SHOCKING! American (And Allies) Torture And Abuse Of German Prisoners After The Country Lost The War

 As described by both Churchill and Elliott Roosevelt in their memoirs, "Stalin rose and proposed a blood-curdling toast. The strength of the German army depended, he said, upon fifty thousand high officers and technicians. His toast was a salute to shooting them, ". . . as fast as we can, all of them."

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The Allies may have chosen to style themselves as ‘liberators’ but they came in hate. In the cases of the Russians, French, Poles and Czechs, this was understandable. To be occupied is to be violated, even when it is not coupled with regular atrocities. The atrocities committed by the SS and the Wehrmacht in Poland and Russia were horrendous, and they were not lacking in France and Czechoslovakia either. It is hardly surprising that there were acts of revenge. Any man found in the east was liable to be subjected to the most fabulous torture and death. Such things we may understand, but surely never condone. 

From After The Reich by Giles Macdonogh

I stumbled across this bit of history accidentally! The inhuman torture that was meted out to German prisoners by American soldiers and authorities after the country lost the war in 1945. 

The truth at times is very unpalatable....The Nazis were evil but what the American interrogators did was hardly holy. 


We always knew America could be cruel inhuman and ruthless. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay showed it clearly. But not many of us know the vicious manner in which America dealt with German prisoners at the end of WW2. One feels a churning in the stomach; a little nausea as one reads about it (the same feeling one gets when reading about the holocaust). As an old saying goes, "All crows are black".

At that time (End Of WW2)  German POWs (Especially those from the Waffen SS) were brutally tortured. After the Second World War, the Allies wanted to extort by torture,(for example, destruction of the testicles) confessions to bring Germans to the gallows and to collect arguments for the re-education of the German people. Among others are the so-called confessions in Malmedy process.

All practices of medieval torture methods were used. As an example, because of alleged involvement in the shooting of Allied airmen the sergeant accused Schmitz who vigorously denied what the interrogators wanted. "Fisher began to rage ... He put the gun to Schmitz's temporal and called again for another statement. Schmitz said nothing. And then the blows rained down with the gun over his head, the lieutenant hit him several times on the face. With a bloody nose and burst scalp Schmitz was returned to his solitary confinement. Pointner, Witzke and Albrecht  had previously been treated with the same methods for many weeks They signed what was presented to them the next day.
(KW Hammerstein, "Landsberg - executioner of the law", Wuppertal, 1952, page 104)

One of the most notorious was the infamous Major Abraham Levine.Most found that the interrogations took place only in the evening or at night. Fisher and Levine tortured the prisoners. About the methods in Landsberg reported KW Hammerstein. 'Sometimes the condemned in Schwitzzellen were kept in rooms with 80 degrees temperature in order to 'burn'.

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British and American authorities denied access by International Red Cross representatives to camps holding German prisoners of war. Moreover, any attempt by German civilians to feed the prisoners was punishable by death.  Many thousands of German PoWs died in American custody, most infamously in the so-called “Rhine meadow camps,” where prisoners were held under appalling conditions, with no shelter and very little food.

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Only rarely do these atrocities became public. By mistake a 60 year old man, Heinrich Heine Heinemann Leo, was accused and shackled in heavy chains, and brought in for questioning. A loaded gun was put to his head and the interrogators tried to force him to sign a confession. When he refused, he was beaten so badly that he was unconscious for a long time. When the mistake was realised six weeks later it was found that the father Leo Heinemann had been apprehended and not his son Henry. The father was ill and returned home with a broken nose .

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"British and allied troops appearing as defendants in war crimes trials with brutal Serbs and former Red Army thugs is well overdue", says 20th Century analyst, Michael Walsh. His research exposes allied genocide, enslavement and institutionalized ill treatment of axis prisoners-of-war both during and after World War 11. He says, "the scale of abuse of prisoners-of-war was contrary to the Geneva and other conventions to which Britain and its allies were signatories. 

 As late as 1948, three years after the war’s end, the British Government’s treatment of its foreign prisoners was subject to International Red Cross scrutiny and international condemnation. The IRC threatened to bring the British government before international tribunals for abuse and illegal enslavement. 

 Typically, British administered prisoner-of-war camps were worse than Belsen long after the war had ended and war disruption ceased. Tragically even civilians were illegally held, deported and murdered in the tens of thousands whilst the evil killers responsible have so far evaded justice. 

 The respected Associated Press Photographer, Henry Griffin who had taken the pictures of corpses in Buchenwald and Dachau when visiting Allied POW camps agreed: "The only difference I can see between these men and those corpses is that here they are still breathing."  

"According to revelations by members of the House of Commons, about 130,000 former German officers and men were held during the winter of 1945-46 in British camps in Belgium under conditions which British officers have described as 'not much better than Belsen."

Source: Nexusboard

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Both during and after the war, the Allies tortured German prisoners. In one British center in England, called “the London Cage,” German prisoners were subjected to systematic ill-treatment, including starvation and beatings. The brutality continued for several years after the end of the war. Treatment of German prisoners by the British was even more harsh in the British occupation zone of Germany.  At the US internment center at Schwäbisch Hall in southwest Germany, prisoners awaiting trial by American military courts were subjected to severe and systematic torture, including long stretches in solitary confinement, extremes of heat and cold, deprivation of sleep and food, and severe beatings, including kicks to the groin. 
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Among the most terrible tormentors in American uniform, were the interrogators Perl and Clay. They operated mainly in Schwäbisch Hall a terrorist regime. Fair-minded Americans, Colonel Everett, mobilized  U.S. public opinion against the injustice of prisoners of war (the Waffen-SS soldiers). The American Judge Edward Leroy van Roden Colonel finally became a member of an appointed official investigative commission, chaired by Gordon Simpson of Texas Supreme Court. Following are excerpts from van Roden's report (quoted by Maurice Bardeche, "Nuremberg and the counterfeiters," Wiesbaden 1957): The "as" evidence submitted was "confessions" extorted from men who were held in perfect seclusion for three, four or five months. They were locked in a windowless room with four walls. Daily two meager meals were pushed in through flap attached to the cell door. They could not talk. They were denied all contact with their families, a priest or a pastor. In some cases, this treatment was enough to bring German to sign whatever they were made to sign.

