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.

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.

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Wikipedia