POW camps in American, insider story

[mookiemookie]

Here's a great site I found on German POWs in America. It even includes some of the newspapers that the POWs put together for their camps. Very interesting read!

http://www.traces.org/germanpows.html

[Ishmael]

Here's one I learned from my home town:

I grew up in Benicia, Ca. up in the Northern San Francisco Bay on Carquinez Straits. During the war it was home to the Benicia Arsenal, an Army post dating from the Mexican War that included William T. Sherman & Ulysses S. Grant as officers who served there and cemented their lifelong friendship. It's also home to the oldest Volunteer Fire Dept. in California, dating from 1851. The Fire Department still has the original Hand-Pump Fire engine, built in Germany in the late 1850's.

During World War 2, there was a POW camp there containing, mainly Italian POWs with a few Germans sprinkled in. At the time, the local houses of joy were primarily staffed by Italian girls from Contra Costa county. Once a month, on a Sunday, the Italian POWs were marched down First Street to patronise the houses, and were known to get into fights with the local Italian boys over the girls.

One of the German POWs, I was never able to find out his name, was on a work detail by the firehouse one day and noticed the old hand-pumper moldering away in the back of the firehouse. It turns out that his grandfather had worked in the factory where the engine was built and had accompanied his grandfather to the factory on many occaisions. He went to the POW camp Commandant & the Arsenal Base commander and offered to restore the Engine as a work detail if it was allowed. The Base commander contacted the Mayor & Fire Chief who were only too happy to oblige as no one there had any experience in that kind of restoration.

Over the next two years, he lovingly restored the engine to pristine condition and, after the war, returned to Germany. As a result of his work, The engine is still in use. Every October, there is a Fireman's Muster in Benicia where fire departments from all over the nation come with their antique engines and have competitions with each other for which dept. can roll out & ready fastest, which one can shoot a water stream the farthest with the antique engines, and other phases of the firefighter's job. So, if you're ever in the Bay Area in early October, check out the Benicia Fireman's Muster and see the results of his loving restoration.

On a side note, Benicia was one of Jack London's early haunts as an oyster pirate and then a member of the Fish Patrol(now the Dept. of Fish & Game). He wrote a series of short stories about his adventures there entitled,"Tales of The Fish Patrol". Below is a link to those stories online. I used to sell the local newspapers in the same bar Jack frequented 100 years ago.

http://emotional-literacy-education....-b/totfp10.htm

[desertisland]

Just curious. How do you de-Nazify someone?

[Gildor]

I remember my dad telling me about a POW camp in Northern Ontario. The guards would let the germans take rifles out of the camp to go hunting. Conditions were so good that there was usually no fear that they would try to escape. As a matter of fact, in my neighbourhood growing up I can recall some elderly german men that were former POWS in the camp nearby that loved the area so much that after the war they immigrated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...amps_in_Canada

However, this site documents an escape attempt at Camp X. (some audio clips from CBC radio 1981)

http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-71-1642...s_Canada/clip6

[GT182]

I can't remember his name, or the year, but there was a German POW that escaped from a POW camp in Ontario and made it across the St. Lawrence River to Ogdensburg NY. There was also a movie of his adventure on the television back in the 60s. He was lucky as he almost froze to death from the frigid winter temperatures, and getting wet if I remember that correctly.

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Ishmael

Here's one I learned from my home town:

I grew up in Benicia, Ca. up in the Northern San Francisco Bay on Carquinez Straits. During the war it was home to the Benicia Arsenal, an Army post dating from the Mexican War that included William T. Sherman & Ulysses S. Grant as officers who served there and cemented their lifelong friendship. It's also home to the oldest Volunteer Fire Dept. in California, dating from 1851. The Fire Department still has the original Hand-Pump Fire engine, built in Germany in the late 1850's.

During World War 2, there was a POW camp there containing, mainly Italian POWs with a few Germans sprinkled in. At the time, the local houses of joy were primarily staffed by Italian girls from Contra Costa county. Once a month, on a Sunday, the Italian POWs were marched down First Street to patronise the houses, and were known to get into fights with the local Italian boys over the girls.

One of the German POWs, I was never able to find out his name, was on a work detail by the firehouse one day and noticed the old hand-pumper moldering away in the back of the firehouse. It turns out that his grandfather had worked in the factory where the engine was built and had accompanied his grandfather to the factory on many occaisions. He went to the POW camp Commandant & the Arsenal Base commander and offered to restore the Engine as a work detail if it was allowed. The Base commander contacted the Mayor & Fire Chief who were only too happy to oblige as no one there had any experience in that kind of restoration.

