“Hände hoch!” During World War II, American soldiers undoubtedly shouted that command—“Hands up!”—countless times to their German counterparts in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, for by the war’s end, more than 400,000 German soldiers were imprisoned in some 500 camps scattered around the United States.
The first large batches of POWs arrived in America when the British, following major North African victories, became overwhelmed by the number of German prisoners in their country and asked their American ally for assistance in housing and feeding them. Soon these POWs arrived in the thousands aboard American ships returning from the British Isles. On arrival, they were dispatched under guard on trains to their assigned camps, prisons usually located near small towns and in rural areas, generally in the South and the Midwest.
The Big Picture
Fort Lewis in western Washington established a POW camp for three years beginning in July 1943. Lewis Army Museum
Most often, these camps consisted of barracks built to house the prisoners. The compounds were surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire fences. Though most of these camps would be described today as minimum security prisons, fewer than one percent of the prisoners attempted to escape, in part because American treatment of POWs was humane and generous. The men received better food than they had in the military, and many even found their living quarters in the barracks a great improvement over the small cold-water flats where they had lived in Germany. One inmate described the camp as “a golden cage,” far superior to the harsh life led by Americans in German and Japanese POW camps.
Like other countries fighting in this conflict, the United States suffered from a labor shortage. The Geneva Accords stipulated that prisoners could only be forced to work if they were paid for their labor. After some debate, American officials paid the German internees 80 cents per day to work on farms and in factories that didn’t directly produce military weapons or supplies. The prisoners might spend their wages on small luxuries in the camp commissaries.
So easy and light was the supervision in these camps that the the greatest threat to the prisoners came not from their guards, but from each other. Nazi devotees, who were a small minority of the inmates, frequently threatened or even murdered inmates they considered quislings and traitors for befriending camp staff. Eventually, American authorities established special camps for these fanatical devotees of fascism, and separated them from the common run of German detainees.
German POWs board a train in Boston. Public Domain
At war’s end, these captured soldiers were gradually repatriated to Germany. Though most remained there, some returned to the United States to work, to marry, and to raise families.
Once emptied, many camps were torn down or abandoned. The rush of postwar events and the natural course of time have so eroded the stories and histories of these places that many Americans today are unaware that such detention centers ever existed.
But like all generalizations, this one comes with exceptions.
Aliceville
Several POWs worked in the greenhouse at Camp Aliceville in Alabama, tending to flowers and plants for their gardens. Aliceville Museum
From June 1943 to September 1945, the town of Aliceville, Alabama played host to the largest POW camp in the Southeast. Four hundred wooden barracks held up to 6,000 captured Germans and 1,000 U.S. military personnel. Like many other such compounds, the Aliceville Prisoner of War Camp was dismantled after the war, and the lumber sold for scrap. All that remains today of the original camp is a vine-covered stone chimney.
The people of Aliceville remembered the camp by honoring it with a museum. Here, we find the largest collection of POW camp artifacts in the United States: photographs, paintings, drawings, sculpture, musical instruments, letters, and more, most of which came from the hands of the German prisoners. Museum visitors learn that these POWs were skilled at making artwork, marionettes, costumes for plays, and all sorts of practical and decorative pieces from materials scrounged around the prison. “They were really artists,” says Sue Stabler in a video documenting the camp’s history. Stabler led the way in establishing the museum. “They could take nothing and come up with something of beauty to it.”
The prisoners organized plays and musical performances, organized soccer games and foot races, and planted vegetable and flower gardens, in some cases with spectacular effects. There was a camp newspaper, some of the prisoners taught college courses—English was by far the most popular—and though books in German, novels, histories, and biographies, were often in short supply, these too were available.
A POW band playing for a Halloween dance at the American officers’ club in Aliceville in 1944. POWs also created a philharmonic orchestra, a brass band, and a string quartet with instruments provided by the YMCA. Aliceville Museum
Camp life didn’t run so as smoothly as these activities might suggest. Disease and wounds led to some prisoners’ deaths. Two Germans were shot dead one rainy night trying to escape, and several attempted or committed suicide. As mentioned earlier, it became necessary to weed out the radical Nazis, who terrorized, beat, and even throttled prisoners they seemed disloyal to Adolph Hitler, and send them to special camps.
Swords into Ploughshares
Sporting Events were popular diversions for the POWs at Aliceville. Aliceville Museum
In addition to the museum, the University of Alabama Television Services produced a film documenting a 1989 reunion of camp guards, former POWs, and Aliceville townspeople. Through a blend of their reminiscences and photographs from the wartime camp, viewers are given an excellent introduction to life behind wire, the relationships that developed between guards and prisoners, and the impact of this large installment on the small town of Aliceville.
Especially touching, and replete with elements of humor, are the accounts by all these parties of the first German arrivals in Aliceville. When they heard the Germans were coming, the townspeople lined the streets from the railway station to the camp. They seemed to expect, as one ex-prisoner puts it, “devils with horns,” and found instead that their enemies were human beings. The guards quickly drew the same conclusions. Not knowing what to expect, the Germans found their captors fair in their treatment and generous with their assistance.
At the end of the film, a former German inmate sums up the spirit of the reunion with words surely as old as war itself: “The thing we have to be thankful for and ... the meaning of this reunion is that all this war and hatred and all these things are behind us. ... We are looking at each other as human beings and appreciate [each other] as human beings, and there’s peace between us and friendship between us. That’s the real meaning of it.”
Peace, friendship, a common humanity: These are the final messages from the Aliceville Prisoner of War Camp to the rest of us.
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
