Call it heartless, call it reprisal, call it a policy of hostile denial: a million Germans captured by Eisenhower's armies died in captivity after surrendering.
In the spring of 1945, Adolf Hitler's Third Reich was on the brink of destruction, milled by the Red Army advancing west towards Berlin and the American, British and Canadian armies under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower advancing east along the Rhine. Since the Normandy landings last June, the Western Allies have recaptured France and smaller European countries, and some Wehrmacht commanders have been poised for local surrender. Other units, however, continued to obey Hitler's orders to fight to the last. Most of the infrastructure, including transportation, was destroyed and the population roamed in fear of the Russians approaching.
"Hungry and frightened, lying in the fields fifty feet away, ready to wave their arms to fly away" - This is how the captain of the Second Anti-Tank Regiment of the Second Canadian Division H. F. McCullough describes the chaos of Germany's surrender at the end of World War II. Within a day and a half, according to Field Marshal Montgomery, 500,000 Germans surrendered to his 21st Army Group in northern Germany.
Shortly after Victory Day - May 8, British-Canadian forces captured more than 2 million. Virtually nothing about their treatment has survived in the archives of London and Ottawa, but some scant evidence from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the relevant military personnel and the prisoners themselves indicate that the prisoners' well-being was excellent. In any case, many were quickly released and sent home, or transferred to France for post-war reconstruction work. The French army itself took about 300,000 Germans prisoner.
Like the British and Canadians, the Americans unexpectedly met with a huge number of surrounded German troops: the total number of prisoners of war among the Americans alone reached 2.5 million without Italy and North Africa. But the attitude of the Americans was very different.
Among the first US prisoners of war was Corporal Helmut Liebig, who served in the anti-aircraft experimental group at Peenemunde in the Baltic. Liebig was captured by the Americans on April 17 near Gotha in central Germany. Forty-two years later, he vividly recalled that the Gotha camp did not even have tents, only a barbed wire fence around the field, which soon turned into a swamp.
The inmates received a small portion of food on the first day, but on the second and subsequent days it was cut in half. To get it, they were forced to run through the line. Hunched over, they ran between rows of American guards, who beat them with sticks as they approached the food. On April 27, they were transferred to the American camp Heidesheim, where for several days there was no food at all, and then only a little.
Under the open sky, hungry and thirsty, people began to die. Liebig counted 10 to 30 bodies daily, which were pulled from his section B, which contained about 5,200 people. He saw one inmate beat another to death over a small piece of bread.
One night, when it was raining, Liebig noticed that the walls of a hole dug in the sandy ground for shelter fell on people who were too weak to get out from under them. They suffocated before their comrades came to their aid …
The German newspaper, the Rhein-Zeitung, named this surviving American photograph on its page: Camp at Sinzig-Remagen, spring 1945
Liebig sat down and wept. "I couldn't believe people would be so cruel to each other."
Typhus broke into Heidesheim in early May. Five days after the German surrender, on May 13, Liebig was transferred to another American POW camp, Bingem-Rudesheim in the Rhineland, near Bad Kreusnach. There were 200 - 400 thousand prisoners there, without a roof over their heads, practically without food, water, medicine, in terrible cramped conditions.
He soon fell ill with typhus and dysentery at the same time. He, half-conscious and delirious, was taken with sixty prisoners in an open carriage northwest down the Rhine on a tour of Holland, where the Dutch stood on bridges and spat on their heads. Occasionally, American guards opened warning fire to drive off the Dutch. Sometimes not.
Three days later, his comrades helped him limp to a large camp in Rheinberg, near the border with Holland, again without shelter and practically without food. When some food was delivered, it turned out to be rotten. In none of the four camps, Liebig did not see any shelters for prisoners - they were all located in the open air.
The mortality rate in American German POW camps in the Rhineland, according to surviving medical records, was about 30% in 1945. The average death rate among the civilian population in Germany was at that time 1-2%.
One day in June, through hallucinations, Liebig saw "Tommy" entering the camp. The British took the camp under their protection, and this saved Liebig's life. Then he weighed 96.8 pounds with a height of 5 feet 10 inches.
