The Allies Starved Prisoners Too

The claim has two parts. The first is that the Allies starved prisoners (often the Eisenhower-Rhine-meadows allegation about German POWs in 1945). The second is that the camp deaths in the final months were a logistics failure caused by Allied bombing rather than an SS policy. The first part is a separate question that does not bear on the Holocaust. The second part inverts cause and effect: the camp food supply collapsed because the SS chose to abandon the prisoners rather than feed them, not because Germany was unable to feed them. Germany continued to feed its own population, its army, its civil servants and its forced foreign labourers throughout the same period. The food was available; the policy was not to send it to the camps.

The food supply that did exist

Germany was not in famine in early 1945. The German civilian ration in the first quarter of 1945, while reduced from earlier years, remained at approximately 1,650 to 2,000 calories per day for the standard adult ration card. The Wehrmacht continued to feed its forces. The forced foreign labour force in Germany, including approximately seven million workers from across occupied Europe, continued to receive its rations (low, but sufficient for survival). The German rail network, while degraded by Allied bombing, continued to move food, troops and equipment until literally the last weeks of the war. Specific Allied bombing of food infrastructure was limited; the bombing campaign focused on transport hubs, oil production, factories and urban centres. Food supplies were not the primary target.

The collapse of the camp food supply in the final months had a different cause. As the Eastern Front advanced and the eastern camps were evacuated westward, the SS marched hundreds of thousands of prisoners on foot or in unheated railway cars to camps in the Reich interior. These camps were not equipped to receive the influx and were not given additional supply allocations. At Bergen-Belsen, the prisoner population grew from approximately 7,000 in summer 1944 to approximately 60,000 by April 1945, with no corresponding increase in food, water or sanitation provision. The SS had made no plans to feed the new arrivals. The decision to march them westward had been taken with full knowledge that the receiving camps could not support them.

Where the food went instead

The SS economic apparatus continued to receive substantial food allocations through the final period. The garrison rations at the camps remained sufficient to feed the SS personnel; SS officers continued to be supplied with the standard officer ration plus the regional supplement. The forced labourers in the Reich’s industrial production network were fed at survival rations because their labour was needed; the camps holding prisoners not in current productive use were the ones from which food was withdrawn. The choice was operational, not logistical. When prisoner labour was wanted, prisoners were fed enough to work; when prisoner labour was not wanted, the food allocation was reduced or eliminated. The camp deaths in the final months reflected the SS having lost interest in the prisoners as a labour resource and having no other interest in keeping them alive.

The Allied bombing argument also fails on the chronology. The food supply at the camps had been calibrated to produce mass mortality from at least early 1942 onwards, well before the strategic bombing campaign reached its full intensity. The standard ration at Auschwitz I in 1942 was approximately 1,300 calories per day for a labour prisoner doing heavy work; at the satellite labour camps it was lower. The medical projection at the time, in surviving SS communications, was that prisoners on this ration would survive approximately three months of heavy labour before dying. The mortality data from the camps confirms the projection. The starvation was a feature of the system from the start, not a consequence of any wartime supply collapse.

The Allied POW comparison

The denier argument sometimes cites the conditions of German POWs in Allied custody, particularly the alleged “Rhine meadow camps” deaths attributed to Eisenhower’s policy in 1945. The figures and the framing are largely the work of James Bacque, whose book Other Losses (1989) claimed approximately one million German POW deaths in Allied custody. Bacque’s figures were demolished by the historians’ commission led by Stephen Ambrose at New Orleans in 1990, which found that Bacque had misread the underlying US Army records and that the actual death toll in Allied POW custody was a small fraction of his claim (in the order of 5,000 to 10,000, mostly from disease and the chaotic conditions of the immediate post-war period). The Ambrose commission’s findings were published in Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood (1992) and have been the standing scholarly position. The deniers continue to cite Bacque; his work is not considered credible by professional military historians.

Even if Bacque’s figures were correct, the argument would not work. The German POWs were captured combatants of an army that had killed tens of millions of civilians; their treatment was not the same moral category as the deliberate starvation of unarmed civilians by their captors. Conflating the categories is the move of bringing the moral discredit of the Holocaust into a comparative frame where it is supposed to be partially cancelled by alleged Allied wrongs. The conflation does not work even on its own terms.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it relocates responsibility for the camp deaths from the people who arranged them to the conditions of the war that they had started. The SS chose the food rations, chose to evacuate eastern prisoners westward without provisioning the receiving camps, chose to maintain its own garrison rations while withdrawing prisoner rations, and chose to keep prisoners alive only insofar as their labour was wanted. None of this was caused by Allied bombing. The food was available; the policy was not to give it to them. The argument that the war made the SS do what it did is the argument that the SS bore no responsibility for what the SS chose to do.

What was the German civilian ration in 1945? What was the SS garrison ration? What was the prisoner ration? Why did one collapse and the others not?

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Sources

• Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, Princeton University Press, 2002, with the food-policy origins of the killing
• Christian Gerlach, Calculated Murders: The German Economic and Annihilation Policy in White Russia 1941 to 1944, Hamburger Edition, 1999, on the deliberate starvation policy
• Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Hamburger Edition, 1999, on the camp ration regime and its mortality projections
• Hermann Kaienburg, Die Wirtschaft der SS, Metropol, 2003, on the SS economic apparatus and its food allocations
• Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp, Routledge, 1998, on the collapse of the food supply at Bergen-Belsen
• Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes, contemporaneous medical reports on Bergen-Belsen, April to May 1945, Imperial War Museum and Wellcome Library
• Stephen Ambrose et al., Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Louisiana State University Press, 1992, the historians’ commission report on the Bacque claims
• Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Allen Lane, 2006, on the German wartime food supply and its allocation
• Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, Penguin, 2011
• Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule, Belknap, 2004, on the contrast between the food allocations to occupied populations and to the camps
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Mortality in the Concentration Camps” and “Death Marches”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org