READ: MALMEDY MASSACRE TRIALS AT WIKIPEDIA

BRITISH BRUTALITY

Former British Army veteran A.W Perkins of Holland-on-Sea described conditions in the ‘Sennelager’ British concentration camp, which shockingly held, not captured troops but civilians. He recounts; "During the latter half of 1945 I was with British troops guarding suspected Nazi civilians living on starvation rations in a camp called Sennelager. They were frequently beaten and grew as thin as concentration camp victims, scooping handfuls of swill from our waste bins."

This ex-guard described how other guards amused themselves by baiting starving prisoners. "They could be shot on sight if they ventured close to the perimeter fence. It was a common trick to throw a cigarette just inside the fence and shoot any prisoner who tried to reach it." . "When Press representatives ask to examine the prison camps, the British loudly refuse with the excuse that the Geneva Convention bars such visits to prisoner-of-war camps." complained press correspondent Arthur Veysey from London on May 28th 1946.
Whale

From the book

After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation 

Giles MacDonogh

MacDonogh discusses the treatment of German POWs in some detail, and this is an especially painful chapter for Americans. After Germany's unconditional surrender the status of the millions of German POWs changed to DEP (Disarmed Enemy Persons), which meant they were no longer subject to the Geneva Conventions. Food rations were immediately reduced and starvation became commonplace.

The most notorious American camps were the Rheinwiesenlager - the Rhine Meadow Camps - where more than 400,000 prisoners were left to starve out in open in the mud. 10% of them died from hunger, disease and exposure.

 The "lucky" ones were herded into former Nazi concentration camps - such as Dachau - where they were treated horribly and many died. I had read about some of this abuse in Ernst von Salomon 's autobiographical book Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire), where he describes in detail his treatment as a prisoner of the Americans, and MacDonogh also draws on von Salomon's account. Former Wehrmacht and SS officers were subjected to brutal "interrogations".

At Schwaebisch Hall, a particularly infamous prison near Stuttgart for officials suspected of major war crimes, MacDonogh writes:

The Americans had used methods similar to those employed by the SS in Dachau. … Worse still were the mock executions, where the men were led off in hoods, while their guards told them they were approaching the gallows. Prisoners were actually lifted bodily off the ground to convince them they were about to swing. More conventional methods of torture included kicks to the groin, deprivation of sleep and food and savage beatings. When the Americans set up a commission of inquiry into the methods used by their investigators, they found that, of the 139 cases examined, 137 had “had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation team.”

Dialoginternational

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In other cases too, continued Judge van Roden, direct physical torture  used in a sadistic manner was used  to extort "confessions": Investigators put a black hood over the head of the accused, then they were struck in the face with brass knuckles,  kicked and beaten with a rubber hose. Several German defendants had broken teeth, some had their jaws broken. In 139 cases reviewed, but two, the Germans had been hit with such force in the testicles, that a permanent disability resulted. This was a standard procedure of our American investigators ....

Seward L. van Roden, was so shaken by  the terrible injustices meted out to Germans  that he was quoted as sayin in the "Chicago Tribune" 12 March 1949 issue, "If justice is to take place, then one would have to attribute the entire American army to the United States, where they sit in judgment order".

READ: ALLIED ATROCITIES IN GERMANY BY JUDGE EDWARD L. VAN RODEN


The British naval officer, Kriegsgeschichtler and publicist Captain Russell Grenfell dealt with the van Roden's investigation results. In his published in 1954 in New York book "Unconditional Hatred" (German: "Unconditional Hatred," Tübingen 1954?) He wrote: The judge found that captured German had faced various forms of mistreatment  - in the words of the magazine "Sunday Pictorial "-" strong men to broken wrecks ready to mumble any admission demanded of them by their accusers. "

From Unconditional hatred by Russell Grenfell (Page 190)

On January 23, 1949, the SUNDAY PICTORIAL published, under the headline: "AMERICANS
TORTURE GERMANS TO EXTORT 'CONFESSIONS' " what it called "an ugly story of
barbarous tortures inflicted in the name of allied justice," taken from the report of the Ameri-can Judge Edward L. van Roden, who had investigated allegations to this effect as a member
of an official Commission of Enquiry.

The Judge found that German prisoners were subjected  to various forms of maltreatment till, as the Pictorial said, "strong men were reduced to broken wrecks ready to mumble any admission demanded by their prosecutors."

Some of the actual methods of persuasion revealed by the Judge included forcing lighted  matches under prisoners' fingernails, kicking in the testicles beyond repair (in all but 2 of the  139 cases investigated), putting a black hood over a prisoner's head and then bashing him in the face with knuckle-dusters, and the use of bogus priests, complete with crucifix and candles, to hear confessions in the hope of gaining incriminating information

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"Concealed documents," the second volume brings the following report of a Flayed of Schwäbisch Hall, Heinz Rehagel: "by blows and kicks, I was driven to the admission in a cell. High fever and kidney pain made me immediately call for a doctor. A doctor came not to help me, but the interrogators.. Even my request for two extra blankets he refused. So I was left with two thin blankets in a cold cell, with leaky windows. Repeated calls and pleas were ignored. Just before Christmas, I asked an American interpreter. My question was, why were we actually there? He responded with vicious insults. The request to be allowed to receive a message from my wife, (she must have given birth in late November) he met with general insults against his wife.When I forbade that, he hit me repeatedly with his fist in the face. As I was led to the first hearing, I received blows with a cudgel on the chest, abdomen and genitals. At my first interrogation I met Perl and Lieutenant Harry Thon, a German emigrant. Thon posed as a Major and senior public prosecutor. Thon:. - (. Thon hits me in the face) "You are Rehagel" "Yes" "You are a stupid piece of shit," That was the welcome by the representatives of the subsequent prosecution.. In many other cases, I answered their questions. But not to the satisfaction of the gentlemen. Not the truth they wanted. I was made  most magnificent promises, but I had to implicate my company boss, the regimental commander, and Lieutenant Christian. When promises had no effect threats followed like: "Well, we have the resources to get you to talk," or: "You can simply disappear; quick executions carried out here," every day.

