Is it true that Eisenhower exterminated all the German POW of the western front after the end of WWII ?

Question

Is it true that Eisenhower exterminated all the German POW of the western front after the end of WWII ?

Answer 1

I think so there was a canadian wrhiter who claim that thing but anyway www.wikipedia.com  

Answer 2

No - that would have been a criminal offence and a war crime, against the Geneva Convention.

Answer 3

Probably not, since his last name suggests that Eisenhauer is German. I learned in German class that it actually means ironbeater. So he must have been more humane than Soviets were. It still wasn't heaven, but I think anyone would rather be captured by an American than a ******* ruskie.

Answer 4

no

Answer 5

Off course he didn't, because unlike some other leaders, Eisenhower did not commit war crimes and he adhered by the Geneva convention.

Answer 6

I doubt it.  America was never in any sense of desperation at that time.  I do know that Germans rushed to surrender to American troops so they wouldn't spend the rest of their lives in a Soviet POW camp (like many did).  Things like that always get out, and Germans wouldn't have been so ready to surrender if they did.

Answer 7

There are books and documents that lean that way.

One month before the end of World War 11, General Eisenhower issued special orders concerning the treatment of German Prisoners and specific in the language of those orders was this statement,

"Prison enclosures are to provide no shelter or other comforts."

Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who was given access to the Eisenhower personal letters, states that he proposed to exterminate the entire German General Staff, thousands of people, after the war.

Eisenhower, in his personal letters, did not merely hate the n**i Regime, and the few who imposed its will down from the top, but that HE HATED THE GERMAN PEOPLE AS A RACE. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible.

Of course, that was illegal under International law, so he issued an order on March 10, 1945 and verified by his initials on a cable of that date, that German Prisoners of War be predesignated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" called in these reports as DEF. He ordered that these Germans did not fall under the Geneva Rules, and were not to be fed or given any water or medical attention. The Swiss Red Cross was not to inspect the camps, for under the DEF classification, they had no such authority or jurisdiction.

Months after the war was officially over, Eisenhower's special German DEF camps were still in operation forcing the men into confinement, but denying that they were prisoners. As soon as the war was over, General George Patton simply turned his prisoners loose to fend for themselves and find their way home as best they could. Eisenhower was furious, and issued a specific order to Patton, to turn these men over to the DEF camps. Knowing Patton as we do from history, we know that these orders were largely ignored, and it may well be that Patton's untimely and curious death may have been a result of what he knew about these wretched Eisenhower DEF camps.

Canadian novelist James Bacque has alleged that U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower oversaw the deaths by starvation or exposure of one million German prisoners of war held in Western internment camps after the Second World War. Bacque charges that hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war (POWs), redesignated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" in order to avoid recognition under the third Geneva Convention, were recorded as entering the camps but not recorded as transferring out, so they must have died. He also points to a German report recording the death of 1.4 million German POWs, and Soviet data accounting for only 450,600 of these deaths. The remainder, he says, must then have died in Western camps.

In his book Other Losses, Bacque recounts interviews with people who claimed to have witnessed trucks full of dead leaving the camps each day, and civilian women who say they were fired upon while trying to throw bread over the camp fence. The fact that Red Cross inspectors were banned, Red Cross food aid was returned, building of shelters was forbidden and soldiers were kept on short rations are seen by Bacque as a "method of the genocide." Another critic of Eisenhower's policy in Germany was Senator Homer E. Capehart.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower frequently clashed with Gen. George S. Patton, a staunch anti-Communist who favored generous treatment of former German officers and even some former n***s. Patton felt that "It is no more possible for a man to be a civil servant in Germany and not have paid lip service to the n***s than it is for a man to be a postmaster in America and not have paid at least lip service to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party when they are in power," and his vocal complaints eventually led to his being relieved of his command as post-war governor of Bavaria. The controversial general who had once been one of the most feared enemies of the German army admired Germans and after the war even called them "the only decent people left in Europe." He complained of what he considered persecution of the German people and saw it as serving the interests of the Soviet Union, not the United States

Eisenhower in October 1945 stated his position to the press as "...I say let Germany find out what it means to start a war."

Answer 8

Not exterminated - more like DIED while imprisoned, which is a very different thing; it's very hard to survive a POW camp.

Here's a good site on it.  Why don't you decide?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_...

Answer 9

The German captured in the last weeks of World War 2 suffered badly.  There were cases of murder and callous treatment but these were the exception and not the rule.  There was no official policy of cruelty and mass murder.  The hardships were the result of the huge numbers of prisoners confined and the overall chaos and destruction within Germany.   Taken captive were not just ordinary members of the German armed forces but also n**i party officials and anyone deemed a threat to allied occupation or a potential war criminal.  The chaos that caused some prisoners to starve also permitted war criminals like Mengele to escape.