Mal-treatment of German POWs

[bob lembke]

Peter;

Final note(s): Didn't address your helpful info.

The French actively recruited Waffen SS to join the French Foreign Legion, and put a camp of healthy, well-fed "volunteers" right next to a camp where the POWs were starving, to induce them to volunteer.

I had a friend who was a Marine sergeant, and he was a member of a US military delegation touring Vietnam in the 1950's to get information for a decision on if the US should help the French with the atomic bomb over there. He saw a SS veteran in the Foreign Legion vomit at the sight of what the French officers were doing to Vietnamese. The nicest thing was the insertion of a red-hot bayonet somewhere where you would rather not have it stuck. From there it went down-hill. My Marine friend said that the French have given him the creeps ever since. (Sorry, not PC)

Also there were reports that, ironically, in the American camps the only POWs that were properly fed were the SS and the like, as they might have to be produced in court.

Citations for the above provided on request.

Bob Lembke

[Exxley]

I had a friend who was a Marine sergeant, and he was a member of a US military delegation touring Vietnam in the 1950's to get information for a decision on if the US should help the French with the atomic bomb over there. He saw a SS veteran in the Foreign Legion vomit at the sight of what the French officers were doing to Vietnamese. The nicest thing was the insertion of a red-hot bayonet somewhere where you would rather not have it stuck. From there it went down-hill. My Marine friend said that the French have given him the creeps ever since. (Sorry, not PC)

And the point of that post being ? That French people can be as cruel as other people ? Noone is going to be amazed for sure. And what does that story have to do with WW2 mistreatment of German POWs ?

[David Thompson]

Let's stay on our one (already overbroad) topic, please.

[bob lembke]

Guys;

Sorry; that comment was certainly over the top.I hope that I have not offended anyone. (Probably have, I suspect.) I just am an over-the-top kind of guy. But the image of the SS man throwing up is great, to my twisted mind.

When I first went to school, at about 5 years old, just after the war, the teacher(s) took me in front of the class, announced a patriotic exercise, and beat me up in front of the class. Finally my parents put me in a private school, for my safety, and it worked out well, as I had "better" friends, went to a top university, etc. However, my first French teacher, Madam Bild, who announced that her father voluntarily dropped dead rather than shake the hand of a German officer, supposedly in the library of the chateau. And she went to the parents of all my school chums and told them that they should not allow their children play with a Boche child. We had been here only 20-some years. (But my second French teacher, Madam Raymond, was a sweetie.) These formative experiences may have made me a bit cranky.

As I identify as a German-American, I had the obligatory guilt about the Holocaust, and half the other problems in the world, until I was 50 or 55. That is behind me, the hypocracy of everyone and the management, and, where necessary, the invention of history for various purposes, has cured me of that.

To my great amusement, as I research my family, it seems quite possible, thanks to my maternal grand-mother, that I actually might be Jewish. She was a Brit who lived in Prussia for 30-odd years and was nuts about Hitler, and seemingly was once seated by him at a speech. She was a regular, and blind, and had come late. Checked this out with several people before they croaked.

As I bail out of this topic, bearing my heart to all, I ask that some people might actually consider reading Bacque, or at least peek at it. Just looked in Amazon.de, and his two most important books are for sale, were translated into German, and the majority of reviews were positive, from readers whose fathers and grand-fathers were in the camps. Average score four and a half stars out of five.

I am sure we all have our little agendas, concious and unconcious, but we should be on a quest for truth, despite out little peversities.

Out the door, and remember to pull my rip-cord.......

Bob Lembke

[bob lembke]

David et al;

Spent about an hour plowing through the list of prior posts put up a while ago. What a mess! I am sorry I opened my mouth.

I would say that the pages I went through were about 50 / 50 on the two sides. Many mentions by the Bacque-o-phobes of a group of historians who supposedly met and conclusively established that Bacque is a liar or worse. However, no specifics. Then there was a mention or two of a meeting of about six professors somewhere, who supposedly debunked Bacque.

I only recognized one name, a guy described as a professor at a Louisiana university. Not mentioned that the guy is also a long-time employee of one Stephen Ambrose, deputy director of Ambrose's Eisenhower Center, and an editor of the ineffectual Ambrose book that attempted to refute Bacque and to my reading accomplished nothing but exhibit impotence. I smell the spoor of the rat-faced Ambrose here.

However, if the panel is diverse and mostly knowledgable it could have been useful to the search for truth, despite the inclusion of a career Bacque-debunker. However, since it seems that the thumb of that intellectual crook, Ambrose, seems to be in the scale, it is likely to be a Ambrosian "snow-job". The topic now bores me to death and I don't want to put the time in to see if a) this is the much-vaunted definative conference, and: b) these guys are all partizans or Ambrosian hirelings. It seems like the Ambrosians have money to burn to protect their hero Eisenhower.

The Eisenhowers are still about here, I think. Met grand-son David Eisenhower at a cocktail party, did not drop Bacque on him. His father John was a drinking buddy of a lesbian school chum of mine who went to Gettysburg College, near where the Eisenhower farm is located. I think I would keep my acid mouth shut if I ran into another Eisenhower; they seem like nice folks.

Have we driven a stake into this puppy's heart?

