Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF),Surrendered Enemy Forces ,disarmed combatants.. was a U.S. designation, both for soldiers who surrendered to an adversary after hostilities ended, and for those previously surrendered
POWs who were held in camps in
occupied German territory at the end of WW two.
It is mainly referenced to
Dwight D. Eisenhower's designation of German prisoners in post war occupied Germany. Because of the logistical impossibility of feeding millions of surrendered German soldiers at the levels required by the Geneva Convention during the food crisis of 1945, the purpose of the designation—along with the British designation of Surrendered Enemy Personnel (SEP)—was to prevent categorization of the prisoners as Prisoners of War (POW) under the Geneva convention.
German agriculture had suffered extreme productivity decreases in 1944 and 1945. A shortage of synthetic fertilizers had developed after nitrogen and phosphate stocks were channeled into ammunition production. Consequently, crop levels had fallen by 20% to 30% at the end of the war.Allied bombing raids had destroyed thousands of farm buildings, and rendered food processing facilities inoperable. Lack of farm machinery, spare parts, and fertilizer caused an almost total disruption of agriculture when the war was over. After the release of slave laborers that were Russian POWs and Eastern Europeans, extreme agriculture labor shortages existed that could only be relieved by German DEFs and SEPs.. Roving bands of displaced persons and returning soldiers and civilians decimated the hog herds and chicken flocks of German farmers.
In addition, the destroyed German transportation infrastructure created additional logistical nightmares, with railroad lines, bridges, canals and terminals left in ruins. The turnaround time for railroad wagons was five times higher than the prewar average. Of the 15,600 German locomotives, 38.6% were no longer operating and 31% were damaged. Only 1,000 of the 13,000 kilometers of track in the British zone were operable.
By May 8, 1945, the Allies were swamped with 7 million displaced persons in Germany and 1.6 million in Austria, including slave laborers from all over Europe. Soon thereafter, German populations had swollen by 12 to 14.5 million
ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe. Bavarian villages in the American zone faced 15% to 25% population increases from displaced persons, with Munich alone having to deal with 75,000 displaced persons.
The worst dislocation of agriculture was caused by the German zonal partitions, which cut off Western Germany from its "breadbasket" of farm lands east of the
Oder-Neisse line that had accounted for 35% of Germany's prewar food production and which the
Yalta Conference had given to Poland to compensate for lands of Eastern Poland. The Soviet Union, with millions of its own starving citizens at home, was not willing to distribute this production to the population in western Germany. In January 1945, the basic German ration was 1,625 calories/day, and that was further reduced to 1,100 calories by the end of the war in the British zone, and remained at that level into the summer, with levels varying from 840 calories/day in the Ruhr to 1,340 calories/day in Hamburg.The situation was no better in the American zones of Germany and Austria.
These problems combined to create severe shortages what was left of Germany. One summary report estimated that just prior to (V-E) Day, German consumer daily caloric intake was only 1,050, and that after V-E Day it dropped to 860 calories per day, though actual estimates are confusing because of the wide variation by location and because unofficial estimates were usually higher. It was clear by any measure that, by the spring of 1945, the German population was existing
on rations that would not sustain life in the long term. A July 1945 CCAC report stated that "the food situation in western Germany is perhaps the most serious problem of the occupation. Average consumption is now
about one third below the general accepted subsistence level of 2000 calories per day.
By way of contrast, the nutritional situation in many of Germany's neighbour states was close to pre-war levels and large quantities of food was offered to Germany. However, due to allied restrictions on German trade all the offers were rejected and in one case, this resulted in
Holland being forced to destroy a large proportion of their vegetable crop and as late as 1948 Swedish fishermen were still destroying their catch or working only two days a week due to a lack of markets. In August, 1945 the
Red Cross shipped 30,000 tons of high protein food parcels by rail to feed displaced persons in Germany but was forced to return them to storage where they eventually spoiled. A further 13.5 million Red Cross rations stockpiled in Europe were confiscated by the military and were never distributed. Senator
Kenneth S. Wherry later
complained about the thousands upon thousands of tons of rations rotting amid a starving population. Max Huber, head of the International Red Cross, wrote a letter to the U.S. State Department regarding the situation and received a letter in response, signed by Eisenhower, stating that giving Red Cross food to enemy personnel was forbidden.
In the spring of 1946 the International Red Cross was finally allowed to provide limited amounts of food aid to prisoners of war in the U.S. occupation zone.
Approximately 35 million POWs were taken in World War II, 11 million of them Germans. In addition to 20 million dislocated citizens, the U.S. Army had to cope with most of the surrendered German army. While the Allies had anticipated 3 million surrendering Germans, the actual total was as many as 5 million in American hands by June 1945 out of 7.6 million in northwestern Europe alone, not counting the 1.4 million in Allied hands in Italy. Approximately 1 million were
Wehrmacht soldiers fleeing west to avoid capture by the
Red Army.
The number of Germans surrendering to U.S. forces shot up from 313,000 by the end of the first quarter of 1945, to 2.6 million by April 1945 and more than 5 million in May. By April 1945, entire German Army groups were surrendering, which overwhelmed Allied shipping such that German prisoners could no longer be sent to POW camps in America after March 1945. According to a June 22, 1945 announcement by the Allies, a total of 7,614,914 prisoners (of all designations) were held in British and American camps.
Although the British and Americans agreed to split the western Germans who surrendered. the British recanted arguing that they "did not have places to keep them or men to guard them on the continent, and that moving them to England would arouse public resentment and adversely effect British morale.
