If possible, Germans in French hands suffered even more than those held by Americans. When France requested slaves as part of its war booty, Eisenhower transferred over half a million Germans east.
“Gee! I hope we don’t ever lose a war,’’ thought a GI as he stared at the broken, starving wrecks being selected for slavery. At one American camp of over 30,000 prisoners, a stunned French officer was horrified to see nothing but a vast killing field, “peopled with living skeletons, male and female, huddling under scraps of wet card board.”
Martin Brech happened to be in a truck slowly following one group of Germans that were marching toward France and slavery. “Whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club and killed,” recalled the shocked US private. “The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to slow starvation in our killing fields.”
“When we marched through Namur in a column seven abreast, there was also a Catholic procession going through the street,” remembered one slave as he moved through Belgium. “When the people saw the POWs, the procession dissolved, and they threw rocks and horse shit at us. From Namur, we went by train in open railroad cars. At one point we went under a bridge, and railroad ties were thrown from it into the cars filled with POWs, causing several deaths. Later we went under another overpass, and women lifted their skirts and relieved themselves on us.”
Once in France, the assaults intensified. “We were cursed, spat upon and even physically attacked by the French population, especially the women,” Hans von der Heide wrote. “I bitterly recalled scenes from the spring, when we marched American POWs through the streets of Paris. They were threatened and insulted no differently by the French mob.”
Like the Americans, the French starved their prisoners. Unlike the Americans, the French drained the last ounce of labor from their victims before they dropped dead. “I have seen them beaten with rifle butts and kicked with feet in the streets of the town because they broke down of overwork,” remarked a witness from Langres. “Two or three of them die of exhaustion every week.”
“In another camp,” a horrified viewer added, “prisoners receive only one meal a day but are expected to continue working. Elsewhere so many have died recently that the cemetery space was exhausted and another had to be built.”
Revealed the French journal, Le Figaro: “In certain camps for German prisoners of war… living skeletons may be seen… and deaths from undernourishment are numerous. We learn that prisoners have been savagely and systematically beaten and that some have been employed in removing mines without protection equipment so that they have been condemned to die sooner or later.”
“Twenty-five percent of the men in our camp died in one month,” echoed a slave from Buglose.
The enslavement of German soldiers was not limited to France. Although fed and treated infinitely better, several hundred thousand POWs in Great Britain were transformed into virtual slaves. When prisoners were put to work raising projects for Britain’s grand “Victory in Europe” celebration, one English foreman felt compelled to quip: “I guess the Jerries are preparing to celebrate their own downfall. It does seem as though that is laying it on a bit thick.”
In vain did the International Red Cross protest:
The United States, Britain, and France… are violating International Red Cross agreements they solemnly signed in 1929. Investigation at Geneva headquarters today disclosed that the transfer of German war prisoners captured by the American army to French and British authorities for forced labor is nowhere permitted in the statues of the International Red Cross, which is the highest authority on the subject in the world.
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