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Disarmed Enemy Forces, and — less commonly^[1] — 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.^[2] It is mainly referenced to Dwight D. Eisenhower's redesignation of POW's in post World War II occupied Germany.^[3] 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.^[4]

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".^[5]

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 POWs could still 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".^[5]^[6]

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.^[7]

Three months after Germany's surrender, the International Red Cross was allowed to investigate the camps in the UK and French occupation zones of Germany, as well as to provide relief to the prisoners held there. On February 4 1946, the Red Cross was permitted to assist prisoners in the U.S. zone and estimated that German prisoners of war were often detained in appalling conditions.^[8]

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.^[9]^[10]

Most captives of the Americans and the British were released by the end of 1948, and 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.^[11]

MacKenzie and Bacque controversy

MacKenzie charges

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".^[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.^[5]

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"^[5] (see Rheinwiesenlager).

Since there was no longer a danger of 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".^[5]

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"^[5]^[12]

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".^[5]

=James Bacque claims

The Western Allies' post-war treatment of German prisoners was first investigated by Canadian novelist James Bacque, together with Ernest Fisher, Jr.^[13] 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 probably 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.

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... It 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".^[14]

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 that 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. ^[15]

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^[16], 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".

The Wehrmacht employed female auxiliaries for nursing, rear-area and anti aircraft duties. These women are held in the Third U.S. Army prisoner of war enclosure at Regansburg, Germany. May, 1945

Ambrose, at the time director of the Eisenhower center at the University of Orleans, also organized a conference of British, American, and German historians. The result of this conference was edited by Ambrose and Guenther Bischof and published in 1992 as the book Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood which strongly disputes Bacque's mortality statistics. The historians did however not dispute Bacque's findings regarding camp conditions: "Bacque's six eyewitnesses fairly accurately reflect the appalling conditions in the Rhine meadow camps.... There can be little doubt that conditions in the worst of the camps were horrific - in the first weeks of May, even inhuman."^[17]

Current academic consensus regarding the post-war death rate in Allied hands can - mainly based on work such as Ambrose's Eisenhower and the German POWs - be summed up in historian Niall Ferguson's words that Bacque's "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".^[18] 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".^[19]

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.^[21]

