German POWs in America

Podcast Transcript

Prisoners of war or POWs during the 20th century were a part of war.

Beligerant nations had to develop systems to guard, house, and feed their prisoners, and before the war, in 1929, most countries had agreed on how prisoners would be treated in captivity.

In reality, conditions for POWs differed dramatically, particularly for captured German soldiers. Those captured by the Soviets faced a far different fate than those captured by the Americans or British.

Learn more about German POWs who were held in the United States, what they experienced, and how it shaped the post-war world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

There has been a lot of attention given to Allied POWs during World War II. Movies like Stalag 17 and The Great Escape, both of which I highly recommend, told the stories of Allied prisoners who attempted to escape and work their way back to the Allies.

While very few prisoners accomplished this, it was at least theoretically possible. Once a prisoner was out of the camp, they could possibly make it to Switzerland or Spain.

How the Germans treated their prisoners depended on who the prisoners were.

Roughly 230,000 American soldiers and about 180,000 British/Commonwealth soldiers were taken prisoner by Germany over the course of the war. About 96–98% of them survived captivity to the end of the conflict.

About 1.8 million French soldiers were captured by the Germans, of whom approximately 1.5 million survived the war for an 84% survival rate.. They also tended to be in captivity much longer than American or British soldiers.

The Germans took 5.7 million Soviet soldiers prisoner, over twice the number of all other nations combined. Of those, 3.3 million died in captivity, primarily from deliberate starvation, exposure, forced labor, and executions. That is a survival rate of only 45%.

So, there was a significant difference between how the Germans treated their prisoners.

This then brings up the question, what happened to the Germans whom the Allies captured?

Just as the German treatment of POWs depended on who they captured, so too did the treatment of German soldiers depend on who captured them.

The Red Army captured about 3 million German soldiers over the course of the conflict. Of these 3 million, roughly 1 million died in captivity due to starvation, disease, forced labor, exposure, and brutal conditions in Soviet camps. The vast majority of these were held for years after the war, with some not being released until 1955.

Some Germans had it worse than others. For instance, of the approximately 90,000 Germans captured at Stalingrad, only about 5,000–6,000 survived to return home, a survival rate of about 6%.

The group of prisoners who had the best treatment, by far, in the entire war, were Germans who were captured by the British and Americans.

Once the Americans joined the war, they began capturing German soldiers as soon as they entered combat in North Africa.

The simplest thing would have been to intern them in Britian as it was closer. However, the British were already overwhelmed with American soldiers and adding prison camps would have only put added strain on the country.

The decision was made to send German soldiers all the way back to the United States. Not only would escape be useless if you are on a different continent an ocean away from your country, but the Americans could also put the prisoners to work to help aleviate the manpower shortage the country faced during the war.

Through the course of the war the United States held about 370,000 German prisoners of war in camps spread across the country, from the Deep South to the Midwest and Great Plains.

The U.S. established about 425 main POW camps across the country, with more than 700 smaller branch or satellite camps.

The county I live in in Wisconsin had two small prisoner of war camps.

The United States not only followed the Geneva Convention, but it also went far beyond what was required.

To put it bluntly, conditions for German prisoners held in the US were far better than they would have faced if they hadn’t been captured and remained in the German army.

German POWs in America typically lived in wooden barracks, received three meals a day (more on that in a bit), had access to libraries, educational programs, and recreational activities.

Local community groups would sometimes come to the camps to put on performances for the prisoners.

They could write letters home and receive packages via the Red Cross. The Americans had no incentive to censor any of the letters that they wrote to their families because they wanted them to tell them the conditions they were living under and how they saw Americans living.

In addition to security, the principal reason the Germans were brought to the US was as a source of labor.

According to the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war could be made to work, so long as they were paid for their labor and their labor wasn’t for the enemy war effort.

Prisoners were primarily sent to work in farms and factories in smaller communities.

They were paid 80 cents per day, which was approximately equivalent to what a private in the US Army made.

Farmers and factories that needed help paid the government 45 cents an hour for their labor. The difference was used to fund the prison program.

Prisoners were paid in a special prison scrip, not in US Dollars. The scrip could be spent at the prison commissary on snacks, cigarettes, playing cards, and other miscellaneous items.

The reason why they weren’t paid in dollars was that if they escaped, it was feared they could use the money to survive outside of camp.

Many of the more educated prisoners taught classes to the other prisoners, teaching them English, mathematics, business, and other subjects. Many of the POWs received the equivalent of a high school and in some cases a university education while they were in the camps.

Most of the prisoners worked more slowly and were less productive than typical American workers, but their work was often of a higher quality. Then again, given the work shortage, they didn’t have much choice.

