标题: In WWII, 400,000 German Prisoners Housed on US Continent Alone [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 4-8-2025 11:32 标题: In WWII, 400,000 German Prisoners Housed on US Continent Alone 本帖最后由 choi 于 4-14-2025 14:07 编辑
Howard Schneider, Lives in Captivity; The US hoped that if German POWs were treated humanely, Germany would reciprocate in its treatment of American prisoners. Wall Street Journal, Mar 26, 2025, at page A13 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... -captivity-bb228c1e
(book review on William Geroux, The Fifteen; Murder, retribution, and the forgotten story of Nazi POWs in America. Crown, Mar 18, 2025)
Note: "During World War II, the US began amassing huge numbers of German prisoners when the Afrika Korps, the Wehrmacht's elite desert troops, surrendered to the Allied forces at Tunisia in May 1943. * * * some 135,000 of these POWs would end up in US prison camps. * * * At its height, the American POW system, which was administered by the military, comprised more than 600 camps scattered across the country. By the end of the war the Army had interned nearly 400,000 Germans"
(a) Afrika Korps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrika_Korps
(table: Size Corps June 1941: 33,500 men in total/ "First sent as a holding force to shore up the Italian defense of its African colonies * * * The Afrika Korps formed on 11 January 1941 * ** * On 13 May, [1943,] the Afrika Korps surrendered, along with all other remaining Axis forces in North Africa. Most Afrika Korps prisoners of war (POW) were transported to the United States and held in Camp Shelby in Mississippi, Camp Hearne in Texas and other POW camps until the end of the war.
(b) Compare Wehrmach
thttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht
(1935-1945; table: Personnel (which is sectional heading) > "Active personnel 18,000,000 (total served)" )
----------------WSJ
During World War II, the U.S. began amassing huge numbers of German prisoners when the Afrika Korps, the Wehrmacht’s elite desert troops, surrendered to the Allied forces at Tunisia in May 1943. As William Geroux, a veteran journalist and the author of “The Ghost Ships of Archangel” (2019), tells us in his excellent and insightful “The Fifteen,” some 135,000 of these POWs would end up in U.S. prison camps because “there was nowhere else to put the Germans but in America.” Britain didn’t have enough space or food, or the manpower necessary for the guard duty required. The story of German POWs in America speaks highly (for the most part) of their American captors, but it’s an indictment of many hardcore Nazi prisoners.
“Given America’s scant experience with POWs in World War I,” Mr. Geroux writes, “the U.S. government had no blueprint for handling an influx of prisoners in World War II.” American know-how came to the rescue in the rapid construction of the camps. At its height, the American POW system, which was administered by the military, comprised more than 600 camps scattered across the country. By the end of the war the Army had interned nearly 400,000 Germans “without a single act of sabotage or violent crime against an American citizen.” German-on-German violence in the camps was another matter.
The German POW experience was far from excruciating, especially by Nazi standards. The U.S. government was determined to treat the Germans well, Mr. Geroux maintains, “for reasons both moral and calculating.” America was a party to the 1929 Geneva Convention, which outlined, in part, how POWs were to be held. Prisoners, the author reminds us, could retain “their military ranks and their chains of command. They were to be housed and fed like American soldiers based in the United States. They were allowed regular contact with their families, the German government, the Swiss”—a neutral nation—“the International Red Cross, and other agencies.” The U.S. hoped that if German POWs were treated humanely, Germany would reciprocate in its treatment of American prisoners. (Not surprisingly, this wouldn’t be the case.)
Wartime imperatives—namely, the military’s need for men to join the service—created a worker shortage in America. Fortunately for employers, the Geneva Convention also allowed for enlisted-rank prisoners to be “compelled to work.” German POWs performed a multitude of tasks, from emptying bedpans to herding cattle to translating documents; “they cut timber in New Hampshire and Maine, packed kosher meat in New Jersey, and stuffed olives in Texas.” They harvested crops, from Kansas wheat to North Carolina tobacco. Throughout the country, POWs were treated decently. German prisoners in the Jim Crow South observed that they had more privileges than blacks did. Employers and most of the prisoners were content with the system. Indeed, thousands of German prisoners wanted to stay in the country after the war.
Not all POWs were ready to abandon their Nazi indoctrination, however. While the average German soldier, Mr. Geroux tells us, “was not a Nazi fanatic,” zealots, including “numerous SS men and Gestapo agents,” could be found among the POWs. “At the height of the war, the army concluded that” roughly 15% of the 371,000 German prisoners in the United States were either “rabid Nazis” or “deeply sympathetic” to the Nazi cause. Some of these true believers sought to exert their authority over the other German prisoners. “To bring a prisoner back into line,” for instance, these Nazis might “threaten to send coded messages to Germany, either in letters or inside the bandages of wounded German POWs being sent home, to sic the SS or Gestapo on their families.” Other offenses might be dealt with in “clandestine ‘courts of honor,’ convened at night.” Prisoners might be sentenced to confinement, or fellow prisoners might be ordered to shun him (“a severe penalty in a place so far from home”)—or worse.
“A postwar army survey listed 211 violent incidents” committed by Germans against fellow inmates at the POW camps, we are told. These included the murder—hangings or gang beatings conducted by the Rollkommando, or beating squad—of those prisoners suspected of spying for the Americans or considered insufficiently devoted to the Third Reich. Mr. Geroux graphically describes the horrifying murder of Johann Kunze in Oklahoma’s Camp Tonkawa. Kunze was beaten to death by a mob of his fellow POWs for allegedly passing information to the American authorities.
The U.S. military would arrest and court martial those POWs suspected of murder once the authorities believed they had enough evidence. (One of the prosecutors, Leon Jaworski, would later become the special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal.) In total, 15 German POWs would be condemned to death.
When the Third Reich learned of these sentences, they in turn sentenced to death (on fraudulent charges) 15 American POWs and sought to trade, via the Swiss, the 15 Americans for the 15 condemned German POWs. The negotiations could verge on the bizarre: One of the Americans may not even have existed. Mr. Geroux’s account of the bureaucratic dueling that ensues is absorbing.
Ultimately, 14 German prisoners would be executed for murder, five of them for the killing of Kunze. (The 15th, initially condemned to death, would eventually have his sentence commuted, to 20 years’ hard labor, by President Truman.) The American prisoners, meanwhile, would escape their executions thanks to the end of the war.
More than a well-crafted history, “The Fifteen” raises questions worth considering today. Was the U.S. too lenient with German POWs? (The columnists Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson thought so.) Was the military justified in sometimes cutting corners to prosecute German POWs? (At least once, German suspects were tortured.) And what was—is—the responsibility of POWs, of any nationality, to their fellow prisoners and their captors? Those reading “The Fifteen” will be motivated to make up their own minds.
Mr. Schneider reviews books for newspapers and magazines.