Spring/Summer 1945

Rheinwiesenlager (Mud Camps of 1945)

As the US and British armies swept through Western Germany, they captured over 300,000 men in just a few weeks. They did not have enough prisons for them, so they improvised.

• Setup: The US Army built 19 huge transit camps along the Rhine River called Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine Meadow Camps). At their peak, these camps held over a million men.
• No Shelter, No Sanitation: These were not buildings. They were open, muddy agricultural fields surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Men were packed tightly together. They had no tents, no bathrooms, no doctors, and almost no food.
• Survival in Earth: Spring 1945 was freezing and wet. To survive the wind and rain, men dug holes in the mud using their bare hands, helmets, or tin cans. These were called “Erdlöcher” (foxholes) to sleep in. When heavy rain came, the mud collapsed, often burying sleeping men alive.

Legal Fiction

DEF Loophole

Why didn’t the International Red Cross step in to help? Because Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower used a controversial legal trick to bypass international law.

• Geneva Convention: Under the 1929 Geneva Convention, a “Prisoner of War” (POW) has specific, unbreakable rights. They must get the same food rations, shelter, and medical care as the soldiers guarding them. Also, the Red Cross must be allowed to inspect camps and deliver food.
• Reclassification:
  Eisenhower explicitly ordered that these surrendered Germans would not be called POWs. Instead, he created a brand new, made-up legal category: Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF).
• Precedent: The Allies argued that because Germany unconditionally surrendered, its army no longer belonged to a real country. Therefore, treaty protections did not apply. Because they were “DEFs” and not “POWs,” the US did not legally have to feed them. The Red Cross was banned at gunpoint from entering camps or delivering thousands of tons of stored food. (Fun fact: The US used this exact same trick decades later for terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, calling them “Enemy Combatants”).

Cruel Intent

Starvation Policy and Morgenthau Plan

These horrible conditions were not just an accident. They came from a very harsh post-war revenge policy.

• Vengeance and Policy: In 1944, US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau proposed the “Morgenthau Plan.” This was a strategy to destroy Germany’s factories and turn it into a weak farming nation. The plan was officially dropped, but its harsh spirit lived on in a military order called JCS 1067. This order told US commanders not to help Germany’s economy recover.
• Calorie Deficit: Under this harsh rule, DEF prisoners were given as little as 900 to 1,200 calories a day. This is a starvation diet. Many men survived by eating grass, dandelions, and bugs.
• Local Interference: The clearest sign of cruelty was how guards treated local civilians. German women and children tried to bring carts of potatoes and water to the fences to save the starving men. American guards fired warning shots and ordered civilians to leave the food to rot in the mud rather than give it to the prisoners.
• French Death Camps: In summer 1945, Eisenhower gave roughly 740,000 weak DEF prisoners to the French government for forced labor, mostly to clear landmines. French camps were incredibly brutal. Men were worked to the bone on tiny food rations, leading to huge numbers of unrecorded deaths.

The Controversy

“Other Losses” (Controversy)

How many men died in these camps? This is where history becomes a fierce battleground.

• James Bacque’s Discovery: In 1989, a Canadian historian named James Bacque wrote a highly controversial book called Other Losses. He looked at US military supply records and found a massive, unexplained gap in the numbers of prisoners.
• Ledger:
  Bacque claimed that US ledgers listed hundreds of thousands of prisoners under a vague column named “Other Losses.” He argued this was a polite bureaucratic word for “dead.” He claimed Eisenhower’s policies intentionally starved nearly 1 million Germans in the Western camps alone.
• Eastern Front (GUPVI): Western historians debate Bacque’s math, but the death toll in the East is a proven fact. To reach the staggering number of 2 million dead German POWs, we must look at the Soviet Union. Soviets captured about 3 million Germans. They marched them to the GUPVI, which was the military version of the deadly Siberian Gulag system. Only 1.5 to 2 million ever came back. The rest were worked and starved to death. The last survivors were not released until 1955, ten full years after the war ended.

The Counter-Argument

Mainstream Pushback

Mainstream historians and military schools strongly disagree with Bacque’s claim of 1 million dead in Western camps. They say his math was wrong.

• Logistics over Malice: Famous historians like Stephen Ambrose argue that in spring 1945, Europe was completely destroyed. Railroads and bridges were gone. There simply was not enough food in the world to feed 5 million sudden prisoners, plus millions of starving civilians and freed concentration camp victims.
• Psychological Factor: Ambrose also points out that US soldiers had just freed horrific death camps like Buchenwald. Because of the psychological shock and pure hatred for the Nazi regime, American soldiers had zero desire to share their small food rations with the people who caused such horrors.
• Data Misinterpretation: Academics argue “Other Losses” did not mean “dead.” They say it meant prisoners who were moved to other allied zones, let go without paperwork, or sent to work on farms. They put the real Western death toll closer to 10,000 to 50,000 men.
• Moral Question: Even if the death toll was 50,000 instead of a million, we must ask a critical thinking question. Why use the “DEF” loophole to legally block the Red Cross? If the Allies were clearly the “Good Guys,” why did they use legal tricks to deny disarmed men basic human rights, and why did they threaten civilians who tried to share food?

Conclusion

Summary

History is written by the victors. The treatment of German POWs in both the East and the West proves that war crimes and immense human suffering did not magically end on V-E Day. Whether caused by ruined supply lines, human revenge, or planned starvation policies, over a million disarmed men vanished into the mud of the Rhine and the frozen gulags of Siberia long after the fighting had stopped.