Over the next two years, he lovingly restored the engine to pristine condition and, after the war, returned to Germany. As a result of his work, The engine is still in use. Every October, there is a Fireman's Muster in Benicia where fire departments from all over the nation come with their antique engines and have competitions with each other for which dept. can roll out & ready fastest, which one can shoot a water stream the farthest with the antique engines, and other phases of the firefighter's job. So, if you're ever in the Bay Area in early October, check out the Benicia Fireman's Muster and see the results of his loving restoration.

On a side note, Benicia was one of Jack London's early haunts as an oyster pirate and then a member of the Fish Patrol(now the Dept. of Fish & Game). He wrote a series of short stories about his adventures there entitled,"Tales of The Fish Patrol". Below is a link to those stories online. I used to sell the local newspapers in the same bar Jack frequented 100 years ago.

http://emotional-literacy-education....-b/totfp10.htm

That is one of the best stories I've ever read on these boards. Thank you so much for sharing that! I loved it!

[Lannes]

The one neat tidbit on German POW's I can add is this-

I was heavily into American Civil War reenacting until a back injury ended that. I was part of a pretty authentic group- real "hardcore" bunch and very focused on presenting the most accurate portrayal we could- Confederate and Union both.

Anyway, a fellow I knew is one of the foremost experts and researchers in the country on Civil War uniforms and he uncovered that apparently there was some sort of clothing shortage in some of the German POW camps in North and South Carolina. Some official in North Carolina discovered that, packed away in an old run down warehouse, there were bundles and bundles of never issued Confederate shell jackets and pants. The uniforms were made of a jean/wool weave and the jackets were what is referred to today as the North Carolina pattern. These were then issued to the German prisoners for their work uniforms...

Any of these jackets today, in just about any condition, would sell for tens of thousands of dollars each...

All told, there are probably less than 100 Confederate shell jackets left in existence today...and thousands were issued to German POW's just 60 years ago...

[August]

Originally Posted by desertisland

Just curious. How do you de-Nazify someone?

Explode the myth of Aryan superiority?

[August]

Originally Posted by Lannes

All told, there are probably less than 100 Confederate shell jackets left in existence today...and thousands were issued to German POW's just 60 years ago...

Interesting. I read a book awhile back that in WW2 a unit fighting in the pacific requested a shipment of machetes and was sent (by mistake apparently) 1860s issue US calvary sabers. Our boys did the American thing and modified them into a quite serviceable, though fancy looking, brush cutter. I wonder what they'd be worth.

Regarding the German POWS, my maternal grandfather was one of them. According to family lore he was captured by American troops walking home on the Autobahn a few weeks before the end of the war and spent the next two years in a pow camp in Texas. Four years later my mother brought my dad, an American from Indiana, home to meet him. According to Pop the reception was a bit, well.... frosty, at first.

It got even frostier when they took him and my grandmother for a ride in my dads car and it got not one but four flats several miles out of town. The old man bailed out and walked home with my grandmother in tow.

I was so glad I got a chance to spend some time with him when I was stationed there in the late '70s, before he passed away. That man was hard as nails.

[Woof1701]

I never met my maternal grandfather and so I don't know any specifics, which might be a blessing. Only what my mother and grandmother told me. He was a German Army Medic on the Eastern Front near the end of the war, and was captured by the Russians and served as a medic in the POW camp under very bad conditions. Most injured soldiers died already on the way to the camp and were simply left lying next to the street. There was little to no medication and if you got infected or ill you had very poor chance to survive the labor camp. My grandpa was among the "fortunate" to be released after only five years. Many German POWs stayed far longer or never returned.
During the last months of the war many people - among them my grandmother with my one-year-old mother - had to flee their homes in Eastern Prussia, where her family had been living for ages, from the advancing Russians. Luckily my grandfather had managed to arrange for them a place to stay in Garmisch in Southern Bavaria. So my grandmother packed the stuff and her two children and set off on a journey into the unknown. They were lucky to leave in time since the Russian soldiers made little difference whether you were a civilian or a not. Many of her neighbors never made it out of East Prussia. The 1500 km trip took almost two weeks on foot and parts of it by train, where the railway system hadn't been destroyed and they arrived in Garmisch shortly before the war ended and were lucky to be in US-occupied territory.
My grandmother raised her two children in Garmisch alone until my grandfather returned from POW. Apparently he had changed a lot but never lost his kindness until he died in 1970. My grandmother never returned to her home in Eastern Prussia - now in Poland - not even for a visit after the "Iron Curtain" was drawn back in 1990 and visits were possible. Her son - my uncle - however went back for a visit in the mid 1990s and found many places still intact and even several people of Polish ancestry he knew are still living there. No Germans though. They either fled or were killed. My grandmother died in 2004 at the age of 97.