EISENHOWER HAS SIGNED AN ORDER FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A CATEGORY OF PRISONERS NOT SUBJECT TO THE GENEVA CONVENTION
According to the stories of ex-prisoners of Reinberg, the last action of the Americans before the arrival of the British was to level one section of the camp with a bulldozer, and many of the weakened prisoners could not leave their holes …
Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war were guaranteed three important rights: that they should be fed and accommodated to the same standards. that the winners, that they must be able to receive and send mail, and that they must be visited by delegations of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who must draw up secret reports on the conditions of detention to the Defending Party.
(In the case of Germany, since its government was dissolved in the last stages of the war, Switzerland was designated as the Defending Party).
In fact, the German prisoners of the US Army were denied these and most other rights by a series of special decisions and directives adopted by its command under SHAEF - Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force - Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower was both the Supreme Commander of SHAEF - of all Allied armies in northwestern Europe - and the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces in the European Theater of Operations.
He was subordinate to the US-British Joint Command (CCS), US Joint Command (JCS), and US government policy, but in the absence of appropriate directives, all responsibility for the treatment of German prisoners of war rests entirely with him.
“God, I hate the Germans,” he wrote to his wife Mamie in September 1944. Earlier, he told the British ambassador in Washington that all 3,500 officers of the German General Staff should be “destroyed”. In March 1945, a CCS letter signed by Eisenhower recommended the creation of a new class of prisoners - Disarmed Enemy Forces - DEF - Disarmed Enemy Forces, which, unlike prisoners of war, did not fall under the Geneva Convention. Therefore, they did not have to be supplied by the victorious army after the surrender of Germany.
This was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention. In a letter dated March 10, in particular.argued: "The additional load on the supply of troops caused by the recognition of the German Armed Forces as prisoners of war, requiring them to be provided at the level of the basic military ration, lies far beyond the capabilities of the Allies, even with the use of all the resources of Germany." The letter ended: "Your approval is required. Plans will be drawn up on this basis."
On April 26, 1945, the Joint Command approved DEF status only for POWs in the hands of the US Army: British Command refused to accept the American plan for their POWs. The CCS decided to keep the status of the disarmed German forces under wraps.
At the same time, Eisenhower's Chief Quartermaster under the SAEF, General Robert Littlejohn, has already halved the ration for prisoners and a letter from the SAEF addressed to General George Marshall, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army, signed by Eisenhower, said that the prison camps would not have "either a roof or other amenities … ".
However, the supply was not the reason. In Europe, warehouses were abundant with materials for the construction of acceptable POW camps. Eisenhower's aide-de-camp for special affairs, General Everett Hughes, visited the huge warehouses in Napla and Marseilles and reported: "There are more supplies than we can ever use. Out in sight." That is, the food was not the reason either. Stocks of wheat and corn in the United States were greater than ever, and potato harvests were also record-breaking.
The army reserves had such a supply of food that when an entire warehouse center in England cut off supplies following an accident, it was not noticed for three months. In addition, the International Committee of the Red Cross had over 100,000 tons of food in warehouses in Switzerland. When he tried to send two echelons of food to the American sector of Germany, the American command turned them back, stating that the warehouses were so full that they would never be emptied.
Thus, the reason for the policy of deprivation of German prisoners of war could in no way be a lack of supplies. Water, food, tents, squares, medical care - everything needed for prisoners of war was provided in fatal scarcity.
In Camp Rheinberg, from where Corporal Liebig escaped in mid-May, dying of dysentery and typhus, there was no food at all for the prisoners at the time of opening on April 17. As in other camps of the "Rhine Floodplain", opened by the Americans in mid-April, there were no watchtowers, no tents, no barracks, no kitchens, no water, no toilets, no food …
Georg Weiss, a tank repairman who now lives in Toronto, says of his camp on the Rhine: “All night we had to sit huddled together. But the lack of water was worst of all. For three and a half days we had no water at all. drank their urine …"
Private Hans T. (his last name withheld at his request), who was only eighteen, was in the hospital when the Americans arrived on April 18. He, along with other patients, was taken to the Bad Kreuznach camp in Rhineland, in which by that time there were already several hundred prisoners of war. Hans only had a pair of shorts, shirts and boots.
