Summary: The Way the Deutsche Wehrmacht handled Prisoners of War between 1939 and 1945
Hubert Speckner
Under the impression of the "positive" WW I experience with enforced labor of prisoners of war (POW) - particularly in agriculture - planning and preparations for creating a separate department of the Wehrmacht to ensure the most effective "use" of POWs had set in long before the beginning of WW II.
Until 1942, the POW Department (Kriegsgefangenenwesen = KGW) was in the responsibility of the "Allgemeines Wehrmachtsamt" (AWA) [General Department of the Wehrmacht] of the Supreme Command of the Deutsche Wehrmacht (Oberkommando Wehrmacht = OKW). On 18 February 1942 the Supreme Command installed the post of "Defense District Commander of POWs" who was directly subordinated to the Defense District Commander and had the responsibilities of a division commander. Due to the high numbers of POWs in early 1942, the KGW within the OKW saw its first reorganization and the creation of the post of "Chief of the POW Department".
The set-up does not seem to have been too satisfactory, since in July 1943 the new post of "Inspector General of the POW Department" was installed. The Inspector General was directly subordinated to the OKW and had the tasks of guarding POWs and to ensure their effective employment for German war efforts.
After a massive POW escape and the assassination attempt against Hitler, the KGW saw another reorganization of its command structure in fall 1944. On the one hand Hitler, as Supreme Commander, now had the Chief of the OKW who was subordinated to the AWA who, in turn, was subordinated to the "Inspector General of the POW Department", while on the other end of the command structure he had Himmler, who was on the same level as the Chief/OKW, with the subordinated Chief of the KGW who was in charge of the organization of the KGW in the Defense Districts.
The Wehrmacht named its POW camps after the inmates assigned to them, i.e. it differentiated between enlisted personnel base camps (Mannschaftsstammlager = Stalag), officer camps, transition camps, repatriatee camps, and internee camps. The "Stalags" that received enlisted personnel and noncommissioned officers theoretically had a capacity of 10,000, though in reality they were filled up with up to 60,000. A special status within the KGW of the Defense Districts was attributed to the so-called "POW Construction and Work Battalions" that, though structurally attached to the Stalags, formed organized units. They were to be used as a most consistent POW work force in various sectors of the industry, mining, and special armament production.
In summer 1944 there were a total of 137,585 POWs of various nationalities in the prison camps of District XVII (Vienna) and 70,465 POWs in the camps of District XVIII (Salzburg) - the largest number of POWs during the entire war. The reasons why these figures peaked in summer 1944 was the front development on the one hand, that necessitated the evacuation of POW camps close to the eastern front and the demands of POW work on the other, particularly in the "war industry" that reached its highest production output in the "Ostmark" in 1944.
The total number of casualties in "Ostmark" POW camps amounted to 23,039 - exclusive of the victims of Mauthausen - out of which 96% were Soviet POWs. A comparison of the death toll of POWs in the "Ostmark" with that in the "Altreich" leads to the assumption that in general the treatment and the situation of the POWs in the "Ostmark" was better.
However, there are still no conclusive answers with regard to compliance with the Geneva Convention. While the American POWs, with a few exceptions, were largely treated according to the Geneva Convention, these regulations by no means applied to Soviet POWs, and as of 1943 Italian camp inmates did not even enjoy POW status anymore. The regulations for handling the POWs of enemy forces varied greatly and were applied very differently. The reason for that lay outside the frame of international humanitarian law, as its application was exclusively based on a racist-ideological stance.
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