No one has eaten any food for weeks, and they are slowly starving and dying. There are the Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of Prisoners of War. Hope continues through the night, with no shelter from the cold, biting rain. Your uniform is sopping wet, and formerly brave soldiers are weeping all around you, as buddy after buddy dies from the lack of food, water, sleep and shelter from the weather. After weeks of this, your own hope bleeds off into dispair, and finally you actually begin to envy those who, having surrendered first manhood and then dignity, now also surrender life itself.
More hopeless weeks go by.
Finally, the last thing you remember is falling, unable to get up, and lying face down in the mud mixed with the excrement of those who have gone before. Your body will be picked up long after it is cold, and taken to a special tent where your clothing is stripped off. So that you will be quickly forgotten, and never again identified, your dog-tag is snipped in half and your body along with those of your fellow soldiers are covered with chemicals for rapid decomposition and buried. You were not one of the exceptions, for more than one million, seven hundred thousand German Prisoners of War died from a deliberate policy of extermination by starvation, exposure, and disease -under direct orders of General Dwight David Eisenhower. Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who was given access to the Eisenhower personal letters, states that he proposed to exterminate the entire German General Staff, thousands of people, after the war.