Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  Since there was no German government after 8 May 1945, who was there to protest? The German Red Cross, purged of its Nazi leadership, would be allowed to continue some inspection work, but in the post-war context this amounted to a fairly toothless watchdog. Basically, there was little or no recourse for the German soldiers who had fallen (or put themselves, often at considerable effort) into Anglo-American hands in preference to those of the Russians.

  Huge numbers of the German prisoners were housed (if that is the word) in the open, with little, or for quite long periods, no food, in a cold, wet spring season. They were often mistreated. That hundreds of thousands, running into millions, of these POWs suffered horribly from hunger, exposure and associated diseases, and that a shamefully large number of them died as a result, cannot be denied. There are wildly differing estimates of the dead, ranging from 8,000 or so up into the hundreds of thousands, just as there are in the case of those bombed at Dresden – and as in the case of Dresden the post-war political orientation of the estimators seems to be a critical factor.6

  Until early 1945, it had been usual for Germans captured at the front line to be transferred back to holding camps over the border in France. The massive numbers who surrendered from that time onwards, however, overwhelmed the system. As early as February 1945, the Americans had handed over the administration of these camps to the French authorities. It was a cynical move, since, although the French agreed in writing that they would adhere to international agreements on the care of POWs, everyone was perfectly aware that the French did not have the resources (or perhaps the will) to feed these prisoners at the previous levels – and also that they would reserve the right to use these prisoners as forced labourers. However, with the war rapidly drawing to an end, German retaliation against American troops in their custody – which had earlier always mitigated against neglecting the letter of the laws of war – was becoming ever more unlikely and would soon be irrelevant.7

  The numbers of German troops surrendering in the west in the last weeks of the war was unlike anything anyone involved had ever seen. The closest comparison was the millions of Red Army soldiers who had fallen into German hands in the summer and autumn of 1941 and then again during the summer of 1942. This was not an encouraging precedent. There were, however, differences. Firstly, the Americans, though prepared, along with the other Western Allies, to bend the laws of war seriously out of shape when it came to caring for their millions of new captives, had no genocidal impulse. And secondly, unlike in the Soviet Union, where the war continued to rage for years after the great encirclements and mass surrenders of the early months, peace was on the horizon, and that horizon seemed close.

  ‘Unconditional surrender’ of Germany had been Allied policy since the Casablanca Conference in 1943. Over the following months, its complex legal implications were the subject of much detailed attention by the EAC’s bureaucrats at Lancaster House. By the summer of 1944, the draft instrument of surrender being circulated by the EAC contained a cunning paragraph stipulating that, in case of surrender, the German commander must accept that his men ‘shall at the discretion of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Allied State concerned be declared to be Prisoners of War’. The obverse of this was, of course, that they might not be so declared,8 which is where the weaselly formulations of the new surrender conditions, finally introduced in March 1945, come in. Josef Bischof slipped ‘under the wire’ by surrendering just before this change in the rules. He therefore enjoyed full POW status under the Geneva Convention. Those who followed him into American custody did not.

  The reason for this decision on the part of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington (the British did the same, in a coordinated move) was that the numbers of prisoners now pouring in were, they judged, impossible to feed and care for under the relatively generous terms of the Convention. The reclassification was justified in law, not especially convincingly, by saying that because at the end of the war the German government would cease to exist, so would its armed forces. As a result, German soldiers ceased to be part of the German armed forces and therefore did not have to be treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.

  Behind this sophistry lay a simple fact: from now on, any Germans who surrendered to the Allies would have to rely on the decency of their captors rather than any chapter or verse of Hague or Geneva. After Casablanca, Churchill had said with typical eloquence but untypical lack of clarity: ‘If we are bound, we are bound by our consciences to civilisation.’ The POWs would now find out what the Allied conscience was and was not capable of.