When news leaked about sadistic methods in the terrorist tribunals in America, voices were raised in protest. On 20 May 1949, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (cited in Ulrich Stern, the real culprits "in the Second World War," Munich, 1990). Know, "As a lawyer and as judge of the circuit court in Wisconsin and I respect the American system of justice I think, the world was expecting a demonstration of American justice, which should be self-applied to our defeated enemies. Instead Gestapo and GPU methods have been applied. I have heard testimony and seen documentary evidence to the effect that accused persons subjected to beatings and physical abuse were in forms as they could only be invented by sick minds. They were exposed to mock trials and executions, they threatened to deprive their families of the ration cards, which justified all the accusers as necessary to create the right psychological atmosphere "for obtaining confessions ". I am firmly convinced that innocent people as well as guilty in this way in the" right psychological atmosphere added, "make confessions or anything and will confirm each. I do not want that murderous Nazis are released. I only wish that innocents are protected.

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Adding to international outrage, Cyril Connolly, one of England’s most acclaimed writers reported: "British guards imprisoned German troops and tortured them." He described how "they were so possessed by propaganda about German 'Huns' that they obviously enjoyed demonstrating their atrocities to visiting journalists. A British reporter named Moorehead who was present at these ‘torture fests’ observed that 'a young British medical officer and a captain of engineers managed the Bergen-Belsen camp. "The captain was in the best of moods," he said. "When we approached the cells of gaoled guards, the sergeant lost his temper." The captain explained. 'This morning we had an interrogation. I'm afraid the prisoners don't look exactly nice.' The cells were opened for the visiting journalists. "The German prisoners lay there, crumpled, moaning, covered with gore. The man next to me made vain attempts to get to his feet and finally managed to stand up. He stood there trembling, and tried to stretch out his arms as if fending off blows. "Up!" yelled the sergeant. "Come off the wall." "They pushed themselves off from the wall and stood there, swaying. In another cell the medical officer had just finished an interrogation. "Up." yelled the officer. "Get up." The man lay in his blood on the floor. He propped two arms on a chair and tried to pull himself up. A second demand and he succeeded in getting to his feet. He stretched his arms towards us. "Why don't you kill me off?" he moaned. "The dirty bastard is jabbering this all morning." the sergeant stated.

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RUDOLPH HOESS

The English author Butler in his book "German Legion," excerpts from the records of a certain batch of Bernard, in British uniform in the capture of Hoess (one of the camp commandant of Auschwitz) was here.Accordingly, we initially extorted from Höss woman in hiding the whereabouts of her husband. This method has been applied, the butler so designated. "Sophisticated techniques of continuous and relentless interrogation" The sergeant in British uniform hay was eventually found on March 11, 1946 on a farm. One of the British soldier wrote: "He lay on top of a three storey bunk and was with a silk pajama clad We found out later that he had lost his Cyanide pill . Even if he had the pill he could not have used it, because we had already rammed a torch in his mouth. As a prelude to the "treatment"  Hoess  was  beaten. He lay naked on a table of the farm and he beat him for some time. Then poured large amount of whisky in his mouth. The violent force-fed alcohol had been in addition to other methods of torture is an effective way to get confessions.

Here are the words Höss uses to describe, in succession, his arrest by the British; his signing of the document that would that would become NO-1210; his transfer to Minden-on-the-Weser, where the treatment that he underwent was worse yet; his stay at the Nuremberg tribunal's prison; and, finally, his extradition to Poland." I was arrested on 11 March 1946 (at 11 pm). My phial of poison had been broken two days before. When I was aroused from sleep, I thought at first I was being attacked by robbers, for many robberies were taking place at that time. That was how they managed to arrest me. I was maltreated by the Field Security Police. I was taken to Heide where I was put in those very barracks from which I had been released by the Bntish eight months earlier. At my first interrogation, evidence was obtained by beating me. I do not know what is in the record, although I signed it. Alcohol and the whip were too much for me. The whip was my own, which by chance had got into my wife's luggage. It had hardly ever touched my horse, far less the prisoners. Nevertheless, one of my interrogators was convinced that I had perpetually used it for flogging the prisoners. After some days I was taken to Minden-on-the-Weser, the main interrogation centre in the British Zone. There I received further rough treatment at the hands of the English public prosecutor, a major."

In all likelihood, Höss was tortured by the British soldiers of the 92nd Field Security Section, but a confirmation of that hypothesis was necessary. Confirmation has come with the publication in England of a book containing the name of the principal torturer (a British sergeant of Jewish origin) and a description of the circumstances of Höss' arrest, as well as his third-degree interrogation.

From Rense

The book is by Rupert Butler. It was published in 1983 (Hamlyn Paperbacks). Butler is the author of three other works: The Black Angels, Hand of Steel and Gestapo, all published by Hamlyn. The book that interests us is entitled Legions of Death. Its inspiration is anti-Nazi. Butler says that he researched this book at the Imperial War Museum in London, the Institute for Contemporary History and Wiener Library, and other such prestigious institutions. At the beginning of his book, he expresses his gratitude to these institutions and, among others, to two persons, one of whom is Bernard Clarke ("who captured Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss"). The author quotes several fragments of what are either written or recorded statements by Clarke.