Hans was far from the youngest in the camp - it housed thousands of displaced German civilians. There were children of six years old, pregnant women, and old people over 60. In the beginning, when there were still trees in the camp, some began to tear off branches and start a fire. The guards ordered the fire to be extinguished. At many sites, it was forbidden to dig holes in the ground for shelter. “We were forced to eat grass,” recalls Hans.
Charles von Luttichau was recovering at home when he decided to resist the arbitrariness of the American military. He was sent to Camp Cripp, on the Rhine near Remagen.
"We were kept extremely crowded in wire-fenced cages under the open sky with little or no food," he recalls today.
POW camps - Prisoners Of War - POWs located along the Rhine - the aftermath of the victorious Allied invasion of Germany. The U. S. Army has officially captured about 5.25 million German troops
For more than half of the days we received no food at all. And on other days - a meager ration "K". I saw that the Americans were giving us one-tenth of the ration they received themselves … I complained to the head of the American camp that they were violating the Geneva Convention, to which he replied: "Forget the Convention. You have no rights here."
“The toilets were just logs thrown over the ditches dug by the barbed wire fences. But due to weakness, people could not get to them and walked to the ground. Soon many of us were so weak that we could not even take our pants off.
WORKING TEAMS ripped off identification tags from corpses, undressed them and folded them in layers, sprinkling with quicklime
So all our clothes became dirty, so did the space in which we walked, sat and lay. In such conditions, people soon began to die. A few days later, many people who entered the camp healthy were dead. I saw many people dragging corpses to the gate of the camp, where they piled them on top of each other in the backs of trucks that took them away from the camp."
Von Luttichau was in the Kripp camp for about three months. His mother was German and he later emigrated to Washington, where he became a military historian describing the history of the US Army.
Wolfgang Iff, a former prisoner of Reinberg and now residing in Germany, describes how 30 to 50 corpses were removed from the approximately 10,000 inmates every day. Ifff reveals that he worked for the funeral team and dragged corpses from his sector to the camp gates, where they were taken in wheelbarrows to several large steel garages.
Here Iff and his comrades undressed the corpses, bit off half of an aluminum identification tag, stacked the bodies in layers of 15-20 in one layer, sprinkled each layer with ten layers of quicklime, forming stacks a meter high, and then put the fragments of the tags into bags for the Americans, and so over and over again …
Some of the dead were dead from gangrene after frostbite (the spring was unusually cold). Some were too weak to hold onto logs thrown through the ditches that served as toilets, fell and drowned.
Conditions in the American camps along the Rhine at the end of April were checked by two colonels of the US Army Medical Corps, James Mason and Charles Beasley, who described them in a newspaper published in 1950: 100,000 sluggish, apathetic, dirty, emaciated people with empty eyes, dressed in dirty gray field uniforms, stood ankle-deep in the mud …
The commander of the German Division reported that the people had not eaten for at least two days, and the water supply was the main problem - although the deep Rhine flowed 200 yards away."
On May 4, 1945, the first German prisoners of war held by the Americans were transferred to DEF status - Disarmed Enemy Forces. On the same day, the US Department of War banned prisoners from sending and receiving letters. (When the International Committee of the Red Cross proposed a plan to restore mail in July, it was rejected.)
On May 8, Victory Day, the German government was abolished and at the same time the US Department deposed Switzerland as the defending side for German prisoners. (Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King protested in the Foreign Office in London the simultaneous removal of Switzerland as a defender in the British-Canadian camps, but received a devastating response for his sympathy).
The Department of State then notified the International Committee of the Red Cross. that since there is no defending party to whom reports can be sent, there is no need to visit the camps.
From that moment on, prisoners in American camps were officially deprived of the opportunity to visit by independent observers, as well as the opportunity to receive food parcels, clothing or medicine from any humanitarian organization, as well as any mail.
General Patton's Third Army was the only army in the entire European theater of operations that freed prisoners of war and thereby saved many German soldiers from imminent death during May. Omar Bradley and General J. C. H. Lee, commander of the Europe Communications Zone, ordered the release of the prisoners within a week of the end of the war, but by SHAEF - Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force - this was canceled on 15 May …
On the same day, when they met, Eisenhower and Churchill agreed to reduce the ration of the prisoners. Churchill was required to agree on the level of the prisoners’rations. he had to declare a decrease in the British meat ration and wanted to make sure that "the prisoners, as far as possible … should be supplied with the supplies that we saved." Eisenhower replied that he had already "given the issue the necessary attention," but was going to double-check everything to see if "further decline is possible."