Officers, again according to the Geneva Convention, were not required to work.

The vast majority of German prisoners were not ideological Nazis; however, some were. It is estimated that about 10% of the prisoners were either committed Nazis or were simply difficult to work with.

Many of these troublesome prisoners were transferred to a special facility in Alva, Oklahoma.

For the most part, locals who lived near the camps accepted the prisoners, and in many cases, they developed friendships with the prisoners they worked alongside.

However, this feeling was not universal. Many people complained regularly about the good treatment the prisoners were getting, and some who said they should be outright executed, given the losses Americans were facing in Europe.

Of course, if the Americans had done that, then the same fate would have befallen American POWs in Germany.

One of the best examples that shows the conditions in which the German prisoners were held was their daily caloric intake. The German prisoners were, on average, getting between 3,000 to 3,200 calories per day, which was on a par with American civilians. This amount did decrease near the end of the war due to rationing.

In comparison, German soldiers on the Eastern Front were subsisting on just 1,800 calories per day. Many German civilians were living on about 2,000 calories per day, depending on where they lived. In some bombed-out cities, it was much less.

Many of the German prisoners actually gained weight while they were prisoners, which was noticed by their families when they returned.

The food they were served had to be adjusted to fit their tastes. Sausages, potatoes, and cabbage were popular items. Most Germans refused to eat corn as they considered it swine food. Likewise, they refused to eat turkey or peanut butter.

The real crux of this story isn’t the conditions under which the Germans were held prisoner. It was their change in attitudes.

Many German POWs arrived expecting to find a country weakened by racial diversity and democratic “chaos,” precisely what Nazi propaganda had told them. Instead, they discovered something that fundamentally challenged their worldview.

These men observed American industrial capacity that dwarfed anything they’d seen in Germany. Agricultural abundance, ethic diversity, and most surprisingly, ordinary Americans who treated them with basic decency despite being enemies.

Many POWs were struck by small things that revealed larger truths. They noticed American guards sharing cigarettes with them, local churches inviting them to services, and farmers who employed them treating them as workers rather than subhuman enemies.

One frequently cited example involves POWs who were amazed that their American guards carried photographs of their families and talked openly about missing home, humanizing the enemy in ways Nazi ideology had never prepared them for.

They noticed that every farmhouse had electricity in every room. Every home had refrigerators, telephones, and radios. Farms had tractors, which were far from ubiquitous in Germany.

In fact, because many of the camps were located in the Midwest and Texas, they were often employed by Americans with German ancestry. These people often shared the same names that they did: Hoffman, Schultz, and Mueller.

Propaganda told them that the Germans who migrated to the United States were losers and traitors. In reality, many of these farmers owned more land than German aristocrats.

The access to uncensored information was equally transformative. Many POWs learned the full extent of the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities through American newspapers and newsreels, information that had been carefully hidden from ordinary German soldiers. Every prison camp had access to the same newspapers as the people who lived near the camps.

Only about 2,200 escape attempts were recorded during the entire war, which was far less than 1 percent of the total number of prisoners. The vast majority of them were captured within hours.

By comparison, it is estimated that the Allied prisoners in Germany had escape attempts that numbered in the tens of thousands.

The end result was that their experience in the United States was transformational for thousands of Germans, even though they were prisoners. They were able to see firsthand a functioning, prosperous democracy, which was the antithesis of everything they had been told by the Nazis.

While it was never the explicit intent of the American government, when these 400,000 men returned to Germany between 1946 and 1948, they became inadvertent ambassadors for American values and democratic ideals.

They were often young men who would go on to become leaders in their communities after the war. They returned to a devastated Germany that needed rebuilding not just physically, but intellectually and morally.

Many former POWs joined the Christian Democratic Union or CDU and other democratic orientated political parties. These POWs had an outsized role in politics, journalism, business, and academia in West Germany.

Unlike the prisoners who returned from Soviet camps, the Germans who were held in the US were much less radicalized and bitter, and were much more open to cooperation and integration with the West.

Perhaps the biggest testament to how German POWs were affected by their time in America was the fact that an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 of them immigrated to the United States after the war, often with the families and businesses they worked for sponsoring them. Thousands more returned to visit.

In other cases, prisoners who befriended Americans developed lifelong friendships and correspondences.

The generous treatment of German POWs represented American values at their best, but it was also strategically brilliant. By demonstrating that democratic societies could maintain their principles even toward enemies, America created a powerful argument for democracy itself.

The contrast between American and Soviet treatment of German POWs became a symbol of the difference between democratic and totalitarian systems and became a powerful weapon during the Cold War.