Bob Lembke

[David Thompson]

Readers interested in additional information on this topic might want to take a look at this thread:

Documents on the US Occupation of Germany 1945
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=69515

and may also find this site helpful:

Archives of the US Army in Europe
http://www.history.hqusareur.army.mil/A ... pation.htm

[Andreas]

I consider German democracy, on the whole, superior to the current state of US democracy, where the influence of money is overwhelming the system, despite excellent demcratic forms. It is a shame that it is felt that it is still necessary to fine people or jam them in prison for simply uttering non-PC speech, without a violent threat. I can give you specific cases of named people who have had this done to them soley for stating things that are either certainly or most likely true. I shudder at the thought of the US having such laws while we are burdened with the radical, ideological, possibly criminal bunch that we now have in Washington.

I can tell you secret of how to make gold from lead.

But I won't, because I am sick and tired of this discussion.

I not surprised that you in the same breath continue to make unfounded accusations against the German criminal system and tell us that you won't back them up, despite repeated challenges to do so. For someone who would like to be on a quest for truth, that is remarkable.

[tonyh]

Andreas;

I have not stopped defending my position. I have just come back from Wisconsin, where I spent four days visiting my cousin, who was in many of those camps. (He has no computer, so I could not see my e-mail, etc.) He refuses to discuss these matters, and is very scared of the US government. When Bacque came out, I sent it to him, and he read half of it. I then (figuratively) beat him over the head and shoulders, and he read the rest, reluctantly, and said that he was in some of the camps mentioned, and that everything he read in Bacque was accurate, as far as he witnessed, except that some of the death rates were actually higher, as far as he could see. That is the last thing he would mention about it to me, to this date, except for one or two criptic comments on this visit. However, on this trip his wife took me to visit some friends for coffee and cake, a couple in which the man was a prisoner of the Brits (who did not generally kill their prisoners), and the third person was a woman whose husband, now dead, was a POW. They have never heard of Bacque, but said a lot about the topic, and everything was consistant with Bacque.

Here is what I know and am influenced by:

1. I have read Bacque; Other Losses. Less than 200 pages of text, supported with 100 pages of footnotes, bibliography, a list of the archives he visited, etc. Have I looked up all of these sources? No. But I was trained in historical research 50 years ago by a historian with several degrees from Columbia University in history, and I have done a lot of research since them, a lot of it under his supervision. The book seems sound, very well researched and laid out. But it could be an enormous fabrication.

2. However, I have read (more correctly, skimmed for an hour) Ambrose's book, produced with the resources of the Eisenhower Center, and it did not score any points at all, as far as I could see. It was full of stuff that did not address Bacque at all. It did include the argument that the alleged events could not have happened, as it is well known that the German POWs held in the US were well treated. Of course the US Army did not kill hundreds of thousands of POWs in front of the American public. If Bacque's sources were fabricated, or misquoted, etc., Ambrose, with an entire historical institute focused on WW II at his beck and call, would have exposed it. Instead, he had a collection of articles that barely seemed to address the question.

3. I mentioned my friend of 30 years. I will say more than I should. He was a colonel in the Defense Intelligence Agency. As I said, he spent a couple of years trying to tell me that Bacque's allegations were nonsense, and then, in a moment of great anger, he admitted they were true. Then he spent a couple of years attempting to, in effect, deny what he said to me and my wife.

4. A mutual friend, now in her 90's, was in Military Intelligence at the end of the war in Austria and Germany. Her companion of many years was an Austrian woman who experienced many of the "difficulties" of the period and whose brother, I believe, was a POW. She had information on this corroboration the "alleged events" and tried to send it to me thru my friend of "3." above, but I never got it, so she later got me a second set of the info.

5. Growing up as a German-American youth in New York City, almost all of the German male immigrants my family knew had been POWs, and you could taste that very bad things had happened, but they generally not shared with me, at, say, 12 years old. My father did tell me the things that my cousin (who I just visited) told him. But the picture was not pulled together, focused.

6. My cousin, although silent, is consistant with the "alleged events", and what he told my father corroborates Bacque, and he told me that when he reluctantly read Bacque that it was true, as far as he experienced. He is scared to death of the US government, is a radical pasifist (sp.?), is a farmer in the middle of nowhere, does not have a firearm (there are cyotese (again, sp.?) about, rabbits eat up the vegetables, he would not harm a hair on their heads. I have known him for over 50 years, and he is not a liar or exaggerator.

7. What about the US colonel with a Ph. D. in history, a Senior Historian in the US Army, who supports Bacque, wrote his forward, and helped him? Other US retired officers and soldiers helped him with his research and book. All some sort of anti-American manics?

I would venture that Andreas and the several others who have attacked Bacque, and me for citing him, have never looked at a word Bacque has written, and certainly have never gone to his sources to check them out. Have you guys read Bacque? Anyone?

Klaus - You father lost half his body weight, due to "starvation", as you said, in a French camp, but he was not "mistreated"? Really? The rules of war state that the POWs are to receive the same rations as the soldiers of the army holding those POWs. My cousin told my father that every POW who smoked died. The former POW that I spoke to yesterday said that he was relatively well taken care of by the Brits (as Bacque said), but that for a good while they had a loaf of bread a day for 19 men, plus a bit of "soup" that, if you were lucky, had a few bits of sugar beet in it.

