The Americans made a distinction between the 4.2 million soldiers captured during the war, who were entitled to the shelter and subsistence called for by the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and the 3.4 million captured in the West at its end. MacDonogh says the latter were classified as "Surrendered Enemy Persons" (SEPs) or as "Disarmed Enemy Persons" (DEPs), and were denied the protections of the Conventions.
He doesn't give a total figure for those who died in American custody, saying "it is not clear how many German soldiers died of starvation." He tells, however, of several situations: "The most notorious American POW camps were the so-called Rheinwiesenlager." Here, the Americans allowed "anything up to 40,000 German soldiers to die from hunger and neglect in the muddy flats of the Rhine."
He says "any attempt to feed the prisoners by the German civilian population was punishable by death." Although the Red Cross was empowered to inspect, "the barbed wire surrounding the SEPs and DEPs was impenetrable." Elsewhere, at "the Pioneers' Barracks in Worms there were 30,000-40,000 prisoners sitting in the courtyard, jostling for space.
With no protection from the rain they froze." The prisoners were starved at Langwasser, and at a "notorious camp" at Zuffenhausen where "for months lunch was turnip soup, with half a potato for dinner.
It would be a mistake to think that a world food shortage caused the United States to be unable to feed its prisoners. Bacque writes that "Captain Lee Berwick of the 424th Infantry who commanded the guard towers at Camp Bretzenheim told me, 'Food was piled up all round the camp fence.' Prisoners there saw crates piled up 'as high as bungalows.'"[10]
The British had a camp in Belgium that "was meant to be particularly grueling." There, "conditions for the 130,000 prisoners were reported to be 'not much better than Belsen' When the camp was inspected in April 1947 there were found to be just four functioning light bulbs there was no fuel, no straw mattresses and no food apart from 'water soup.'"
A Reuters report in December 2005 adds an important dimension: "Britain ran a secret prison in Germany for two years after the end of World War II where inmates including Nazi party members were tortured and starved to death, the Guardian says. Citing Foreign Office files that were opened after a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the newspaper says Britain had held men and woman [sic] at a prison in Bad Nenndorf until July 1947.
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