The German Armed Forces Supreme Command and British and American prisoners-of-war, 1939-1945 : policy and practice

Despite the plethora of material written on the history of prisoners-of-war in the Second World War, surprisingly few works treat the issue analytically, at least from the perspective of German military policy toward, and treatment of, British and American prisoners-of-war. The handful of dissertations written on the subject have examined tightly focused aspects within this subject, or did not make thorough use of the German federal military archives. Most published works, indeed, have tended to examine the issue from the perspective of the prisoners themselves. While these were valid and valuable approaches to the subject, they also left a significant gap in the historiography: what precisely was German policy towards British and American prisoners-of-war, how did it evolve over the course of the war years, and how was it ultimately put into practice? The largest portions of this dissertation consist of distilling, from the thousands of pages of German military orders and documents which survived the war, the essence of the German Armed Forces Supreme Command (the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) directives to the lower levels of command, ultimately reaching the level of the camp Commandants, with regard to the many facets of prisoner-of-war life, from shelter, clothing, and food, to labour policy and security measures. Every report by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protecting Power delegates of their visits to most of the British or American prisoners-of-war in German-run camps for non-commissioned soldiers (Stalags) and camps for commissioned officers (Oflags) which could be found in the national archives of Great Britain, the United States, and Canada, was then examined, with the aim of providing a standard by which to measure German policy. Given the sensitivities of each of the belligerents to the plight of their own soldiers held captive in enemy hands, the final results of the investigation are then presented in conclusion with a brief comparison of how German prisoners-of-war fared while in British or American captivity. Though necessarily relying on the scholarship of other historians in this regard, it allows for the original findings of this dissertation to be placed in a wider context for the reader. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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