Why don't you guys scratch up Other Losses and read it; possibly track down a few of his sources? How can you attack his work, and anyone (me) who cites him, without reading a word of him. I know that I said I don't read Ambrose; I actually have some read some, and it is instantly clear that it is junk. He says one thing on one page, the opposite two pages later, something else in the next book. He got caught in serious plagarism with one of his most recent books, and he defended himself saying in effect it is not plagarism since he never read (his) book, it is a product of his giant ghost writer factory that he did not bother to supervise.

I for my part will look at some of sites cited that supposedly refute Bacque. Everything I have seen to date that perports to do so has seemed to be nonsense, like Ambrose. But there may be something there.

This all emotion is one reason why I do not study or write about WW II. In my area, WW I, it is only in the last 10-15 years that some US and Brit writers are really getting thru the nonsense and are discovering what really happened in that war, after all the participants are dead. With all of the emotion about WW II, it will be at least 100 more years before a lot of its history can be sorted out.

Andreas - Do you really think that you can go to Germany, stand on a soap-box, and say anything you want? I know of a 79 year old American citizen from Florida who visited Germany on vacation and was arrested and imprisoned, based on something he wrote in the US. You can't be serious to say that you can literally say anything you want, write anything you want, and get away with it. Even some things that are historically correct, or are probably historically correct. Happily, this is not the case in the US, except possibly for narrow and extreme things, like clear and creditable threats of violence. (Having said this, I think that the present US administration is a disaster, a nightmare, but they have made only limited progress in their attempts to strip us of our political and legal rights.)

Bob Lembke
All of the

Hi Bob, don't get too upset by some of the screamers in here. It seems that if a question is raised about any Allied misdemeanors or doubt expressed about any of German warcrimes, one is pounced upon with the usual catchphrases. I too have read Baques book a few years ago and found it to be a good read. But I do think his figures may be off somewhat. 1.1 mil DOES sound too high. Still the fact remains that a very large number of German POWs were held in appaling conditions after the war ended, but I don't know how many died as a result. I know personally of one woman (the wife of Joseph, an RAD man I have mentioned before on the site) who served with the Luftwaffe and told me she was held in a camp, where two of her friends starved to death and she lost a terrible amount of weight herself on the rations she received. She, in fact, survived because a British officer picked her as an interpreter as she spoke very good English.

Keep looking up the sources of Baques book, they may lead to more answers.

As for Baques refuters, Ambrose et al, one must ask the question, why they are so eager to refute the books findings at all.

Tony

[David Thompson]

tonyh -- You remarked:

Still the fact remains that a very large number of German POWs were held in appaling conditions after the war ended, but I don't know how many died as a result.

This may be helpful -- two recent German studies, unassociated with Stephen Ambrose. Here's Roberto Muehlenkamp's translation from Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche Militarische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1999), compared to the West German government's Maschke Commission findings (1982):

Table 65: Deaths in captivity (by custodian state)

Total number of prisoners of war

France 940,000
Great Britain 3,640,000
USA 3,100,000
Yugoslavia 190,000
Other States 170,000
USSR 3,060,000
Sum 11,100,000

Deaths in captivity according to present study

France 34,000
Great Britain 21,000
USA 22,000
Yugoslavia 11,000
Other States 8.000
USSR 363,000
Sum 459,000

Deaths in captivity according to Maschke Commission

France 25,000
Great Britain 1,300
USA 5,000
Yugoslavia 80,000
Other States 13.000
USSR 1,090,000
Sum 1,214,300

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 327#112327
For those interested in percentages, I calculated these:

Death rates for German POWs

France 3.6% (Overmans) or 2.6% (Maschke Commission)
Great Britain 0.5% (Overmans) or 0.03% (Maschke Commission)
USA 0.7% (Overmans) or 0.16% (Maschke Commission)
Yugoslavia 5% (Overmans) or 42% (Maschke Commission)
Other States 4.7% (Overmans) or 7.6% (Maschke Commission)
USSR 11.8% (Overmans) or 35.6% (Maschke Commission)
Total: 4% (Overmans) or 10.9% (Maschke Commission)

You also asked:

As for Baques refuters, Ambrose et al, one must ask the question, why they are so eager to refute the books findings at all.

It probably has something to do with the seriousness of Bacque's allegations, and the fact that many scholars of the period believe that Bacque's claims are irresponsible, false and defamatory.

[tonyh]

Hi David, sorry I didn't see your reply until now. I have nothing really to add, but I do find the figure for German deaths in Soviet captivity somewhat dubious and I wonder how Overmanns arrived at it. 363,000 sounds at bit cheap to me, considering the nature of the war in the East. I wonder if this figure for deaths in Soviet captivity includes German soldiers murdered by the various partisan groups, who were notorius for offing POWs, when they were no longer of any use.

It probably has something to do with the seriousness of Bacque's allegations, and the fact that many scholars of the period believe that Bacque's claims are irresponsible, false and defamatory.

Perhaps, but one wonders why the same determined efforts aren't applied to the warcrimes of the "other side", much of which, it has to be said, seems to be gathered by hearsay and eyewitness testimony. It would be nice to this type of revisionism applied to all war crime allegations, not just when it concerns an allied situation.

