German prisoners of war packed into the Nonant le Pin prisoner camp, 1944

All these German POWs were captured after the Battle of Falaise Pocket. By the evening of 21 August 1944, the pocket was sealed with C. 50,000 Germans were trapped inside. Many Germans escaped but suffered heavy losses of men and equipment.

These photographs show a humane and more realistic side of the German army at war. In almost all surrender/POW photographs, the German army was in disrepair, with overgrown hair, thin, sleep-deprived, disheveled uniforms.

It was not the camps that made the soldiers look tainted, it was the continuity of their condition when they surrendered.

The guard soldiers would get into a jeep, drive around the camp and occasionally yell "Stop!" and fired their guns in the air to give the impression that the fleeing soldiers were being shot at.

But escapes were rare, in fact none because these prison camps were protecting the prisoners as much as they were detaining them.

Anyone who escaped from that camp may have been recaptured by Allied forces or captured and executed by the resistance or resistance-friendly civilians. Most, if not all, of them knew that their chances were much better inside those enclosures.

The Battle of the Falaise Pocket ended the Battle of Normandy with a decisive German defeat. Hitler's involvement had been damaging from the beginning, with his hopelessly unrealistic counter-attacks, micro-management of generals, and refusal to retreat when his armies were threatened with destruction.

More than forty German divisions were destroyed during the Battle of Normandy. No exact figures are available but historians estimate that the German army suffered heavy losses in the battle. 450,000 men, of whom 240,000 were killed or wounded.