Notes

^ Note: Used for German troops in Northern Italy, not to be confused with the British equivalent "Surrendered Enemy Personnel"
^ Note: In April the War Department approved treating all members of the German armed forces captured after the declaration of ECLIPSE conditions, or the cessation of hostilities, and all prisoners of war not evacuated from Germany immediately after the conclusion of hostilities, as 'disarmed enemy forces', and specified that such captives would be responsible for feeding and maintaining themselves. This ruling did not apply to war criminals, wanted individuals, and security suspects, who were to be imprisoned, fed, and controlled by Allied forces. The War Department further directed that there be no public declaration made on the status of the German armed forces. (Smith p. 93)
^ ICRC Commentaries on the Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War Article 5 "One category of military personnel which was refused the advantages of the Convention in the course of the Second World War comprised German and Japanese troops who fell into enemy hands on the capitulation of their countries in 1945 (6). The German capitulation was both political, involving the dissolution of the Government, and military, whereas the Japanese capitulation was only military. Moreover, the situation was different since Germany was a party to the 1929 Convention and Japan was not. Nevertheless, the German and Japanese troops were considered as surrendered enemy personnel and were deprived of the protection provided by the 1929 Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The Allied authorities took the view that unconditional surrender amounted to giving a free hand to the Detaining Powers as to the treatment they might give to military personnel who fell into their hands following the capitulation. In fact, these men were frequently in a very different situation from that of their comrades who had been taken prisoner during the hostilities, since very often they had not even gone into [p.76] action against the enemy. Although on the whole the treatment given to surrendered enemy personnel was fairly favourable, it presented certain disadvantages: prisoners in this category had their personal property impounded without any receipt being given; they had no spokesman to represent them before the Detaining Power; officers received no pay and other ranks, although compelled to work, got no wages; in any penal proceedings they had the benefit of none of the guarantees provided by the Convention. Most important of all, these men had no legal status and were at the entire mercy of the victor. Fortunately, they were well treated but this is no reason to overlook the fact that they were deprived of any status and all guarantees."
^ Note: Hague states that prisoners shall be released as soon as possible after peace, but since the Allies had abolished the German government and thus had no German state to sign a formal peace treaty with they argued that they were not obliged under Hague to release their prisoners.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h S. P. MacKenzie "The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II", The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 66, No. 3. (Sep., 1994), pp. 487-520.
^ Further referenced in footnote to: J. Wilhelm, Can the Status of Prisoners of War Be Altered? (Geneva, 1953) p.10
^ United States Department of State / Foreign relations of the United States : diplomatic papers : the Conference of Berlin (the Potsdam Conference), 1945 Volume II (1945) p. 765
^ Staff. ICRC in WW II: German prisoners of war in Allied hands, 2 February 2005
^ ICRC Commentaries on the Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War Article 5 "Under the present provision, the Convention applies to persons who "fall into the power" of the enemy. This term is also used in the opening sentence of Article 4, replacing the expression "captured" which was used in the 1929 Convention (Article 1). It indicates clearly that the treatment laid down by the Convention is applicable not only to military personnel taken prisoner in the course of fighting, but also to those who fall into the hands of the adversary following surrender or mass capitulation."
^ Note this makes no mention of the status of Prisoners of War held in facilities on enemy territory following surrender or mass capitulation, implying that their re-designation from POW to DEF in 1945 was in violation of the Geneva conventions, and that there was no semantic loophole in the conventions that needed to be rectified by modifying the conventions with regards to this category of prisoners.
^ stern-Serie: Besiegt, befreit, besetzt - Deutschland 1945-48
^ Footnote to: K. W. Bohme, 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.
^ Ernest Fisher, Jr. was for many years a senior historian with the United States Army Center for Military History in Washington, and wrote the official history of the U.S. Army campaign in Italy, Cassino to the Alps. Among his recent publications is a book on the American non-commissioned officer, Guardians of the Republic published by Ballantine. From HNN Debate: Was Ike Responsible for the Deaths of Hundreds of Thousands of German POW's? Pro and Con
^ Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War After World War II., Review author[s]: Jonathan Osmond International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) © 1991 Royal Institute of International Affairs
^ The Scholarship on World War II: Its Present Condition and Future Possibilities. Richard H. Kohn. The Journal of Military History, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 365-394
^ Note: Food relief shipments to Germany were prohibited by the Allies until December 1945, since "they might tend to negate the policy of restricting the German standard of living to the average of the surrounding European nations". "CARE package shipments to individuals remained prohibited until 5 June 1946". The U.S. Army In The Occupation of Germany 1944-1946 by Earl F. Ziemke Footnotes to chapter 23, Further referenced to: (1) Memo, European Section Theater Group, OPD, for L & LD, sub: Establishment of Civilian Director of Relief, 8 Dec 45, in OPD, ABC 336 (sec. IV) (cases 155- ) . (2) OMGUS, Control Office, Hist Br, History of U.S. Military Government in Germany, Public Welfare, 9 Jul 46, in OMGUS 21-3/5.
^ Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, "The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38", p.289
^ Niall Ferguson "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
^ Ike's Revenge? Time Magazine, Monday, Oct. 2, 1989
^ Note: Captive Italian nationals who were not designated as prisoner of war were alternatively also designated as "personnel in custody of the Government of the United States of America and its agencies,". An alternative name given was also Italian surrendered enemy personnel
^ Note: German protests that forcing POWs to clear mines was against international law, article 32 of the Geneva conventions, were rejected with the assertion that the Germans were not POW's; they were disarmed forces who had surrendered unconditionally ("avvæpnede styrker som hadde overgitt seg betingelsesløst"). Mine clearance reports received by the Allied Forces Head Quarter state: June 21, 1945; 199 dead and 163 wounded Germans; 3 Norwegians and 4 British wounded. The last registration, from August 29, 1945 lists 392 wounded and 275 dead Germans. Mine-clearance was then for unknown reasons halted for close to a year before recommencing under better conditions during June-September 1946. This time many volunteered thanks to good pay, and death rates were much lower, possibly in part thanks to a deal permitting them medical treatment at Norwegian hospitals. Jonas Tjersland, Tyske soldater brukt som mineryddere VG, 08-04-2006.

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.

