German prisoners of war in northwest Europe

[a] The number of prisoners taken in the West in March and April was over 1,800,000,[7] more than double the 800,000 German soldiers who surrendered to the Russians in the last three or four months of the war.

[8] One reason for this huge difference, possibly the most important, was that German forces facing the Red Army tended to fight to the end for fear of Soviet captivity whereas German forces facing the Western Allies tended to surrender without putting up much if any resistance.

[b] The Western Allies also took 134,000 German soldiers prisoner in North Africa,[10] and at least 220,000 by the start of 1945 in the Italian campaign.

"[17] For comparison, in the Battle of Halbe on the Eastern Front from 24 April to 1 May 1945, over 30,000 German soldiers, out of a much smaller number encircled, were killed fighting the Red Army.

[3] In his book Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower wrote 'We owed much to Hitler',[32] because he prevented his generals from pulling back the defending forces to the east of the Rhine, probably no later than early January, thus handing the Western Allies 300,000 prisoners on a plate.

Overmans put the losses in the West from 1939 to 1943 at 95,066 and 244,891 in 1944[37] However the American military estimated German casualties in the west from D-day to V–E Day probably equaled or slightly exceeded Allied dead and missing, which were 195,000[15] The Canadian author James Bacque claims in Other Losses that the United States was responsible for the deaths of 800,000 to 1,000,000 German POW.

Rüdiger Overmans believes that "on the basis of factual individual data, shown before, the thesis of the Canadian James Bacque cannot be supported."

On March 29, 1945, Joseph Stalin said to Marshal Georgy Zhukov with alarm, "The German front on the West has entirely collapsed.

On March 27 the Reuters correspondent wrote that the British and American armies heading for the heart of Germany were encountering no resistance.

On March 31, at a meeting with the American ambassador W. Averell Harriman,[50] Stalin appeared much impressed by the vast number of prisoners the Allies were rounding up in the West, and said, "Certainly this will help finish the war very soon."

Stalin's concern over the apparent ease with which the Western Allies were capturing so many German soldiers persuaded him, towards the end of March,[46] to start making his plans for the attack on Berlin on April 16,[51] which led to Hitler's suicide on April 30 and the end of the war in Europe.