., the guys over 30.
My uncle survived due to being raised as a farm boy and knew how to “rough it”.
The Germans-military and civilian- were totally brutal. They had no intention of letting a single POW get liberated. Those too sick to march were frequently shot. My uncle’s group was only freed when the Americans were almost on top of them and the guards fled.
Germany in the last months of the war was falling into chaos, but there’s no excuse for treating people like this. Germany had become a nation of sadists.
I’ve read that some guards became quite conscientious about their duties. If you were a Wehrmacht guard in a POW camp in Prussia and you deserted your post to head east, you were liable to be arrested and shot for desertion. But if you took the POWs with you, you had an excuse - you were guarding the prisoners that you were transferring to a more secure location in the west.
One of my patrons at the Library had been a POW.
They were moved, but the German in charge would let you go off to take a leak and run off.
One of the guards on the other hand had been such an asshole that the liberating American troops gave two guys Tommy guns, and they killed the guy.
This is a very interesting post, because I have NEVER heard of death marches tied to German POW guards and allied POWs. I am going to try to find out more about this, but in the meantime, if you have any links to point me to, I’d appreciate it.
“Death March” was something I associated with the Japanese Imperial Army, the most famous being the Bataan Death March in the Philippeans. Those were some cruel bastards, marching sick and starving men through hot and humid conditions, watching thousands die. I can’t say that a forced march in the snow would be any better, especially toward the end if the war, when supplies were limited for the German troops, forget about POW’s
Interesting. I always had the image of the Germans for the most part, either leaving the camps unguarded, or if they did move prisoners, it would always be toward the west. No one wanted to fall in the hands of the Russians. But if what you say is true, that march in the winter of 44-45 was no picnic either.
I had a teacher who was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. I wish I could remember more of what he said (He spent one class talking about it) but I remember him saying the Germans served soup a lot and in the six months in captivity he lost 68 pounds. He did say when one German woman started to attack the POWs when they marched through a town (thinking they were airmen), the German soldiers moved in to protect them. He and two of his friends regained weight quickly…managed to get enrolled in three U.S.army different units so they could get nine meals a day. Another story was the three of them ended up drinking one night in Prague with three Russian soldiers. The Russians kept proposing toasts to Stalin,
Churchill and Roosevelt and refused to alter it when the GIs told them Truman and Atlee were in power.
One side benefit was years later when vacationing in Italy, was he knew how not to get pestered by Italian street vendors. Dress conservatively (ho Hawaiian aloha shirts) and speak some German as you examine the merchandise. The Italians will think you are some skinflint German vacationer and go after the next American to sell overpriced junk.
This has nothing to do with being a German POW but he did say when they got back to New York, there were a lot of military people waiting for hours to get trains home. So a lot of them wrote down their departure times and destinations on paper, pinned it on them and took a nap so someone would wake them in time. Some practical joker from the Navy went around changing signs on people so the military police had to wake people up to verify the signs on them were correct.
As always, just start with wiki. In my first response I was only remembering Colditz, I should have remembered more about how desperate things were for many of the other POWs.
There were also death marches for concentration camp prisoners, who were worse off to begin with, of course. The whole point of those marches were to kill the remants cheaply.
I don’t think anyone will argue that the concentration camp experience was better than the POW experience in any way. However, if we could, I’d like to keep this particular thread focused on POW’s. Because the goals of the two camps were different from the beginning… Because the people in the different camps were viewed differently from the start.
I have the ?fortune? of knowing two people that were POW’s in Germany.
They had very different experiences.
One said he weighed 200 pounds coming in and 80 pounds when liberated. He was captured late in the war during the battle of the Bulge.
Another was a air crewman who was shot down in early 44. He said he was well taken care of and at the end of the war rations were lean but still liveable. He attributed it to the fact that the Germans in/around the POW camp knew the writing was on the wall and wanted to not be punished after liberation. He also said he got the feeling that the camp commander seemed a good man that probably went beyond his authority in securing food.
Question for you. For the guy that weighed 80 lbs when liberated, did he indicate that he was basically starved? Or what did he survive on? Because if you weigh 80 as a grown man, there isn’t much left of you. What kept him alive?
FIL was in a camp for officer airmen. He said they sat around telling stories about their favorite meals and then dreamed about food. He came home a skeleton. He also said they woke one day and the guards were gone, so some of the stronger prisoners went into town to see what was up and town was so full of drunken Russians shooting the place up for fun that they retreated to the camp and waited for the Americans. Safer at camp than on the street. He said there was one guard who was a dick, but the rest of them were O.K.