I’ve been listening to Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany as an audiobook. The Germans held more than 30,000 American airmen prisoner by the end of World War II, i.e., more men than were enrolled in the U.S. Army Air Forces prior to the war.
According to the author, Donald Miller, just as depicted in Hogan’s Heroes, the Luftwaffe supposedly let the prisoners more or less run everything within the camp except for security. The inmates ran theater, taught each other classes, and manufactured stuff, including escape tools (though towards the end of the water the Germans began killing escapees rather than punishing them for 10 days with solitary confinement). Except for the food and health care, life as a Luftwaffe prisoner was probably better than the life of a U.S. prison industry customer today.
The Geneva Convention was observed to a large extent by the Germans, who hoped to ensure reasonable treatment for their own prisoners by the Allies and also, once they realized that the war was lost, to avoid post-war retribution. The main area where the Germans violated the Geneva Convention, according to the author, was in supplying nutrition. Inmates were supplied with only about 1800 calories per day of rancid vermin-infested food. Had it not been for packages sent from the U.S., delivered through the Red Cross, many prisoners would have gradually starved. Mail was also delivered, though this was not always a blessing. A man wrote to thank a Stateside woman for knitting a sweater that he received. She responded with “I didn’t realize that they would give it to a prisoner. I knitted it for a fighting man.” A man received a letter from his wife: “Dear Harry, I hope you are broad-minded. I just had a baby. He is such a jolly fellow. He is sending you some cigarettes.” There were so many similar letters that each bunkhouse had a wall of photos of former wives and girlfriends who had decided to discard their imprisoned mates via a “Dear John” letter. (Today there is a significant opportunity for financial profit in breaking up with a serving member of the military, but back in the 1940s there were no child support guidelines to determine the profitability of out-of-wedlock children and alimony was generally short-term as the woman who discarded one husband was expected to remarry quickly.)
Bailing out over France or Belgium resulted in a pretty good chance of being returned to England via Spain, with the assistance of a network of friendly civilians known as “the Comet line”. Bailing out over neutral Sweden was also a good option. Though the Swedes theoretically interred the combatants in reality they looked the other way as escapes were made. One real question is why aircrew who had jumped out of a flaming bomber would try to escape a comfortable life in Sweden to return to get back into a B-17. That is true heroism in my book. Bailing out or landing a disabled plane in Switzerland was problematic. The Swiss were theoretically neutral but at least the German-speaking portions were sympathetic to Germany. Luftwaffe planes came and went, but Allied planes were often fired upon, even when plainly disabled, e.g., with flaming engines. Imprisonment in Switzerland, especially following any escape attempt, could be shockingly harsh and filthy.
When bailing out over Germany it turned out that the luckiest break an airman could hope for was to be found by German soldiers. Oftentimes the soldiers would have to threaten civilians with their rifles to prevent Americans from being lynched or stoned to death on the spot. Absent serious wounds, once an airman was in the custody of the German military his troubles were mostly over.
[German civilians had not endured a single battle on German soil during World War I and were genuinely stunned when their cities began to be destroyed. According to the author, Germans regarded British and American bomber crews as “child murderers” who were not entitled to the protections of prisoners of war. This was not a universal sentiment, however, and Allied bombing of German cities was not a misfortune from the perspective of all city-dwellers. The remaining Jewish residents of Dresden, for example, were scheduled to be deported to a concentration camp just a few days after the firestorm that destroyed the city. Many were able to escape due to the chaos that ensued. (Most of the roughly 215,000 pre-War German Jews had already been killed by their Lutheran and Catholic neighbors by 1945, of course, but a handful were still living in various places due to being married to non-Jewish spouses.]
Aside from being shocked at the accuracy of a 1960s TV show, the most shocking part of this portion of the book is the split-personality of both Germans and Americans during World War II. On the one hand it was Total War with no qualms about civilians being targeted. On the other hand, both sides were consulting the Geneva Convention and various other rule books before acting.
The US also scrupulously observed the Geneva Conventions for German prisoners. According to the conventions, prisoners had to be housed in barracks comparable to American soldiers of comparable rank and received American military wages if they worked (officers did not have to work) and the same food as American troops. For some poorer Germans who still lived in cold water flats back home, the camp conditions were an improvement to their standard of living. They did complain a lot about American white bread and weak coffee – not exactly a war crime.The Americans let the (Nazi) officers pretty much run things inside the camp. So it was not uncommon for prisoners who expressed anti-Nazi sentiment to be beaten to death.
