According to the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions and the 1929 Geneva Convention, capturing powers in wartime were to remove prisoners from battle areas and give them medical care, housing, clothing, and food comparable to those of their own troops. When interrogated, prisoners of war (POWs) were to receive treatment commensurate with their rank, and could refuse to give any information except their name, rank, and service number. While in captivity, POWs were to be able to practice their religion, correspond, and expect humane treatment. The Geneva-based International Red Cross inspected camps to insure compliance. During World War II, however, reality typically departed far from such guidelines, with the circumstances of the millions of POWs dependent on resources, the time and place of capture, and the attitudes of the capturing powers. The treatment of POWs by the United States was in general good, while American POWs received decent treatment from Germany and usually dreadful treatment by the Japanese.
Germany took more than 2 million prisoners in its conquests of Poland and France in 1939 and 1940, and then 5 million Red Army captives after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Germany treated Soviet prisoners exceptionally badly. Unlike Allied POWs in the West, who were housed in camps built for the purpose, captured Soviets became inmates of the Nazi concentration camp system. More than 3 million Soviet prisoners died in German captivity. Because the Soviet government had not signed the Geneva Convention, the Germans held that Soviet prisoners were not covered by its terms. This attitude, when combined with Nazi racial policies defining Slavs as subhumans, sealed the fate of Soviet prisoners. German treatment was reciprocated by the Soviets toward their portion of the nearly 4.5 million Germans captured by the Allies. Of the nearly 3 million Germans in Soviet captivity, fewer than a million had returned to Germany by 1957, the remainder perishing in Soviet labor camps. Moreover, after the war, repatriated Russians, at Joseph Stalin’s insistence, were imprisoned in the USSR as punishment for having been captured. The Western Allies repatriated all Axis prisoners by 1947.
Germany and Japan captured 200,000 and 108,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers, respectively—most between 1940 and 1942 in Europe, North Africa, Burma, Malaya, and Hong Kong. Some 80,000 British troops were captured by the Japanese at Singapore alone in 1942 and were joined in squalid camps by 22,000 Dutch from the Netherlands East Indies. German treatment of British prisoners was far better than that by their Japanese allies, largely because of the German belief that the British would then treat well the growing numbers of Germans in British hands. The same logic and pattern held true for the 90,000 Americans captured by the Germans after 1942.
Particularly for those German and Italian POWs transported to the United States, the U. S. treatment of POWs was generally humane and within convention guidelines. In fact, the treatment of Axis prisoners sometimes drew civilian complaints that the enemy was being “mollycoddled” while American servicemen were dying abroad. The
670.000 Italian and German prisoners held in the 155 main camps and 500 subcamps in the continental United States were often used as farm labor. Sometimes POWs were permitted to leave camps in the United States for brief periods of recreation. African Americans complained that German and Italian POWs in the United States received better treatment and more access to public accommodations than did black Americans. Relatively few Japanese soldiers surrendered and became POWs in the bloody World War II Pacific theater.
Japanese military and racial attitudes, coupled with Japan’s lack of recognition of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, reinforced the Japanese belief that prisoners were dishonored and inferior weaklings, unworthy of respect, if not of life itself. This same attitude dominated the beliefs of Japanese soldiers and was the reason that fewer than
11.000 Japanese military personnel were taken prisoner by all of the Allied powers before August 15, 1945. The Japanese in turn were infamous for their brutal treatment of British prisoners and of the 15,000 Americans captured in the Philippines (site of the Bataan Death March of American and Filipino POWs), at Guam, and at Wake Island. The Japanese captors ruthlessly demanded hard labor on military projects, and typically denied POWs adequate food, medicine, clothing, and proper care. In Manchuria, Unit 731 of the Japanese Army conducted heinous medical and biological warfare experiments on prisoners. Thousands of Allied prisoners were transported to Japan and Manchuria to perform slave labor in mines and war industries in direct violation of the Geneva Convention. More than 12,000 British and Commonwealth prisoners died from overwork, ill treatment, and disease constructing the Burma railway. All told, nearly 40 percent of the Allied prisoners in Japanese captivity died.
While it was considered the duty of prisoners to escape, only about 35,000 British, Commonwealth, and American prisoners escaped German captivity. The number of Axis prisoners escaping Allied custody, and Allied prisoners escaping the Japanese, was so low as to be statistically insignificant.
Further reading: Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (New York: Morrow, 1994); Arnold Krammer, Nazi Prisoners of War in America (New York: Stein & Day, 1979).
—Clayton D. Laurie
World History