Bernard Clarke shows no remorse. On the contrary, he exhibits a certain pride in having tortured a "Nazi." Rupert Butler, likewise, finds nothing to criticize in that. Neither of them understands the importance of their revelations. They say that Höss was arrested on 11 March, 1946, and that it took three days of torture to obtain "a coherent statement." They do not realize that the alleged "coherent statement" is nothing other than the lunatic confession, signed by their quivering victim on the l4th or l5th of March 1946, at 2:30 in the morning, which was to seal Höss' fate definitely, a confession which would also give definitive shape to the myth. The confession would also shape decisively the myth of Auschwitz, the supposed high-point of the extermination of the Jews, above all due to the alleged use of homicidal gas chambers.

On 11 March 1946, a Captain Cross, Bernard Clarke and four other intelligence specialists in British uniforms, most of them tall and menacing, entered the home of Frau Höss and her children.

The six men, we are told, were all "practised in the more sophisticated techniques of sustained and merciless investigation" (p. 235). Clarke began to shout:

If you don't tell us [where your husband is] we'll turn you over to the Russians and they'll put you before a firing-squad. Your son will go to Siberia.

Frau Höss broke down and revealed, says Clarke, the location of the farm where her husband was in hiding, as well as his assumed name: Franz Lang. And Bernard Clarke added:

Suitable intimidation of the son and daughter produced precisely identical information.

The Jewish sergeant and the five other specialists in third degree interrogation then left to seek out Höss, whom they surprised in the middle of the night, sleeping in an alcove of the room used to slaughter cattle on the farm.

Höss screamed in terror at the mere sight of British uniforms. 

Clarke yelled "What is your name?" 

With each answer of "Franz Lang," Clarke's hand crashed into the face of his prisoner. The fourth time that happened, Höss broke and admitted who he was. 

The admission suddenly unleashed the loathing of the Jewish sergeants in the arresting party whose parents had died in Auschwitz following an order signed by Höss. 

The prisoner was torn from the top bunk, the pyjamas ripped from his body. He was then dragged naked to one of the slaughter tables, where it seemed to Clarke the blows and screams were endless. 

Eventually, the Medical Officer urged the Captain: "Call them off, unless you want to take back a corpse." 

A blanket was thrown over Höss and he was dragged to Clarke's car, where the sergeant poured a substantial slug of whisky down his throat. Then Höss tried to sleep. 

Clarke thrust his service stick under the man's eyelids and ordered in German: "Keep your pig eyes open, you swine." 

For the first time Höss trotted out his oft-repeated justification: "I took my orders from Himmler. I am a soldier in the same way as you are a soldier and we had to obey orders." 

The party arrived back at Heide around three in the morning. The snow was swirling still, but the blanket was torn from Höss and he was made to walk completely nude through the prison yard to his cell. (p. 237)

So it is that Bernard reveals "It took three days to get a coherent statement out of [Höss]" (ibid.). This admission was corroborated by Mr. Ken Jones in an article in the Wrexham Leader.(October 17,1986):

Mr. Ken Jones was then a private with the fifth Royal Horse Artillery stationed at Heid[e) in Schleswig-Holstein. "They brought him to us when he refused to cooperate over questioning about his activities during the war. He came in the winter of 1945/6 and was put in a small jail cell in the barracks," recalls Mr. Jones. Two other soldiers were detailed with Mr. Jones to join Höss in his cell to help break him down for interrogation. "We sat in the cell with him, night and day, armed with axe handles. Our job was to prod him every time he fell asleep to help break down his resistance," said Mr. Jones. When Höss was taken out for exercise he was made to wear only jeans and a thin cotton shirt in the bitter cold. After three days and nights without sleep, Höss finally broke down and made a full confession to the authorities.

The editor of the magazine "Striker," Julius Streicher were, among others regularly flogged with a riding whip, the testes, then it was placed a crown of thorns and he could be photographed naked with swollen testicles. Streicher was convicted by the Nuremberg Tribunal to death.

Streicher died on the gallows at Nuremberg solely for publishing a paper critical of the Jews.

Streicher was not part of the German government during the war.

Streicher had no role in the German war effort or in the concentration camps.

Source: Stormfront

THE CASE OF JULIUS STREICHER

(Source: vho.org)

It was at Mondorf that Streicher composed his autobiographical political testament, a manuscript of some 15,000 words. It was published as 'Das Politische Testament," edited and with a foreword by Jay. W. Baird, in Vierteljahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte (April 1978).

On 22 May [1945) I was arrested in Waidring (Tirol) and was brought into the jail at Salzburg. There my hands were put into handcuffs by a Jewish police-officer.

On 23 May, I was brought to Freising, via Toelz and Munich. During the 200 Kilometer trip in considerable cold, I was only dressed with shirt and pants, since my jacket was not given to me. My bands were handcuffed.

In Freising I was put in a cell, where there was no possibility of sitting or lying down. The window was removed and the cell was cold. During my three days stay in there (23 May afternoon to 26 May afternoon) I was subjected to the following treatment:

1) After being stripped of my clothes, two Negroes tore my shirt into two pieces. Dressed only with my underpants, and barefoot, I spent three days in the cold room. During the night and during a few hours in daytime, I was handed an old military coat. It was taken away immediately, whenever I tried to resist the tortures.

2) Two or three times daily I had to stand against a wall, with my handcuffed hands held above the head, whereupon a Negro or the police-officer kept hitting me on my genitalia, with a leather whip up to a minute long. Whenever I made a resisting move with my handcuffed hands, I received a hit with the foot in my testicles. My testicles and genitalia were badly swollen.

3) Two or three times daily I had to open my mouth, whereupon the white police-officer or the Negroes spat into it. If I kept my mouth closed, it was forcefully opened with a wooden stick.

