Rhine meadow camp

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Map of the Rhine meadow camps

The Rheinwiesenlager (official American designation Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosure , PWTE) were prison camps of the USA , Great Britain and France in the Rhineland at the end of the Second World War . Different groups of prisoners were temporarily detained in them. They existed from April to September 1945 and during this time differed significantly in size, equipment and location.

Locations of the Rhine meadow camps

from north to south, the official American name in brackets:

history

Memorial stone for the camp in Ludwigshafen-Rheingönheim

After the failure of the Ardennes offensive and the destruction of the Ruhr basin , hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers were taken prisoners of war. Following the German surrender , 3.4 million people were in US custody. Originally the Allies planned to take their prisoners to England by the end of the war to look after them there. Due to the sheer number of prisoners, however, it seemed more appropriate to detain the prisoners in Germany . For this purpose, 23 prisoner of war camps were set up along the Rhine. The possibility of fleeing back to the Reich and resisting underground was made more difficult by the establishment of prisons on the western bank of the river. Although most of the camps were on the left bank of the Rhine, which was also what their name gave, this applies to e.g. B. not to the camp at Diez or Siershahn. The official name was "Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures" (PWTE).

The camps were built from April to June 1945 and were built according to a uniform scheme. An open arable land was demarcated on the edge of a place that usually had a rail connection. Those responsible divided this area into ten to twenty camps with masts and barbed wire, which offered space for five to ten thousand prisoners. Dirt roads were converted into camp roads and the adjacent buildings were used for administration, kitchens and hospital wards. The prisoners of war had to hand over their military field equipment, including tents and blankets, and were therefore forced to dig holes in the ground for sleeping. The 106th Infantry Division of the American Army , which had been increased to 40,000 men and had received additional transport units to bring food to the camps, was charged with guarding the camps . The transport capacity was insufficient and the division was completely overwhelmed with the organization of the camps, which is why it was left to the German prisoners. The Americans left the internal administration of the camps to the German prisoners: camp managers, camp police, doctors, cooks, work details, etc. were posts occupied by Germans.

After several weeks, those who were politically unsuspicious, especially Hitler Youth and women, were released from the camps . Afterwards certain professional groups that were important for the reconstruction were dismissed: agricultural workers, truck drivers, miners. At the end of June 1945, the Remagen , Böhl-Iggelheim and Büderich camps were dissolved again. This first wave of layoffs was stopped again.

In April and early May 1945, the supply was only irregular and insufficient, after which it slowly improved. Only in June were there sufficient portions of food. In the course of May and June, all camps were given latrines, kitchens and sick quarters. Dirt, moisture, malnutrition and unsanitary conditions lead to illness. The Americans prevented the outbreak of epidemics by chlorinating the drinking water, delousing all prisoners with DDT , and providing plenty of soap and toilet paper.

The headquarters of the Allied Forces in Northwestern Europe ( SHAEF ) offered France, which had approached the USA with the demand to receive 1.75 million prisoners of war as forced laborers, to take over the Rhine meadow camps. The camps were handed over to the French by July 10, 1945, the British had taken over the camps in their zone by June 12. The prisoners of war were transferred to France, unless they were released on the spot as unfit for work. By the end of September 1945, both the British and French camps had been disbanded. Only the Bretzenheim camp near Bad Kreuznach served as a transit camp for prisoners of war returning from France until 1948.

Storage conditions

Remagen camp

The food and the hygienic conditions in these camps, fenced, muddy, open-air meadows where the prisoners lived in open holes in the ground due to the lack of barracks, were poor to catastrophic. Regular soldiers were mostly hardened by military service and were able to cope with the conditions more easily. Attempts by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to help the prisoners were repulsed by the Americans, the ICRC was denied access to the camps because the US occupation forces did not want the ICRC to control the conditions in the To show camps.

The DEF (disarmed enemy armed forces) status, which is not defined under international law , was applied to most German soldiers who were only captured by the US armed forces after the unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. However, members of the SS and suspicious persons were not declared DEF . The catering of the DEF was based on that of the " Displaced Persons ", former Nazi slave laborers, who were also supplied by the USA, and corresponded to around 1500 kcal per day. In comparison, the food rations of the German civilian population in the spring of 1945 were around 1000 kcal.

Most of the prisoners, such as members of the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth , were released after a short time, other German units declared as DEF were to be kept organizationally intact and used as workers for the American army or transferred to other allies.

In 1943, the United States and Great Britain decided to take half of the prisoners each. These framework conditions still existed in 1945. But when the Allies crossed the Rhine, the number of prisoners rose to such an extent that the British were reluctant to take their share. The USA initially took over all prisoners and set up the American Rhine meadow camps. Of revisionist authors initially extremely inadequate supplies of food storage as a plan of the Americans is considered, the stand with the status of DEF in context. Status DEF was abolished by the US military leadership in the spring of 1946 and "POW" ( prisoner of war replaced POW). Views that the catastrophic situation in the Rhine meadow camps had DEF status as an essential prerequisite were rejected by scientists in the discussion of James Bacque's theses . Most of the prisoners in the Rhine meadow camps were originally classed as prisoners of war rather than DEF.

