1945 by the Western Allies was 1,500,000.[1]<span> April also witnessed the capture of at least 120,000 German troops by the Western Allies in the last campaign of the war in Italy.</span><span> In the three or four months up to the end of April, over 800,000 German soldiers surrendered on the Eastern Front.</span><span>In early April, the first </span>Allied<span>-governed </span>Rheinwiesenlagers<span> were established in western Germany to hold hundreds of thousands of captured or surrendered </span>Axis Forces<span> personnel. </span>Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force<span> (SHAEF) reclassified all prisoners as </span>Disarmed Enemy Forces<span>, not </span>POWs<span> (prisoners of war). The </span>legal fiction<span> circumvented provisions under the </span>Geneva Convention of 1929<span> on the treatment of former combatants.</span><span>By October, thousands had died in the camps from starvation, exposure and disease.</span>