4) When I refused to drink from the piss-bowl in the toilet, I was hit with the whip.

5) On each of his visits to my cell, the white police-officer pulled hair from my nipples and eyebrows.

6) During the three days I received no nourishment, and only once I was allowed to drink water in the toilet. When I refused to take and to eat partially decayed leftovers from a cardboard box, I was pushed to the ground, a heavy iron chain was put on my back and I was forced to kiss the feet of the Negroes.

7) At the end of each torture, I had to put out with my bare feet burning cigarette butts, thrown on the ground.

8) I was repeatedly photographed by people of the press, while wearing underpants and my genitalia were visible. The photographers were Jews.

9) On the last day, two hours before being transported to Wiesbaden, a Negro said: now comes "kill, kill" and made the corresponding gesture at the throat. He asked me what I wanted to eat or drink, I may wish. I asked for paper in order to write a letter to my wife.

10) Before being transported, a Negro called me into the toilet, then threw my civilian clothes in and ordered me to get dressed. This I had to do with handcuffed hands.

On 26 May, I was brought to Wiesbaden in handcuffs, where I arrived in the early hours of 27 May. Only in Wiesbaden, the handcuffs which I had on since 22 May (five days) day and night were removed from my greatly swollen hands and infected joints. Since then I am under medical care. The officer in charge of the jail in Wiesbaden (he said he was a Jew) acted correctly.

[signed]
Julius Streicher
16.6.45

Ernest Hemingway  boasted in his memoirs that he killed a German prisoner of war ...


Source: wno.org

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GERMAN SLAVES HELD IN ALLIED COUNTRIES

United States 140,000 (US Occupation Zone of which 100,000 were held in France, 
30,000 in Italy, 14,000 in Belgium. 
Great Britain 460,000 German slaves. 
The Soviet Union 4,000,000 - 5,000,000 estimated. 
France had 680,000 German slaves by August 1946. 
Yugoslavia 80,000, 
Belgium 48,000, 
Czechoslovakia 45,000, 
Luxembourg 4,000, Holland 1,300. 

Source: International Red Cross

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An outraged International Red Cross organization opined: "The United States, Britain and France, 

nearly a year after peace are violating International Red Cross agreements they solemnly signed in 1929.  Although thousands of former German soldiers are being used in the hazardous work of clearing minefields,  sweeping sea mines and razing shattered buildings, the Geneva Convention expressly forbids  employing prisoners 'in any dangerous labour or in the transport of any material used in warfare.'

Henry Wales in Geneva, Switzerland on April 13, 1946 added, 'The bartering of captured enemy soldiers by the victors  throws the world back to the dark ages when feudal barons raided adjoining duchies to replenish their human live stock.  It is an iniquitous system and an evil precedent because it is wide open for abuse with difficulty in establishing responsibility.  It is manifestly unjust and sell them for political reasons as the African Negroes were a century ago."

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GERMAN TREATMENT OF POWs FAR MORE HUMANE By contrast the German armed forces behaved impeccably towards their prisoners-of-war. "The most amazing thing about the atrocities in this war is that there have been so few of them. I have come up against few instances where the Germans have not treated prisoners according to the rules, and respected the Red Cross reported respected newspaper The Progressive February, 4th1945. Allan Wood, London Correspondent of the London Express agreed. "The Germans even in their greatest moments of despair obeyed the Convention in most respects. True it is that there were front line atrocities - passions run high up there - but they were incidents, not practices, and misadministration of their American prison camps was very uncommon." Lieutenant Newton L. Marguiles echoed his words. US Assistant Judge Advocate, Jefferson Barracks, April 27th 1945. "It is true that the Reich exacted forced labour from foreign workers, but it is also true that, they were for the most part paid and fed well." "I think some of the persons found themselves better off than at any time in their lives before." added Dr.James K.Pollack, Allied Military Government. "What did the Germans do to get efficient production from forced labour that we were not able to do with Germans working down the mines? They fed their help and fed them well." Said Max H. Forester, Chief of AMG's Coal and Mining Division in July 1946.

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 Waffen SS soldiers surrender to the Americans

From Germancross

Here is another telling vignette, as recounted by American author Marguerite Higgins visited Germany following the war and later wrote of her experiences in "News Is a Singular Thing". Higgins described a visit to a GI "Interrogation Center": "The GI led us to the main door of the camp . . . Behind the bars of the cell we saw 3 uniformed Germans. Two of them, beaten and covered with blood, were lying unconscious on the floor. A third German was lifted up by the hair on his head, and I shall never forget, he had red hair like a carrot. A GI turned his body over and struck him in the face. When the victim groaned, the GI roared, "Shut your mouth, damned Kraut!". . . . It turned out that for almost a quarter of an hour, the doubled rows of 20 to 30 GI's stood aligned taking turns methodically beating the six captured Germans. . . It came out later that the worked-up GI's had captured six young German boys, who had never even been members of the SS. The youngsters had only recently been inducted into a government work battalion. The boy with the red hair was 14 years old. The other 5 German boys in the cell blocks were between 14 and 17 years old." The book "Vorsicht! Faelschung!" reproduces a photograph of 2 German youngsters taken after their "interrogation" by Allied investigators. The photo speaks for itself. The faces of the two youngsters are bruised, swollen, and bloody. These beatings were endemic. These were not isolated occurrences. And if this was the treatment meted out to the innocent - to youngsters in particular - it is only logical to assume that "Nazis" accused of "heinous crimes" were treated far, far worse.

RELEVANT BOOKS

After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
BY
Giles MacDonogh


In a sobering and courageous book, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation,  British historian Giles MacDonogh details how the ruined and prostrate Reich (including Austria) was systematically raped and robbed, and how many Germans who survived the war were either killed in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or starvation.
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EXCERPTS
(P 389)

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.