Prisoner groups

Different groups of prisoners were temporarily interned in the camp:

  • Regular German POWs ( Prisoners of War , POW), who were captured before the surrender on 8 May 1945
  • Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF), or in British captivity Surrendered Enemy Personnel (SEP) - captured German soldiers without the status of prisoners of war
  • Members of the Waffen SS who were imprisoned centrally in the Bretzenheim camp
  • Members of the Volkssturm
  • Suspicious civilians (young people, women, war invalids and wounded soldiers) who were mostly released after a few days

Controversy over the number of deaths

The surrounding German municipal administrations reported 4537 deaths, the US authorities reported 3053 deaths. The most thorough investigation of the death toll was published by the Maschke Commission, named after its head Erich Maschke , which scientifically examined the history of German prisoners of war on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims . The camps with the highest mortality were: Bad Kreuznach ( Galgenberg and Bretzenheim camps ), Sinzig near Remagen, Rheinberg , Heidesheim am Rhein , Wickrathberg and Büderich . Approximately 5,000 of the 500,000 inmates perished in these six camps. If you extrapolate these numbers to the approximately 1,000,000 prisoners, the upper limit of 10,000 deaths results. A more recent study for the two Remagen camps, in which a third of all prisoners were, confirms this result and rules out higher death rates for this region. The American historian Arthur L. Smith names the numbers 8,000 and 40,000 as the lowest and highest estimates of the victims.

literature

  • Günter Bischof, Stephen E. Ambrose (Ed.): Eisenhower and the German POWs. Facts against falsehood . Louisiana University Press, 1992 (contains critical examination of Bacque's controversial account).
  • Wolfgang Gückelhorn, Kurt Kleemann: The Rhine meadow camps in 1945 in Remagen and Sinzig. Facts about a mass fate in 1945 . Helios-Verlag, Aachen 2013, ISBN 978-3-86933-094-5 .
  • State Center for Civic Education Rhineland-Palatinate (ed.): POW camp 1939–1950 - POW as a theme of memorial work . State Center for Civic Education Rhineland-Palatinate, Mainz / Osthofen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89289-025-6 ( gedenkstaette-hinzert-rlp.de [PDF] Memorial work in Rhineland-Palatinate, vol. 9).
  • Rüdiger Overmans : The Rhine meadow camps 1945 . In: Hans-Erich Volkmann (Ed.): End of the Third Reich, End of the Second World War. A perspective review . Piper Verlag, Munich / Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-12056-3 .
  • Arthur Lee Smith: The Missing Million. On the fate of German prisoners of war after the Second World War (=  quarterly journal for contemporary history . Volume 65 ). Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-486-64565-X .
  • Rüdiger Gollnick: Foreign in enemy country - foreign in home country (DP camp and Rheinwiesen camp search for traces on the Lower Rhine) . Pagina Verlag GmbH, Goch 2017, ISBN 978-3-946509-11-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sheets on Land No. 63: Captivity in the Rhine meadow camps (1945 to 1948) - State Center for Civic Education Rhineland-Palatinate, 2015
  2. ^ Kurt W. Böhme: The German prisoners of war in American hands . Munich 1972, p. 105.
  3. ^ Richard Ernest Dupuy: St. Vith: Lion in the Way, The 106th Infantry Division in World War II . Nashville 1949, ISBN 0-89839-092-3 , p. 227.
  4. ↑ a b Arthur L. Smith: The "Missing Million". On the fate of German prisoners of war after the Second World War (= quarterly journals for contemporary history . Volume 65): pp. 39, 49, 86; on behalf of the Institute for Contemporary History, ed. by Karl-Dietrich Bracher , Hans-Peter Schwarz , Horst Möller , Oldenbourg Verlag Munich 1992, ISBN 3-486-64565-X .
  5. ↑ Arthur Lee Smith: The Missing Million . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 978-3-486-64565-1 , p. 20.
  6. ↑ a b Rüdiger Overmans: Die Rheinwiesenlager 1945 , p. 290.
  7. ↑ Arthur Lee Smith: The Missing Million . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 978-3-486-64565-1 , p. 21.
  8. ^ Klaus-Dietmar Henke: The American occupation of Germany . De Gruyter Oldenburg, Berlin / Boston 2009. ISBN 978-3-486-59079-1 . P. 439.
  9. ↑ Arthur Lee Smith: The Missing Million . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 978-3-486-64565-1 , p. 30.
  10. ↑ Brigitte Bailer-Galanda: Eisenhower and the German prisoners of war - "The prisoners of war" . ( Brigitte Bailer-Galanda: Eisenhower and the German prisoners of war ( Memento from January 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive ))
  11. ^ Ekkehard Zimmermann : Internment camp in the American zone of occupation . In: Franz W. Seidler , Alfred de Zayas (ed.): War crimes in Europe and the Middle East in the 20th century . Mittler, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-8132-0702-1 , pp. 256-258.
  12. ^ German (O) / prisoners of war in the west after 1945 . In: Gunnar Heinsohn : Lexicon of Genocides , Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-499-22338-4
  13. ↑ Kurt W. Böhme: The German prisoners of war in American hands , Munich 1972, p. 204.
  14. ↑ Kurt Kleemann: The prisoner-of-war camps Remagen and Sinzig 1945 from the point of view of municipal files . In: Yearbook for West German State History . 20, 1994, p. 52.