I came in to make that point. The rules and legalities of war are what the winners say they are. International law is a concept, not currently a reality in our world as there is no overarching world government to enforce any rules or laws. This is why there are wars.
In addition, I thought the answer to the question was that after the war ends the soldiers just fade away.
I don’t think there is a single factual answer to this question. Solders can loot, die, pillage, become slaves, take over countries, stand trial, go home (if it still exists), be banished from their homes (if they still exist) etc.
We can research what has happened in the past, but that gives us almost no guidelines as to what can/will happen in the future.
Did enemy POW’s have a choice? Could they refuse to return to Germany or Japan and legally stay in the United States?
That’s in modern wars. Prior to the modern era (I’m saying pre Napoleonic wars) that is kinda what happened. Especially among the officer class (who probably had far more in common with their opposite number than the troops under them) if it wasn’t some long drawn out religious war, just an attempt by one monarch to take a bit of another monarchs territory. The officers share a glass of wine, shake hands, and see you at the next war.
We had troops in Afghanistan for twenty years. I don’t feel that qualifies as “up and left”.
They could ask for asylum in the US. Anyone can ask for asylum.
I am not sure of the particulars regarding the end of WWII
How would that work? Germany and Japan were under American occupation. So POW’s from those countries would be asking the American government for asylum from the American government.
I suppose a German solider whose home was in the Soviet zone of Germany might ask not to be returned to that zone. But it seems the solution would be to send him to the American zone of Germany rather than allow him to stay in the United States.
This guy escaped a POW camp in the USA, and surrendered 40 years later.
The British attempted to avoid the legal issues by labeling German and Japanese prisoners as "Surrendered Enemy Personnel’
Thank you for your link. I looked him up. A fascinating life.
It mentions in the article that the Russians controlled his home town, and if he returned his life would not be pleasant.
Were the British protecting those Germans from being sent to areas of Germany controlled by Russia, or were they forcing them to do labor for the British? Rebuilding bombed areas would need a lot of manual labor, even just clearing rubble.
I recall something about captured Soviet POW soldiers being returned when the Germans surrendered. The Americans and British forced many of them to return despite being aware of their fate, and Stalin figured that any POW was (a) a traitor for surrendering and (b) possibly contaminated with Western ideology so many were killed or sent to the Gulag.
The story goes that one important topic at Yalta was what to do with Germany after the war. Stalin suggested they simply execute the top 50,000 Germans. Roosevelt thought he was joking, and replied “why not just 49,000?” Churchill was well aware it was no joke. That’s when they agreed to set up the Nuremberg trials.
The Romans, if they captured a land, would send the enemy combatants to slavery. Presumably their lands were forfeit (awarded to the winning soldiers as compensation). This was the days before welfare and unemployment insurance, obviously. Rather than having a mob of homeless, landless foreigners and their families camping in the area they used to inhabit and likely to resort to banditry, it was simpler to disperse them to prevent group action. Also, the slave owner was responsible for feeding them, and in the middle of the empire, with obvious foreign accents, there really no easy way to hide if they ran away.
OTOH, Genghis Khan had a simpler system - surrender and swear allegiance, and you lived (under Mongol rule). Fight too long and too hard, and they killed all the adult males, dispersed the rest as slaves, and razed the city to the ground. Quite often surrendering, cooperative nobility got to keep their positions. From this policy he build one of the mightiest empires of the ancient world.
The rehabilitation of the German economy after WWII, even with the Marshall Plan, was a major work in progress. There are plenty of not-so-conspiracy theories about how the local Nazi administrative apparatus was retained in place by the Americans because (a) it was there and working, (b) they were the ones who had been fighting Communist infiltration, and (c) conspiracy theory says many of the American military were sympathizers. Stories from the time indicate the country was on the brink of starvation for a few years, getting housing, industry, agriculture and food distribution back to normal, so dumping a hundred thousand soldiers back into the country would be a serious problem. (The founder of Sony writes in his memoirs that starvation was a problem into the early 1950’s for occupied Japan too.)
(If you watch A Private Function with Michael Palin, it revolves around an unlicensed pig in post-war Britain where food rationing also was still in effect. It wasn’t just the losers who had problems.)
The British continued food rationing into the 11950s, did they not?
That long? I thought they were done by 1960.
There is also the ambiguity to the question of what you mean by “when the war ends”. These days very few wars are actually declared, and so few peace treaties are signed. Sometimes is just boils down to one side quits fighting or you have just and ongoing low level simmering conflict that becomes the status quo.
I was just talking about the classic film The Best Years Of Our Lives with my 97 year old dad, a WWII vet. It was filmed in 1946, about the demobilization of several young soldiers, following each of their paths as they try to settle back into society. Top actors and of course the material was extremely topical at the time. Indeed, one of the actors was a real vet who had lost both his arms. Worth watching even if you aren’t interested in the OP’s question.
After WW1, many former German soldiers joined political paramilitary organizations and fought each other in the streets. The Nazi Party was especially good at this, but they did not invent it. There were armed wings of the German Communist Party, as well as the Social Democrats, and various right wing movements such as the Stalhem (steel helmets). This is an example of what soldiers do after the war is over in the case of mass mobilization.
This probably doesn’t happen in every country, but I know of at least two stories of pleasant after-war adjustments.
There were many German POWs held in Wisconsin during WW2, mostly doing farm work. They were not held at gunpoint and often lived with farm families. Since many of the US men were away in the military, farms needed as much help as they could get. And escaping wouldn’t make much sense – from Wisconsin, the US border is pretty far away and cars weren’t as common then. Anyone with a German accent would stand out a bit in the heartland.
Some of the POWs, after being returned to Germany, visited their former farm families years later; some even married local girls and became US citizens.
In the Vietnam war case, a neighbor of mine who was in the US military during that conflict took his wife on a holiday trip to Vietnam during the 2010’s. He said they had a nice time, and were able to hook up with some of the Vietnamese he knew in the 1970’s.
Actually Wisconsin had a very large component of recent immigrants, with the majority from Scandanavia and Germanic areas. Those POWs could have easily made friends within the large German community there. (My maternal family is from Wisconsin; both my grandparents spoke German at home).
My point is that the German POWs weren’t badly treated in Wisconsin, and weren’t considered a serious sabotage or escape threat, necessitating armed guards over them. And in the long run, the kindness shown was reciprocated.