Were World War 2 prisoners fed?

Answer 1

The Japanese starved their prisoners. The Germans starved their Russian prisoners, but made an effort to feed those of the other Allied nations. The Germans would allow Red Cross Parcels to be given to the prisoners, through the good offices of the International Red Cross, which was based out of neutral Switzerland, and this helped quite a bit. The Allied nations fed their prisoners well, as a rule. At the end of the war though, things were more problematic. German agriculture had been run on slave labor for several years during the war, and as the Allies advanced into Germany in the spring on 1945 these slaves were freed, with the result that no one planted a crop in Germany in 1945. The German Navy's submarines had just spent six years sinking every cargo ship they could get a torpedo into. There was still a war going on in the Pacific, and what scarce ships there were had to be used to transfer troops from Europe, once Germany surrendered, to the Pacific, for the final push to take out Japan (no one yet knew that the atomic bombs existed, and would end the war quickly). Thus, what ships there were still available to carry food to war ravaged Europe were few, and what food they brought went first of all to feed Allied troops, then to feed civilians, particularly those in the countries just recently freed from the Nazis, whose food production had for years been stolen by the Germans. The German Army surrendered by the hundreds of thousands in April and May 1945, and were herded into hastily built POW camps. All these factors combined meant that there was little food left to feed former German military personnel in these POW camps, who were pretty much last on the list to get imported food, after German civilians. Around 50,000 German POWs died in these camps in the winter of 1945-46, many from starvation, and nobody felt too sorry for them, considering how the German military had behaved over the six preceding years. This was not a policy of deliberate starvation, as pursued by the Germans and Japanese during the war; it was a situation where all of Europe was ravaged by the Germans and Europe was incapable of feeding itself.

Answer 2

If there was spare army rations, they would be issued those consumables. Otherwise, food available at the POW camp and surrounding region would be grown to support the men.

Answer 3

nun dey starve em