Whenever there is a major war, conspiracy theories are bound to
bring up, and considering that World War II was the largest war in human history,
it’s no surprise that the conflict has more than its fair share of them.
In this video, we’ll be addressing one in particular that you may or may not have seen:
did American General Eisenhower intentionally starve a million German prisoners of war?
On the Western Front of the European Theater, during the liberation of France
and the push towards Berlin, the Allies captured millions of German soldiers,
who became prisoners of war until the conflict ended. The theory claims that the Americans,
either out of spite for the Germans or for some other reason, starved many of these prisoners of
war, resulting in nearly a million deaths. Proponents of the theory claim that it is
backed by official public US military documents in which certain figures don’t seem to match up.
This theory was first put forth by Canadian novelist James Bacque,
who backed the theory with numbers taken from actual American military documents.
These documents state that there were 1.8 million prisoners of war were being held in
the Communication Zone, but also stated that only 900,000 daily rations would be needed
to feed prisoners in American care. Bacque claims that this discrepancy means that the US
intentionally starved the remaining 900,000 German prisoners of war, and later covered it up.
This theory, however, is actually definitely false,
and you might already be able to see why. Bacque has a bit of a history of ignoring context and
making the Allies look worse than they actually were concerning prisoners of war, and that is
simply what the case is here. The discrepancy in the numbers that he cited isn’t really a
discrepancy at all - the necessary context is merely eliminated to make it look like one.
The American documents in question states that 1.8 million prisoners were being held
in the Communications Zone in total - this means that the number includes the
prisoners of war held by the United Kingdom and by France, not just the United States.
It is therefore fairly reasonable to conclude that the US only needed 900,000 daily rations
because its numbers of prisoners of war were actually closer to that total - after all,
the US was not responsible for feeding prisoners of the other Allied Powers.
As a more general note, it is also important to consider the state that many German prisoners of
war were in when they were captured when dealing with casualty counts from Allied POW camps. Many
of, if not a majority of, German prisoners of war were sick or badly injured when captured,
and therefore many of them would have died in captivity because of these factors.
This does not, however, make these deaths the fault of the Allies,
as the matter was often out of their hands.
In addition to this, there was also a food shortage in Europe as a whole,
so despite the fact that the Americans had planned to feed prisoners a daily ration of around
2600 calories, that figure was simply a logistical impossibility when one factored in the sheer
amount of prisoners captured by the allies. On the basis of current historical scholarship,
the number who died while in American POW camps was closer to 5000 than it was 1 million
it should be noted however that there were indeed some individual acts of brutality
namely by some French and US soldiers, who had personal vendetta’s against German soldiers
and would therefore treat them pretty badly, but To suggest
that the intentional starvation of almost 1 million prisoners of war
was essentially US policy is factually disputed by context and most historical anecdotes of the time.
So, that’s the truth behind the matter of whether or not the Americans intentionally
starved prisoners of war during World War II. There are many conspiracy theories about World War
II out there, some more credible than others, and so we may well touch on more in the future.