Forgotten Missing Prisoners Of War – a Collective Silence

Aus der Traum – Waffen-SS and Heer POWs, May 1945

Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTE), June/July 1945

Austrian Prisoner of War returning home from the East, 1949

Judge Robert H. Jackson, Chief U.S. prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials, told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves: have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. Dr. Richard Dominic Wiggers argued that the Allies violated international law regarding the feeding of enemy civilians, they both directly and indirectly caused the unnecessary suffering and death of large numbers of civilians and POWs in occupied Germany, guided partly by a spirit of postwar vengeance when creating the circumstances that contributed to their deaths and by strict orders to U.S. military personnel to destroy or otherwise render inedible their own leftover surplus so as to ensure it could not be eaten by German civilians. The Americans also prevented locals from bringing prisoners food under threat of being shot. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was prevented from visiting German POWs. Only in the autumn of 1945 the Red Cross was granted permission to send delegations to visit camps in the French and U.K. occupation zones, and to provide - very small - amounts of relief. On February 4 1946 the Red Cross was allowed to send relief also to those in the U.S. run occupation zone. During their visits, the delegates observed that German POWs were often detained in appalling conditions. According to American historian and Professor Edward N. Peterson the U.S. chose to hand over another hundred of thousands German POWs to the Soviet Union in May 1945 as a gesture of friendship. Official Russian sources list the deaths of some 475,000 German POWs. They died in Soviet labor camps of harsh conditions, beating and starvation during World War II and in the years that followed. The destiny of another 440,000 missing on the eastern front remains unclear. They probably died in Soviet custody or was killed on the spot and therefore not counted as POWs. Both the Maschke Commission and military historian Lt. Colonel Rüdiger Overmans puts the number of German POWs dead in Soviet captivity to over 1,000,000. Officially 77,000 German POWs are confirmed to have died in Western custody. According to one of the most comprehensive works about the German POWs by Rüdiger Overmans they died in the post-war period after June 1945. According to the section of the German Red Cross dealing with tracing the captives, the ultimate fate of 1,300,000 German POWs is still unknown and officially listed as missing. They entered captivity and effectively disappeared from the historical record. It is a story that has been kept quiet. Top image: Waffen-SS and Heer POWs at the Elbe River. Photo by American photojournalist William Vandivert in May 1945. Credit: Johannes Dorn. LIFE photo archive. Middle image: German POWs at Camp Remagen, part of the Rhine meadow camps, in June/July 1945. U.S. Army photo. Bottom image: an Austrian lady holding up a photo of a missing young soldier while a returnee passes by her. Photo taken at the Wien Südbahnhof by Austrian press photographer Ernst Haas and publ. in LIFE magazine with an anti-communist viewpoint on Aug. 8 1949. Credit: Facundo Filipe. Archive Heute.