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The Postwar Destruction of Germany: Engineered Famine, Mass Expulsions, and Forced Labor (1945–1950)
After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower converted open fields along the Rhine into the Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine Meadow Camps). To circumvent international legal protections, Eisenhower stripped Wehrmacht personnel who had surrendered of their lawful status, classifying them as “Disarmed Enemy Forces” (DEF) rather than Prisoners of War. With that single administrative maneuver, the United States tossed aside its obligations under the 1929 Geneva Convention.
Roughly one million men were crowded into barbed-wire enclosures without barracks, tents, latrines, or medical facilities. Prisoners slept in mud burrows dug with their mess kits or bare hands. Rations frequently collapsed below 1,000 calories per day, and in many enclosures, men went days without water or food. Meanwhile, trainloads of International Red Cross relief supplies sitting on rail sidings in Switzerland and France were deliberately turned away at the German border under orders from Eisenhower’s headquarters.1 Typhus, dysentery, and hypothermia tore through the open pens. Camp rosters and burial records were systematically destroyed or withheld, leaving the full body count buried under official postwar silence before the open pens were largely dismantled in the autumn of 1945 and the surviving men were moved into forced labor pools.
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THE GENOCIDE OF GERMANS
The Rhine camps were only the opening chapter of a wider catastrophe enforced by the victorious powers:
The Expellees: Roughly 16 million ethnic Germans, overwhelmingly women, children, and the elderly, were driven from their ancestral homelands in Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia into the ruins of postwar Germany under predatory, lethal conditions. Millions perished on the roads and in transit camps from violence, typhus, and exposure.
The Prisoners: Hundreds of thousands of surrendered soldiers withheld from repatriation and transferred into foreign labor pipelines across Europe and the Soviet Union.
The Residents: The surviving civilian population inside the occupied zones were subjected to systematic deindustrialization, looted infrastructure, and engineered shortages of basic food and coal.2
Given the extraordinary harsh conditions imposed upon them by the Allies (the British, French, Soviets, and Americans), at least 9.3 million and possibly as many as 13.7 million Germans had, by 1950, needlessly died as a result.
Through deliberate starvation, forced marches, exposure, and untreated disease, millions of these people slowly starved to death in front of the victors’ eyes every day for years.
More Germans perished after the formal surrender than died in battle, air raids, and concentration camps combined during the entirety of the Second World War. Yet these deaths have never been honestly reported by either the Allies or the German government.
This is many more Germans than died in battle, air raids and concentration camps during the war. Millions of these people slowly starved to death in front of the victors’ eyes every day for years. These deaths have never been honestly reported by either the Allies or the German government.3
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Starvation By Design: The Plan To Break The German People
The millions of German civilians who starved after the war did not die because of bad luck or poor weather. They died because of a deliberate plan drawn up by top officials in the United States government.
During the war, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. pushed a plan to completely strip Germany of its factories, mines, and technology, turning the entire country into one giant, backward farming territory. Most history books claim the U.S. rejected the Morgenthau Plan.4
This is a lie. Its main ideas were secretly baked straight into the official military orders handed to General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
That order (Directive JCS 1067) told Eisenhower and the U.S. Army that they were strictly forbidden from doing anything to rebuild the German economy or help its people get back on their feet. The military had explicit orders not to raise living standards. This meant the United States deliberately kept food, medicine, and heating fuel out of the hands of ordinary people.
Under Eisenhower’s rule, the daily food ration for German civilians was slashed down to barely 1,000 calories a day, half of what a human body needs just to stay alive. The U.S. military shut down factories, shipped valuable machinery out of the country as war loot, and strictly banned food from being imported.
When private groups like the Red Cross and American church charities tried to step in and send food packages to keep women and children alive, the American military command stopped them. They banned CARE packages from entering Germany until long after the worst damage was already done. During the freezing winter of 1946 to 1947, German cities were filled with walking skeletons. Old people froze to death in their apartments, children dug through trash heaps for stray lumps of coal, and mothers had to sell their wedding rings to get a handful of rotten potatoes. Eisenhower and the Allied command knew the math: if you shut off the heat and choke off the food, the weakest people will die off by the millions.
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Modern-Day Slavery: German Men Sold For Human Labor
The other part of this nightmare was what the Allies did to the men who survived. The Geneva Convention is a set of international laws designed to protect prisoners of war from being abused, starved, or worked to death. But Eisenhower dodged those laws simply by calling German soldiers “Disarmed Enemy Forces” instead of prisoners of war. With that single stroke of a pen, the protections vanished.
At the big wartime meetings, the Allied leaders agreed that Germany would pay for the war not just in cash, but in human bodies. The result was a massive, government-run slave trade.
Instead of letting surrendered German soldiers go home to their families to plant crops and fix shattered homes, the Americans packed them onto cattle cars and shipped them off to do hard labor. The U.S. handed hundreds of thousands of these starving, sick men over to the French, who forced them to clear live minefields with their bare hands, dig canals, and work deep underground in coal mines. Countless men died of exhaustion, disease, and cave-ins.
The British took their share of forced workers while the Soviet Union took millions more. In Russia, German prisoners were dragged into the frozen Gulag camps for years, treated like cattle, and worked until they dropped dead. Many did not make it home until the 1950s. Hundreds of thousands never came back at all.
By stealing an entire generation of working-age men, the Allies did two things at once: they got free, brutal labor to rebuild their own countries, and they made sure Germany could not recover. Back home, German mothers and young women were left all alone to clear mountains of shattered brick and concrete with their bare hands just to earn tiny rations to keep their babies alive.
This was not justice. It was a cold, organized campaign to drain the life out of an entire population long after the fighting was done. The victors got away with it because they controlled the news, locked away the documents, and wrote the history books to make themselves look like the good guys.
The Allied atrocities (Rhine Meadow Camps, mass rapes, forced starvation, expulsions that killed at least 12 millions ethnic Germans) would have shattered the carefully-cultivated moral high ground claimed by the victors. Publishing those facts would have undermined the Nuremberg show-trial narrative and made it harder to extract reparations. So history was written by the winners and locked down before the internet could bypass their gatekeepers.
Be honest: Had you ever heard a word about the Rhine Meadow camps or the genocide of Germans before reading this? If not, why do you think your history books left these millions of people out of the story?
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ICRC Archives, Report on the Activity of the International Committee of the Red Cross for the Indemnification of War Victims, 1948; and Bacque, Other Losses.
Douglas, R. M. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. Yale University Press, 2012.
Blair, Eric. “A Hidden Holocaust—Revealed: Crimes and Mercies, by James Bacque.” Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). January 1, 1996.
The text of the directive is a public record. The link between this directive and the "pastoralization" of Germany is documented in Michael Beschloss’s The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941–1945 (Simon & Schuster, 2002).
