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Prisoners of War in the Second World War

Image: These Japanese prisoners were among those captured by U.S. forces on Guadalcanal Island in the Solomon Islands, November 5, 1942. Courtesy The Atlantic

The Kennesaw State University Department of Museums, Archives and Rare Books (MARB) presents exhibitions, public programs, collections, and educational services supporting KSU’s mission and encouraging dialogue about the past and its significance today. The Museum of History and Holocaust Education, as a unit of MARB, has developed a series of online modules, including this one, for university students to explore pivotal moments from the history of World War II and the Holocaust.

This unit explores the varied experiences of prisoners of war (POWs) during the Second World War (1939-1945). Some POWs received respect and mercy from their captors, in accordance with the Geneva Convention, while others soon found themselves as victims in one of the most horrific genocides in modern history. This exhibit endeavors to chronicle their experiences.

Essential Questions

Using the primary source material and content in this online unit, respond to the three essential questions found below. In your responses, include evidence from the content in this online unit. Please refer to the directions provided by your instructor on submitting your responses to these essential questions as well as to the questions posed throughout this unit.

  1. How did international relations and laws regulate the treatment of POWs during World War II?
  2. Why did international laws sometimes fail to prevent abuses?
  3. How were the experiences of POWs similar and different, and what accounts for these similarities and differences?
  4. How did POWs become victims of the Holocaust?

The Geneva Convention and International Law

Over 35 million spent time as POWs in the Second World War. In the early days of the war, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) asked those involved if they intended to honor the 1929 Geneva Convention. All who had signed the Geneva Convention promised to abide by its terms.

The Geneva Convention originated from the writings of Henri Dunant. He witnessed the carnage on the battlefield of Solferino in 1859 during the Second Italian War of Independence. Dunant advocated for the care of all wounded soldiers in battle. With memories of the First World War, the 1929 Geneva Convention clarified many basic rights for prisoners of war.

Click the button below to learn more about the 1929 Geneva Convention.

Click the button below to review the 1929 Geneva Convention rules regarding treatment of POWs.

The Geneva Convention listed several provisions for the humane treatment of POWs. These included adequate pay for labor, "limited working hours, no unhealthy or dangerous jobs, and no war-related work." POW camps would also need to ensure proper supplies of food, adequate shelter and sanitary conditions. Defying these provisions often proved to be tempting since following required significant investments of resources by the captors. Ideology and desperate circumstances could inspire open resistance of the Convention. On March 29, 1944, Josef Goebbels, Nazi Germany's minister of propaganda, wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter encouraging civilians to kill American and British "terror fliers" who crash-landed and attempted to surrender.

Throughout the Second World War, treatment of prisoners of war became a pressing issue, since the Geneva Convention was well known, and the news reports of mistreatment were widespread. Even still, the chaos of battle often obscured violations. This module explores the varied experiences of prisoners of war during World War II.

Image: Russian soldiers, left, hands clasped to heads, marched back to the rear of the German lines on July 2, 1941, as a column of Nazi troops move up to the front at the start of hostilities between Germany and Russia. Courtesy The Atlantic

American Prisoners of War: At the Mercy of the Axis

The first few years of World War II were devastating for the Allies. In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly invaded Poland, swiftly conquering and partitioning it within weeks. By the summer of 1940, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France were under Nazi occupation. Great Britain alone stood in resistance to German expansion. In June 1941, Hitler violated the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union by invading and defeating much of the Red Army, taking millions of prisoners of war. By the end of the year, the Wehrmacht found itself on the outskirts of Moscow. In early1942, Germany had conquered most of Europe.

In the Pacific, Japan had been expanding for far longer, invading Chinese Manchuria as early as1931. By 1941, the Japanese controlled much of East Asia and many Pacific islands. After the United States had placed embargo restrictions on Japanese oil imports and froze Japanese assets in U.S. banks, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941 in retaliation. This attack destroyed many U.S. battleships and killed over 2,000 U.S. military personnel. The next day, the United States officially declared war on Japan.

