How 371,000 German POWs Ate, Slept & Worked in 500 American Camps

At the end of May, 1945, the United States Army counted the enemy soldiers it was holding on American soil. 371,683 Germans, 50,000 Italians, 4,000 Japanese. They were spread across more than 500 camps in 46 of the 48 states. Every one of those Germans had been told what America was. A weak country, a soft country, a country that would not last.

Then they were put on a ship and sent there. This is what they found. Where they slept, what they ate, what they were paid, and what happened to the ones who talked. Start with one of them. Heino Eriksson was 19 years old, a private in the Africa Corps. He had been in Africa 6 months when Tunisia fell in May, 1943.

He had dysentery. He was one of more than 150,000 German and Italian soldiers captured that month, along with General von Arnim, Rommel’s replacement. Years later, he said the same thing almost every one of them said. “We had no idea where we were going.” Where they were going was America. The first prisoners had arrived on the 21st of April, 1942.

 After Tunisia, the flow became a river, 20,000 men a month, every month, from May to October, 1943. After Normandy, 30,000 a month. In April and May of 1945 alone, more than 60,000. The ships came into ports like Boston, and here the first thing they expected did not happen. They were not marched into cattle cars.

 They were put on passenger trains with seats and sent inland. Some of them rode for days. They watched the country go by through the window, the farms, the towns, the lights on at night. The camps they arrived at were all built to the same plan. Two wire fences around the outside, inside compounds separated by a single fence.

Each compound held four companies of prisoners, about a thousand men. Each company had five barracks, a latrine, a mess hall, and an administration building. Then a recreation building, an infirmary, a workshop, a canteen, a chapel, and a hospital. Seven base camps and 22 branch camps in Texas alone. Some branch camps held 35 men.

 The big ones held 4,000. So, where did they sleep? In barracks covered with tar paper or corrugated iron. Inside, rows of cots and footlockers, and a pot-bellied stove in the center aisle. The treaty America had signed in 1929 gave each enlisted prisoner 40 square feet of space. Officers got 120. Reveille at a quarter to 6:00 in the morning.

Lights out at 10:00. Not every camp was the same. A prisoner at one camp wrote home that conditions were indescribable and primitive. Four men to a room, no tables or chairs. A prisoner at Camp Crossville, Tennessee wrote that the food was excellent, the climate marvelous and healthful, that he was taking courses toward his school certificate, and that he was even taking piano lessons.

Both letters were written from American camps. Now, what did they eat? The same rations as the American soldiers guarding them. That was not generosity, it was the law. The Geneva Conventions said prisoners were to receive the same treatment as members of the American armed forces. And the United States applied it to the letter to every prisoner at every camp.

At Camp Wallace in Texas, the prisoners worked in the cold storage warehouse cutting sides of beef, part of which went to their own kitchen. In the same camp, a former watchmaker spent the war repairing army typewriters. One prisoner put it in numbers. When he was captured, he weighed 128 lb. After 2 years as an American prisoner, he weighed 185.

He said he had gotten so fat you could no longer see his eyes. Heino Eriksson at Camp Hearne said it more plainly. We could take hot showers, eat good food, and we had sports facilities for soccer. The people of Hearne noticed, too. In Texas, the towns had a name for their local camp. The Fritz Ritz. Now the work.

Every enlisted prisoner who worked was paid 80 cents a day in canteen coupons, which bought cigarettes, beer, and magazines at the camp store. The farmer who used him paid the government a dollar 50 for the day. In Texas, that meant cotton, rice, peaches, pecans, and hay. In Oregon and California, it meant the harvest around Tuley Lake, where guards drove the prisoners out to the farms one, two, and three at a time.

In Orange County, the quota was 36 boxes of oranges per prisoner per day. In 1944, the prisoners earned 22 million dollars. The government calculated it had saved 80 million. Not everyone was pleased. The president of one railroad wrote to the Secretary of War asking why anyone would turn loose Nazi soldiers skilled in demolition so that they might run amok on the railroads.

The prisoners stayed off the railroads. At Camp Hearne, the prisoners built a theater with an orchestra pit and Rommel’s own military band played in it. They built fountains and a waist-high castle with a moat. There was a camp library, movies as often as four nights a week, and courses that counted toward German university degrees.

