Rheinwiesenlager - Remagen - RLP - Germany - Wikipedia Entries on Waymarking.com

The Rheinwiesen camps were prison camps of the USA, Great Britain and France in the Rhineland at the end of the Second World War. In them, various groups of prisoners were temporarily imprisoned. They existed from April to September 1945 and differed significantly during this time in size, equipment and location.

Locations of Rheinwiesenlager:
Other
Bad Kreuznach
Biebelsheim, Germany
Böhl-Iggelheim
Büderich
Dietersheim, Germany
Diez
Hechtsheim
Heidesheim on the Rhine
Koblenz, Germany
Ludwigshafen-Rheingönheim
Plaidt / Miesenheim
Planig
Remagen
Rheinberg, Germany
sierry
Sincerely
Urmitz
Wickrathberg
Winzenheim / Bretzenheim
Numberbach

After the failure of the Ardennes offensive and the destruction of the Ruhrkessel, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were arrested. After the German capitulation, 3.4 million people were in custody. Originally, the Allies planned to make their prisoners to England before the end of the war, to provide them there. However, due to the sheer number of detainees, it seemed more appropriate to set prisoners in Germany. That is why about twenty prisoners of war were built along the Rhine. The possibility of fleeing back into the Reich and resistance in the underground was made more difficult by the establishment of the detention facilities on the western bank of the river. Although most of the camps lay on the (left) bank of the Rhine, which also influenced their name, this did not apply to the camps near Bad Kreuznach or Siershahn, for example. The official designation was "Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures".
The camps were built from April to June 1945 and were built according to a uniform scheme. At the edge of a village, which usually had a railway connection, an open farmland was demarcated. This area was divided into ten to twenty camps, which provided space for five to ten thousand prisoners, with masts and barbed wire. Pathways were converted into storage roads and adjacent buildings served as administration, kitchens and hospitals. The prisoners of war had to surrender their soldier field equipment and were therefore forced to dig holes in the ground as sleeping places. The 106th Infantry Division of the American Army, which had been jacked up to a divisional strength of 40,000 men, and had received additional transport units to feed food into the camps, was commissioned to guard the camps. The transport capacity was not sufficient, with the organization of the camps, the division was completely overburdened, which was left to the German prisoner. The internal administration of the camps passed the Americans to the German prisoners: camp managers, camp police, doctors, cooks, work commissions, etc. were occupied by Germans.
After several weeks, those who were politically unsuspecting were dismissed from the camps: Hitlerjungen and Frauen. Afterwards, certain professional groups were dismissed, which were important for reconstruction: agricultural workers, truck drivers, miners. At the end of June 1945 some camps were already dissolved: Remagen, Böhl-Iggelheim and Büderich. However, this first discharge shaft was stopped again.
In April and early May 1945 the supply was only irregular and was not enough, after which it slowly improved. Only in June there were sufficient food portions. In the course of May and June, all the camps were given latrines, kitchens and hospitals. Dirt, wetness, malnutrition and unsanitary conditions led to illness. The outbreak of disease was prevented by the Americans by chlorinating the drinking water, discharging all prisoners with DDT, and providing plenty of soap and toilet paper.
The Headquarters of the Allied Forces in North West Europe (SHAEF) offered France to take over the Rheinwiesen camps, claiming to receive 1.75 million prisoners of war as forced laborers. Until July 10, 1945, the camps were handed over to the French; the British had already taken over the camps in their zone until June 12th. The prisoners of war were transferred to France, unless they were dismissed as inactive on the spot. By the end of September 1945, both the British and the French camps had disappeared. Only the Bretzenheim camp near Bad Kreuznach served until 1948 as a transit camp for the prisoners of war returning from France.

The food and hygienic conditions in these camps, fenced, muddy meadows under the open sky, where the prisoners lived in open earth holes because of barracks, were bad to catastrophic. Regular soldiers were usually hardened by the war service and were able to cope with the conditions more easily. Attempts by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to help the prisoners were denied by the Americans, the ICRC was denied entry to the camps, as it was not desired by the US occupation forces, Storage.
The DEF (disarmed enemy forces), which was not defined under international law, was applied to most German soldiers who were captured by the US forces after the unconditional surrender on May 8, However, SS members and suspicious persons were not declared DEF in principle. The diet of the DEF was calculated on the basis of the "Displaced Persons", former Nazi forced laborers, who were also supplied by the USA, and amounted to about 1500 kcal per day. The food rations of the German civilian population in the spring of 1945 were about 1000 kcal in comparison. Most of the prisoners, such as members of the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth, were soon dismissed, and German units declared as DEF were to be kept intact and employed as workers for the American army or transferred to other allies.
In addition, the United States and Great Britain decided in 1943 to take half of the prisoners. These conditions still existed in 1945. However, when the Allies had crossed the Rhine, the number of prisoners rose to such an extent that the British were reluctant to take their share. The USA initially took over all the prisoners and set up the American Rheinwiesen camps. Critics consider the initially very deficient supply of foodstuffs as a plan for the Americans, which is related to the status of the DEF. The status of DEF was abolished by the American army leadership in spring 1946 and replaced by "prisoner of war (POW)". Conclusions, the catastrophic situation in the Rheinwiesenlager as an essential condition the DEF status, were rejected by scientists in the dispute with the theses of James Bacque. Most of the prisoners in the Rheinwiesen camps were originally not DEF, but classified as war prisoners.

In the camp, different groups of prisoners were temporarily interned:
Regular German prisoners of war (Prisoners of War, POW) who were captured before the surrender on May 8,
Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF), or in British captivity Surrendered Enemy Personnel (SEP) - captured German soldiers without the status of prisoners of war
Members of the Waffen-SS, which were imprisoned centrally in the camp Bretzenheim
Members of the Volkssturm
Suspected civilians (youths, women, war-wounded and wounded soldiers), who were mostly released after a few days

4537 deaths were reported by the surrounding German municipalities, while the US authorities reported 3053 deaths. The most thorough investigation on the numbers of deaths was published by the Maschke Commission, named after its chief, Erich Maschke, who scientifically investigated the history of the German prisoners of war on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Refugees and War Victims. The camps with the highest mortality were: Bad Kreuznach (camp Galgenberg and Lager Bretzenheim), Sinzig near Remagen, Rheinberg, Heidesheim on the Rhine, Wickrathberg and Büderich. In these six camps, about 5,000 of 500,000 inmates have been killed. If these figures are raised to the approx. 1,000,000 prisoners, a possible but not unoccupied number of total losses of no more than 10,000 people will result. A recent investigation for the two Remagen camps, where a third of all prisoners were, confirms this result and excludes higher deaths for this region. The American historian Arthur L. Smith cites the lowest and highest estimates of the victims, the numbers 8,000 and 40,000.

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