  Fritz Mann belonged to what was left of a German unit that gave itself up to the Americans in mid-April at a sheet metal factory at Remscheid near Wuppertal, in the southern part of the Ruhr area. They stumbled over the corpses of those who had not been so lucky, were herded by their captors none too gently from assembly area to assembly area, with the column of prisoners growing dramatically as they progressed, until on the highway leading south towards Hückeswagen the flood of defeated, exhausted troops seemed endless. By the time they reached the outskirts of Wipperfürth, a little more than twenty kilometres from their starting point, they were around ten or twelve thousand strong, and it was early evening. The heat of the day was giving way to a chilly night. And here was a vast camp area, surrounded by an improvised barbed wire fence. This was their first ‘cage’, and in it they slumped down, without shelter or protection, to spend their initial night of captivity.

  Mann, a veteran of the invasion of Russia, still has nightmares about that first, terrible winter, when he saw so many of his comrades die in the snows near Moscow. Now he would have some more to live with. The following morning, despite their protests, they were stripped of their rucksacks and blankets and of anything they could not stuff into their pockets, and put in trucks. Packed sixty per vehicle, they were driven further south, to Gummersbach. This was the real thing, the big holding camp, where they joined at least fifty thousand ‘disarmed enemy forces’ awaiting their fate in a grassy valley snaking between high, forested crags, with machine-gunners on the heights to stop prisoners from scaling them, and guards with guns and clubs to keep those down in the valley in order:

  At mid-day, the sun beats down red-hot upon the valley. But this lasts only a short time. Already in the afternoon, the valley finds itself in the shadow of the forest. The cool evening is followed by a frosty night. – Here and there a few improvised tents have been erected with blankets and canvases. They belong to the few lucky ones who came from assembly areas where they were allowed to keep all or at least a part of their belongings. We others stretch out on the bare earth. We lie very close to each other, and the colder the night becomes, the more closely we press our bodies together. Thirty, forty men lie in a row together. You cannot move or rise. Anyone who stands up loses their place, irretrievably. The row immediately closes up, slithering and sprawling to fill the gap . . .

  . . . From the heights and the outcrops, the camp fires of the guard units cast their light down into the valley. The silhouettes of the guards stand out against the horizon. Here and there, the tune of an American song floats over the night air. Down here, however, nothing moves. The valley, with its silent guests, lies like a huge mass gravesite in the flickering light of the flames.9

  For four days there was nothing to drink. Then some large metal tubs, containing around seventy or eighty litres of water, were delivered. Squads were organised to fetch water for the thousands of men crowded in the valley. It took hours for anything like a universal distribution to occur, during which time the thirsty men spent an agony of waiting. A day later, they got their first distribution of food: American emergency (known as ‘K’) rations. Each pack contained four biscuits, a small can of cheese, a twist of coffee powder, a little sugar and four cigarettes. It was a beginning, after five days without nourishment of any kind.

  There was abuse from some of the guards, and liberal use of wooden clubs to impose what the Americans viewed a
s ‘order’ and to move the prisoners around as required. Another account of the same camp has the prisoners being insulted by the guards as they arrived, running a gauntlet of jeers and catcalls in English and pidgin German – Nazischweine! and Hitlerbande! (Hitler gang) and so on. Otherwise the account is similar. The days without water or food, then the tubs of water and the ration packs finally arriving, just enough to keep the men alive for as long as it takes.10

  Once some kind of food ration had started being doled out, it was enough to keep most of the men – those who were reasonably young, reasonably fit, not already suffering from wounds or illnesses – from death, though not from malnutrition and its associated ailments. After that, the worst enemy was the weather. At first hot during the day and frosty at night, as April progressed it started to rain, either chilly drizzle or sporadic downpours, and the men still had no shelter worth speaking of. A few lucky ones had managed to hold on to blankets; others managed to purloin cardboard or metal boxes and use them as sheets and blankets. Some dug holes and lay in grave-like trenches, with whatever pathetic, improvised roofs they could find, to keep themselves from the all-pervasive wet.

