Pretty cool’
Mostly Afrika Korps, they weren’t the really bad guys, some hit Africa and never saw battle. They arrived by boat and found that the general had surrendered. For them the war was over, and southern fried chicken would soon be on their chow hall menus. Lots of videos about then on Youtube. The Brits made a deal with the US to take them because they had on room for them.
Lucky Germans. Think of all the Germans captured at Stalingrad and their outcome.
dmam2011, Thanks for posting this great article and introducing me to this great site:
Clarksvillian Underground
Please ping me when you post articles from this site.
Thanks
Dave
I worked with a Federal Agent whose Father-in-Law owned a large farm in South Alabama. Herb told me that he would give them a coke and a pack of cigarettes, I think every day.
He became friends with many of them and exchanged Christmas cards until he died.
He mentioned that they would receive Red Cross packages from Germany. One thing they contained was German cigarettes which they immediately threw away.
Legend has it there was one on Fort Jackson. The neighborhood I grew up in was once on Relaxin’ Jackson and there were several building foundations in the surrounding woods. We were told as kids those foundations were part of the POW camp.
When we were stationed in Bremerhaven, Germany the owner of a local gasthaus was a POW in Texas. He went to Texas every year on vacation. When we were drawing down in the early 90s I asked “Joe” what he was going to do when we all left. His answer ws “When the American’s go, Joe goes. I am moving to Texas!”
More than once Joe told me that he had a good time in Texas. I guess in retrospect anything is better than the Russian front.
While at Ft Campbell on maneuvers we were tasked to moving to a new location and erecting a comms antenna.
We got to the location and found a nice clear spot, though overgrown, right near a river.
Started putting up the antenna and a black guy named Rick on my team started to pull the rope to get the antenna upright.
Turned out, in the high weeds in this “clearing in the trees” was a very old cemetery.
Well Rick, tumbled over one of these headstones in the weeds while pulling that antenna rope and about lost his cookies. He went hollering and hooping off into the woods.
We just busted out laughing :)
Lots of German POWs were sent to Iowa as well. My dad fought in North Africa and traded a German soldier a candy bar for a patch on his uniform. I now have it.
The military indiscriminately took enough of my Grandfather’s farm for a POW camp to render it inconsequential, paid him little as they condemned it. There were lots of other places not nearly so useful or valuable so why that one? WTH knows?
Our prisoners were extremely well treated and the ones of the Germans... not. There was no quid pro quo on that.
We should know how the Japs tortured and impressed our people as slave labor and then starved them to death or killed them brutally. The Japs have no excuse for what they did and I have no forgiveness. They are a crude and cruel society for what they did. I need to be convinced they have changed, regret and repent. At this date I am not convinced. We, McArthur, created modern Japan as we did Germany and much of the rest of Europe.
At least some people in liberated Europe still remember what our boys and other’s boys did. Generations have kept the tradition of respect and remembrance alive in some places. That will probably not go on much longer. Even we are forgetting. It only takes 3 or 4 generations for memories to fade and disappear.
There were also prisoner of war camps in Wisconsin and in the South. The camps in Wisconsin were practically idyllic for German prisoners because a lot of Wisconsinites were first and second generation Germans themselves.
The camps in the South reached a point were those German POWs who proved not to be a problem were allowed to go into towns and stroll around, go shopping and go to movie houses where to the consternation of black residents they were allowed to sit in the “Whites Only’’ sections.