He told Churchill that POW POWs get 2,000 calories a day (2,150 calories were accepted by the US Army Medical Corps as the absolute maintenance minimum for warm, sedentary adults. US military personnel received 4,000 calories a day) … However, he did not say that the American army practically does not feed DEF - the Disarmed Enemy Forces at all or feed them significantly less than those who still enjoy the status of prisoners of war.
The rations were then cut again - direct cuts were recorded in the Quartermaster's Records. However, there were also indirect cuts. They turned out to be possible due to the discrepancy between the payroll and actual number of prisoners in the camps.
The meticulous General Lee was so enraged by these inconsistencies that he literally ignited the telephone cable from his headquarters in Paris to SHAEF headquarters in Frankfurt: "The command is experiencing significant difficulties in establishing an adequate base of necessary rations for prisoners of war held in the theater of war … response to Command's demand … SAEF provided completely contradictory information about the number of prisoners held in the theater of operations."
It was the policy of the US Army to provide "no shelter or other amenities." In the disposition of the prisoners: people lived in holes they dug in the ground
Then he cites the latest SAEF statements: "The telegram … dated May 31, states the presence of 1,890,000 prisoners of war and 1,200,000 disarmed Germans. Independent command figures show prisoners of war in the communication zone - 910,980, in temporarily fenced areas - 1,002,422, and in the GP Twelfth Army, 965,135, giving a total of 2,878,537 and an additional 1,000,000 Disarmed German Forces from Germans and Austrians."
The situation was astounding: Lee reported more than a million people in US camps in Europe than SHAEF cited in her data. But he fought against windmills: he was forced to calculate the supply of food to the German prisoners based on the number of prisoners, determined by SHAEF G-3 data (operational). Given the general confusion, the fluctuations in the data are excusable, but more than 1 million prisoners apparently disappeared in the interval between two reports by the Chief of the Military Police of the Theater of War, published on the same day, June 2:
The last of the TPM's daily series of reports counted 2,870,000 inmates, and the first - 1,836,000. One day in mid-June, the number of inmates on the ration list was 1,421,559, while Lee's data and other indicate a real number, almost three times superior to the official!
Allocating a deliberately inadequate diet was one way to create hunger. Others were significantly underreported in the number of prisoners. In addition, a million prisoners who received at least some food due to their status as prisoners of war lost their rights and their food by secret transfer to DEF status. The transfer was carried out rigorously for many weeks, with particular attention to maintaining the balance in the weekly SHAEF reports between POW and DEF - prisoners of war and disarmed enemies.
The difference between those withdrawn from the POW status and those who received the DEF status was 0.43% during the period from June 2 to July 28.
The transfer to DEF did not require any transfer of the person to other camps or the involvement of any new organizations to attract German civilian supplies. People stayed where they were. All that happened after a few clicks of the typewriter was that the person stopped getting a meager bite of food from the US Army.
A condition of the recount policy, supported by winks and nods - without ordering, was to discredit, isolate and expel the mid-level officers in charge of the POW.
The Colonel of the Quartermaster Service of the Forward Combat Units of the United States wrote a personal appeal to General of the same service, Robert Littlejohn, on April 27: we received, are intended entirely for consumption by the troops on personal request and absolutely do not relate to the requirements imposed on us in connection with the influx of prisoners of war."
Rumors about conditions in the camps were circulating in the American army. "Boys, these camps are bad news," said Benedict K. Zobrist, a technical sergeant in the Medical Corps. "We were warned to stay as far away from them as possible."
In May and early June 1945, a team of medics from the US Army Medical Corps carried out an inspection of some camps in the Rhine Valley, where some 80,000 German prisoners of war were held. Their report is removed from the US National Archives in Washington, but two secondary sources cite some information from the report.
The three main killers were: diarrhea or dysentery (considered one category), heart disease, and pneumonia. However, with the strain of medical terminology, doctors also recorded deaths from "wasting" and "wasting". Their data revealed mortality rates eight times higher than the highest peacetime levels.