Tony

[David Thompson]

tonyh -- You remarked:

I have nothing really to add, but I do find the figure for German deaths in Soviet captivity somewhat dubious and I wonder how Overmanns arrived at it. 363,000 sounds at bit cheap to me, considering the nature of the war in the East. I wonder if this figure for deaths in Soviet captivity includes German soldiers murdered by the various partisan groups, who were notorius for offing POWs, when they were no longer of any use.

Overmans' mortality figures for German troops in Soviet captivity seemed low to me as well, particularly when compared to the Maschke Commission figures. Hopefully his work will someday be translated into English, so I can get a better idea of how he arrived at his statistics. Oleg Grigoriev posted some Soviet statistics in this section of the forum on the German POW mortality rate, which were compatible with Overmans' estimates, but I have not been able to find Oleg's posts to cite to them.

You also said:

Perhaps, but one wonders why the same determined efforts aren't applied to the warcrimes of the "other side", much of which, it has to be said, seems to be gathered by hearsay and eyewitness testimony. It would be nice to this type of revisionism applied to all war crime allegations, not just when it concerns an allied situation.

This is one of the reasons that I started posting documentary threads on German war crimes, since most of the information is little-known (except among scholars and hard-core researchers) and rarely seen. The subject of war crimes is so often used as an excuse for propaganda exchanges that it's a relief to have records available -- at least for some of the topics.

[bob lembke]

Guys;

In a weak moment, and against my better judgement, I am going to make a few comments.

David;

Thanks for posting those figures. A minor note: Interesting that the Brits are supposed to have held more prisoners than the Yanks. Sounds odd, but it could well be true due to some quirks of the geography of the Occupation Zones, and other factors. It would seem unlikely that they took more prisoners than the Americans.

Major point: The Maschke Commission numbers are very interesting, and I feel prove several of my points. The average POW held by the Western Allies seemed to have been held for about 18 to 24 months. The idea that the Brits held 3,640,000 POWs for this period, and 1,300 died, presumably of all causes; and that the US held 3,100,000 POWs, presumably for such a period of time, and 5,000 died of all causes, is absolutely, completely unbelievable. Any three year old, without an agenda, would find such a basic and important finding, a major crux of twenty-years' work, totally absurd. Looking in abebooks.com, there seem to be eight volumes of this study available for sale (supposedly only 431 sets were ever sold), that there must have been at least 14 volumes, probably much more, and it seems that Volume VII was published in 1966, and a second volume of Volume X in 1974. Willy Brant was already discussing the series in the Bundestag in April 1969. I guess from your input that the last volume was published in 1982. (Incidentally, the reviled Bacque discusses his work for several pages, PP. 155-58.) How could a commission, or even one grey-beard, research, toil and publish for say 20 years, evidentally about 10,000 pages of work, and come to such a ridiculous conclusion? Such a death-rate is consistent with a stay in the Plaza in New York, or the Kempinski in Berlin (if you exclude all guests over 60 years of ago; no strokes in the lobby, please), not in POW camps in which there were, by all accounts, even those of the apologists, severe conditions and a lack of food.

The Maschke results also conveniently pushed the losses over to the Russians. During the war, the Russians and Germans killed off each other's POW with abandon (in my youth in New York City I knew an ex-POW who, with 240 other POWs, were put to work on one job by the Russians, unloading cement from railcars; he and one other POW survived the one work assignment out of 240 men. He was a little guy, name was Weisenburg, and I bet that because of his size he was assigned to keep the tally of work output, rather than do the actual physical work.) However, after the war was over, the Russians, with lots of experience with slave labor, knew that they had lots of generally very skilled labor, and generally treated them well enough to allow most to survive and work productively. Lots came back to Germany after as long as 10 years' labor in the USSR.

Clearly the "Maschke report was a white-wash.

In contrast, with the Americans, the day the war ended (and our POWs were safe) the conditions in the US camps, which had been OK, went steeply downhill, not only according to Bacque, but also my cousin, a young artillery lieutenant. In French custody they were sleeping on the bare ground, when winter came one of their two blankets was taken from them. He told my father that all smokers died. Winter 1945/46 was extremely severe.

I visited my cousin a couple of weeks ago, on his Wisconsin farm, and bought and brought a tape-recorder to record what I could. His wife and daughter told me not even to show it to him. But I was orally able to get family data, and my knowledge of my father's family has been pushed back another generation. But I only got one scrap about his experiences; he suddenly laughed and said that: "Can you imagine, in the camp there was a forester, due to his green uniform, anyone in a uniform was thrown into the camps." He knew I was thinking about his experiences in the camps, but that was the only words he said about them. He is a feverent pascifist, he even refuses to take measures against the rabbits eating his wife's vegtables; he just tells her to plant more than they need and let them have their share.

Again I will try to keep away from this nasty topic.

Bob Lembke

[David Thompson]

Bob -- You said:

The average POW held by the Western Allies seemed to have been held for about 18 to 24 months. The idea that the Brits held 3,640,000 POWs for this period, and 1,300 died, presumably of all causes; and that the US held 3,100,000 POWs, presumably for such a period of time, and 5,000 died of all causes, is absolutely, completely unbelievable.

