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What the Angels Saw: Red Cross and Protecting Power Visits to Anglo-American POWs, 1939-45

Despite the plethora of material written on the history of prisoners of war in the second world war, surprisingly few works analytically assess Germany’s overall treatment of British and American POWs. The handful of dissertations written on the subject have examined tightly-focused aspects within this field, while most published works have tended to examine the issue from the perspective of the prisoners themselves. While these are valid and valuable approaches, they leave a significant gap in the historiography: how precisely was German policy towards British and American POWs ultimately put into practice? This article distils every report by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protecting Power delegates on their visits to most of the British or American POWs in German-run transit camps (dulags), regular camps for non-commissioned soldiers (stalags), and camps for commissioned officers (oflags), which could be found in the national archives of Great Britain, the USA and Canada. The findings of the inspectors were analysed to determine how well the OKW tended to treat the prisoners in terms of material conditions in the camps as well as in terms of harassment and serious violations of the Geneva Convention. Ultimately, it was determined by these two neutral sources that material conditions of life were ‘satisfactory’ for most of the war years and that instances of mistreatment by the German armed forces were rare, once a prisoner of war had been accepted as such by Germany.