The United States had not prepared its Pacific defenses for a war. In a few weeks, the United States lost control of most of its Pacific possessions, except for Hawaii, Aleutian Islands, the Midway Atoll, and pockets of determined resistance in the Philippines. The following year, U.S. forces in the Philippines surrendered, giving Japan control of the largest U.S. possession in the Pacific. The Japanese seized tens of thousands of U.S. prisoners of war.

The infamous Bataan Death March soon followed. On the march, 650 Americans, 4% of the U.S. forces captured on the Bataan Peninsula, died. By the time U.S. forces rescued these captured soldiers in 1945, over 4,000 (40%) of the American and Filipino POWs had died. Beatings and starvation were commonplace while in Japanese captivity. The Japanese openly committed atrocities such as castration, disembowelment, and decapitation as they forced their American prisoners along on the march. One former POW recollected that "'Japanese guards allowed the Americans and Filipinos practically no food or water.'" All of these actions represented flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention, which Japanese forces had already violated numerous times beforehand, particularly in mainland China.

After the war, General Jonathan M. Wainwright lamented that "the rights and privileges which civilized nations have agreed to grant prisoners of war were denied by the Jap." Such brutal treatment of prisoners of war was frequently used in U.S. propaganda to depict the Japanese as savage barbarians with only a faint understanding of what it meant to be "civilized." Such stereotypes, however, ignored realities that contradicted them. For example, the Japanese military treated Russian POWs amicably during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Many historians have contrasted the awful treatment of POWs at the hands of the Axis Powers with the Allies' high standards of POW treatment to assert the latter's moral superiority.

Both sides committed violations of the Geneva Convention. Substantial documentary evidence indicates that American soldiers often killed Japanese soldiers who attempted to surrender. In the last days of the war in Europe, tens of thousands of German POWs died of malnutrition and disease in Allied captivity. While remembering and honoring those who suffered atrocities and mistreatment, it's important to not slip into ethnic prejudices. Instead, the focus should be recognizing the tragic and dehumanizing consequences of war.

Image: American soldiers line up as they surrender their arms to the Japanese at the naval base of Mariveles on Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines in April of 1942. Courtesy The Atlantic

Image: World War II: Philippine Islands, Corregidor Islands, and Bataan Islands. This photograph shows some American prisoners of war on the Bataan Death March, already dirtied and thinning. Courtesy National Archives

Click the button below to listen to Lester Tenney's personal account of the march and the treatment he witnessed and endured while a POW. As you listen, consider the following questions:

  1. What can we learn from Tenney's oral history?
  2. Is this interview more or less powerful than a written account? Explain your reasoning.

In the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht continued to advance against the Red Army. German battlefield success inspired sympathy and support from the citizens of Allied powers. The implications of Axis victories were often portrayed dramatically in propaganda, as in this painting below.

Image: Propaganda painting of a woman and baby promoting sympathy for the Soviet Union. Courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Tables Turned: Axis Prisoners of War in Allied Hands

By the end of 1942, the Allies had made significant gains against the Axis on both fronts. The United States defeated the Japanese at the Battle of Midway (June 1942), the most serious and decisive defeat for the Empire of Japan thus far. In the Soviet Union, the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht at the Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 – February 1943). By the time the Allies assaulted the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in June 1944, the outcome of the war seemed obvious to many.

More than a year passed until the global conflict finally ended in August 1945 with Japan's unconditional surrender, following the collapse of Nazi Germany in May. As the Allies moved forward in Europe and the Pacific, a vast number of POWs were captured requiring food and shelter. The images below capture only a handful of the surrenders that took place.

Image: With his hands in the air, the first of 20 Japanese emerges from a cave on Iwo Jima, on April 5, 1945. Courtesy The Atlantic

Image: Japanese soldiers surrendering their rifles as a Soviet soldier records information in a book in 1945. Courtesy The Atlantic

Image: These five Germans were wounded and left without food or water for three days, hiding in a Normandy farmhouse waiting for a chance to surrender. Courtesy The Atlantic

Image: An American soldier of the 12th Armored Division stands guard over a group of German soldiers, captured in April 1945, in a forest at an unknown location in Germany. Courtesy The Atlantic

Image: This combination of three photographs shows the reaction of a 16-year old German soldier after he was captured by U.S. forces, at an unknown location in Germany, in 1945. Courtesy The Atlantic

Even amidst Allied victories and the approaching end of the war, Allied prisoners continued to subsist in Axis POW camps. The Red Cross played a significant role in the survival of Allied POWs. American POWs in German captivity (nicknamed "Kriegies") relied heavily on Red Cross care packages for survival, given the paltry German rations. According to Glen Jostad, an American POW in a German camp, hunger was a constant reality: "You woke up hungry, you went to bed hungry, you were hungry all day long."

