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Disarmed Enemy Forces

Disarmed Enemy Forces, and — more uncommon — Surrendered Enemy Forces, was a U.S. designation both for soldiers who surrendered to an adversary after hostilities ended and for those previously surrendered POWs who were held in camps in occupied German territory at that time. It is mainly referenced to Dwight D. Eisenhower's redesignation of POW's in post World War II occupied Germany. The purpose of the designation was to circumvent the 1929 Geneva Convention, Relative to the treatment of prisoners of war.

The prisoners were redesignated as POWs in March 1946, but many were for additional years still used as forced labor instead of being released as mandated by the Hague Conventions.

Historical precedents

After defeating Poland in 1939, and also after the defeat of Yugoslavia two years later, many troops from those nations were "released" from POW status and turned into a "virtual conscript labor force".

Germany had either broken up or absorbed the countries in question, and the German argument was that neither country remained as a recognized state to which the POW's could claim to belong, and that since belonging to a recognized nation was a formal prerequisite for POW status: "former Polish and Yugoslav military personnel were not legally prisoners of war".

Effect on German prisoners

As of June 16, 1945 the U.S. France and the U.K. held a combined total of 7,500,000 German POW's and DEF's. By June 18 the U.S. had discharged 1,200,000 of these.

After the German surrender, the International Red Cross was prohibited from providing aid or visiting prisoner camps. However, in the autumn of 1945 it was allowed to investigate the camps in the UK and French occupation zones of Germany, as well as provide relief to the prisoners held there. In February 4, 1946 the Red Cross was permitted to assist prisoners in the U.S. zone, although only with very small quantities of food. "During their visits, the delegates observed that German prisoners of war were often detained in appalling conditions. They drew the attention of the authorities to this fact, and gradually succeeded in getting some improvements made.

The Allied argument for retracting Geneva convention protection from the German soldiers was similar to that of Nazi Germany vis á vis Polish and Yugoslav soldiers; using the "disappearance of the Third Reich to argue that the convention no longer operated-that POW status did not apply to the vast majority who had passed into captivity on and after May 5." The motive was twofold; both an unwillingness to follow the Geneva convention now that the threat of German reprisals against Allied POWs was gone, and also they were "to an extent unable to meet the high standards of the Geneva code" for the large number of captured Germans.

The conditions these prisoners had to endure were "extremely harsh". Many of the camps in Western Germany were "huge wired-in enclosures lacking sufficient shelter and other necessities". (see Rheinwiesenlager)

Since there was no longer a danger German retaliation against Allied POWs; "less effort was put into finding ways of procuring scarce food and shelter than would otherwise have been the case, and that consequently tens of thousands of prisoners died from hunger and disease who might have been saved."

According to S. P. MacKenzie "callous self-interest and a desire for retribution played a role in the fate of these men"; and he exemplifies by pointing out that sick or otherwise unfit prisoners were forcibly used for labor, and in France and the Low countries this also included work such as highly dangerous mine-clearing; "by September 1945 it was estimated by the French authorities that two thousand prisoners were being maimed and killed each month in accidents"

The International Red Cross was never permitted to fully involve itself in the situation in DEF or SEP camps, and even though conditions in them gradually improved "even the most conservative estimates put the death toll in French camps alone at over 16,500 in 1945".

Controversy

The Western Allies post-war treatment of German prisoners was first investigated by Canadian novelist James Bacque together with Ernest Fisher, Jr. in the book "Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II". In this 1989 book Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower deliberately caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949. In similar French camps some 250,000 more were said to have perished. Bacque charged that hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war (POWs) were recorded as entering the camps but not recorded as transferring out, so they must have died. He also points to a German report recording the death of 1.4 million German POWs, and Soviet data accounting for only 450,600 of these deaths. The remainder, he says, must then have died in Western camps.

Bacque revealed that the International Committee of the Red Cross was refused entry to the camps, Switzerland was deprived of its status as "Protecting Power" and that POW's were reclassified as Disarmed Enemy Forces. Bacque argued that there was a deliberate policy of mass murder, for example by keeping prisoners on starvation rations even though there was no food shortage in Europe in 1945-1946, and put the blame on Eisenhower.