  Gummersbach was one of several larger holding camps used for housing the hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht personnel captured in the Ruhr Cauldron in mid-April. They were there for a few days. Then most were once more packed into trucks and went on a much longer journey, this time to the left bank of the Rhine. In the area between Wesel, north of Düsseldorf, to somewhere around Bad Kreuznach – more than 300 kilometres – lay the notorious ‘Rhine Meadows’, where improvised, open-air POW camps – the most infamous of the ‘cages’ – had been set up among the fields and banks lining the great river.

  At the time of the Rhine cages’ establishment in early April, the area on the left bank was chosen as a collection point, a processing archipelago for the vast numbers of captives and even large numbers of prospective ones, because most bridges had been destroyed, and so there was little possibility of newly captured German troops escaping (potentially staging mass breakouts), crossing the river and rejoining the Wehrmacht forces at that time still fighting not so far to the east. Altogether, over the next months, it is their stories that show the very worst of what could happen to those who surrendered to the Americans during this chaotic period.

  The ‘Rhine Meadows’ were definitely a black mark against America’s otherwise good record of treating enemy POWs. There was chaos and there were terrible shortages and transport difficulties throughout Europe in the immediate aftermath of war. In Austria, Italy and other theatres, German prisoners suffered routine but mostly not life-threatening deprivations during this time. Camps were also established on a temporary basis in southern Germany and Austria by the Americans. Conditions were tough. But the numbers of surrendered troops were not so terrifyingly large and POW survival rates were roughly as expected.

  The Rhine camps, however, were something else. The worst of them seem to have numbered six – Bad Kreuznach-Bretzenheim, Remagen-Sinzig, Rheinberg, Heidesheim, Wickrathberg and Büderich – holding hundreds of thousands of German prisoners in the weeks following the mass surrender.11 Sickness and ill health were undoubtedly rife. At least during the first weeks after the cages were established, the prisoners went unwashed and were perpetually hungry. Rations were similar to those at Gummersbach, or might include milk powder, dried spinach and potatoes (two, often enough all but raw), with bread and a thin soup only becoming available after some weeks had passed.

  Many prisoners rapidly deteriorated into skeletal figures, not easily distinguishable from the concentration camp inmates liberated by the Americans and British earlier in the spring (an experience for many Anglo-American troops that may in turn have influenced their attitude towards these same German prisoners). Of the 1,247 officially recorded as dying in the camp at Remagen-Sinzig, many died of dysentery-related illnesses. Some were shot trying to escape. A few others died when ‘sleep-holes’ dug by prisoners collapsed in heavy rain, burying their occupants alive.12

  As in all prisons throughout history, there was often admirable solidarity, but theft, intimidation and black-marketeering also quickly became everyday phenomena. The hierarchy that was established was probably the only one possible, but it did give opportunities for exploitation and bullying. The men were split into ‘thousands’ and the thousands into ‘hundreds’ and these also into ‘tens’, each under a leader. It was through this chain of command that water and food distribution was organised. That there was corruption among some of the leaders, and even among the German medical staff, there can be no doubt. Proud soldiers were reduced to begging for cigarette butts thrown away by the guards, who often showed brutal contempt for their charges. Little about the camps reflected nobly on either jailers or inmates, but at least the latter had some excuse for less than immaculate behaviour.13

  The disaster of the Rhine Meadows camps, which some have blamed entirely on American malice, seems, in fact, to have arisen mainly from two factors. First, inadequate food supplies – bearing in mind that apart from millions of surrendered German soldiers, the Allies in western Germany had the duty to feed huge, largely urban civilian populations that had also fallen into their hands in the previous weeks – exacerbated by transport problems; second, serious overstretching of the personnel available to guard and organise the camps.

