How did Germany treat the people they captured during World War 2?

Answer 1

Men from the UK and Commonwealth, the US and other western nations were generally treated as well as might be hoped. The food was still scanty and of very poor quality, but so was the food available to most German civilians. There was one instance where 50 prisoners recaptured after a mass escape were murdered by the Gestapo, upon which story the movie "The Great Escape" is based.

Russian prisoners on the other hand were treated with the utmost brutality, starved, worked to death, etc. The Germans usually segregated prisoners by nationality, and put officers in separate camps from enlisted men, but in several places there were adjoining compounds - one for westerners and the Russians adjoining, so this was witnessed. Any Russians fortunate enough to be still alive at the end of the war were promptly sent off to Siberia into Russian camps by Stalin, who felt they should have fought to the death instead of letting themselves be captured, and also because the communists feared those individuals had been tainted, corrupted by contact with the "decadent, hedonistic" western life, as they starved in POW camps. Most of these remained in the Gulag camps until 1955, after Stalin finally, at long last, died. (Many German POWs held by the Russians also did not get released until 1955, after the war had been over ten years. Tomorrow it will be 70 years since the German 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad. Over 100,000 were taken prisoner by the Russians; in 1955, about 6,000 were still alive to get to go home.)