(GC) required SHAEF to feed German POWs a ration equal to its own base soldiers. The original discussion of the Allies treating post Victory in Europe (V-E) Day prisoners of war as something other than those protected by the Geneva Convention had its vague origins in the Casablanca Conference, but it was given specific form by the EAC in the summer of 1944 in a "draft instrument of surrender" given to the American government. The instrument required the surrendering German commander to accept that his men "shall at the discretion of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Allied State concerned be declared to be Prisoners of War." Several factors went into this consideration, including that the EAC member the Soviet Union refused to sign the Geneva Conventions, despite intense pressure from 1942 onward to sign the document. Behind the Soviets' refusal were a number of considerations closely linked with the regime, but a major consideration that emerged at the Tehran Conference was that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin desired four million German laborers for an "indefinite period", perhaps for life. The Soviets' refusal to even consider signing the GC created great problems for the EAC, including the fact that a single surrender instrument could not be drafted if a Soviet commander taking the surrender could not possibly commit his government to accord GC rights to prisoners. As a result, the EAC instruments promised nothing in that regard, employed awkward and tortured language and made plain the premeditated Allied evasion of the Geneva Convention. In addition, other Allies also considered using Germans for prison labor, which the Germans themselves had already required of prisoners they had held during the war. Later EAC documents described the "Disabled Enemy Forces". DEF and SEP designations With regard to food requirements, regardless of the reasoning or GC legal requirements, SHAEF was simply not capable of feeding all of the millions of German prisoners at the level of Allied base soldiers because of the high numbers and lack of resources. This was not deliberate policy, but the result of wartime damage to the infrastructure, which created the difficult problem of feeding the defeated peoples without it. In a March 10, 1945 cable to the CCS, Eisenhower requested permission for this designation per the earlier EAC documents, and was granted such permission. When the CCS approved Eisenhower's March 1945 request, it added that prisoners