
At the end of the war, mines had been laid on more than 500,000 hectares of land in France. The
French had asked the Americans and the British to hand German POWs over to them for use in
mine-clearing operations. London and Washington agreed, and the French forced tens of thousands
of German prisoners of war to clear minefields between mid-1945 and the end of 1947, regardless of
whether the mines had been laid by German army engineers or by the French army against German
forces. Possibly as many as 50,000 German POWs may have been used for this high-risk form of
forced labor. An estimated 1,800 of them died. Some of the survivors are asking for compensation.