Click the button below to read more about the experiences of American POW's in Germany on the Thanksgiving of 1944.

In December of 1944 and January of 1945, the German counteroffensive known as the Battle of the Bulge surprised U.S. forces and resulted in the capture of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers.

Click the button below to watch a German propaganda film celebrating the United States' defeat, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As you watch the film, consider the following questions:

  1. How do the filmmakers portray the captured American soldiers, and what does this tell you about the Nazi regime's attitudes?
  2. Why do you think they emphasize the capture of African American soldiers in particular? How are the German soldiers depicted?
  3. What tone does the music lend to the film's subject matter?

More than 400,000 Axis prisoners of war lived in captivity in the United States by the end of the war. During national food rations and popular hostility towards enemy combatants, Americans complained about the amicable treatment of prisoners of war, calling the camps the "Fritz Ritz" (a prejudiced pun based upon the prisoners' German nationality).

Throughout 1943, German POWs from the Afrika Korps filed into Camp Huntsville in eastern Texas. According to prisoner George Kellermann, each barracks held about 35 to 40 prisoners, "the conditions [were] so hot...that, 'although we were almost naked, the sweat ran from our body as if we were doused with water.'" Historian David Joseph Welch acknowledges that conditions in American POW camps were better than those in Germany or Japan. He emphasizes, however, that they were still "prisoners being held thousands of miles from their loved ones in unfamiliar territory that was inhabited by people that possessed negative opinions of them in general." The experience of being a prisoner of war was never an easy or comfortable one.

Nazi Ideology and Soviet Prisoners: POWs as Victims of the Holocaust

In the course of Nazi Germany's conquest of Europe, many POWs on the Eastern Front became casualties of the Holocaust. Soon after the Nazis' conquest of Poland at the beginning of the war in late 1939, Marian Nasielski, a Polish POW, avoided execution through convincing his German captors that he wasn't Jewish.

Click the button below to read more about the experiences of Polish POWs at the hands of the Germans.

As POWs, the Soviets were the second largest group of Nazi victims, second to Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The historian Timothy Snyder notes in his book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin that "never in modern warfare had so many prisoners been taken so quickly." By the end of 1941, the Wehrmacht had taken 3 million Soviet soldiers as prisoner. For Hitler, horribly mistreating these Soviet POWs became part of his war strategy in eastern Europe. Hitler "wished to ensure that German soldiers would fear the same from the Soviets, and so fight desperately to prevent themselves from falling into the hands of the enemy."

Stalin used a similarly sadistic logic, abandoning any respect or sympathy for his soldiers who were captured. In August 1941, Stalin declared that "Soviet prisoners of war would be treated as deserters, and their families arrested." Even when Stalin's son fell into German hands, he ordered the arrest of his own daughter-in-law. Fearing execution if they retreated, Soviet commanders often held positions for too long, which allowed the Wehrmacht to surround their forces and take prisoners in massive numbers. Snyder argued that "the policies of Hitler and Stalin conspired to turn Soviet soldiers into prisoners of war and then prisoners of war into non-people."

In Twice Betrayed, Alexander Yakovlev drew a similar conclusion. Division Commander Laskin, for instance, allowed Field Marshal Paulus to surrender to the Germans as his forces became encircled, but he and his men later escaped. When Soviet counterintelligence, SMERSH, later discovered the incident, the highly-decorated Laskin was imprisoned for fifteen years for permitting the surrender. The Soviets' German captors made hunger and starvation official policy. According to Snyder, Eduard Wagner, the Wehrmacht's quartermaster general, stated explicitly that Soviet POWs who could not work were to be deliberately starved to death. Many Soviet soldiers in German captivity grappled with a demoralizing sense of isolation and abandonment, even leading some to commit suicide.

