Disarmed Enemy Forces - Early Considerations of DEF Designations

Early Considerations of DEF Designations

Regarding the adherence to the Geneva Convention for vanquished Germans, Churchill at the Casablanca Conference in 1943 summed up the Allies "unconditional surrender" policy with "It we are bound, we are bound by our consciences to civilization." In prosecuting the war, SHAEF carried out the decisions of the Combined (Anglo-American) Chiefs of Staff (CCS). They had to execute the directives of the European Advisory Commission (EAC), which included the Soviet Union. The CCS and EAC directives implemented policies of the heads of government who decided the most important questions of Allied occupation policy. After the EAC was set up by the 1943 Moscow Conference, it drafted the instruments of unconditional surrender. During the EAC debates the Allies determined that they could strip the Germans of all government, including their protection by international law, and be free to punish them without restriction. The Geneva Convention (GC) required SHAEF to feed German POWs a ration equal to its own base soldiers.

The original discussion of the Allies treating post Victory in Europe (V-E) Day prisoners of war as something other than those protected by the Geneva Convention had its vague origins in the Casablanca Conference, but it was given specific form by the EAC in the summer of 1944 in a "draft instrument of surrender" given to the American government. The instrument required the surrendering German commander to accept that his men "shall at the discretion of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Allied State concerned be declared to be Prisoners of War." Several factors went into this consideration, including that the EAC member the Soviet Union refused to sign the Geneva Conventions, despite intense pressure from 1942 onward to sign the document. Behind the Soviets' refusal were a number of considerations closely linked with the regime, but a major consideration that emerged at the Tehran Conference was that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin desired four million German laborers for an "indefinite period", perhaps for life. The Soviets' refusal to even consider signing the GC created great problems for the EAC, including the fact that a single surrender instrument could not be drafted if a Soviet commander taking the surrender could not possibly commit his government to accord GC rights to prisoners. As a result the EAC instruments promised nothing in that regard, employed awkward and tortured language and made plain the premeditated Allied evasion of the Geneva Convention. In addition, other Allies also considered using Germans for prison labor, which the Germans themselves had already required of prisoners they had held during the war. Later EAC documents described the "Disabled Enemy Forces."