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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
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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.
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The ‘work-over’ was the prelude to an ordeal that lasted for months, and in some cases years. There were no exceptions – not even generals were immune, although one SS-Standartenführer who had ‘solved the Jewish question’ in Hungary with singular efficiency was treated with awe and absolved from the usual beating. As it transpired, once a prisoner was officially marked down as a ‘war criminal’, the physical abuse ceased. The higher judicial authority would certainly have learned of any beatings. This sort of rough handling was reserved for those the Americans deemed obscure or defenceless, not for Göring or Ribbentrop. There were too many journalists buzzing around the courthouse in Nuremberg. 

For the mere soldiers the treatment was less brutal, but could be just as deadly. Hans Johnert was taken prisoner by a GI on 9 April 1945. The soldier snatched his watch and threw away his mess tin: ‘Kriegst du alles neu!’ (You’ll get new ones!). He was taken to the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen and given a tin of beans with bits of meat in it. Then he was transferred to the Pioneers’ Barracks in Worms, where the gloves came off. There were 30,000–40,000 prisoners sitting in the courtyard, jostling for space. With no protection against the rain they froze. They went from Worms to France. As their convoy arrived on French soil, French civilians threw stones and lumps of coal at them. A black guard had to fire his weapon to keep them at bay. Behind bars back at Natternberg the violence slackened off, but did not die out. 

One memorable day the prisoners had to run the gauntlet – a punishment that had made the Prussians infamous in their time. The prisoners were called out in alphabetical order. The Americans formed two lines and the men ran between them while they rained down blows with rubber truncheons. Salomon noted that the elderly were the hardest hit, because they moved most slowly. 

Once again it was a Polish sergeant who was most feared for his brutality. He was in the middle of one of the rows. When L was called out it was the turn of Hanns Ludin, Hitler’s ambassador to Slovakia. Ludin was determined to drink his cup down to the dregs. He where are our men? 401 walked slowly through the ranks. ‘When he reached the Polish sergeant he lost one of his wooden shoes. He turned about and with his bare foot fished for the shoe he had lost. The sergeant ran after him, striking him, and dropped his rubber truncheon. Ludin leaned down, picked it up and handed it back to him. The physical maltreatment of the inmates came to an end only when General Patton sent up a colonel to inspect the camp. After that the prisoners received proper rations and medical treatment. The earlier violence was attributable to JCS 1067, and ultimately to Morgenthau.

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PITIFUL CONDITION OF GERMAN POW (Prisoner Of War) AFTER WW2 ENDED

(Truedemocracy)

Half of the German POWs in the West were imprisoned by US forces, half by the British. The number of prisoners reached such a huge proportion that the British could not accept any more, and the US consequently established the Rheinwiesenlager from April to September of 1945 where they quickly built a series of "cages" in open meadows and enclosed them with razor wire.

One such notorious field was located at Bad Kreuznach where the German prisoners were herded into open spaces with no toilets, tents, or shelters. They had to burrow sleeping spaces into the ground with their bare hands and in some, there was barely enough room to lay down. In the Bad Kreuznach cage, up to 560,000 men were interned in a congested area and denied adequate food, water, shelter, or sanitary facilities and they died like flies of disease, exposure, and illness after surviving on less than 700 calories a day. There are 1,000 official graves in Bad Kreuznach, but it is claimed there are mass graves which have remained off limits to investigation. There were no impartial observers to witness the treatment of POWs held by the U.S. Army.

From the date Germany unconditionally surrendered, May 8, 1945, Switzerland was dismissed as the official Protecting Power for German prisoners, and the International Red Cross was informed that, with no Protecting Power to report to, there was no need for them to send delegates to the camps. In 1945, thousands of German POWs were jammed into US Army vehicles going through towns such as Nürnberg and Emskirchen (below). They often traveled for hundreds of miles without being able to sit and with no food, rest, or relief stops. Hundreds of German prisoners were confined in makeshift US camps in Emskirchen and elsewhere. Some were sent to fields, mudholes, quarries, and hell holes elsewhere. It is very tricky giving numbers since most records are absent or inaccurate. Only by the autumn of 1945, after most camps had closed or were in the process of closing, was the Red Cross granted permission to send delegations to visit camps in the French and UK occupation zones and to finally provide minuscule amounts of relief, and it was not until February 4, 1946, that the Red Cross was allowed to send even token relief to others in the U.S. run occupation zone.

The death rate for prisoners in these U.S. camps was at that point 30 per cent per year, according to a U.S. medical survey. Nearly all the surviving records of the Rhineland death camps were destroyed. But these men were lucky. Large numbers of captured soldiers were taken away to be enslaved.

If captured in smaller groups, even the US Army policy was to slaughter the prisoners where they stood, especially if they were SS. The largest (currently acknowledged) massacres at the hands of the Americans were the murder of 700 troops of the surrendered 8th SS Mountain Division, atrocities carried out against the surrendered SS Westphalia Brigade where most of the German captives were shot through the back of the head, and the machine gunning of three hundred surrendered camp guards at Dachau.

There was also an alleged mass murder of as many as 48 surrendered German prisoners who were captured on April 15, 1945 at Jungholzhausen. An eyewitness stated: "The Americans forced the Germans to walk in front of them with raised hands in groups of four. Then they shot the prisoners in their heads from behind." The bodies were loaded onto a truck and taken away. The matter is still under investigation.

At the end of June, 1945 the first camps in Remagen, Böhl-Ingelheim and Büderich were dissolved. SHAEF offered the camps to the French, who wanted 1.75 million prisoners of war for use as slave labor. In July, Sinzig, Andernach, Siershahn, Bretzenheim, Dietersheim, Koblenz, Hechtzheim, and Dietz, all containing thousands of prisoners, were given to France.

