Talk:Leipzig war crimes trials

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Physically impossible conditions at Müller's camp

The article says "1,000 British POWs were squeezed into an area of only 60 square feet", which would mean about 8.6 in² or about 55cm² per prisoner. This is physically impossible, unless the prisoners were literally stacked into a tall tower - but in that case the portrayal is very misleading. For example, just the palm of my right hand is *roughly* 9*9cm²=81cm², it's completely impossible to put even one adult in that space. Unfortunately I don't have access to the reference so I'll leave the statement in for a while in case someone replies to this. Maybe the units got mixed up somewhere along the way? Sqft are certainly not a common unit in Germany or France. Steffens123 (talk) 22:15, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

I've checked the cited source (Yarnall). He's certainly been misquoted, but what he does say doesn't exactly make sense either. The passage runs:

In these circumstances the camp quickly became a "large cesspool". The 1,000 men were herded into three huts of 60 square feet by 20 square feet, each of which could only satisfactorily hold 100 men. There were no floorboards, and no bedding or camp utensils were supplied. The men had to sleep on wet ground with no room for them all to lie down. [etc.]

I think that's pretty obviously an error for each hut measuring 60 feet by 20 feet, so covering 1200 square feet; or 3600 square feet in total across the three huts. That would mean that, at a "satisfactory" occupancy of 100 men per hut, each man would have had 12 sq ft, about the area of a single bed; but that as things were, each man had about 3.6 sq ft, i.e. standing room but very little more. That seems to tally with the other elements of the description. Yarnall doesn't cite a source for this specific statement, but the source he uses for most of this section is Command Paper 1450, German War Trials: Report of the Proceedings before the Supreme Court in Leipzig with Appendices (1921), which is available online here. The Müller case is covered at pp. 9–11 and 26–36. However, although the account there is broadly consistent with Yarnall, those specific figures don't appear. The only relevant quotes I can see are "Into sheds capable of accommodating at the utmost 450 men, over 1,000 men were crowded." (p. 10); and "In the two residential barracks, which together afforded room for some 300 prisoners only, double that number had been quartered." (p. 28). Yarnall is a pretty solid source, and I would imagine is paraphrasing (but then slightly garbling and failing to cite) some other primary source. We could make that assumption, and give his version silently corrected; or we could reword more radically and cite the Command Paper. GrindtXX (talk) 01:57, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Well, something needs to be done, as I came here to say that the conditions described in the article were physically impossible. Even merely a direct quote of the dimensions referenced above would be an improvement, even though still nearly impossible as opposed to being literally physically impossible.2600:1004:B11B:107A:3D1E:3521:1016:2612 (talk) 02:03, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

"Even though massacres of German POWs after they surrendered and were disarmed was common practice among soldiers from every Allied Army"

No page number is given for this and it is impossible to check the whole of Pity of War for mention of this, though I can confirm that Ferguson nowhere discussed the Stenger case. Ferguson's work is criticized for wide sweeping, glib, and dubious statements so even if it did say that it was common practise to *massacre* POWs *after they surrendered and disarmed*, I would still like to see another source to include such a statement. It is actually clear from the statements of witnesses that they did not regard it as common (see, e.g., the witnesses quoted here). FOARP (talk) 19:00, 5 March 2024 (UTC)