The German prisoners had a grand time in America. They were mostly held in the South and generally treated better than American Black troops. Some had such a good time that they immigrated back to the US when the war was over.
One of the ironies of Hogan’s Heroes is that many of the German officers were played by German Jews (or converts, which made them Jews anyway to the Nazis) who had escaped. Colonel Klink was the cousin of Victor Klemperer whose famous diary was probably the source for your observations about the Jews of Dresden and the son of the famous conductor Otto Klemperer.
By late 1943 (I was told by my grandmother), most German POWs in Canada were subject to unsupervised day-release or short-term assignment as farm workers. Because of the difficulty of escape, they pretty much settled in and made the best of it. An exception occurred in one camp (I forgot where) in which some of the more doctrinaire types tried and executed a fellow inmate.
My grandparents got to know their prisoner pretty well, and exchanged letters with him until the late fifties. He stayed on their farm for weeks at a time during planting and harvest.
The most appalling thing (apart from the loss of life of both combatants and civilians) about the bomber offensive (by both USAAF and RAF) was the inaccuracy and ineffectiveness of the effort strategically.
Some very nice recordings of Otto Klemperer were recently discovered and released.
http://articles.philly.com/2016-03-20/news/71681363_1_conductors-beethoven-philadelphia-orchestra
The initial treatment of Dutch POWs was even more mild; they were released after the Dutch army surrendered. Officers were required to give their ‘word of honor’ that they would not take hostile action against Germany, and then they could go home as well. Of course, this was good PR in an occupied country.
The Geneva conventions were drafted by diplomats. Gentle people, and certainly in Europe at that time, aristocratic. Perhaps that’s why the rules for treating POWs seem more appropriate for a friendly rugby match between gentlemen.
Recommend “a higher call” by Adam Markos. About WWII Germany fighter pilot and American B-17 Bomber pilot encounter on the North Sea. Excellent reading.
On the other hand, the German treatment of Soviet POWs was much different. Vast numbers died of hunger, exposure and so forth. That was related to Nazi racial theories which considered Slavic peoples inferior to western Europeans.
Quite, Soviet POWs were by and large treated as subhuman, often “palmed off” to civilian/ SS authorities to be deported to extermination camps (in Auschwitz a 30000-strong contingent of Russians was used in 1942 to test the “throughput” of the gas chambers-to-ovens extermination “production” line. Most Russians there were simply starved to death under open skies).
From what I remember reading over many years, it seems that at the beginning of WWII, the Wehrmacht treated even mass-surrendered Polish=Slavic army forces quite leniently: conscripts etc were sent off as slave labour/ agricultural farmhands to Germany; to Stalags; or (in not so few known cases, esp. the wounded) even released home; while officers placed in Wehrmacht-run Offlags. Strangely enough, the Wehrmacht has honored the Geneva convention even when it came to Polish-Jewish officers, in spite of the various informal “Führerorders” to the contrary. On the other hand, I’ve read of one Fall 1939 case where a number—don’t remember how many offhand, but a sizable group—of Jewish-Polish soldiers (who may have been denounced by their fellow ethnic Polish detainees in need of a scapegoat following the shock of defeat) were put behind barbed wire in a field, and left to die of exposure and hunger within less than 2 weeks. This doesn’t seem to have been repeated though, possibly due to [my interpretation] the distress expressed by the guarding Wehrmacht conscripts who saw the inhumanity of it (analogous to later known cases of similar distress among young soldiers ordered to shoot Jewish women and children in Belarus and Ukraïne, when SS Einsatzgruppen and Police Battalions weren’t enough). I haven’t seen the “Hogan’s Heroes,” but am sure that (white/WASP) English, French, and American POWs in IIIrd Reich were treated with lots more respect than other ethnicities, and way better than such POWs in Japanese “custody.”
I don’t know how black Americans (though hardly airmen) were treated by the Germans, but during the “Red Hot Rake” in Italy 1944-1945, the life of captured black US (and French Legion Moroccan) troops wasn’t worth much… the prisoners seldom survived the day of surrender.
“THE RED-HOT RAKE Italy’s Sorrow:
A Year of War 1944-45” by James Holland
(Harper Press 606pp £25)
a review: http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/552646/putting-the-jackboot-in/