@@ Line 17: / Line 17: @@
 Three months after Germany's surrender, the International Red Cross was allowed to investigate the camps in the UK and French occupation zones of Germany, as well as to provide relief to the prisoners held there. On February 4 1946, the Red Cross was permitted to assist prisoners in the U.S. zone and estimated that German prisoners of war were often detained in appalling conditions.<ref>Staff. [http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/htmlall/57jnwx?opendocument ICRC in WW II: German prisoners of war in Allied hands], [[2 February]] [[2005]] <!--Retrieved 12 August 2008--></ref>
+==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.<ref>[[ICRC]] [http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/WebList?ReadForm&id=375&t=com Commentaries on the Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War] [http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/COM/375-590008?OpenDocument Article 5] "Under the present provision, the Convention applies to persons who "fall into the power" of the enemy. This term is also used in the opening sentence of Article 4, replacing the expression "captured" which was used in the 1929 Convention (Article 1). It indicates clearly that the treatment laid down by the Convention is applicable not only to military personnel taken prisoner in the course of fighting, but also to those who fall into the hands of the adversary following surrender or mass capitulation."</ref><ref> Note this makes no mention of the status of Prisoners of War held in facilities on enemy territory following surrender or mass capitulation, implying that their re-designation from POW to DEF in 1945 was in violation of the Geneva conventions, and that there was no semantic loophole in the conventions that needed to be rectified by modifying the conventions with regards to this category of prisoners.</ref>
+Most captives of the Americans and the British were released by the end of 1948, and 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.<ref>[http://www.stern.de/politik/ausland/537667.html?eid=537265 stern-Serie: Besiegt, befreit, besetzt - Deutschland 1945-48]</ref>
+==MacKenzie and Bacque controversy==
+===MacKenzie charges===
 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".<ref name=MacKenzie-487-520/> 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.<ref name=MacKenzie-487-520/>
@@ Line 30: / Line 38: @@
 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".<ref name=MacKenzie-487-520/>
+===James Bacque claims==
-==Controversy==
 {{main|Other Losses|James Bacque}}
 The Western Allies' post-war treatment of German prisoners was first investigated by Canadian novelist [[James Bacque]], together with Ernest Fisher, Jr.<ref>Ernest Fisher, Jr. was for many years a senior historian with the United States Army Center for Military History in Washington, and wrote the official history of the U.S. Army campaign in Italy, Cassino to the Alps. Among his recent publications is a book on the American non-commissioned officer, Guardians of the Republic published by Ballantine. From [http://hnn.us/articles/1266.html HNN Debate: Was Ike Responsible for the Deaths of Hundreds of Thousands of German POW's? Pro and Con]</ref> 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 camp]]s 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 probably 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 POWs 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 blamed 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... It 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".<ref> Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War After World War II., Review author[s]: Jonathan Osmond International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) © 1991 Royal Institute of International Affairs </ref>
@@ Line 47: / Line 53: @@
 Current academic consensus regarding the post-war death rate in Allied hands can - mainly based on work such as Ambrose's ''Eisenhower and the German POWs'' - be summed up in historian [[Niall Ferguson]]'s words that Bacque's "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".<ref>Niall Ferguson "''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</ref> 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".<ref>[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,958673,00.html Ike's Revenge?] [[Time Magazine]], Monday, Oct. 2, 1989</ref>
-==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.<ref>[[ICRC]] [http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/WebList?ReadForm&id=375&t=com Commentaries on the Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War] [http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/COM/375-590008?OpenDocument Article 5] "Under the present provision, the Convention applies to persons who "fall into the power" of the enemy. This term is also used in the opening sentence of Article 4, replacing the expression "captured" which was used in the 1929 Convention (Article 1). It indicates clearly that the treatment laid down by the Convention is applicable not only to military personnel taken prisoner in the course of fighting, but also to those who fall into the hands of the adversary following surrender or mass capitulation."</ref><ref> Note this makes no mention of the status of Prisoners of War held in facilities on enemy territory following surrender or mass capitulation, implying that their re-designation from POW to DEF in 1945 was in violation of the Geneva conventions, and that there was no semantic loophole in the conventions that needed to be rectified by modifying the conventions with regards to this category of prisoners.</ref>
-Most captives of the Americans and the British were released by the end of 1948, and 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.<ref>[http://www.stern.de/politik/ausland/537667.html?eid=537265 stern-Serie: Besiegt, befreit, besetzt - Deutschland 1945-48]</ref>
 ==See also==