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Peace Network


"Rhine Meadow Camps"

"RheinWiesenLager"

"Rijn weidekampen"

Kaartje Rheinwiesenlager
Kaart Rheinwiesenlager

"Rheinwiesenlager", which history?

My name is Rob GT and I live in the Netherlands. A long time ago I learned the German language at school, but German remains a difficult language for me. Despite that, I have read a lot of German texts, watched and listened to videos and now I write about a part of German history.
I ask my readers to read this internet document critically.

At the beginning of January 2023, I first heard about the "Rheinwiesenlager" (RWL) or "Rhine Meadow Camps". It was a completely unknown part of the history of post-war Germany from May 1945 onwards.
It touched me and I didn't know why.
So I started searching on the internet. I discovered an unimaginable and a deeply hidden part of German history.

In very short I give some history, which is well known. It's very short:

The known history had another unknown and terrible sequel. Maybe I was naive to think: the war is over and the warring parties are going back to their own country, they are going home.
That turned out differently . . .

The Second World War was coming to an end. It was April 1945 when the army command of the Allied troops gained control of the captured German soldiers. The Geneva Convention of 1929 called these soldiers prisoners of war (POWs). This description determined how these captured soldiers were to be treated after capture. However, that did not fit in with the Allies' alley and that is why the prisoners of war were called differently. The captured German soldiers were called "Disarmed Enemy Forces" (DEFs). This allowed the Allies to prevent the Red Cross from supervising the care of the captured German soldiers. And the supply of the prison camps was stopped. All this had serious consequences for the prisoners.

The Allies had set up camps in Germany in 1945 in the weeks before and after the German surrender. There were about 20 of those camps and they were fields or meadows along the Rhine or in the vicinity of the Rhine. The camps were no more than bare fields surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire.
These Rheinwiesenlager were filled with German soldiers, who came back from large parts of Europe and from North Africa. You would think that those German soldiers could go home, if they still had one. The reality was very, very different.
There were no facilities at all in these camps. There were no tents or blankets, there were no sanitary facilities and there was little or no medical care. Many of the returned soldiers didn't even have coats left.
And... There was virtually no or no food or drink at all.
Partly due to severe cold and a lot of rain, many German soldiers died in these camps.
The only thing the imprisoned soldiers could do was dig a hole with their bare hands, in which they found some protection against wind and cold. However, the bad weather and the overcrowded fields with the countless potholes caused many potholes to collapse. Many soldiers were caught off guard in their sleep and they suffocated in the mud. Sometimes excavators shoved the mud and earth over the sleeping soldiers. And if they did not die as a result, they did die from cold, hunger, thirst or from infectious diseases and poor medical care. Many German soldiers had returned from the front (seriously) wounded.
Those who tried to escape were shot dead by the guards.

A number of these Rheinwiesenlager were closed at the end of the summer or closed in the autumn of 1945. It has not always become clear where the surviving soldiers were sent from the closed camps. Many soldiers were sent to other Rheinwiesenlager, which were still open and some soldiers were allowed to go home.
In the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, some encampments remained in operation, sometimes for three or four years. Many German soldiers were sent to France from these camps and were deployed in the reconstruction of France.

The big question was and still is: how many German soldiers, but also women and children died in this Rheinwiesenlager?
A lot of people died in the Rheinwiesenlager. Numbers are mentioned that run into the hundreds or thousands. There are also reports that speak of more than 1 million victims or even a multiple of that. A report about an encampment read: only three survivors have been counted.

As mentioned, it is an unknown piece of history for most Dutch people. But that also applies to the Germans. This piece of history is not talked about in Germany. The soldiers who survived the Rheinwiesenlager did not talk about it. Even after returning home, nothing was rarely told. Even descendants of these German soldiers have never been able and dared to talk about the camps where their parents or grandparents died. Either they didn't know anything or they didn't want to or weren't able to say anything about it.
There was and still is no mentioning of the Rheinwiesenlager.

Historians and other researchers who went in search of the true facts of the Rheinwiesenlager were and are opposed by some governments. It has happened that even written requests for information about the Rheinwiesenlager have not been responded to.
History of a war is written by the victor and that victor will not record his own crimes in the historiography. It mainly describes heroic deeds and other lies.
Because of this wall of silence, it is still difficult in 2024 to get a clear picture of what really happened in this phase of German history. There are still many questions unanswered.

Questions like:


I wanted to learn more about the largely unknown history of the Rheinwiesenlager. How has this been dealt with and how is it brought to the attention? Are there any remnants of the encampments? Where are monuments, if any?