But only 9.7 to 15% of inmates died from reasons purely associated with malnutrition, such as exhaustion and dehydration. Other diseases prevailed, directly related to the unbearable conditions of detention. Overcrowding, dirt, lack of any sanitary conditions were undoubtedly aggravated by hunger.
The report noted: "Keeping, overcrowding in pens, lack of food and lack of sanitation all contribute to this high mortality rate." It should be remembered that the data was obtained in POW camps - prisoners of war, not DEF - disarmed enemy forces.
At the end of May 1945, more people died in American camps than in the flames of the atomic explosion in Hiroshima.
On June 4, 1945, a telegram signed by Eisenhower informed Washington that "there is an urgent need to reduce the number of prisoners at the earliest opportunity by re-sorting all classes of prisoners in a different way than the Allies require." It is difficult to understand the meaning of this telegram.
There are no grounds for understanding it, and in the large volume of telegrams preserved in the archives of London, Washington and Abilene, Kansas. And regardless of the orders to Eisenhower to accept or transfer prisoners of war, the order of the Joint Command of April 26 forced him not to accept more prisoners of war after Victory Day, even for work. However, about 2 million DEFs were brought in after May 8th.
During June Germany was divided into occupation zones and in July 1945 SHAEF - Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force - The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force was disbanded. Eisenhower became the military commander of the United States zone. He continued to contain the Red Cross and the US Army notified American humanitarian groups that the area was closed to them.
It turned out to be completely closed for any humanitarian supplies - until December 1945, when some relief came into effect.
Also, starting in April, the Americans transferred between 600,000 and 700,000 German prisoners of war to France to rebuild its infrastructure damaged during the war. Many of the transporters were from the five American camps located around Dietersheim, near Mainz, in the part of Germany that had come under French control. (The rest were taken from American camps in France).
On 10 July, a French Army unit entered Dietersheim and 17 days later Captain Julien arrived to take command. His account is preserved as part of an army investigation in a discussion between Captain Julien and his predecessor. In the very first camp he entered, he witnessed the presence of a dirty land "inhabited by living skeletons", some of which were dying before his eyes.
Others huddled under pieces of cardboard, although July was not too hot. The women lying in burrows dug in the ground gazed at him, swollen with hunger, with bellies parodying pregnancy; old men with long gray hair looked at him hunched over; children six or seven years old with hungry circles of raccoons around their eyes looked at him with lifeless gaze.
Two German doctors in the "hospital" tried to help the dying on the ground in the open air, between the marks of the awning, which the Americans took with them. Julien, a member of the Resistance, caught himself thinking: "This resembles photographs of Dachau and Buchenwald.." transl.).
There were about 103,500 people in the five camps around Dietersheim, and among them Julien's officers counted 32,640 people who were not able to work at all. They were released immediately. In all, two-thirds of the prisoners taken over by the French this summer from the Americans in camps in Germany and France were useless for reconstruction work.
In the Saint-Marty camp, 615 out of 700 prisoners were unable to work. In Erbisel, near Mons, Belgium, twenty-five percent of the men accepted by the French were "dechets," or ballast.
In July and August, US Quartermaster Littlejohn reported to Eisenhower that the Army's food reserves in Europe had grown by 39%.
On August 4, Eisenhower's order, consisting of one sentence, condemned all prisoners of war in the hands of the Americans to the DEF position: "Immediately consider all members of the German troops held under US guard in the American occupation zone of GERMANY as disarmed by the enemy forces, and not having the status of prisoners of war."
No reason was given. Retained weekly counts indicate continued dual grading, but for POWs, now treated as DEFs, the diet began to decline from a rate of 2% per week to 8%.
The mortality rate among DEFs for the entire period exceeded five times the above percentages. The official Weekly PW & DEF Report, September 8, 1945, is still kept in Washington. It states that a total of 1,056,482 inmates were held by the US Army at the European Theater, of which about two-thirds were identified as POW. The remaining third is 363 587 - DEF. During the week, 13,051 of them died.
