So I'm watching a documentary about The Great Escape from Stalag Luft 3 and I was curious as to why Germans during WWII would even keep prisoners of war to begin with. In case the camps were liberated, wouldn't this mean more men fighting against Germans?
What was the point of keeping prisoners of war? It would just be a drain on resources to keep them alive. Was there a rule that prevented German soldiers from straight up killing Allies the moment they were encountered?
I figured that it would just be easier to kill your enemy rather than go through the procedure of making prisons and taking care of them, let alone deal with all the Geneva conventions that restricted mistreatment (I'm amazed that's even a thing).
Because the Germans were not animals. I'd call this outright racist if I wasn't convinced this was sourced from simple ignorance.
I mean, yes, at some level every army operating in WW2 had instances- reported or not- where soldiers who had surrendered were shot. The reality was that for the German army your average soldier was a professional and not necessarily associated with the more war-crimey / crimes against humanity type as you see with the ideologically motivated SS divisions. You don't shoot soldiers who have surrendered because you expect the same treatment from your enemy.
Furthermore it serves some diplomatic purposes. I'd have to do some digging to find the particulars again, but one of the members of the British crown was actually a prisoner of war from fairly early in WW2, but he was treated decently enough, even when Hitler was aware of this.
I also wouldn't underestimate the value of the camps- while officers were technically exempt from physical labor the usage of forced / slave labor in Germany was a major component of their war effort. Much of the V-2 rocket project was built and assembled by slave labor.
If nothing else in strictly utilitarian terms physically shooting them all would be a gross waste of munitions, and physically stabbing or hanging them would be equally as mentally taxing. One of the reasons why prison guards who were part of firing squads for executions are / were commonly given a blank round randomly was for this exact reason: having someone be a career murderer of people who are by most estimates at that moment and for the foreseeable future harmless is mentally taxing. Similarly you'd actually want to worry about someone who could do such a task and not feel anything for it.
You don't need things like the Geneva convention to understand this either. Napoleon, Sherman, Patton, and Ghengis Khan didn't kill everyone they ever ran into either. They might enslave some, but total annihilation serves little purpose. Even Adolf Hitler's end game for Ukraine and his Leibensraum or however you spell Living Space in German didn't call for the complete annihilation of everyone, even if most groups would be culled to 50% or less of their populations and retained solely as slave labor.