By June 1, 1945, Eisenhower reported to the War Office that this refusal produced shortages in the 25 million prisoner-day rations which were growing at the rate of 900,000 prisoner-day rations. Feeding this number of people became a logistical nightmare for which frequently had to resort to improvisation.
The original discussion of the Allies treating post
Victory in Europe (V-E) Day prisoners of war as something other than those protected by the Geneva Convention had its vague origins in the Casablanca Conference, but it was given specific form by the EAC in the summer of 1944 in a "draft instrument of surrender" given to the American government. The instrument required the surrendering German commander to accept that his men "shall
at the discretion of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Allied State concerned be declared to be Prisoners of War.Several factors went into this consideration, including that the EAC member the
Soviet Union refused to sign the Geneva Conventions, despite intense pressure from 1942 onward to sign the document. Behind the Soviets' refusal were a number of considerations closely linked with the regime, but a major consideration that emerged at the
Tehran Conference was that Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin desired four million German laborers for an "indefinite period", perhaps for life. The Soviets' refusal to even consider signing the GC created great problems for the EAC, including the fact that a single surrender instrument could not be drafted if a Soviet commander taking the surrender could not possibly commit his government to accord GC rights to prisoners. As a result the EAC instruments promised nothing in that regard, employed awkward and tortured language and made plain the premeditated Allied evasion of the Geneva Convention. In addition, other Allies also considered using Germans for prison labor, which the Germans themselves had already required of prisoners they had held during the war. Later EAC documents described the "Disabled Enemy Forces.
With regard to food requirements, regardless of the reasoning or GC legal requirements, the SHAEF was simply not capable of operationally feeding all of the millions of German prisoners at the level of Allied base soldiers because of the high numbers and lack of resources. In a March 10, 1945 cable to the CCS, Eisenhower requested permission for this designation per the earlier EAC documents, and was granted such permission. When the CCS approved Eisenhower's March 1945 request, it added that prisoners after
Victory in Europe (V-E Day) should not be declared "Prisoners of War" under the Geneva Convention because of the lack of food.
The CCS then cabled British Field Marshal Sir
Harold Alexander, supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, suggesting that the same steps be taken regarding the German surrenders in Austria, and then approved Alexander's similar request for a DEF designation, stating "in view of the difficulties regarding food and accommodation, it was so decided."
] Eisenhower's JCS superiors ordered him to change German POW's designation to
"disarmed enemy forces" (DEFAlexander then requested that the CCS let British forces use such a designation for the surrender of German forces in Italy, the CCS granted his request and the conditions of such surrenders to British commander General Sir William D. Moran almost prevented the surrenders from occurring for worried German troops
By June 22, 1945, of the 7,614,914 prisoners were held in British and American camps, 4,209,000 were soldiers captured before the German capitulation and considered "POWs".This leaves approximately 3.4 million, who according to Allied agreements, were supposed to be split between Britain and the United States. As of June 16, 1945, the U.S. France and the U.K. held a combined total of 7,500,000 German POW's.
After the DEF designations were made in the early summer of 1945, the International Red Cross was not permitted to fully involve itself in the situation in camps containing German prisoners (POWs, DEFs or SEPs), some of which initially were
Rheinwiesenlager transit camps, and even though conditions in them gradually improved, "even the most conservative estimates put the death toll in French camps alone at over 16,500 in 1945.
The Geneva Convention was amended. Articles 6 and 7 of the
Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Geneva July 27, 1929, had covered what may and may not be done to a prisoner on
capture. The wording of the 1949
Fourth Geneva Convention was intentionally altered from that of the 1929 convention so that soldiers who "fall into the power" following surrender or mass capitulation of an enemy are now protected as well as those
captured in the course of fighting.
Most captives of the Americans and the British were released by the end of 1948, and most of those in French and Soviet captivity were released by the end of 1949, although the last big release occurred in 1956. According to the section of the German Red Cross dealing with tracing the captives, the ultimate fate of 1,300,000 German POW's in Allied custody is still unknown; they are still officially listed as missing.
In his 1989 book
Other Losses,
James Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander
Dwight Eisenhower deliberately caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949. Bacque charges that some of these deaths were DEF designated soldiers that could receive harsh treatment because they did not fall within the Geneva Convention protections. Stephen Ambrose, at the time director of the Eisenhower center at the University of Orleans, also organized a conference of eight British, American, and German historians. The result of this conference was a group of papers by these eight historians published in 1992 as the book
Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood which strongly disputes virtually every claim in James Bacque's book, including his categorization of "other losses", their purported origination, Bacque's description of the DEF designation decision, Bacque's oral histories, Bacque's methodologies and Bacque's analysis of World War II documents. Even with regard to the poor conditions of prisoner camps highlighted by Bacque which the panel members agree existed, the New Orleans panel concluded that Bacque raised no new or novel issues that had not been raised since the Maschke Commission findings of the 1960s and 1970s, and studies thereafter that had also chronicled those conditions in far more specific detail.
Current academic consensus regarding the post-war death rate in Allied hands can—mainly based on work such as Ambrose's
Eisenhower and the German POWs—be summed up in historian
Niall Ferguson's words that Bacque's "calculations grossly exaggerate both the number of Germans the Americans captured and their mortality", although he also notes that "the mortality rate for German POWs in American hands was more than four times higher than the rate for those who surrendered to the British", but that the United States total mortality rate was under 1% and better than every other country in World War II except for the British. Ambrose did concede: "we as Americans can't duck the fact that terrible things happened. And they happened at the end of a war we fought for decency and freedom, and they are not excusable.
