Rheinwiesenlager
The Rheinwiesenlager (English: Rhine meadow camps) were a group of 19 (other sources claim 23) camps built in the Allied-occupied part of Germany by the U.S. Army to hold captured German soldiers at the close of the Second World War. Officially named Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTE), they held between two and three million surrendered Wehrmacht personnel and others. Around half of German soldiers captured in the West at the end of the war were placed in these camps. Most of the rest were placed in British and French custody.
Contents
History
Prisoners held in the camps were designated disarmed enemy forces, not prisoners of war. This decision was made in March 1945 by Dwight D. Eisenhower: by not classifying the hundreds of thousands of captured troops as POWs, the logistical problems associated with accommodating so many prisoners of war mandated by the Geneva Convention governing their treatment were negated. Many of these died from starvation, dehydration and exposure to the weather elements because no structures were built inside the prison compounds.
- For all but fringe debaters on the subject, the book is closed. The horror and death caused my maltreatment or murder in German, Japanese and Russian prisoner of war (POW) camps stains the history of these countries red, and is still painful for many, on all sides of Word War II, to even mention. However, over the years, controversy has lingered over another group of camps. Many still claim that these camps were another war crime, this time committed by the Americans, under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower: the Rheinwiesenlager. It is certainly true that some facts about the Rheinwisenlager are shocking, the behavior of some of the Allied troops atrocious. These facts and their greater context will be presented along with the conclusions of historians and experts who have dived deep into this subject and the controversy around it. There were 19 camps built in total, housing between 2 and 3 million prisoners. Some of these camps were turned over to British control in June, as they were in the “British Zone” in post-war Germany. Over 180,000 prisoners were sent to France at the request of the Charles de Gaulle’s government for forced labor. By September 1945, most of the Rheinwisenlager camps were closed. The camps were beyond overcrowded. Prisoners mostly slept without shelter, exposed to the elements. Rations were generally between 1000 and 1550 calories per day.
- There was often little or no access to clean drinking water. Thousands died. How many thousands depends on who you ask. Regardless, given the facts, these camps did not hold up to the conditions mandated by the Geneva Convention. This issue was circumnavigated, however, by a decision made in 1943 to declare German soldiers taken prisoner not as POWs, but as Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF). With this characterization in place, things like lower rations and poor living conditions were inflicted without officially breaking what amounted to a binding international treaty. Much of the controversy over these camps is centered around a book published by James Bacque in 1989 titled Other Losses. Bacque, a fiction writer, and amateur historian, found himself investigating what he saw as very disturbing deception and grievous disregard for life that lead to the death of probably over 1 million Germans. Bacque posits that Eisenhower, out of a spirit of vengeance denied the DEFs food that was readily available throughout Europe and through the offers of the Red Cross. With all the sweeping and horrifying claims made in Bacque’s book, a conference was held at the Eisenhower Center of the University of New Orleans to examine the history of the Rheinwiesenlager. The conference was attended by several historians and experts from America, Canada, Britain, Germany, and Austria specializing in that period of post-war Germany.[2]
Mainly German soldiers from the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS were held prisoner in the Rhine meadow camps. Former military combat units or groups that had been brought to a camp together were usually divided up and housed separately. The German officers were also separated from the 'ordinary' soldiers and were, at least officially, better off. Many of the prisoners were physically and mentally weakened by the rearguard action, poor care and their stay in assembly camps at the front.
The prisoners of war came from all areas of the former German Reich and from different social classes. Their war experiences varied, as did their ages. In addition to the German Wehrmacht members, there were also Luxembourgers, Belgians, Slovenes, Hungarians, ethnic Germans from Poland and soldiers from Alsace-Lorraine, the majority of whom had volunteered to fight for the German army. The term 'special nationals' also included foreign civilians in the prisoner of war camps who had collaborated with them in the areas occupied by the Germans.
There were also German civilians among the prisoners, including teenagers and women. They were arrested as 'automatic arrests' because they either held a political position in the state or in the NSDAP – for example as mayor – or because they were suspected of wanting to continue fighting. A total of around 2,600 German women were interned in the Rhine meadow camps. They mostly worked as Wehrmacht and Air Force helpers, as radio operators, paramedics, typists or for the German Red Cross on and behind the front. In the camps themselves, the women were housed in separate camp areas, often provided with tents, and were provided with somewhat better care than the men.
