Posted on 10/30/2021 11:28:57 PM PDT by citizen
There were about half a dozen prisoner of war camps in Tennessee during World War II — the best known of which was Camp Crossville, in Cumberland County. We know a lot more about Camp Crossville than the others because of Gerhard Hennes.
Hennes was a German officer captured in North Africa in May 1943. Five months later, he entered the gates of Camp Crossville, where he was interred for two years.
After World War II, Hennes would become an American citizen, and in 2004 he published The Barbed Wire: POW in the USA. In it he gives a detailed description of life at Camp Crossville — a piece of real estate now occupied by the Clyde York 4-H Training Center.
Hennes and his fellow prisoners were treated better than any prisoners of war I’ve ever heard of. They were given new uniforms, they were not interrogated and they were mostly left to the authority of their own German officers.
The best part of Camp Crossville, Hennes claims, was the food. “There were three square meals a day,” he wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at elizabethton.com ...
In Texas, armadillo is opossum on the half-shell. Yum.
Their fellow soldiers captured by the Russians were not so lucky.
My father worked for the Corps of Engineers, and helped build POW camps for Germans near Frederick, Maryland. He told me that the prisoners were used to help pick apples in the local orchards and loved it. One day, a large German POW asked my father for a cigarette, and was given a menthol brand. When he began smoking it, he turned white with terror because he thought my father had poisoned him.
Look up the book WN62 about Heinrich Severloh a German machine gunner on the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach, he was taken prisoner and transported to the USA where he was a POW mainly traveling around the South working a a farm laborer
Yes. Many war crimes in the Pacific went unpunished.
He did the restoration work on many Mississippi and Louisiana historical buildings The pointed finger church in port Gibson (1807)for example and the old State Capital and Beauvoir ....and so on He fell and broke his back there from the ceiling of that church He was paroled and stayed in the USA sponsored by my grandpa and married a woman from Houston and settled there and had two boys Quite a story...I knew him well....
Still have some maps of SoCA where Patton had trained his Army in live minefields before the war. Those live minefields were cleared by German POWs.
I notice the former POW camp is now used by the 4-H. I wonder if that was common. I know a portion of the former POW camp near Front Royal, VA, is now a 4-H site.
I’m surprised they didn’t have one in Frankenmuth!
Could be “swamp rabbit” and if Granny cooked it, it sho-nuff was some mighty good vittles.
When I was in Germany, I knew a former German soldier, who was captured in North Africa. He said, he, and many other Germans, thought that getting captured by the Americans, was the best day of their lives. Many of them spent the rest of the war in Paris, Texas.
As a kid we would tell scary stories in a Northern Minnesota cabin about escaped German prisoners, thinking the war was still on. Living in the woods and raiding cabins, kidnapping and killing kids, etc.
It made The Battle of The Atlantic one-way because the German's knew westward bound ships would be transporting German POWs.
https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/pow-camps-in-world-war-ii/
It was the same for Italian POW’s here in Australia. I got to know a former Italian Lieutenant who was a POW here. He was captured in North Africa and ended up in a camp here and worked on a farm and thought he’d died and gone to heaven. After the war he immigrated to Australia and worked on the Snowy Hydro Electric project.
I even met a former Japanese POW. He was interesting as he described how it took years for him to get over the shame of being captured.
Quite a few were used as farmhands. Here’s one article.
https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/money_04.html
Stick these search terms in your favorite non-Google search engine.
german farmhands pow wwii
You’ll get tons more articles from all around the country.
I remember my grandfather telling me our little town had a couple German POWs that worked at the local factory during the day
“I had no idea there were European theater POW camps in the US”
Yep, there were some German POW’s working the Fields in Central California, many didn’t go home after the War. My Dad was in his teens during the War and lived in Corcoran CA and remembers this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Ruston
Camp Ruston was one of the largest prisoner-of-war camps in the United States during World War II, with 4,315 prisoners at its peak in October 1943. Camp Ruston served as the “base camp” and had 8 smaller work branch camps associated to it. Camp Ruston included three large, separated compounds for POWs, a full, modern hospital compound, and a compound for the American personnel. One of the POW compounds, located in the far northwestern part of the camp was designated for POW officers. The officer’s compound’s barracks were constructed to house a lesser number of POWs affording more privacy and room for the officers. The enlisted men’s barracks were designed to house a maximum of 50 POWs in two rows of bunks that ran along each side. POW latrines were separate buildings located at the end of each compound
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