Officially named Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTE), they held between one and almost two million surrendered Wehrmacht personnel from April until September 1945.

This decision was made in March 1945 by SHAEF commander in chief Dwight D. Eisenhower: by not classifying the hundreds of thousands of captured troops as POWs, the logistical problems associated with accommodating so many prisoners of war mandated by the Geneva Convention governing their treatment were negated.

Furthermore, all captured soldiers would no longer have the rights of prisoners of war guaranteed to them under the Geneva Convention because they belonged to Nazi Germany, a state that had ceased to exist.

Historian Perry Biddiscombe believed the decision to keep hundreds of thousands of men in poor conditions of the Rheinwiesenlager camps was "mainly to prevent Werwolf activity" in post-war Germany.

[1] Listings are from north to south with official number In the beginning, there were plans to transport the prisoners of war to Britain, where they would remain until capitulation, because there they could be better provided for.

Open farmland close to a village with a railroad line was enclosed with barbed wire and divided into 10 to 20 camps, each housing 5,000 to 10,000 men.

The deal was struck because the government of Charles de Gaulle wanted 1.75 million prisoners of war for forced labor in France.

The Red Cross was granted permission to send delegations to visit camps in the French and UK occupation zones.

[9] But historians including Stephen Ambrose, Albert E. Cowdrey and Rüdiger Overmans have examined and rejected Bacque's claims, arguing that they were the result of faulty research practices.

It had conducted detailed research of the camp histories on behalf of the Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte (German Federal Ministry of Displaced persons, Refugees, and War Victims).

[14] In 1969, Lieutenant General Leonard D. Heaton prepared and published an exhaustive report for the United States Army Medical Department that examined preventive medicine and the problems associated with housing such a large number of German prisoners after World War II.

The report found a number of problems, including: In 2003, historian Richard Dominic Wiggers argued that the Allies violated international law regarding the feeding of enemy civilians, and that they both directly and indirectly caused the unnecessary suffering and death of large numbers of civilians and prisoners in occupied Germany, guided partly by a spirit of postwar vengeance when creating the circumstances that contributed to their deaths.