Confronting Captivity: Britain and the United States and their POWs in Nazi Germany (review)

Soon after the start of World War II, the Nazi government signaled the British that they intended to adhere to the Geneva Convention's rules pertaining to prisoners of war (POWs), a far different policy from the one applied to Polish prisoners of war and later to Russian captives. British and eventually American POWs benefited from Nazi racial theory. By the spring of 1940, the Germans held approximately 3,000 British prisoners, but after Dunkirk the number swelled by some 130,000. British captives were reasonably well looked after and German rations were supplanted by the delivery of Red Cross parcels shipped through Portugal. Treatment, however, varied depending upon the camp a POW found himself in.

Dieppe, the site of a British-Canadian commando raid on the coast of France on 19 August, 1942, resulted in disaster—nearly 2,000 soldiers were taken prisoner. During capture the Germans discovered a document that ordered British soldiers to bind the hands of German prisoners whenever feasible to prevent the destruction of important papers. The German high command countered by ordering that all prisoners captured at Dieppe be shackled. The British retaliated by shackling a like number of German prisoners. The shackling controversy lasted for over a year and while resolved in 1943 it put on hold an exchange of seriously wounded and sick POWs. That same year the Allied victory in North Africa witnessed a massive surrender of Axis soldiers. The Allies now held the larger number of prisoners, which induced the Germans to undertake the complicated negotiations that led to the first POW exchange.

As the air war against German cities and industry increased and after the Normandy invasion when it was clear Germany would lose the war, the British feared the Nazis might break off negotiations on future exchanges. Great Britain and the United States were also concerned over the fate of Jewish soldiers, especially members of the Palestine Brigade captured in Italy. The Germans, demonstrating a practicality that overlooked their racial ideology, consistently treated all Allied soldiers the same regardless of race. Surprisingly, this policy did not change even after the SS took over the POW camp system in late 1944. The Germans' incentive was their desperate need of several thousand medical personnel (protected by the Geneva Convention and eligible for exchange) held captive by the Allies. As the war dragged on, Germany proposed an even larger exchange of prisoners in an effort to retrieve men for combat, a proposal the British accepted but the U.S. opposed. After protracted negotiations, three more exchanges occurred before the end of the war.

The Roosevelt administration was far less interested in the prisoner issue than the British as few American prisoners were held by the Germans until after D-Day. However, from that date forward the number of U.S. soldiers captured increased dramatically. During the Battle of the Bulge beginning in December 1944, huge losses occurred in a few short weeks. Twenty-one thousand prisoners flooded into the German camp system. This enormous influx at a time when Germany was collapsing seriously strained Nazi resources. Prisoners received less medical attention, poor quality food and less of it, and far fewer Red Cross packages. The International Committee of the Red Cross struggled to distribute packages, but transport and military complications hampered their efforts. Many British and American prisoners held in the east were forcibly marched west to escape the advancing Red Army.

With Germany's collapse imminent, U.S. and British fears for the POWs increased dramatically. Especially worrisome was the Nazi declaration that Allied airmen were terrorists and had no legal status as POWs under the Geneva Convention—a few downed airmen had on capture been lynched by irate German civilians. Concern posed a number of unanswerable questions. Would the prisoners be fed, would they be used as hostages, would...