Three months after I first heard about the Rheinwiesenlager, my wife and I decided to do our own research in Germany. The preparation mainly consisted of sifting through the locations, where we might find something to do with the Rheinwiesenlager. So we mainly looked for street names, coordinates and (old) situation maps.
At the beginning of May 2023, we got in the car and drove to Germany. Our plan was simple, we wanted to visit all the Rheinwiesenlager and we wanted to do this as much as possible in a logical order. We decided to look for the locations upstream of the Rhine.

On the overview map at the beginning of this document, 23 Rheinwiesenlager are mentioned with the place name. It was quite a puzzle to find out on the internet where the camps were located in these places. Maps, street names and/or coordinates were hardly to be found. Rheinwiesenlager were often renamed or were not named.
I understand that there is no guide who can give a tour, but is the shame so big, is there so little interest or what should be hidden?

After our first research trip through Germany in the spring of 2023, I recorded our experiences and discoveries in a report. On the way during our first trip along the fields, we already realized that we had to visit a number of Rheinwiesenlager again. In total, we made four trips to the Rheinwiesenlager in 2023 and 2024. Too many questions had remained unanswered.

Goals

This document has been written to supplement the fragmented information that can be found there, to give coherence and more publicity to the history of the Rheinwiesenlager. I have done a lot of work in two years. I hope that this work will open many people's eyes to the history of the Rheinwiesenlager. People may even look at other historiographies differently.

Together with my wife, I have tried to visit all known and unknown Rheinwiesenlager and we have more than succeeded reasonably well.
It's like one big puzzle, I found a number of missing puzzle pieces and put them in the big puzzle. But the puzzle is far from finished, because many pieces of the puzzle are still missing and maybe one or two corner pieces.
I have compiled a lot of information that I found on the internet in this document of 25 chapters. Through our visits to the fields, meadows, fields, etc. I have gained a good impression of the circumstances under which the soldiers who returned to their homeland tried to survive.

I am certainly not a historian, but I have learned to think logically. You cannot draw good conclusions or make calculations if there is no or no good or insufficient information at your disposal. It is just like a piece of mathematics, but slightly different.

A second goal was to pray at the heavily loaded places and ask God, our Dear Father, the Almighty to spread Love, Light and thus Peace over these Rheinwiesenlager, cemeteries and monuments. This is to illuminate these places and make them more liveable, in the past, in the present and in the future.

Special experiences

So it started for me at the beginning of January 2023. I was struck internally by something unknown. How can a word like "Rheinwiesenlager" affect you so deeply? I knew nothing about it. I have spent many months of research into this piece of German history. We have tried to find and visit all the Rheinwiesenlager. We visited some camps several times. Gradually, it became a little clearer to me what affected me so much, but for the time being it remains guesswork.

In this document I will stick to the facts as I found them. But that is part of what really happened.
Because a lot of information has found me and that led to facts. And that is a fact.

It was striking how much information came to me. It was coincidence several times that put me on new tracks.

New and unknown information came to me, such as:

Now I have to say that I approach the phenomenon of coincidence differently than most people. We have learned in our upbringing and at school: "coincidence does not exist". Almost every day you hear people around you say "coincidence does not exist". On television, in films, in television series, on birthdays, at work, you hear again and again: "coincidence does not exist". It seems as if this is imposed as a doctrine.
For me, coincidence works differently. Too many beautiful and valuable events came my way. I started to regard coincidence as a beautiful gift. Coincidence: it falls in place for you. And what do you do with a gift? You accept that gift gratefully and you carefully unwrap that gift and you look at it from all sides. Coincidence always comes at the moment that you can do something with it. So don't put it away to look at it again later.
Then it could just be that this coincidence is an answer to that one question that you are struggling with. Or it fits in with a meeting with someone you are seeing for the first time.
Oooh yes, and there are usually no days, months or years between a question and a coincidental answer. That can come quickly and I mean really quickly. I once experienced that a question came to mind and I got an answer within seconds. Ten meters away I heard two men talking and one of them told the other something and that was exactly the answer to the question that I was struggling with.

And what happens to me by chance, happens to everyone. I am convinced of that.

hen there is something else to think about. Coincidence does not only happen to you, but also to someone else. And then it could just be that you are part of it, without even realizing it.

Then know that what you radiate, you attract.

One more thing: I consider a coincidence as a pat on the back.
From whom? Maybe I have an angel on my shoulder after all.
Wow ....

How do you recognize coincidence?
ou did that already. And then you said, that is coincidence and that does not exist, because that is how you had learned it.

Coincidence exists!

And so it is!