In the British Zone, prisoners of war who were able to work were transferred to France and the rest were released. At the end of September, 1945 all the initial camps were dissolved. At one point, 80,000 prisoners of war a month were supposed to have to been returned from USA captivity and discharged into the Allied zones of Germany as part of the 1.3 million allotted to France for "rehabilitation work" (slave labor), but after the Red Cross reported that 200,000 of the prisoners already in French hands were so undernourished they were unfit for labor and likely to die over the winter, the USA stopped all transfers of prisoners to French custody until the French would maintain them in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

About 250,000 Germans (including most of the Afrika Korps) and Italians surrendered in Tunis in May 1943, and were taken as prisoners of war where they sweltered in large pens in the desert heat. Many survivors were later sent to Egypt and camps in the US and elsewhere.

By the winter of 1947, it was estimated that 4,160,000 German POWs were still held in 'work camps' outside Germany: 750,000 in France, 30,000 in Italy, 460,000 in Britain, 14,000 in Belgium (at one point, 48,000), 4,000 in Luxembourg and 1,300 in Holland (as discussed later, the Soviet Union started with 4,000,000-5,000,000, Yugoslavia had 80,000 and Czechoslovakia 45,000) as well as the USA's 140,000 in the US Occupation Zone with 100,000 more later also held in France. It is estimated that 700,000 to a million men may have died within the period they spent incarcerated in American and French camps alone from 1945 to 1948.

There are much higher estimates, however, and attempts to uncover the truth regarding these camps in modern times, as well as excavation of reported mass grave sites, have been vigilantly thwarted by, among others, the German government. It is unknown how many perished under British captors but recently declassified documents indicate widespread torture and abuse. Under all of them, many of the prisoners were used to do dangerous work such as working with hazardous materials and mine sweeping in complete disregard of the law. Nearly all the surviving records of the Rhineland death camps were destroyed. Although it was always strongly denied, Morgenthau himself said his plan was implemented. In the New York Post for November 24, 1947, he wrote, "The Morgenthau Plan for Germany... became part of the Potsdam Agreement, a solemn declaration of policy and undertaking for action.... signed by the United States of America, Great Britain, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

After the German capitulation in Norway on May 8,1945, over 5,000 German prisoners of war were forced by the British, under the command of General Sir Andrew Thorn, to undertake clearance of land mines in clear violation of the Geneva Convention of 1928. The POWs had to walk arm in arm through mine fields already cleared of mines in hopes of triggering off land mines that were not found previously. This act of cruelty led to the deaths of 184 German Soldiers and the injuring of another 252 POWs. Neither Thorn nor anyone else was ever held accountable for war crimes. It happened in Denmark as well, and a Danish historian documented the killing of German POWs during such clearance of land mines. It is assumed that about 250 German POWs met their deaths in this way in Denmark when forced to perform this diabolical task. On the morning of July 22, 1945, seven Germans were blown into the air as 450 land mines detonated. The other German POWs had to then collect the body parts of their friends without using gloves or other protection.

 GERMAN SOLDIERS IN SOVIET CAPTIVITY

In the communist realms, the conditions that German POWs, many just kids, endured on the Eastern Front were beyond grim and did not follow any accepted protocol for treatment of captured soldiers. Under the provisions of the Yalta Agreement, the U.S. and U.K. had agreed to the use of German POWs in the Soviet Gulag as "reparations-in-kind," but comparatively few Germans were taken alive before Stalingrad. Most were shot and many were mutilated alive. Out of the 90,000 Germans who marched into Soviet captivity at Stalingrad, only 5,000 ever returned: 40,000 did not survive the march to the Beketovka camp, where another 42,000 perished of hunger and disease. Those POWs that made it alive to separate camps in Siberia and elsewhere in the western Soviet Union were forced into slave labor and endured frequent beatings, brutal torture, poisoning, and execution.

The gulag's daily food ration was padded with 400 to 800 grams of bread, more than half of the prisoner's daily 1200-1300 calories. The most productive workers received a modest food bonus (ironically, the Morgenthau Plan for occupied Germany suggested the same allotment of 1300 calories a day per German, while the suggested minimum requirements for heavy labor are from 3100-4000 calories per day). In the gulags, the prisoner's food ration was linked to his production. Realizing that the most productive work done by prisoners is in the first three months of captivity, after which they were too debilitated to perform well, the exhausted prisoners were simply killed off and replaced with fresh blood, ensuring a constant flow of new labor.

This is how the Russians treated German POW. This photo shows one of 34 German soldiers of 9th SS-Panzer-Division "Hohenstaufen" that were captured by the Red Army in April 1944 in the Ukrainian village of Kalasantovka. The mutilated bodies were found by their comrades during the German counter attack on the near-by town of Ternopil. A German eyewitness: "That's not the way soldiers are supposed to act. The hands and the feet of the dead were bound with the ropes of their own tent pieces. Partially the trousers were pulled down and genitals severed. With some the eyes were stabbed, ears and tongue cut off. Furthermore their own bayonet was rammed into the stomach from the downside. Dog tags and other ID's were removed to avoid an identification of the dead. Fortunately most of them had their last names sewn on the inside of their uniform pieces so that a list of the victims could be compiled. However this list was lost later on so that these 34 soldiers are considered officially as "Missing in Action". (ww2incolor)

Because the German POWs had been conveniently redefined as "disarmed enemy forces," Allied captors did whatever they wanted with their German captives, even bartering them away to others for use as slaves. In fact, in a "Re-education" bulletin distributed by the "Special Service Division, Army Service Forces" of the U.S. Army in 1945, tacit approval is given for the intentional transfer of German POWs from Allied hands to the genocidal Red Army: "Many German prisoners will remain in Russia after the end of war, not voluntarily, but because the Russians need them as workers. That is not only perfectly legal, but also prevents the danger of the returning prisoners of war becoming the core of a new national movement. If we ourselves do not want to keep the German prisoners after the war, we should send them nonetheless to Russia." Again, shades of Morgenthau.

