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1944 map of POW camps in Germany. American Red Cross German POW Camp Map from December 31, 1944 Nazi Germany operated around 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps ( German : Kriegsgefangenenlager ) during World War II (1939-1945).
The interactive map below shows the location of many important detention/internment facilities operated by the U.S. Government during World War II, which held persons of German ancestry from the US and Latin America.
During World War II, the Germans held American POWs in a system of nearly 100 camps spread throughout German-occupied territory. Major camps, as well as camps mentioned throughout the exhibit, are indicated on this map.
This page and the maps and other pages it links to represents the work on a project to document and map all of the POW, internment, and concentration camps worldwide during World War II. Although most of the camps in North America have been mapped, those in Europe and Japan are incomplete.
Germany holds 28,867* American prisoners of war in these categories. While Americans are held in 57 scattered permanent camps, transit camps and hospitals, the great majority are confined in 8 main camps.
In the United States at the end of World War II, there were prisoner-of-war camps, including 175 Branch Camps serving 511 Area Camps containing over 425,000 prisoners of war (mostly German). The camps were located all over the US, but were mostly in the South, due to the higher expense of heating the barracks in colder areas.
The Germans were hardly the genial hosts, whether you were a POW during World War I or World War II. There was severe punishment for escape attempts, there were meager rations and drafty bunkhouses, and there were irregular deliveries of packages from the Red Cross.