After the Reich (76 page)

Once the team had been assembled they were brought first to France, initially to Rheims and Versailles, before being lodged in a villa in the Paris suburb of Le Vésinet. They were eventually delivered to Farm Hall near Cambridge, where they were perceived to have nothing in common bar the title
Herr Doktor
‘by which they punctiliously addressed one another’.
³³
Once the Anglo-Americans had learned everything they could about the Nazi atom-bomb programme they were released in Hamburg and Göttingen, but told not to stray into the Soviet Zone. That was also for their own safety. The Russians were keen to abduct or simply tempt away scientists and technicians who might have been useful to them. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gustav Hertz was taken to Russia to help them develop nuclear weapons. On 21 October 1945 a large number of skilled workers, technicians and scientists were freighted out by train. The Western powers made a weak protest, which the Russians simply ignored.
³⁴

15

Where are our Men?

The only thing I know for certain is that the prisoners-of-war are dying of hunger and that the field in which they have to sleep is hellish damp.

Ernst von Salomon, The Answers, London 1954, 423

The Status of German POWs

T
he history of the German POWs is murky, largely because the West, by acting in an inhumane manner, lost the moral high ground they had achieved by fighting a moral crusade against the Nazis, but also because the German Federal Republic has allowed it to remain shrouded in darkness.

Around eight million German soldiers were captured at the end of the war - making a total, if you add those taken before May 1945, of around eleven million. This meant that every household in Germany was affected in some way; and the women were asking, ‘Where are our men?’
¹
The Western Allies captured some 7.6 million, while the rest fell into the hands of the Red Army. About five of the eleven million were released within a year. A million and a half, however, never came home, giving rise to a number of stories of how they met their end. Some writers have averred that they were all killed in captivity, and that it was a deliberate policy on the part of the Allies. The only figures that exist refer to the ‘missing’. The Red Cross gives their number as 1,086,000. A more reliable tally would be 1.3 million in the east (including Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland) and around 100,000 in the west.
²

Until 8 May 1945, the Swiss had been responsible for German prisoners of war. On that day they packed their bags - the Allies had decided that the German Empire had ceased to exist. The German army had ‘unconditionally surrendered’ and the new prisoners were now at the mercy of their captors, without recourse to protection by a neutral state. Two new terms - strange to the Geneva Convention - were created to describe the newly captured soldiers: they were ‘Surrendered Enemy Persons’ and ‘Disarmed Enemy Persons’. POW status, as regulated by the Geneva and Hague Conventions, accounted for 4.2 million men who had been caught in the net earlier. The other 3.4 million in the West were SEPs or DEPs and were not entitled to the same levels of shelter and subsistence.
³
The Soviet Union had never signed the Geneva Convention, so the Red Cross never had any jurisdiction there; they were not POWs, or anything else for that matter. Their fate was often a matter of complete indifference to the Soviet authorities. The change in terminology is significant. The men had been robbed of their status as combatants, which left them open to prosecution, an outcome excluded by the Geneva and Hague Conventions. It presaged new uses for the men, who were to be put to work. With the exception of the Americans, the Allies all envisaged a prolonged use of German slave labour. While the International Red Cross had a right to inspect POW camps, the barbed wire surrounding SEPs or DEPs was impenetrable.
⁴

The idea of using the POWs as slaves was aired at Moscow in 1943. The originators of the proposal were the British. At Yalta it was decided that the men could be made to repair the damage Germany had caused to the Allies. They were to be a ‘work force’ and were to be retained for an indefinite period. It was at that moment that it became clear that their status would have to be changed to get round the Geneva Convention. Once again it was the British who were most keen - the proposal was put forward before the full horror of the concentration camps was known. It was to have another advantage - the British could evade another of the Convention’s stipulations, the requirement that they provide 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day. From the first day of peace the British would have had immense problems supplying that amount, and for most of the time levels fell below 1,500 calories. The more prosperous Americans were for rapid demobilisation and for adherence to the Convention.
⁵
There was no precedent either for the rough treatment of high-ranking officers. In the view of the Allies, German generals were complicit in war crimes and thereby lost their usual privileges. This was decided before any crime had been proven. There were generals’ camps in South Wales and Russia, and there was rumoured to be a third near Nuremberg,
^dh
in close proximity to the courthouse.
⁶
They were not treated as badly as the hoi polloi, however. In
^dh
Wales the German general officers had a small number of privileges, and in Soviet Russia they were exempted from work.

That the Allies should conspire to rob prisoners of their status was outrageous; to treat them with so little care that a million and a half died was scandalous. The Russian attitude is understandable, though not forgivable: the Germans had systematically killed three million of their Russian prisoners.
^di
But this could not be claimed for Western POWs. Indeed the Malmédy trial of those accused of massacring American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge and the quest for the killers of the fifty British airmen who had taken part in the Great Escape from a Silesian POW camp show quite clearly how rare it was that the Germans ill-treated American and British POWs. That the Americans should have pursued the perpetrators of the killing of a hundred or so soldiers with such ruthlessness while at the same time allowing anything up to 40,000 German soldiers to die from hunger and neglect in the muddy flats of the Rhine was an act of mind-boggling hypocrisy.