Long columns of German prisoners were marched on foot hundreds of tortuous miles toward their doom in Stalingrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow, and Minsk where most were starved and worked to death. Very few ever saw home again. When approximately 6,000 German Army officers were released by the Western Allies in the first half of 1945, they were then re-arrested by the Soviets and held in Zone II at Sachsenhausen Prison Camp which had formerly held the Communist political prisoners of the Nazis. Later, Special Camp No. 7 was filled with German prisoners who had been sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal to 15 years of hard labor. By the end of 1945, it held 12,000 to 16,000 prisoners, among them 2,000 female prisoners, but the population grew. There was inadequate food and deplorable sanitary conditions. Prisoners could have no clothing other than what they were wearing when arrested. Disease and epidemics ran through the barracks where the prisoners had to sleep on the bare wood frames with only a block of wood for a pillow for two years until blankets and bags of straw were finally distributed in 1947. They were not allowed any activities, and even singing was prohibited. The windows of the overcrowded barracks were blacked out and the prisoners were kept in almost total darkness. A total of approximately 60,000 German prisoners were held in Special Camp No. 7 after World War II ended, and 12,000 were buried in unmarked mass graves. None were released by the Soviets until 1948, and most prisoners remained there until 1950, and some were sent on to the Soviet gulags or handed over to the East German Communist government for even more punishment.

The fates of thousands upon thousands of German soldiers, many just kids, surrendered to both the Allies and especially the Soviets have never been accounted for and any attempts to uncover the truth of their disappearance have been halted. Between 1941 and 1952, millions of German POWs died in the Gulag. The last surviving 10,000 of them were not released from the Soviet Union until 1955, after a decade of forced labor. About 1.5 million German soldiers are still listed as missing in action and join the ranks of those who vanished while under Soviet captivity. In total, 5,025 German men and women were convicted of war crimes between 1945 and 1949 in the American, British, and French zones by Allied War Crimes Trials. Over 500 were sentenced to death and the majority were executed, among them 21 women.

 KILLINGS IN THE BALKANS

The Red Terror was let loose on surrendered German POWs in eastern Europe from Czechoslovakia to Poland and beyond. Many were simply shot and thrown into mass graves, others were tortured and mutilated first, and these retributions extended even to young boys. German POWs who fell into the hands of the Yugoslav hordes suffered horrible fates. After 1986, a report appeared showing that out of about 194,000 prisoners, up to 100,000 died from gruesome torture, murder, horrible conditions, disease, and intentional starvation. Around 93,000 ethnic Germans who lived in the Danube basin from 1939 to 1941 served in Hungarian, Croatian, and Romanian armies, and they remained citizens of those countries during the war (many of these ethnic Germans served in the "Prinz Eugen" Waffen SS division of about 10,000, which automatically gave them German citizenship). 26,000 of these soldiers died, over half after the end of the war in Yugoslav camps.

When most of the "Prinz Eugen" division surrendered after May 8, 1945, over 1,700 of them were murdered in a village near the Croat-Slovenian border and the other half was worked to death in Yugoslav zinc mines near the town of Bor, in Serbia. Aside from these Danube German soldiers, over 70,000 Germans who had served in regular Wehrmacht died in Yugoslav captivity from revenge murders or as slave laborers in dangerous work. These were mostly troops of "Army Group E" who surrendered to British forces in southern Austria on May 8, 1945 only to have the British turn about 150,000 of them over to vengeance fueled Communist Yugoslav partisans who dealt with them as brutally as they could. Mob surrounds POW, left. Location unknown. The fates of the remaining captured German troops in Yugoslavia was murder, both fast and slow. First, up to 10,000 died in Communist-organized "atonement marches" (Suhnemärsche) which stretched 800 miles from the southern border of Austria to the northern border of Greece. In most instances, the prisoners were all tied together and forced to walk barefoot with no food or water. As some dropped off one by one on these death marches, others were executed or tied together in smaller groups and thrown into rivers where they were all shot for sport and drowned.

On November 1, 1944, the Council for the Liberation of Yugoslavia declared all Germans "open prey" and less than half of the German POWs and ethnic German civilians survived the partisans' genocide during this time. Then, later in the summer of 1945, many more German POWs were murdered in mass executions or thrown alive into large karst pits along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. For the next 10 years, from 1945 to 1955, as was the case in the Soviet Union and other communist countries, 50,000 more German prisoners died from being worked to death as slaves and from the results of disease, starvation, or exhaustion. Thousands of German and Croat soldiers captured in the final days of the war were coldly executed and buried in mass graves found in western Croatia. A site recently uncovered at Harmica, 50 kilometres northwest of Zagreb, holds the bodies of 4,500 soldiers, including 450 German officers, executed by communist partisans. The bones at Harmica were found in six separate caves and laid in trenches upon discovery. The officers were buried in a separate grave, presumably because they were separated from the soldiers and executed last. The victims were troops of the 392 Infantry Division, set up by the German command in Croatia in August 1943 and placed under the leadership of Lt. General Hans Mickl.

The fates of thousands upon thousands of German soldiers, many just kids, surrendered to both the Allies and especially the Soviets have never been accounted for and any attempts to uncover the truth of their disappearance have been halted.

An interesting footnote: After the war, many German combat veterans joined the French Foreign Legion. Some were surviving SS members recruited directly from prisoner of war camps. Others were men from lost German lands who had nowhere to go home to. Highly regarded by the French for their discipline and bravery, an estimated 35,000 Germans took part in France's war in Vietnam. Germans made up over half the Foreign Legion units in Vietnam that bore much of the heaviest fighting against the communist Viet Minh forces of Ho Chi Minh. In this brutal conflict, more than 10,000 Legionnaires were killed out of about 70,000 who fought.

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