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Government property became surplus big time after the war. My father had a chicken coop on his retirement farm that the previous owners had bought from the Japanese-American internment camp in Delta, Utah. It was quite nice for a chicken coop, but I don't imagine so nice for family.

There were veterans with business acumen who bought surplus Liberty ships and started their own shipping line. The Boy Scouts and 4-H were two of the largest buyers of former POW camps.

The story of German prisoners not wanting to go home dates back to the American Revolution. When our daughters were attending college in Virginia's famous Shenandoah Valley, we stayed at a budget hotel called "Hessian House." It had a modernistic front connected to a large stone building originally built by Hessian POWs during the American Revolution to house them and later was converted to a tavern on the trail road. The multiple rooms in the large stone building made it ideal for such a repurposing. A local lady told us that many of the POWs who built it chose to stay and farm or work as stone masons in the area after the war ended. One of the officers even sent for his wife and children.

A number of them had been skilled in stone masonry work before becoming a hireling of George III which, I guess, is why the building was still being used more than two centuries later.