Lucas: German POWs found fresh start in America after WWII

The influx of immigrants spanning our demarcation under President Biden s watch isn t the first time the U S has hosted foreign nationals en masse During WWII German soldiers made the U S their home They were prisoners of war and they were here because there was no place else to put them Great Britain was living on the edge with no space food or manpower to spare So they lived out their wartime imprisonment in six hundred mostly hastily built and now forgotten POW camps that stretched across the U S from Massachusetts Cape Cod Ft Devens to California with plenty of camps in Texas Georgia and Arkansas The prisoners officers excluded provided the country with manpower partially filling the roles of young American men serving in the military The POWS herded cattle and tended crops in Kansas Iowa North Carolina and elsewhere They worked in forestry in Maine and New Hampshire and as cowboys in Texas While multiple of the officers and noncoms were hard-core Nazis the bulk of the soldiers were not Nevertheless it was the Nazis who often ruled the internal workings of the camps issuing punishment that included murder The first batch of prisoners came following the Allied defeat of the General Erwin Rommel s vaunted Afrika Korps in North Africa in May The allied conquest came following the U S invasion in November called Operation Torch It was along with the Russian defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad a sign of things to come in the final defeat of Hitler s Germany Particular German soldiers including generals were taken prisoner following the battle and shipped to the United States to be housed Soon thousands more would arrive in a country that had not dealt with prisoners of war to any extent since the Civil War As the U S and Germany were signatories of the Geneva Convention the German prisoners were treated well in the hope that American prisoners of war held in Germany and Japan would also be treated well It was often was not the episode The good rehabilitation accounted for why there were relatively meager attempts to escape Besides America was too vast Only one German escapee made his way back to Germany to rejoin the war This determined German walked out of a camp in Oklahoma hitchhiked a ride to Baltimore talked his way onto a freighter bound for Lisbon crossed Portugal and Italy to Germany He was later recaptured before he could dream of opening a excursion agency All of this and more is explained in William Geroux s book The Fifteen which is about Murder Retribution and the Forgotten Story of NAZI POWs in America The dark side of the story was the murder by rabid Nazis hangings and death by beating of scores of fellow prisoners who were accused of faltering belief in Hitler and Nazism The Nazis set up secret squads in the camps to conduct beatings and killings of prisoners thought to be too friendly with U S leaders or were accused of being informers The U S would eventually arrest and with due process court martial die-hard Nazis on murder charges All were sentenced to hang When Hitler s Third Reich learned through the Swiss of the sentencing it ordered death sentences for American prisoners of war on bogus charges of war crimes Fourteen of the convicted Nazis were hanged while the fifteenth had his sentenced commuted to years by President Harry Truman The Americans escaped execution because Nazi Germany collapsed Hitler shot himself and Germany surrendered The prisoners were sent home However several five thousand returned to the U S and became doctors lawyers artists and set up businesses Gerd Kruse an Afrika Korps artilleryman declared When I set foot on German soil and saw what happened I just as soon turned around He married an American and ran the family farm Frieda Goedecke who set up a manufacturing company and a retail store with her husband Heinrich who was a prisoner announced You can do it here in America I think that is the only place you can do it Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at peter lucas bostonherald com In this handout from the U S Army German prisoners of war interned at Camp Blanding near Jacksonville Fla exercise on the horizontal bar July AP Photo U S Army