WWII German P.O.W.'s in America
An amazing story of how the US housed and fed over 400,000 captured German soldiers
A little less than 100 years ago, back in my college days, I had a buddy whom I will call E. B. whose father was one of the German scientists who developed the infamous V-2 bombs that terrorized England during World War 2. After the war, five-year old E. B. escaped Germany with his family to settle in Huntsville, Alabama. There his dad again became one of the German rocket scientists but this time working with ex-Nazi Werner Von Braun in America’s fledgling space program at Redstone Arsenal.
E.B. and I were having beers in a bar near the campus one evening and marveling that our fathers had both been involved in the war in Europe but on opposing sides. The Longest Day (the movie about the D-Day invasion at Normandy) was showing in a theater up in Birmingham so we decided it would be cool for the sons of those two guys to drive there together and see it. We both left the movie with a sense of how awful that war was and how the young men who fought in it could so amazingly shoot and kill each other when, like E.B. and me, they had so much in common. It was a strange experience.
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E.B. told me that had his family not been taken by the Americans they would have fallen into the hands of the Soviets. They were thankful for coming to the United States and being able to live and work in freedom. Both the Russians and the Americans were seeking German rocket scientists and some were taken by each side.
Thousands of other Germans had already arrived on American shores, not as valued assets in the country’s space program but as prisoners of war who had been captured by the Allies during combat. These undoubtedly were the lucky ones.
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The Geneva Convention of 1929 required the United States to provide living quarters comparable to those of its own military. If prisoners had to sleep in tents while their quarters were being constructed, so did their guards. The three admirals and forty generals in custody were sent to camps in Mississippi where each had his own bungalow with a garden!
Moreover, those prisoners who worked were paid American military wages (equal nowadays to about $15.00 per day) and were employed on farms, canneries, mills and other places not considered security risks. Officers could not be compelled to work at all.
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In the prison camps, ex-soldiers were allowed to wear their German uniforms, sing their traditional songs, give the Nazi salute and refuse to work if they chose. (Those who did refuse were placed on a diet of only bread and water). The food they had was equal in quality and amounts to the food that American soldiers received. Canteens were established at the camps, allowing prisoners to buy candy, cigarettes, writing materials, toothpaste and other supplies, including beer.
“This made us mad as hell,” one American officer told a newspaper reporter, “especially since we weren’t allowed such luxuries.” The US government may have exceeded the minimum requirement for prisoner well-being in an effort to influence the German government to do likewise for American POW’s in German territories,
Life in the camps was a vast improvement for many who had grown up in “cold water flats” in Germany. Many complained about being allowed no girlfriends and no contact with family. But the food was excellent and clothing adequate. Such diversions as sports, theater, chess games and books made life behind barbed wire a sort of “golden cage,” one prisoner remarked.
Farmers who contracted for POW workers usually provided meals for them and paid the U.S. government 45 cents an hour per laborer, which helped offset the millions of dollars needed to care for the prisoners.
During the time that the prisoners lived and worked in American camps, many of them were befriended by their American neighbors. Families even invited groups of them into their homes, including in several instances to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Germans knew nothing of Thanksgiving, of course, but were thankful for the food and the hospitality.
Die-hard Nazis in the camps were re-directed to Camp Alva in Oklahoma and kept separate from the other captives. Of the more than 400,000 prisoners in the US, only 2,222 or less than 1 percent attempted to escape and they were rounded up quickly. In 1946, all prisoners were returned to their home countries. Many of them later wrote warm letters to the Americans they had known.
The infamous Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, once famously said “War means fightin’ and fightin’ means killin” and certainly both Americans and Germans did a lot of that with horrific result in that brutal and very nasty war. With few exceptions, those young men were no different than E.B. and me just a few years later at the University of Alabama.
And I can’t help but wonder what might have transpired had they met over a few beers and gone to a movie together instead of killing one another.
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