  The American 159th Regiment, not quite 2,400 men, was given the responsibility of dealing with the 300,000 or so Germans captured in the Ruhr three weeks before the end of the war, when other units were still fighting further east. These same soldiers had to build the vast enclosures at Remagen, where the Americans had first crossed the Rhine so dramatically in March, and Sinzig, five kilometres to the south – two of the largest and most infamous holding camps – from scratch.14 That they consisted of barbed wire stretched between stakes, a few basic tents for medical personnel and so on, and little more, was nothing to make anyone proud, but it was explicable.

  The entire 300-kilometre sequence of camps large and small, snaking down the Rhine from Wesel almost to Mainz, was made the responsibility of one US infantry division, the 106th, with a few more reserve units thrown in. These were not specialists, nor did they have experience in this kind of duty. Five hundred and fifty-seven thousand surrendered German troops were reckoned by reliable post-war German sources to have been swept into these camps in the weeks before the end of the war.15 Because of these serious personnel shortages, and the potential for being overwhelmed (in the military sense also) by the vast numbers of German troops in the Americans’ care, DPs were also drafted in as guards. Such auxiliary forces, largely Polish and Jewish, brought with them, in many cases, a real malice – a taste for making their recent oppressors, now at their mercy, suffer as they, their families and compatriots had done under the German heel.

  On the other hand, as time went on, many prisoners were, in fact, released. After checks had been made against lists of wanted war criminals, and forearms checked for SS tattoos, wrongly arrested civilians, elderly and juvenile Volkssturm conscripts, and non-German Wehrmacht soldiers (Poles, Alsace-Lorrainers, Austrians and so on) found themselves at liberty. Separate camps (with tents) were set up for women prisoners (Luftwaffe auxiliaries and so on), and likewise, also with tents, for the under-age boys taken prisoner after being inducted into Hitler Youth and Volkssturm units.16

  Rations for the prisoners were never generous, but slowly improved. Despite the chronic grain shortages in Germany and all over the continent, there arrived, after a few weeks, a real red letter day. As one former prisoner wrote later:

  The teams that bring the rations for the thousand-man units are hauling strange loads. We have seen nothing like this so far. Among the usual cans and cartons they carry white paper sacks, with square objects in them. As soon as the carriers turn into the camp, the first curious prisoners start stalking them. – Hey, mates! What you got in those sacks? – But their mates tell them nothing. They just grin – a bit slyly, a
bit meaningfully, and they just keep hauling their mysterious cargo on towards the distribution point.

  But the haulers’ path is soon crowded with more and more curious men; finally, there are so many snuffling around the load that, inevitably, the veil of secrecy can’t be maintained. Someone suddenly says just one simple word. Shyly, almost incredulously, with a voice filled with awe, he says it:

  Bread!

  A second voice joins his: Bread! – a third cries out: Bread! The news spreads through the camp like wildfire: Bread!

  Admittedly, there was only a quarter of a loaf per ten men, but it was a powerful moment, a sign of things slowly changing. However, the American position regarding the three million or so German personnel in their custody at the end of the war throughout Europe was clearly put by Major General Robert L. Littlejohn, Chief Quartermaster (European Theatre of Operations): ‘Definitely I do not intend to go along with a ration that will cause prisoners to starve to death, or throw them into our hospitals. Neither do I intend to be a party to a ration that will make the Germans fat.’17

  Large-scale discharges of prisoners began, in fact, just two weeks after the official end of the war. On 23 May 1945, by order of General Eisenhower, women, under-age soldiers and representatives of various professional groups deemed crucial to the post-war survival of Germany were, subject to their not being politically or criminally tainted, proclaimed eligible for release (these groups included farmers, miners, railway workers and officials and telephone engineers).18

  The releases were then temporarily halted, a result of the French government’s demand that some of the Americans’ captives be handed over to them as forced labour. A kind of human reparation, their job would be to clear mines and rebuild factories, utilities and infrastructure damaged and destroyed in France as a result of occupation and the consequent fighting during the liberation.