Structure
All camps in the Rheinwiesenlager complex were built according to the same principle. Each camp consisted of a large fenced-off square, which was divided into individual cages. A cage usually had a length and width of around 250 meters. These cages were separated by a 2 meter high barbed wire fence and by a camp road, so that the prisoners could not get from one cage to the next. In one corner there was a watering hole, in another the latrine, consisting either of a gutter or a deep hole.
The outer barrier was two barbed wire fences approximately 3 meters high. In between there was a paved guard path on which a guard patrolled at a distance of approx. 50 m. Each cage was equipped with one or two watchtowers placed in the corners. They were about 5 meters high and were occupied by a machine gun post. Depending on the prison camp, the cages were occupied by 5,000 to 15,000 prisoners and were made up of different groups. The individual cages were divided according to rank, nationality, Volkssturm men, young people, wounded, SS, party officials, foreigner volunteers and women.
Camp hierarchy
Because the American camp management gave some of the prisoners positions in the camp's administration, a camp hierarchy developed. These prisoners were able to obtain benefits as camp leaders, camp police officers, interpreters or cooks. In addition, they did not have to live in the open air, but had a place to sleep in the few barracks or administration houses. There was resentment and attacks between them and the other prisoners in many camps.
As punishment, the guilty were separated from the other prisoners or exposed internally. In some camps they were literally pilloried and punished with beatings by the German camp police or their fellow prisoners. But the opposite was also the case: new groups sometimes formed in the camp to help each other. They provided practical and emotional support, organized self-help, shared their possessions such as tents, and helped each other in difficult situations. This was particularly important because the prisoners were no longer organized into their original units and troops, but had been distributed to different camps or cages upon capture.[3]
Quotes
- "The Allies have set up a military police force in Germany which is outside the jurisdiction of all ordinary courts and is not responsible to any court. The police, like the Gestapo, do not need a court order to arrest a German citizen. (...) They arrest men, just like the Gestapo, at night, take them out of their homes without stating the reason for their arrest, take them away without telling their families where they are being taken, cut off all contact between the family and the prisoners, keep them in the camp for months without interrogating them; in short, they have adopted the Gestapo's method." – Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen
- "The bodies of those who had starved to death were dumped daily on carts far outside the camp into long, prepared pits and stacked in five layers and long rows. After filling them with the previously excavated soil, the mass graves were leveled." – Willi Griesheimer, a former internee
- "About 60,000 prisoners of all ages were locked up in Andernach in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate large cage. The men I guarded had no roof over their heads and no blankets; many of them had no coats either. They had to sleep in the cold and wet mud. I was particularly shocked by the sight of the prisoners of war preparing grass and weeds into a thin soup. They told me that they were trying to quench their hunger pains. They were losing weight rapidly. Dysentery was spreading. Soon they were sleeping in their own excrement because they were too weak to reach the latrine trenches. They wasted away and died before our eyes. We had plenty of food and supplies, but did nothing to help the German prisoners, nor did we provide medical aid. I was outraged by these conditions and protested to officers. But the reaction was hostility or indifference. When I persisted, I was told that it was 'higher orders'. When I threw food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught. I was threatened with punishment." – As a young US soldier, the religious scholar Martin Brech was part of the guard force at the American prison camp in Andernach on the Rhine at the end of the war. He decided to go public with his own experiences in order to ensure justice and truth. He called his former US Army comrades "cold-blooded killers full of hate."[4]
See also
- Morgenthau plan
- Western Holocaust camps: Reuse of the camps
- Claimed mass killings of Germans by the WWII Allies
Further
- Allied atrocities
- Bombing of Germany during World War II
- Mass rapes by Allied forces during World War II
- Marocchinate
- The World Wars and mass starvation
- National Socialist Germany and partisans/resistance movements
- German Expellees (forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Germans)
Further reading
- James Bacque: Other Losses – The Shocking Truth behind the Mass Deaths of Disarmed German Soldiers and Civilians under General Eisenhower's Command, Prima, Rocklin 1991
External links
- Accounts of the American and French POW Camps after World War II
- In "Eisenhower’s Death Camps": A U.S. Prison Guard's Story
- The camps of the Rhine meadows
- Mass Starvation of Germans, 1945-1950 (Eisenhower's Death Camps)