Your premise here is false. The average German soldier in US custody was not held for that period of time. The vast majority of POWs captured by the US were not even held for 14 months. In July 1946, only 216,657 prisoners of war and 66,868 internees were in the custody of the U.S. Army. See The First Year of the Occupation, Part 5 (in vol. 2), Occupation Forces in Europe Series, 1945-1946, Office of the Chief Historian, [US] European Command, Frankfurt-am-Main: 1947, pp. 125-135 at:
http://www.history.hqusareur.army.mil/A ... ar%202.pdf

From that study, I printed out and scanned the section captioned "The Disarmament and Disbandment of the German Armed Forces" and then posted it on the thread "Documents on the US Occupation of Germany 1945" at
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 059#628059

It may give you a better idea of how things worked. Here's an extract:

132. Statistical Analysis.

In September 1944, German prisoners of war who had been captured by the Allied expeditionary Force numbered 545,756.(308) Each day thereafter a few more thousand prisoners were apprehended, and when the year ended 811,796 had been recorded.(309) The one-millionth was captured on 8 March 1945(310), the two-millionth on 16 April (331), and the three-millionth on 1 May.(312) Supreme Headquarters authorized army group commanders on 4 May, to consider the great masses of German troops then surrendering, not as prisoners of

- 131 -

war entitled to the privileges prescribed in the Geneva Convention, but as disarmed enemy forces. The captured troops were disarmed, retained in their own organizations, and moved into concentration areas to be disbanded as soon as practicable.(313) When hostilities ceased, 4,005,732 prisoners of war had been captured.(314) Additional prisoners continued to be reported after V-E E Day, and revised statistics show that the total number captured was 6,155,468.(315) Of this total 2,657,138 were prisoners of war and 4,098,330 were disarmed enemy forces.(316)

133. The Course of Events from V E Day to the Slowing Up of Disbandment.

Members of the Volkssturm who were prisoners of war or who were wearing a uniform when captured were disbanded as members of the disarmed enemy forces. Others were permitted to go home.(317) On 15 May 1945, Supreme Headquarters gave authority to discharge certain categories of prisoners of war and members of the disarmed enemy forces. Those to be discharged first were all men of German nationality who were agricultural workers, coal miners, transport workers, and other urgently needed workers provided that they lived in the area in which they were imprisoned and were not war criminals, security suspects, or members of the SS. All women members of the German armed forces were also to be promptly discharged, provided that they lived in the area in which they were imprisoned and were not war criminals, security suspects, or members of the SS.(3l8) Three days later, Supreme

- 132 -

Headquarters gave authority to discharge all prisoners of war over fifty years of age, provided that they lived in the area in which they were imprisoned and were not war criminals, security suspects, or members of the SS.(319) On 5 June 1945, nationals of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg who were prisoners of war or in the status of disarmed enemy forces and not wanted for war crimes by a country other than their own were released to their respective governments. (320) General discharge was authorized late in June for all Germans except war criminals, security suspects, and those in automatic arrest categories. Those whose homes were in the Soviet Zone were held until an agreement on their transfer could be reached. At the same time, it was announced that war crime suspects would be discharged and reimprisoned as civilian internees, and that automatic arrestees and security suspects might be discharged if held in custody for interrogation.(321) In July, authority was given to release to their governments all non-Germans who were not security suspects or wanted as war criminals by a country other than their own, with the exception of Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles not claiming Soviet citizenship, and dissident Yugoslav and neutral nationals with ardent Axis sympathies. The last directive relating to the mass disbandment of the German armed forces was issued in August.(322) It required that automatic arrestees be discharged and reimprisoned as civilian internees before being tried as war criminals, and provided that SS members who had joined that organization subsequent to 1 August

- 133 -

1944 and who were privates could be discharged if cleared by the Counter Intelligence Corps.(323)

134. Situation in July 1946.

a. In July 1946, 216,657 prisoners of war and 66,868 internees were in the custody of the U.S. Army. Of the prisoners of war, 29,900 were in Italy, 242 were in Austria, 176,265 were elsewhere in Europe, and 250 were in the Zone of Interior. Members of the SS still held as prisoners of war totaled 11,064 and consisted of all members of the Waffen-SS above the grade of Scharfuehrer (sergeant) and all members of the Allgemeine-SS above the grade of Unterscharfeuhrer (corporal). They were held as members of an indicated organization pending decision of the International Military Tribunal with reference to the criminality of that organization. The total of 7,969 individuals held in the category of other automatic arrestees included General Staff Corps officers, senior members of paramilitary organizations other than the SS, and high officials of the Nazi Party. These were held in confinement nominally as prisoners of war but really as war crime and security suspects.

b. There were 42,498 prisoners of war who were in the process of discharge. They included individuals recently returned from the United States, personnel of Labor Service units recently rendered surplus, individuals released from hospitals, and those in the routine process of being disbanded.

