| Original caption: “One of the largest concentrations of Nazi prisoners, over 160,000 men, packed into area in Germany, under control of United States Army. Aerial view shows tent area in which men are housed temporarily.” Original caption LIFE Magazine, May 14, 1945: “German Prisoners of War, a 160,000 of them, have been concentrated in this huge area “somewhere in Germany” by the United States Army. Since no other temporary housing is available on this bombed-out tableland, small canvas pup tents have been issued and the prisoners are in process of setting them up in the picture. The wooden structures (right, background) are barracks for the United States Army Military Police who guard the gigantic encampment. By last week the Allies alone held 4,000,000 prisoners, captured since D-Day. More than half of these were taken between May 1 and May 5.” This aerial photo is likely the “Golden Mile” of Remegen “Disarmed Enemy Forces” Rheinwiesenlager. The numbers of German Prisoners of War (POWs) taken by the United States Army shot up from 313,000 to more than 2 1/2 1,000,000 in early April, 1945, then to more than 5,000,000 a month later. These masses created vast problems for the Allies. By the terms of the Geneva Convention, which the United States had signed and which had the force of a treaty, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was required to feed German prisoners a ration equal to that of its own base soldiers. SHAEF had insufficient resources to meet those requirements. Anticipating huge food deficits in central Europe, United States Army General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower’s (October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) superiors on the Joint Chiefs of Staff had ordered him to change the designation of German POWs to “Disarmed Enemy Forces” (DEFs), just as the British chiefs had changed the status of German POWs to “surrendered enemy personnel” (SEPs) for the same reason. This would allow the Allied commanders in Germany to feed German POWs at a lower level. No German government existed that could have spoken in favor of its soldiers in foreign captivity. While the German Red Cross was allowed to continue its work in the American and British zones, the French and the Russians did not even permit the German Red Cross to operate. 1 observer summed up the fate of the German POWs: “Once hostilities ceased, the Germans were on their own – subject to the unconditional will of the occupier with no rights whatever.” The Americans had some 200 Prisoner of War camps scattered throughout Germany, mostly along the Rhine River. They came to be known as Rheinwiesenlager (“Rhine Meadow Camp”). Upon surrendering, because they were designated as DEFs, the German soldiers were pushed onto large meadows, makeshift corrals surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guarded by soldiers with machine guns in watchtowers. Large meadows became prison camps; sanitary facilities, like latrines, were nowhere to be found. Thousands upon thousands of German prisoners, as far as the eye could see, were pushed unto these pens and then kept without food or water for days. These German soldiers were exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and dirty. While the front line still lay west of the Rhine, prisoners were transported to France and Belgium. But after Allied Forces crossed the river the journey back became too long, and from April, 1945 (and, especially for DEFs, after the capitulation) transit camps had to be set up, which later became notorious as the Rheinwiesenlager. The most important and best-known of the altogether 16 Rheinwiesenlager were Bad Kreuznach-Bretzenheim, Remagen-Sinzig, Rheinberg, Heidesheim, Wickrathberg, and Büderich. Prisoners were starving in other camps, but in these particular 6 the conditions were quite indescribable. Comprehensive accounts of the state of provision of food, clothing, and shelter, as well as of the health of the prisoners, can be found among the documentation of Erich Maschke’s (March 2, 1900 – February 11, 1982) 1962 – 1974 Prisoner of War Commission and in other publications. Protests against the state of these camps came not only from the Red Cross and other aid organizations; even the Archbishop of Trier hurled public accusations from his pulpit. This situation lasted from the beginning of April into June and July of 1945. On June 12, the Americans surrendered control of 3 large camps – Rheinberg, Büderich, and Wickrathberg — to the British; on July 10, a further 8 were given over to the French. Subsequently, the United States was the 1st of the Allies to release all its POWs, so far as they had not been assigned to other custodial powers as labor forces. The mortality rate in the Rheinwiesenlager between April and July, 1945, was high. The largest claim in contemporary eyewitness accounts was that 32,000 fatalities occurred in the Rheinwiesenlager. A comparison can be made between American figures for deaths, the figures known to the communities and parishes in which the camps were situated, and the accounts of former prisoners. The figures are as follows: Highest estimate in an eyewitness account: 32,000 dead; Official American statistics: 3,053 dead; Registered by parish authorities: 5,311 dead (4,537 from the 6 largest camps, 774 from all other camps). The 5,311 registered by parish authorities represents about 1 percent of the 557,000 who, according to the Maschke Commission, lived in these camps. The Maschke Commission did not believe that this mortality figure was very accurate but considered it impossible that the actual number of deaths could have been more than double that cited. Many German POWs/DEFs have survived to tell about their suffering in American camps and