In November 1945, General Eisenhower was replaced by George Marshall, and Eisenhower departed for the United States. In January 1946, a significant number of prisoners were still held in the camps, but by the end of 1946 the United States had almost reduced the number of its prisoners to zero. The French continued to hold hundreds of thousands of prisoners in 1946, but by 1949 almost all had been released.
During the 1950s, most of the material relating to American POW camps was destroyed by the US Army.
Eisenhower regretted the useless defense of the Reich by the Germans in the last months of the war due to the useless losses on the German side. At least 10 times as many Germans - at least 800,000, very likely more than 900,000, and quite possibly more than 1 million - have died in American and French camps than have been killed in northwestern Europe since America's accession in the war from 1941 to April 1945.
Excerpt from the memoirs of Johann Baumberger, German POW
home.arcor.de/kriegsgefangene/usa/europe.html
home.arcor.de/kriegsgefangene/usa/johann_baumberger2.html#We%20came
In this aerial photo, each black dot represents a German POW sitting in a snowy field for a month
We arrived at the Brilon POW camp near Sauerland. It was winter and we settled down in a snowy pasture. At night, we lay in 7-8 people, huddled closely to each other. After midnight, those lying inside changed places with those lying outside so that they would not freeze to death.
The next camp was Remagen on the Rhine. 400,000 people in one camp. The conditions were terrible. We were not given food for 2-3 days and we drank water from the Rhine. We lined up in the morning to get 1/2 liter of water ("brown soup") by evening. Anyone who did not boil water fell ill with diarrhea and died, in most cases in a ditch-toilet. There were beautiful orchards here, but after a few weeks there was nothing left of them.
We tore off branches, made a fire, boiled water and boiled one potato for two. 40 people received 1 kg of bread. I haven't had a chair for a month. In such conditions, 1,000 people died a week. We were so weak that we could not get up and walk - that memory forever engraved in my memory.
Fever broke into the camp in May 1945. We were transferred to another camp in Koblenz. When we arrived, the clover was 15cm tall. We pressed and ate it. The wheat reached half a meter and we were glad that we could not lie on the bare ground. The camp was subordinate to the French, and most of the prisoners were transferred to France. I was fortunate enough to be released on medical grounds.
In "Eisenhower" s Death Camps ": A U. S. Prison Guard" s Story
In the "Eisenhower Death Camps": The Story of an American Guard (excerpt)
the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/us_war_crimes/Eisenhowers_death_camps.htm
In late March - early April 1945 I was sent to guard a prisoner of war camp near Andernach on the Rhine. I took four German courses and was able to talk to inmates, although it was forbidden. But over time, I became a translator and was tasked with identifying members of the SS. (I have not identified a single one).
In Andernach, about 50,000 prisoners were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate pen. The inmates had no shelters or blankets, and many did not even have coats. They slept in the mud, rain and cold, amid incredibly long excrement ditches. The spring was cold and windy and their suffering from bad weather was terrible.
It was even more horrifying to watch as the prisoners cooked a kind of liquid grass and weed soup in cans. Very soon the prisoners were exhausted. Dysentery raged, and very soon they slept in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to get to the toilet trenches.
Many begged for food, grew weaker and died before our eyes. We had plenty of food and other provisions, but there was nothing we could do to help them, including medical attention.
Enraged, I protested to my officers, but was received with hostility or mild indifference. Under pressure, they replied that they were following the strictest instructions "from the very top."
Turning to the kitchen, I heard that the kitchen masters are strictly forbidden to share provisions with the prisoners, but there is more of it than ever and they do not know what to do with it. They promised me to allocate a little.
When I was throwing food over the barbed wire to the inmates, I was captured by the guards. I repeated the "offense" and the officer viciously threatened to shoot me. I thought it was a bluff until I saw an officer on a hill near the camp shooting a group of German civilian women with a.45 caliber pistol.
To my question, he replied: "Target shooting" and continued to fire to the last bullet in the store. I saw the women run for cover, but due to the range I was unable to determine if the officer had injured anyone.
Then I realized that I was dealing with cold-blooded murderers full of moral hatred. They saw Germans as subhumans worthy of annihilation: another round of the downward spiral of racism. The entire press at the end of the war was full of photographs of German concentration camps with emaciated prisoners. This increased our overconfident cruelty and made it easier for us to behave in the way that we were sent to fight …
