Nazi Prisoners On American Soil
Prisoner of War Camps in America During World War II
Why and how German, Italian and Austrian soldiers were brought to the United States and held in prisoner of war camps during the second world war
Most Americans are taught that during World War II, there were Japanese American Interment camps, but very few Americans know that from 1942 to 1946 more than 400,000 German, Italian and Austrian Nazi prisoners were housed in over five hundred major camps and several satellite camps in many U.S. states, including Ohio, California, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oregon, Georgia, Texas and Nebraska. In Texas alone, there were about seventy camps. Most of the prisoners were enlisted men, but there was a small amount of officers as well.
Statistics show that 150,000 prisoners came after the Allies captured the complete Afrika Korps in 1943. Another huge influx of prisoners came after D-Day in 1944, through December of that year, when 30,000 POWs arrived monthly.
Why Did the U.S. House These Prisoners?
There were three major reasons for housing these prisoners on American soil. First, it was originally discussed that the prisoners would be kept in England, but after seeing the huge numbers of prisoners, England decided there was not enough room in their country and asked America to house them instead.
Another reason was that once we captured the Afrika Korps, we were required to feed them. Food for the prisoners was brought from America by ship. Soon, it became obvious that the room used on the ships to bring food to the POWs was depriving American servicemen from being properly fed. So, the logical answer was to transport all the POWs to America.
The other major reason for housing prisoners on American soil was that they could be used as bargaining chips to assure that American POWs still on foreign soil would be returned back home.
Prisoners Used as Laborers
Once in America, prisoners were used to bolster the local economy and augment the depleted labor pool. They were used for example as general laborers in factories in Ohio, doing forestry work in Mississippi, North Carolina and Arkansas, and farming in the south where they picked peanuts and cotton.
Life In the Camps
For the most part, the majority of the soldiers were treated properly under the provisions of the Geneva Convention. The men would work either outside the camp or doing maintenance inside the camp during the day and then were heavily guarded at night. They worked for a small hourly wage – usually about eight cents. They used this money to buy supplies like cigarettes. Some camps had their own newspapers, sports teams and theatre productions.Many Americans were unhappy about how well the prisoners were being fed, saying they fared better than those Americans fighting overseas.
Some men did try to escape, but without money and with thick accents, they were usually detected and brought back. Also, most of the camp locations were chosen for their remoteness to large cities, making a successful escape even more difficult.
Nazi Instigators in the Camps
There were also core groups in many of the camps that were still pro Nazi and tried to keep all the men loyal by intimidation and staging food and work strikes. When the instigators of these actions were discovered, they were taken from the general population and moved to another camp with tighter security.
As the war was about to end, the Germans were shown newsreels about the devastation in their homeland and about the true state of the German losses. Many men felt that they had been treated so well by their captors that they either did not go back home or if they did, they would return to visit.
A sidebar is that many Northern American and Latin American’s of German, Japanese and Italian decent were also gathered up and imprisoned in these camps as subversives. These subversives were detained as early as December, 1941.
References:
The Enemy Among Us by David Winston Fielder
Nazi Prisoners of War in America by Arnold Krammer
