Rhine meadow camp Construction and construction Between April and July 1945, the US Army set up numerous prisoner of war camps along the Rhine, including in Bretzenheim, Remagen and Sinzig. They officially referred to them as Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTE) and numbered them A1 to A19 and C1 to C4. A camp built in Urmitz was never put into operation. In addition, there were other collection camps, some of which only existed for a few weeks, including in Eckelsheim, which did not receive an official PWTE designation. However, the same conditions prevailed there as in the other camps along the Rhine. The provisional character, which was born out of necessity, is already indicated by the official name of the camps as “Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures” (PWTE), which means the term “temporary”. picks up. Since the Americans did not want to keep the prisoners under their control for long, they did not establish any developed camps with camp regulations. Everything was based on the conviction that these camps were only a temporary facility and many things could only be regulated imprecisely in such a short time. This was one cause of the chaotic conditions in the spring and summer of 1945. The decision for the locations on the Rhine was influenced by the availability of large, open areas on which the camps could be set up. The Rhine served as a natural border and the American leaders could assume that a recapture of these areas by the German army was impossible. Villages or towns with a railway connection bordered all camps, which provided further transport and supply options. The Americans separated open-air farm areas with barbed wire and divided them into smaller units, so-called cages or compounds, each containing 5,000 to 10,000 prisoners. The prisoners were not allowed to leave these cages or were only allowed to leave them in exceptional cases. A camp consisted of ten to 20 of these cages, which were guarded by American soldiers. Contact between the cages was hardly possible as they were often separated from each other by a path blocked off with barbed wire. The Rhine meadow camps were completely overcrowded with a total of over a million prisoners, as they were originally intended for far fewer people.
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