- 134 -

c. In the United States Zone and in the liberated countries, there were originally almost 750,000 prisoners of war in Labor Service units. By July 1946 this number had decreased to 105,100, organized into 420 units. It was anticipated that Labor Service units in the United States Zone would be disbanded and the personnel discharged by 30 November 1946. Those units performing tasks in liberated countries were to be disbanded as the need for them ceased, and in any event by 1 July 1947.

d. Prisoners of war in hospitals totaled over 175,000 in August 1945. By July 1946 this number was reduced to 9,634. The hospitals were staffed to a considerable degree with technical personnel of the former German Medical Corps. Although the hospitals operated under the direct supervision of United States medical battalions, they were not military organizations in any sense and were preserved to render necessary medical service to prisoners of war. Individuals requiring hospitalization in excess of thirty days were discharged. The intention was to release all hospitals for civilian use when the military need no longer existed.

e. A total of 71,794 civilian internees of various Nazi and paramilitary organizations other than the SS were being held in internment camps throughout the United States Zone, awaiting decisions as to their culpability under war crimes provisions.(324)

- 135 -

See also the "Wehrmacht" section in Chapter 16 of Earl Ziemke's official history, "The US Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-46," on-line at:
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/wwii/O ... h16.htm#b5

The Wehrmacht

In the last week of the war, on orders from' Admiral Doenitz, the main objective of the German troops still fighting had been to surrender to the Western Allies, which they had done by the hundreds of thousands. What was left of the German Army Group Vistula after its retreat from the Oder River and Berlin took refuge behind the 21 Army Group and Ninth Army lines. Third Army, in Czechoslovakia, let in 125,000 German troops before the surrender. Austria was jammed with the remnants of the armies that had been on the southern flank of the Eastern Front. Meanwhile, the US troops were rounding up and herding into makeshift cages what was left of the Wehrmacht in southwestern Germany, and Montgomery's armies were acquiring the entire garrisons of Holland, north Germany, and Denmark. When SHAEF G-1 added up the totals, the figures came close to 5 million prisoners of war and disarmed enemy troops in SHAEF custody, well over 3 million of them being held by US forces.60

The discrepancy between the numbers of prisoners in US custody and in British custody was a lingering point of contention between the US side of SHAEF and the British War Office. Under the Fifty-fifty Agreement, made in 1944, the British and Americans had each undertaken to assume responsibility for half the prisoners no matter who captured them. After February 1945, the US forces had made the most captures, but the British had refused to take their half, arguing that they did not have places to keep them or men to guard them on the Continent and that moving them to England would arouse public resentment and adversely affect British troop morale. After V-E Day, Eisenhower repeatedly tried to get the British to take at least several hundred thousand prisoners, with remarkable lack of success. When Seventh Army negotiated with the British command in Austria for 9,000 Wehrmacht horses, the British said they would have to send along enough prisoners to care for the horses; they sent 82,000. On 1 June, Eisenhower informed the War Office that the shortage in the British "account" up to then amounted to 25 million prisoner-days' rations and was growing at the rate of 900,000 rations every day.61

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Food was the problem. Registered prisoners of war were entitled to 2,000 calories a day, and working prisoners, 2,900 calories. The disarmed enemy troops could be given the normal German consumer's ration; therefore, SHAEF had intended to transfer all German troops inside Germany to disarmed enemy status after the surrender, but the legality of this move was in doubt at least until after the Berlin Declaration was signed.62 According to the ECLIPSE plan, the disarmed enemy troops were to be fed, like the DPs, from German sources; but while the DPs were scattered in groups of thousands and could theoretically live off the local economies, the troops were concentrated, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands. On 16 May, Bradley cabled Eisenhower that the Wehrmacht stocks the Seventh Army had been using to feed its disarmed enemy troops would run out that day. In another four days

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Seventh Army would have used up all it could get from civilian sources in its area. The other armies could not help because they were in much the same position. "These disarmed forces," he maintained, "will either have to be fed or released." He asked for immediate authority to discharge the disarmed enemy forces and for US Army or military government rations to feed them until the discharge could be completed.63 SHAEF could not authorize a "blanket release" of German forces, Eisenhower replied, because their discharge had to be "strictly controlled in order to prevent widespread disorder, or other conditions which military government agencies will be unable to cope with"; the release of the categories already approved (see below) would "tax the administrative machinery for a considerable time . . . . Until such time as indigenous resources can meet the needs," he concluded, 12th Army Group could use imported military government food for the disarmed forces. Preferably it should use the imported food for feeding the DPs, and the indigenous food could thus be saved for feeding the German troops.64 Imported food, however, was not a real solution either. Brig. Gen. Robert M. Littlejohn, Chief Quartermaster, Communications Zone, pointed out that there was a food shortage in the United States and in the theater. Including the prisoners of war, his ration strength was over 7 million, and he was having to reduce the rations of US officers and enlisted men by ten percent to meet it. Moreover, the War Department had made no provision for clothing and camp equipment for the prisoners. Littlejohn recommended "settling down to 500,000 in three months." 65

SHAEF issued three disbandment directives in May. Disbandment Directive No. 1 authorized the release of agricultural workers, coal miners, transportation workers, and others in key occupations. No. 2 authorized the discharge of women, and No. 3 of men over fifty years of age. Directive No. 4, put out in early June, released the Belgians, French, and Dutch who had served in the Wehrmacht to their governments.66

A G-1 inspection in early June revealed, however, that the attitude of the armies was "to discharge as many as possible as fast as possible without a great deal of attention to categories." The average rate for 12th Army Group was 30,000 a day; Third Army alone had released over a half million disarmed enemy troops by 8 June. The armies were working against time. Unless the British accepted the prisoners and troops due on their account or unless a large number were released, the rations, according to G-5 estimates, would run out within the month.67