Image: The body of a Soviet prisoner of war who committed suicide on an electrified barbed wire fence in Mauthausen. Courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Many Soviets who were fortunate enough to survive German captivity were often horribly emaciated and disfigured after the war.

Image: An Emaciated Soviet Prisoner of War Soon After Liberation. Courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Others captured Soviets, known as Trawniki guards (named for the SS camp in which they trained), became perpetrators in the Holocaust. These Soviet POWs saw collaboration with the Nazis and the SS as their only chance of surviving. Their experiences were often traumatic. According to David Alan Rich, one Trawniki guard tasked with monitoring Jews at Treblinka "poisoned himself by drinking gasoline" after only a month of service there. Their loyalty to the Nazi regime was also fragile and one SS officer complained of Ukrainian Trawniki guards singing "Communist 'liberation songs about Stalin.'" An SS officer in interrogation after the war testified that the Trawniki guards feared that their Nazi superiors in the SS would execute them once their genocidal work was completed. The story of the Trawniki guards is further evidence of the tragic complexity of the Holocaust.

Image: Askari or Trawniki guards peer into a doorway past the bodies of Jews killed during the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Conclusion

POWs' experiences varied across nationalities, ethnicities, and individuals. Some enjoyed amicable treatment at the hands of their captors, while others suffered abuses and blatant violations of the Geneva Convention. Others, such as the so-called Trawniki men, assisted their captors in committing atrocities, often reasoning that collaboration offered their only chance at survival. Their stories serve as testaments to the tragedies that inevitably unfold in times of war.

Research Assignment

Click the button below to explore the stories of American POWs from World War II. Select one soldier's story to respond to the accompanying writing prompt.

Write: Examine the experiences of American POWs during World War II and compare this experience to other POWs. In your response, refer to the resources in this module as well as those for your selected soldier.

Sources Consulted

Guise, Kim. “A POW Thanksgiving: 1944 in Stalag Luft IV.” The National World War II Museum. Accessed 10 July 2020. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/pow-thanksgiving-1944-stalag-luft-iv.

MacKenzie, S. P. “The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II.” The Journal of Modern History 66, no. 3 (1994): 487-520. Accessed June 29, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/2124482.

Murphy, Kevin. “‘To Sympathize and Exploit’: Filipinos, Americans, and the Bataan Death March.” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations 18, no. ¾ (2011): 295-319. Accessed July 10, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/23613155.

Rich, David Alan. "The Third Reich Enlists the New Soviet Man: Eastern Auxiliary Guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Spring 1943." Russian History 41, no. 2 (2014): 269-82. Accessed June 29, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/24667175.

Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. 2010. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

Tenney, Lester. “First Contact with the Japanese as Prisoner.” The National WWII Museum. Accessed July 10, 2020. https://www.ww2online.org/view/lester-tenney#first-contact-with-the-japanese-as-prisoner.

“The Historian Shmuel Krakowski about the Fate of Jewish Prisoners of War in the September 1939 Campaign.” University of Southern California. Accessed July 10, 2020. https://iwitness.usc.edu/SFI/modules/researchguide/YVContent.aspx?materialid=6566.

Wainwright, Jonathan M. “Remember Bataan! Remember Corregidor! Never Neglect Our Defenses Again.” Ibiblio. Accessed July 10, 2020. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1945/1945-09-10a.html.

Welch, Daniel Joseph. "Letters from the 'Fritz Ritz': German POWs in America during World War II." OAKTrust. Texas A&M University Libraries. 2016. https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/164566.

Yakovlev, Alexander N., Anthony Austin, and Paul Hollander. "Twice Betrayed." In A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, 169-80. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2002. Accessed June 29, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vkrrn.11.

Thank you for participating in our online unit, "Prisoners of War in the Second World War." If you would like to learn more about the many resources the Department of Museums, Archives, and Rare Books at Kennesaw State University offers, please follow the link below:

This digital lesson was curated and designed by Mason Allen from the University of Georgia in collaboration with staff from the Museum of History and Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University.