A chaplain who served there said, “Nobody could become bored.” That was the camp the Americans could see. There was another camp inside it. The army had sorted the prisoners only by the simplest rules, navy from army, officers from enlisted men. It had not sorted Nazis from anyone else. And the first prisoners, the men from Africa, were the most hardened in the German army.

They ran the compounds from the inside through the spokesman the Geneva Convention required. They held their own courts. A prisoner accused of anti-Nazi talk could be sentenced by a kangaroo court and, in the army’s own words, hanged, beaten, or coerced to death by Gestapo methods. At Camp Hearne, on the 17th of December 1943, a prisoner named Hugo Kraus was beaten with pipes, sticks, and boards studded with nails by six to 10 of his own countrymen.

He died six days later at Papago Park in Arizona. A submariner named Werner Drechsler arrived on the 12th of March, 1944. He had been an informant for American naval intelligence and the army had orders never to put him with other U-boat men. It put him in a camp full of them. He was recognized within hours. A court was held.

He lived about 7 hours. He was found the next morning hanging in the shower room. 15 German prisoners were court-martialed for murders like these. The prosecutor was Leon Jaworski, who would later prosecute Watergate. All 15 were sentenced to hang. On the 25th of August, 1945, seven of them, the men who killed Werner Drechsler, were hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

By 1945, the army had moved the worst 4 and 1/2 thousand to one camp at Alva, Oklahoma. And 3,300 known anti-Nazis to camps of their own. Could they escape? They could try. From the first arrival in 1942 to the end of the war, there were more than 1,500 escapes. Almost all of them ended within a day because there was nowhere to go.

The most famous was Papago Park. On the 23rd of December, 1944, 25 men, most of them U-boat officers, went out through a tunnel nearly 200 ft long. Some carried boards to build a raft and float down the Gila River. The river was dry. They found an arroyo. One man walked back into camp when he saw the Christmas menu.

Every one of them was back within 3 weeks. The FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, called each escaped prisoner a danger to our internal security. There was a congressional hearing. Nothing had been damaged. One man did get away. Georg Gärtner walked out of a camp at Deming, New Mexico on the 21st of September, 1945, after the war was already over.

He stayed gone for 40 years, living under an American name, until he gave himself up in 1985. In 2009, the United States made him a citizen. There was one more thing inside the camps, and the prisoners were not told about it until the war in Europe was over. In the fall of 1943, the War Department created a special projects division under a lieutenant colonel named Edward Davison in total secrecy.

 It published a newspaper for the prisoners, Der Ruf, The Call. It stocked the camp libraries with the books Germany had banned, and at Fort Getty in Rhode Island, it ran a school. There is film of it, German prisoners walking to class with an army manual called Speaking English. An American officer at the front of the room explaining the separation of church and state, and asking the prisoners what they thought.

 By the time the program ended, more than 23,000 men had graduated, chosen to go home first, and to help run the occupation. Then it was over, and the country that had fed them stopped. In May 1945, after Germany surrendered, rations were cut and the work was increased. The War Department ordered the prisoners out of the farms by the end of February 1946, out of military work by the end of March, and gone by the 1st of April.

 50,000 a month were shipped out, and many were not sent home. Under an agreement with France, they were handed over to work there. France, Britain, and the Soviet Union kept more than 5 million German prisoners for nearly 3 years after the war ended. Heino Erichsen went back to Kiel and found it destroyed. He came back to Texas and became an American citizen.

 About 5,000 of the men who had been prisoners did the same. In 1951, a former prisoner named Hans Joachim Sembach wrote to the Dallas Morning News from his new home. Texas, he said, “became my first tranquil home after harsh years of war.” 860 of them never left. They are buried in 43 cemeteries across the United States. Most of them in the towns that once called their camp the Fritz Ritz.

Erickson, who arrived at 19 with dysentery and no idea where he was, said the line that the whole program was built on without ever being told it. “I learned the meaning of freedom in a prison camp. I never knew what America was like before I was a prisoner.” That is how 371,000 German prisoners of war ate, slept, and worked in 500 American camps.