Editing Other Losses (section)

=== Lack of records ===
There are no longer any surviving records showing which German POWs and [[Disarmed Enemy Forces]] were in U.S. custody prior to roughly September 1945. The early standard operating procedure for handling POWs and Disarmed Enemy Forces was to send a copy of the POW form to the [[Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects]] (CROWCASS). However, this practice was apparently stopped as impractical, and all copies of the POW forms, roughly eight million, were destroyed.<ref>US Department of Justice, Criminal Division, In the Matter of Josef Mengele: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 1992) (DD 247 .M46 U55 1991). Available from [http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/mengeleosi.html Jewish Virtual Library] as PDF (15 MB) or from the [http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/nazi/mengele/mengele_report.html rotten dot com archive] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070612235422/http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/nazi/mengele/mengele_report.html |date=2007-06-12 }} as html</ref><ref>Note: the file was originally available for download from the United States Department of Justice homepage, as "http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/publicdocs/11-1prior/crm12.pdf", and may still be available under a different name or catalog</ref> By way of contrast, the Soviet archives contain dossiers for every German POW they held, averaging around 15 pages for each.<ref name="HHP">[http://www.historiography-project.org/misc/bacque_letter.html James Bacque Answers a Critic] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120317183548/http://www.historiography-project.org/misc/bacque_letter.html |date=2012-03-17 }} Holocaust History Project 2003</ref>