The discharge procedure was simple and generally similar to that devised by CCA of 12th Armored Division under Brig. Gen. Riley F. Ennis, which got the job of disbanding the 82,000 troops sent by the British with the horses from Austria. The

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separation center was an old cavalry school. The men lined up in the stable compound. On entering the building, they removed their shirts and raised their arms to be inspected for the SS blood-type tattoo. (SS men were held either as prisoners of war or, if they had enough rank, under automatic arrest.) After they were inspected, German doctors gave them superficial physical examinations and separated any who were obviously sick. Next, the men filled out counterintelligence questionnaires and were interviewed briefly to determine whether they were subject to automatic arrest or had technical skills of intelligence interest. Those who fell into neither category were given slips stamped with a "B" and could be discharged. Those with an "A" slip were put under automatic arrest when they reached the end of the line. With a "C" they were held as prisoners of war. The next step was to fill out the so-called P-4 form, on which the soldier was required to give his name, the names of his close relatives, and his place of residence. After completing the form, he turned his Soldbuch (pay book) over to a German clerk and received a discharge form and instructions on how to act. If he was going to a place in the Seventh Army area, he was also given half a loaf of black bread and about a pound of lard, his rations for the trip, and could leave the stable to wait for a truck to take him home. CCA had five truck companies working day and night hauling those discharged. If his destination was outside the army area, the soldier went to one of several small temporary camps to await transportation. Outside the center, CCA set up sixty guard posts to block all roads and paths leading in, less to keep those inside in than to keep others out. Upon learning of the center's existence, German soldiers who had deserted late in the war or had been captured and turned loose by US troops tried to infiltrate the center to get themselves officially discharged.68

On 29 June, SHAEF G-1 sanctioned what the armies were already doing and in Disbandment Directive No.5 authorized a general discharge of German nationals held as prisoners of war and disarmed enemy troops, excepting those in automatic arrest categories, SS men, war criminals, or residents of the Russian zone. The last group would have to be held until the Soviet authorities agreed to receive them.69 From then on, the separation centers ran at full tilt until the middle of August when the glut of prisoners seemed about to become a shortage. SHAEF had contracted in July to provide 1.3 million prisoners for labor in France and smaller numbers for Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg; and the US forces were using over half a million in Military Labor Service Units. For the next several months, the numbers on hand plus the contingents to be returned from the United States (370,000) and from Norway and Italy were just about enough to meet the commitments.70 After the summer's rush was over, the presence of prisoners of war threatened to become a permanent feature of the occupation. For the US forces, they were a useful source of labor as well as a willing one, since they were better fed than they would be on the

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outside; furthermore, no matter how many disbandment directives were published (the last, No. 26, was issued on 29 November 1945) , there seemed always to be thousands of ineligibles: the sick and disabled, war crimes suspects, SS men, who might be charged as members of a criminal organization, and members of the General Staff. 71

The General Staff officers, including also all generals, appeared for a time to be the likeliest candidates for permanent detention. Because their appointments had been for life, SHAEF had ordered all active and retired General Staff officers arrested, "not so much to punish them for their misdeeds as to ensure that their opportunities for planning and making preparations for future war . . . are reduced to a minimum." 72 One recurring proposal, last submitted by SHAEF G-2 on 27 April 1945, was to "exile all General Staff officers and all generals forever in a group and imprison them for life in an area under the control of one or all of the United Nations." 73

The future of the General Staff officers and generals was going to be substantially different from the one G-2 proposed for them, which in fact never went beyond the talking stage. In Washington, the War Department G-2 Historical Branch, later the Historical Division, War Department, and eventually the Office of the Chief of Military History, needed information on German operations for the war histories it was going to write. Col. S. L. A. Marshall, chief of the Historical Division, ETOUSA, needed the same kind of information for his division's history of the European theater. In the spring and summer of 1945, however, German military records were only just being uncovered and war crimes and intelligence investigators would have first call on them for a long time. Interviews seemed to offer a useful substitute, and in July 1945, the Historical Branch, G-2, sent Dr. George W. Shuster, President of Hunter College, to Europe at the head of a mission charged with interviewing high-ranking Germans. The transcripts of eighty interviews that Maj. Kenneth Hechler, a member of the mission, conducted with German officers held at ASHCAN SO impressed Colonel Marshall that he authorized Major Hechler to transfer some key German officers to a prisoner of war enclosure at Versailles, where the theater historians would have a better opportunity to interrogate them. After the theater historical activities were moved to Frankfurt in early 1946, the Historical Division, USFET, took over Disarmed Enemy Forces Enclosure 20 at Allendorf, Hesse. The division assembled there all of the German generals and General Staff officers in US custody whose personnel records indicated that they would be able to provide information pertinent to the history of US campaigns in western Europe. Later, prisoners with knowledge of the Mediterranean theater and the German campaigns against the Soviet Union were also included. Under the former chief of the General Staff, Generaloberst a. D. Franz Halder, the officers were put to work writing studies for use in the Army historical program and in the training courses at service schools. After nearly all were released from prisoner of war status in July 1947,

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many continued to work full or part time under General Halder and a control group of senior German officers, turning out hundreds of historical manuscripts and providing information for Army historians. By the time the program terminated in 1959, most of the younger officers had found managerial positions in industry or had resumed their military careers in the Bundeswehr of the German Federal Republic. 74

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You also said:

The Maschke results also conveniently pushed the losses over to the Russians.