Other Losses received initial support from some historians, including Richard Overy and Desmond Morton. Jonathon Osmond, writing in the Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said: "Bacque...has published a corrective to the impression that the Western allies after the Second World War behaved in a civilised manner to the conquered Germans... The voices of those who suffered give harrowing accounts of cruelty and suffering... I)t is clear that he has opened up once more a serious subject dominated by the explanations of those in power. Even if two-thirds of the statistical discrepancies exposed by Bacque could be accounted for by the chaos of the situation, there would still be a case to answer.

Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose acknowledged that Bacque had made a "major historical discovery", in the sense that very little attention had hitherto been paid to the treatment of German POWs in Allied hands. He acknowledged he did not support Bacque's conclusions, but said at the American Military Institute's Annual Meeting in March, 1990: "Bacque has done some research and uncovered an important story that I, and other American historians, missed altogether in work on Eisenhower and the conclusion of the war. When those millions of Wehrmacht soldiers came into captivity at the end of the war, many of them were deliberately and brutally mistreated. There is no denying this. There are men in this audience who were victims of this mistreatment. It is a story that has been kept quiet.

A book-length disputation of Bacque's work, entitled Eisenhower and the German POWs, appeared in 1992, featuring essays by British, American, and German historians. In a 1991 New York Times book review, Ambrose claimed: "Mr. Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation or about the column "other losses." Mr. Bacque's "missing million" were old men and young boys in the Volkssturm (People's Militia) released without formal discharge and transfers of POWs to other allies control areas."

Current academic consensus regarding the post-war death rate in Allied hands can - based on work such as Ambroses Eisenhower and the German POWs - be summed up in historian Niall Fergusons words that Bacques "calculations grossly exaggerate both the number of Germans the Americans captured and their mortality" although he also notes that "the mortality rate for German POWs in American hands was more than four times higher than the rate for those who surrendered to the British". Ambrose did concede: "we as Americans can't duck the fact that terrible things happened. And they happened at the end of a war we fought for decency and freedom, and they are not excusable.

Aftermath

The wording of the 1949 Third Geneva Convention was altered from that of the 1929 convention so that it explicitly states that soldiers who "fall into the power" of the enemy are protected as well as those taken prisoner in the course of fighting.

Most captives of the Americans and the British were released by the end of 1948, most of those in French and Soviet captivity were released by the end of 1949, although the last big release occurred in 1956. Estimates of POW casualties range from 600,000 to 1,000,000. According to the section of the German Red Cross dealing with tracing the captives the ultimate fate of 1,300,000 German POW's in Allied custody is still unknown, they are still officially listed as missing.

External links

FRANCE'S DEADLY MINE-CLEARING MISSIONS Surviving German POWs Seek Compensation. Georg Bönisch, Der Spiegel Online, international edition Aug. 25, 2008.
Germans forced to run across minefields ("Tvang tyskere til å løpe over minefelt") Video Extract from Norwegian documentary on Germans forced to clear minefields in Norway.

Notes

References

Bohme, K. W. Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, 15 vols. (Munich, 1962-74), 1, pt. 1:x. (n. 1 above), 13:173; ICRC (n. 12 above), p. 334.
Ferguson, Niall. Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat, War in History, 2004 11 (2) 148–192
ICRC Commentaries on the Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War Article 5
Lee Smith, Arthur. Die"vermisste Million" Zum Schicksal deutscher Kriegsgefangener nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1992, ISBN 348664565X
MacKenzie S. P. "The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II", The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 66, No. 3. (Sep., 1994)
Staff. Ike's Revenge?, Time Magazine, October 2, 1989.

Colonel Harold E. Potter. First year of the Occupation, Occupation Forces in Europe Series, 1945-46, Office of the Chief Historian, European Command
Earl F. Ziemke " The U.S. Army in the occupation of Germany 1944-1946" Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington, D. C., 1990, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 75-619027 Chapter XVI: Germany in Defeat