Luftwaffe and Allied Air Forces Discussion Forum - Aftermath

The name of the notorious camp was "Rheinwiesenlager". Tens of thousands were deliberately starved to death there. In order to keep them from "POW" status and to avoid the Red Cross inspecting the camps the ex-soldiers were defined to be "DEF", disarmed enemy forces, which did never and does not exist elsewhere. Thus any human rights or rights resulting from the La Hague convention could be denied to them. They also did not appear on any statistic sheet or in post war memory and I betyou neve have Googled "German DEF post WW II". Only POWs are counted in death statistics, which death toll was in the few thousands. DEF's death toll was over a million. The scandal is that food was stockpiled outside the camps and in the end was rotten. Eisenhower gave the order not to pass it into the camps and punished those who couldn't see it anymore, throwing some food rests over the barbed wire fences. In addition all prisoners for month remained in the open without any protection or even basic sanitary equipment. Eisenhower said: "Prison enclosures are to provide no shelter or other comforts."

From an Australian WW II veteran, Ltd. Col. Gordon Mohr:

In the first week of September 1945, 13,051 of the 363,587 Germans died and were listed cryptically as "other losses." This was the equivalent of a death rate of 3.6% per week. At such a rate, all the remaining 350,536 DEFs would have been dead within 28 weeks before the end of the approaching winter.
The civilian death rate immediately outside the American camps in Germany was about 2% per year, or nearly 100 times lower, despite the greater proportion of older people. Since adequate supplies were readily available to the American troops at all times, this killing seems to have been deliberate.
As for the 692,895 German soldiers still falsely listed as POWs, the last of them had actually been transferred from POW to DEF status a month earlier on August 4, by order of General Eisenhower. Their death rate quickly quadrupled within weeks, from .2% to .8% per week. Assuming the latter rate for the week ending September 8, about 5,543 of the so-called POWs listed in the report as being alive and in American hands had died that week - all would have died within just over two years.. (The reason this death rate was lower than 3.6% weekly for the longer-term DEFs was simply that the barbaric treatment of the DEFs was cumulative, and that some of the American troops refused to go along with this barbaric treatment.) I recall the winter of 1945, when I was on occupation duty in Japan. A similar order came from our local U.S. military commander who was known for his hatred of all Japanese. It did not come from MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo. We were not allowed to give food of any kind to Japanese civilians, although many of them were on the verge of starvation. I was commanding a detachment of 28 men, which were guarding a Japanese Quarter Master dump at the little town of Niski'ya'hama, about eighty miles south of Osaka. Food in this storehouse was literally spoiling, yet we were not allowed to share it with the Japanese people. For Christmas rations that year, my detachment received eight sheep carcasses and 28 turkeys, with no refrigeration for storage. Rather than see this food go to waste, I shared it with the starving population, and when word leaked out, I came very close to being court marshaled. It was only the intervention of a high ranking officer from MacArthur's Headquarters which saved me.
The same thing happened over and over again in Germany, and American officers and servicemen were court marshaled, on Eisenhower's orders, for sharing their rations with the starving Germans. If you were a young man, with several small children at home, you know how these enemy children played on the minds of decent Americans who knew what their government was doing was wrong. Enemy children have never been enemies, to big hearted Americans.
But with a man of unbounded hatred for the Germans, his order of August 4th, made it impossible for there to be such a thing as a bona fide German POW in American hands on European soil.

http://www.scripturesforamerica.org/html2/jm0053.htm

look also

http://www.rense.com/general46/germ.htm