German prisoners of war in northwest Europe

More than 2.8 million German soldiers surrendered on the Western Front between D-Day and the end of April 1945; 1.3 million between D-Day and March 31, 1945; and 1.5 million of them in the month of April. From early March these surrenders seriously weakened the Wehrmacht in the West, and made further surrenders more likely, thus having a snowballing effect. On March 27, Dwight D. Eisenhower declared at a press conference that the enemy were a whipped army. In March the daily rate of POWs taken on the Western Front was 10,000; in the first 14 days of April it rose to 39,000 and in the last 16 days the average peaked at 59,000 soldiers captured each day. The number of prisoners taken in the west in March and April was over 1,800,000, more than double the 800,000 German soldiers who surrendered to the Russians in the last three or four months of the war.

The Western Allies also took 134,000 German soldiers prisoner in North Africa, and at least 220,000 by the end of April 1945 in the Italian campaign. The total haul of German POWs held by the Western Allies by April 30, 1945 in all theatres of war was over 3,150,000, rising in NW Europe to 7,614,790 after the end of the war.

It is worth noting that the Allied armies which captured the 2.8 million German soldiers up to April 30, 1945, while Adolf Hitler was still alive and resisting as hard as he could, comprised at their peak 88 divisions, which amounted to roughly 1.2 to 1.4 million men. The casualties suffered by the Western Allies in making this contribution to the defeat of the Wehrmacht were relatively light, 164,590 killed and 78,680 taken prisoner, a total loss of 243,270 to inflict a loss of 2.8 million on the German army.

Time-line of German surrenders in the West
After the D-Day landings German surrenders initially came quite slowly. By June 9 only 4,000 prisoners had been taken, increasing to 15,000 by June 18. The total for June was 47,000, dropping to 36,000 in July; 135,000 were taken in the month subsequent to July 25. August’s total was 150,000. The total number of prisoners attributed to the Normandy campaign was 200,000.

With the successful invasion of the South of France on August 15 and the link-up of the US 7th Army from the south and the US 3rd Army from the north on September 11, all the German troops remaining in central and west France were cut off. As a result, and also including the German troops who surrendered in the hot pursuit to the northern border from Normandy, 344,000 German soldiers surrendered to the Western Allies in September. This was one of the largest German losses in a single month of the war so far. To put it in perspective, 41,000 British troops surrendered after Dunkirk, 138,000 British and Indian soldiers surrendered at Singapore, 173,000 UK military became POWs in the entire course of the war, in Europe and the Far East, while the corresponding figure for the US was 130,000 POWs.

Up to October 17, 1944, 610,541 German soldiers surrendered on the Western Front. Between October 17 and February 5, 1945, this total of German POWs taken in NW Europe increased to 860,000. 250,000 POWs were captured between October 17 and February 5 at a rate of 65,000 a month. By February 22, a further 40,000 German soldiers had surrendered and the total number from D-Day until the end of February was over 940,000.

In March 1945, the numbers of German soldiers surrendering accelerated. Eisenhower said they were surrendering at a rate of ten thousand a day but actually approaching 350,000 surrendered in the whole month, bringing the total between D-Day and the end of March 1945 up to 1,300,000. The reason why so many surrendered in March was because Hitler did not allow a fluid response and orderly retreat before the Western Allies’ advance towards the Rhine, so that many German soldiers were trapped in indefensible positions to the west of the Rhine, where they were forced to surrender. Eisenhower referred to the Wehrmacht as a ‘whipped army’ on March 27. In his book Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower wrote ‘We owed much to Hitler’, 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.

The loss of these battle-hardened soldiers irretrievably weakened the German armies left to defend the great natural barrier of the Rhine, and the disintegration of the German armies in the west is shown in their more and more rapid rate of surrender as April progressed.

In the first five days of April, 146,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner [at a rate of 29,000 a day]. In the next nine days, 402,000 prisoners were taken [44,000 a day]. Between April 15 and 21, over 450,000 Germans surrendered [over 60,000 a day]; in the last ten days of the month over 500,000 waved the white flag [over 50,000 a day]. For the month as a whole the average rate of Germans surrendering was 50,000 a day.

To sum up, from D-Day onwards the numbers of German soldiers who surrendered in NW Europe were as follows: 200,000 in Normandy; 610,000 up to October 17, 1944; 1.3 million up to the end of March 1945 and 2.8 million up to the end of April 1945, when Hitler died.

German estimates
German POWs Held in Captivity

Western Allies' figures
In total, the number of German soldiers who surrendered to the Western Allies in northwest Europe between D-Day and April 30 1945 was over 2,800,000 [ 1,300,000 surrendered up to March 31 1945, and over 1,500,000 surrendered in the month of April].

Stalin and the German surrenders in the West
On March 29, 1945, Joseph Stalin said to Marshall Georgy Zhukov with alarm, "The German front on the West has entirely collapsed." While Stalin did not want the Western Allies to fail, he did not want them to succeed in defeating the German armies facing them before he had defeated the German armies in the East. On March 27 the Reuters correspondent wrote that the British and American armies heading for the heart of Germany were encountering no resistance. On the same day Eisenhower referred to the Wehrmacht in the West as a "whipped army". The Times, March 27, reported that 31,000 Germans surrendered on March 24 and 40,000 on March 25. The Daily Telegraph wrote on March 22 that 100,000 German prisoners had been taken since the Moselle was crossed the day before, and on March 30 that 60,000 POWs had been taken in the last two days. Thus between March 21 and 30, 231,000 German soldiers surrendered to the Western armies. On March 31, at a meeting with the American ambassador Averrell Harriman, 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, to start making his plans for the attack on Berlin on April 16, which led to Hitler’s suicide on April 30 and the end of the war in Europe.