Talk:Disarmed Enemy Forces

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[edit] Legality of the DEF designation

• 1 I'm going quietly crazy trying to re-find a reference I once read that stated that the Judge Advocate General (or very similar) strongly opposed Eisenhowers use of the DEF designation. Anyone have any clues on this?

• 2 The Geneva conventions were aparently changed after the war to close the loophole that allowed the creation of DEF by the U.S. I've also read that the Geneva conventions were changed in responce to the German use of loopholes in them, for example witholding medical treatment to injured POW's until after interrogation. Anyone know of any Germans charged for violating the spirit of the conventions, although not the letter?

• 3 The Hague convention that states that POWs are to be released and repatriated as soon as possible after peace has been achieved was circumvented by the Allies in a similar fashion, since the Allies claimed unconditional surrender and disolved the German government, and put-of the signing of a peace treaty indefinitely. As a consequence German POW's and DEF could be used as forced labor for several years by all the Allies (I think the number of forced labourers in 1947 were 1 million in the west and 3 million in Russia). All this taken together indicates to me that we need an article collecting these legal issues. There is the general article Debellatio but I think we need to create a main article dealing specifically with Germany, e.g. The legal status of Germany after World War II.

• 4 Does anyone have any info on the legality of Eisenhowers handing over of several hundred thousand German soldiers (Dont know if they were DEF or POW at that time) to the Soviet Union, where many of them eventually died in the Soviet work camps?

--Stor stark7 ^Talk 19:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)