German prisoners of war in northwest Europe

More than 2.8 million German soldiers surrendered on the Western Front between D-Day (June 6, 1944) 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. One reason for this huge difference, possibly the most important, was that German forces facing the Red Army tended to fight to the end for fear of Soviet captivity whereas German forces facing the Western Allies tended to surrender without putting up much if any resistance. Accordingly, the number of Germans killed and wounded was much higher in the East than in the West.

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 northwest 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, with a peak strength in May 1945 of 2,639,377 in the US and 1,095,744 in the British and Canadian forces. The casualties suffered by the Western Allies in making this contribution to the defeat of the Wehrmacht were relatively light, 164,590–195,576 killed/missing, 537,590 wounded, and 78,680 taken prisoner, a total loss of 780,860 to 811,846 to inflict a loss of 2.8 million prisoners on the German army. The number of dead and wounded on both sides was about equal. This, plus the fact that most surrenders occurred in April 1945, suggests that (unlike on the Eastern Front, where the number of German killed and wounded far exceeded the number of prisoners taken by the Soviets), most German soldiers who surrendered to the Western Allies did so without a fight. For instance, in the battle of the Ruhr Pocket, there were about 10,000 fatalities on the German side (including prisoners of war in German captivity, foreign forced laborers, Volkssturm militia and unarmed civilians), whereas about 317,000 Germans surrendered. "Many a German walked mile after mile before finding an American not too occupied with other duties to bother to accept his surrender." For comparison, in the Battle of Halbe on the Eastern Front from 24 April to 1 May 1945, over 30,000 German soldiers, out of a much smaller number encircled, were killed fighting the Red Army.