Please see the newspaper clipping file on the postwar POW release controversy, beginning at:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 904#602904
and continued through p. 6 of the thread. There you will see 20 newspaper articles from the New York Times dating from the period 1950-1952, documenting the official protests of the West German, French, Italian, Japanese, UK and US governments, as well as the UN, to the USSR on the subject of missing POWs from WWII. The problem was well documented thirty years before the last volume of the Maschke Commission report was issued, and using the term "convenient" for the Maschke Commission findings is a substantial misapprehension.

[WalterS]

Wow. The Nazi apologists are out in force on this one. So now, in addition to the heinous acts of defeating the Nazi regime, those wicked Allies are accused of mistreating prisoners. The apologists and deniers who permeate and infect this forum conveniently ignore the fact that the whole war was started by the Nazi German government and that its intent was the extermination of an entire race of people. Nope, these folks are not at all concerned with the fact over 3 million Soviet POWS died in German captivity. The survival rate of Allied prisoners in Japanese POW camps was also very low.

In their never ending quest for moral equivalency our Nazi apologist friends, who routinely deny that the Germans intended to murder a race of people, or that the Germans deliberately bombed civilian targets, are now squawking about the treatment of prisoners.

As long as this forum allows Holocaust denial and Nazi apologia to flourish we'll get these kinds of threads.

[bob lembke]

David;

Perhaps the typical POW was held 9 months, not 18-24 months. The anecdotal material seems to have POWs getting home in 1946 or 1947, perhaps the latter was unusual. I believe the "guest workers" taken to England came back in 1947, your material refers to the cadres laboring in victorious countries. And I know that some POWs were dumped quite quickly.

However, even adjusting for this, some of the alleged death rates are roughly one-tenth of what I understand was the peace-time rate in the US Army home-side at that time. They are again simply impossible, even if the treatment of the POWs was correct.

Your material mentions that over 4 million prisoners were not to be fed from Army stores, but from German civilian stocks. What stocks? For much of the two years following the war, the official ration in the western zones of Germany was 1275 calories per day, according to correspondence between Herbert Hoover, who was doing relief work; Secretary of War Patterson; Secretary of State Marshall, and General Clay, Governor of Germany. Secretary Patterson wrote Secretary Marshall on June 13, 1947 that "the average ration for the last six weeks has been 1,200 calories, and in many places it is as low as 900 calories....this is slow famine" The situation in the French zone was worse. To think that sufficient food could be squeezed out of such a situation to feed four million men in camps is absurd. Or, possibly, the food stocks in Germany in the fall of 1945 were much better than in the spring of 1947.

My area of expertise is WW I, not WW II. I use a lot of official histories. I have recently bought about 65 German official histories, and my wife, a librarian, obtains others for me on inter-library loan. I have the entire collection of materials ever published by the US Army Historical Section. I am studying the fighting on one street of a French village, over a three week period, in which we lost about 5000 men. I have about 25 American sources, mostly official sources, but also letters and books written by participants, almost no secondary sources.

There was something awkward to cover up, and I have to say that, comparing all the sources exhaustivly for several months, 80% of the material in the "official" histories have to be quite wrong, or simply ignore important events, as they are generally wildly contradictory. Or they are a bit understated, in one case, in a regiment's official history, they, at a strength of 2000 men, they move into the village, a couple of days later they move back across the tiny River Aisle, and they have lost 1000 men. How much detail on this? One sentence, and of course no mention of losses. Then follows an exhaustive discussion of settling up their tents in a rest area.

One also observes that the only accounts that seem to be truthful are from enlisted men, or from lieutenants or captains. Any higher grade, and truth flies out the window. The higher officers, National Guard, many politicians of one sort or another back home, spin out self-serving nonsense, mostly.

My digression points out the pitfalls of what is often found in official histories. I doubt that the truth about what happened to those POWs will not ever be clear, but I doubt that thew truth will be found in American official histories written in occupied Germany in 1947, nor in West German official histories written in the 1960s or 1970's.

I have spoken of these events repeatedly with participants over the last 50 years, and I have never heard anything that was inconsistant with what Bacque claims. My cousin, whom I have known for 50 years, is totally creditable to me. He is now 80, and with a damaged pelvis and knee, still runs a tractor 10 hours a day, and missed 1 1/2 days of milking in 20 years. He is the kind of straight-forward, honest person that I rarely expect to meet in the governmental, corporate, and urban life I have inhabited most of my life.

Soon the last of these guys will be dead. We will never get down to the truth of the POW question ever, I think. I have some time left; I will again retreat from WW II back to my WW I haven, and back to my book. It is interesting that in the WW I arena the truth about lots of things seems to be arising only after the participants are dead. In my own narrow area I have uncovered a highly successful disinformation campaign by an American and a Brit general that they carried out for almost 20 years after the war, and that still poisons currently written history.

Bob Lembke