The inflow of immigrants crossing our border below President Biden’s watch isn’t the primary time the U.S. has hosted international nationals en masse.
Throughout WWII, 400,000 German troopers made the U. S. their dwelling. They have been prisoners of warfare, and so they have been right here as a result of there was no place else to place them. Nice Britain was dwelling on the sting with no house, meals or manpower to spare.
So, they lived out their wartime imprisonment in 600 largely swiftly constructed — and now forgotten — POW camps that stretched throughout the U.S., from Massachusetts (Cape Cod, Ft. Devens) to California, with many camps in Texas, Georgia and Arkansas.
The prisoners, officers excluded, offered the nation with manpower, partially filling the roles of younger American males serving within the navy.
The POWS herded cattle and tended crops in Kansas, Iowa, North Carolina and elsewhere. They labored in forestry in Maine and New Hampshire and as cowboys in Texas.
Whereas most of the officers and noncoms have been hard-core Nazis, the majority of the troopers weren’t. Nonetheless, it was the Nazis who usually dominated the interior workings of the camps issuing punishment that included homicide.
The primary batch of prisoners got here following the Allied defeat of the Common Erwin Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps in North Africa in Could 1943.
The allied victory got here following the U.S. invasion in November 1942 known as Operation Torch. It was, together with the Russian defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad, an indication of issues to come back within the closing defeat of Hitler’s Germany.
Some 170,000 German troopers, together with 12 generals, have been taken prisoner following the battle and shipped to the USA to be housed.
Quickly hundreds extra would arrive in a rustic that had not handled prisoners of warfare to any extent because the Civil Struggle.
Because the U.S. and Germany have been signatories of the Geneva Conference, the German prisoners have been handled nicely within the hope that American prisoners of warfare held in Germany and Japan would even be handled nicely. It was usually was not the case.
The great remedy accounted for why there have been comparatively few makes an attempt to flee. In addition to, America was too huge.
Just one German escapee made his method again to Germany to rejoin the warfare. This decided German walked out of a camp in Oklahoma, hitchhiked a experience to Baltimore, talked his method onto a freighter certain for Lisbon, crossed Portugal and Italy to Germany. He was later recaptured earlier than he might dream of opening a journey company.
All of this and extra is informed in William Geroux’s guide “The Fifteen,” which is about “Homicide, Retribution and the Forgotten Story of NAZI POWs in America.”
The darkish facet of the story was the homicide by rabid Nazis — hangings and loss of life by beating — of scores of fellow prisoners who have been accused of faltering perception in Hitler and Nazism.
The Nazis arrange secret squads within the camps to conduct beatings and killings of prisoners considered too pleasant with U.S. officers or have been accused of being informers.
The U.S. would finally arrest, and with due course of, court docket martial 15 die-hard Nazis on homicide prices. All have been sentenced to hold.
When Hitler’s Third Reich realized by the Swiss of the sentencing, it ordered loss of life sentences for 15 American prisoners of warfare on bogus prices of warfare crimes.
Fourteen of the convicted Nazis have been hanged, whereas the fifteenth had his sentenced commuted to twenty years by President Harry Truman.
The 15 People escaped execution as a result of Nazi Germany collapsed, Hitler shot himself and Germany surrendered.
The prisoners have been despatched dwelling. Nevertheless, some 5 thousand returned to the united statesand turned medical doctors, legal professionals, artists and arrange companies.
Gerd Kruse, an Afrika Korps artilleryman, stated, “Once I set foot on German soil and noticed what occurred, I simply as quickly rotated.” He married an American and ran the household farm.
Frieda Goedecke, who arrange a producing firm and a retail retailer along with her husband Heinrich, who was a prisoner, stated “You are able to do it right here in America. I believe that’s the solely place you are able to do it.”
Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas could be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