In parts of Europe the sight of a German POW became an everyday occurrence. In Britain these dishevelled figures often prompted acts of generosity, despite the fact that only a few months before British towns and cities were being wrecked by German bombs. In France and elsewhere German slave-labourers sometimes had a quite different effect. It was not money the local people threw at them but bricks, stones and - in at least one instance - grenades. The horrors of the war were fresh in the minds of the people. Many had been wounded themselves, physically or emotionally. ‘What did the hunger, misery, sickness or death of a German POW matter?’ In Russia that feeling would have been particularly widespread.
⁷

Another novelty was the leasing of prisoners to other powers. The Anglo-Americans handed over around a million German soldiers to the French to help rebuild their country. The Belgians were given 30,000 by the Americans and another 34,000 by the British, the Dutch had 10,000 and the Luxembourgeois 5,000.
⁸
The Soviet Union gave about 80,000 Germans to the Poles, who hung on to some of them until as late as 1953. Germans worked Europe’s mines and sawmills and factories; they laid roads and did menial chores in France, Poland and Yugoslavia. In Britain they harvested potatoes and turnips. German soldiers were imprisoned in some twenty countries around the world.

Those left on German soil after the summer of 1945 were only a small fraction of the total number of POWs. The Americans, for example, used their German camps for political prisoners and those awaiting trial or denazification. Like the British and the Russians, they tended to use the old concentration camps to house prisoners. Usually there was decent accommodation for the GIs in the neighbouring SS barracks. Any attempt to feed the prisoners by the German civilian population was punishable by death. It is not clear how many German soldiers died of starvation. Very soon people were comparing the conditions in American and French camps with those in the Nazi concentration camps. The psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, who examined former POWs, learned that they were prone to compare themselves to Hitler’s victims, and to accuse the Allies of hypocrisy in their stories of German atrocities.
⁹

On 10 December 1946, the industrious Cardinal Frings (he had received his red hat earlier that year) delivered a petition to the Control Council in Berlin. Ten million people had demanded the release of the POWs or
Kriegsgefangener
. At the Moscow Conference in 1947 it was decided that the Allies would send all prisoners home by the end of 1948. At that point the Soviets admitted to holding 890,532 (although the real figure might have been nearer to three million), the French 631,483; there were 435,295 in British hands, 300,000 in the Balkans, 54,000 in Belgium, 30,976 in American custody and 10,000 in Holland.
¹⁰
In the middle of 1948 the number of POWs yet to come home stood at one million. The return was agreed by the Western Allies, the Czechs and the Yugoslavs (who subsequently reneged on the deal), but not by the Russians and the Poles. That Christmas 1948 date decided the category of prisoner in the minds of the German public: a
Spätheimkehrer
(late homecomer) was released between 1949 and 1950. A
Spätestheimkehrer
(latest homecomer) returned between 1950 and 1956.
¹¹
In 1979 there were believed to be 72,000 prisoners still alive in - chiefly Russian - custody.
¹²

It was Adenauer who was the first German politician openly to raise the problem in 1950. Addressing the Bundestag, he called for an end to France’s cruel treatment of its German POWs - who had, in fact, all gone home. The Yugoslavs were also singled out, and the German chancellor added that it was horrifying that several hundred thousand German men, women and children were still in Russia and Poland five and a half years after the end of the fighting. He could think of no parallel in history for such ‘cold heartlessness’. Even such strong words failed to deliver all the goods. It was Adenauer’s visit to Moscow that finally brought home almost all the last survivors, at the end of 1956.
¹³

Adenauer’s successors were more faint-hearted. In 1957 a wide-ranging academic study of the treatment of the German POWs was commissioned by the Federal Republic. The project allowed for fifteen separate studies in twenty-two volumes. The work was ready by the mid-1970s. In the meantime, however, Bonn had had a change of heart. It was the time of Willy Brandt’s
Ostpolitik
- an attempt to link hands through the Iron Curtain; the Oder-Neisse Line was recognised in the West for the first time. The publication of a work of this sort would, they feared, upset relations with Russia and Poland. No names were mentioned in the texts, and much of the material was returned to the archives. The book was quietly issued, but only for ‘official use’. Just 431 copies were printed: 391 for the Federal Republic, and 40 for abroad. The FRG made it clear to all the recipients that access was to be made difficult.
^14
dj

This coyness on the part of the Bonn government added fuel to the fire. In 1989 the Canadian journalist James Bacque published
Other Losses
in which he claimed the French and the Americans had killed a million POWs. It was called a work of ‘monstrous speculation’
¹⁵
and was dismissed by an American historian as an ‘absurd thesis’.
¹⁶
Bacque’s book printed some evocative drawings made of the Rheinwiesenlager, and asserted, as was probably true, that thirty to forty Germans died every day in Rheinberg.
^17
dk
Part of the problem was the little care taken by the Western Allies in registering the prisoners and the destruction of Wehrmacht records. The transfer of POWs from one nation to another often meant they were counted twice. The final number of deaths will never be known, but it has since been proved that Bacque misinterpreted the words ‘other losses’ on Allied charts to mean ‘deaths’, when it was in fact an oblique reference to prisoners who, for one reason or another, were no longer of interest to the statisticians: deaths, yes, but also deserters, Volksturm and other categories who were released without receiving a formal discharge.
¹⁸

Bacque’s red herring had a positive result, however, in that it pointed out that it was not just the Russians who killed prisoners of war. The Russians were still the worst, but who was the second worst? The Yugoslavs killed as many as 80,000 prisoners of war, which, given the numbers they started with, must put them in second place. About 2.5 per cent of all the Germans in French custody died, a figure that is proportionally far higher than the American tally.