enclosures in Germany. That suffering, however, was not the result of American policy. It was rather the upshot of inadequate preparations to deal with the huge numbers of captured. Barely 2,400 men of the American 159th Infantry Regiment, for example, had to take care of and guard more than 300,000 German POWs/DEFs captured in the Ruhr pocket. They had to build the Remagen and Sinzig enclosures from scratch within a few weeks. By April, 1945, entire German Army Groups were surrendering to the Allies. The numbers were too overwhelming for Allied shipping capacity; after March no further transfers were made to the relatively cozy camps in the United States. In the summer of 1945, the Americans needed all their available shipping to transport the European forces to the Pacific theater for the planned invasion of Japan. The acute American lack of shipping also affected the available tonnage for moving food to Europe. The lack of shipping, next to the necessity of feeding more than 5,000,000 German POWs and some 20,000,000 Displaced Persons (DPs) and refugees -not to mention the German civilian population under the protection of the United States Army — answers the question of 1 former German POW, who wondered why there was such a deterioration in the food situation in the months following the end of the war. Hermann Greiner (???? – ????), a soldier in a tank battalion, was captured on April 8 in the Ruhrkessel. He ended up in an orchard in Remagen. He lived in a hole, without water, for days on end; the regular daily diet consisted of 1 cookie, 1 spoon of coffee, 1 spoon of egg powder, and dried red beets. Hauptgefreiter Karl Schranzhofer (???? – ????), in Luftwaffe (“Nazi German Air Force”) communications, was captured on the Western Front; he was happy to fall into American captivity, but his long report details his harrowing experiences in Rheinberg. He says he lost 27 kilograms — nearly 60 pounds — of his body weight in 2 weeks (from 65 to 38 kilos). Schranzhofer fully supports charges that Eisenhower intentionally starved POWs but does not claim to have actually witnessed mass deaths. These medical officers and the Remagen communications officer Nicholas Gordon insist that they did everything in their power to guarantee the best possible treatment of the POWs/DEFs in their charge. They are absolutely certain that they never received orders from “higher-ups” to withhold food and water from German prisoners. Given that they had little in terms of food and medical supplies to start with, they made the best of a desperate situation. These guards do remember deaths in the camp-not infrequently Germans killing Germans—which of course is not to say that no German POWs died from exhaustion and starvation. How many POWs died? Were there mass deaths or not? The Maschke Commission figures for the 6 worst camps (Bad Kreuznach-Bretzenheim, Remagen-Sinzig, Rheinberg, Heidesheim, Wickrathberg, and Büderich, together holding a total of 557,000 POWs on May 8, 1945): 3,053 dead according to United States Army sources, or 4,537 dead according to local authorities. If 1 accepts these figures the death rate was ca. 1 percent, compared with a mortality rate of 20-25 percent in Russian camps. The commission’s conclusion: “There were no mass deaths in the west.” Reports from other German local authorities confirm this. At 1 point the commission had doubts with regard to these figures. Reports and diaries of ex-prisoners differed, figures from local authorities differed, there was no complete picture of all the camps; but still, “even if we [the Maschke Commission] accepted a death rate double as high, for example, nine thousand, it would still be much lower than in the East and would not justify speaking of mass deaths.” In the end the Western Allies had on hand 7,614,794 POWs — a figure officially released in June, 1945. The Allies were not in any way prepared to accommodate properly this tremendous number of POWs. We all know the result, or at least we thought we knew it. The handling of the prisoners in American hands was disorganized, to put it mildly. Hundreds of thousands of the captives were put in open fields surrounded by barbed wire; these were called “Prisoner of War Temporary [or Transient] Enclosures” (PWTE). The worst of them were the big Rheinwiesenlager; living conditions were appalling, but relatively few prisoners died – between 7,000 according to official American and German sources. That was lamentable in itself, but absolutely nothing compared with what happened in the East; out of 3,155,000 German POWs in Russian hands, more than a 1,000,000 died. Hundreds of thousands did not even reach the camps, where conditions were utterly horrible. And whereas the Western Allies had discharged their prisoners by 1948, the Russians kept theirs. Only during the Moscow visit of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (January 5, 1876 – April 19, 1967) of West Germany in September, 1955, did the Soviets agree to release those remaining in Soviet camps in return for reopening diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic and the Soviet Union, and an exchange of ambassadors. In 1956 the last German POW returned home – 11 years after the end of hostilities. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0837.jpg |
| Image Size | 1.52 MB |
| Image Dimensions | 2892 x 2324 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | United States Army Signal Corps |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 25, 1945 |
| Location | |
| City | Remagen |
| State or Province | Rhineland-Palatinate |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NRE-338-FTL(EF)-209(1) |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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