German POWs Expected Misery at Camp Ruston—Then Louisiana Changed Their View of America

There is a page in an archive in North Louisiana, and on in a careful officer’s hand is an entry dated the 4th of June, 1944. It records that the evening was calm. The man who wrote it had been captured that afternoon. He wrote the entry early the way a busy officer does, filling in the log before the day was over.

It is the last thing he ever wrote in his war diary, a peaceful evening that never happened. And for the next 2 years, his family in Germany believed he had gone down with his boat while he sat behind barbed wire in Lincoln Parish, Louisiana alone. And he raised He was not the only one. There were dozens of them hidden in the corner of a camp that most Americans have never heard of.

If your father served in that war, he almost certainly never knew this happened. There were camps like this one in 46 of the 48 states. There is a field in North Louisiana where the grass grows over concrete. Cattle graze there now. In summer, the heat sits on the ground like a hand pressing down. And the pine trees at the edge of the pasture make a sound in the wind that people who lived here in the 1940s said reminded them of water.

If you walk that ground slowly, if you know what you are looking for, you can still find the outlines. A rectangular foundation, a line in the dirt where a fence once ran. Four buildings sagging, roofs failing, paint gone decades ago. Between 1943 and 1946, more than 4,000 enemy soldiers lived on this ground. They were German, most of them, but not all.

There were Italians here and Austrians and Poles and Czechs and Yugoslavs and Romanians and more than 100 Russians and men from Chechnya who required special meals because they were Muslim and Frenchmen who had fought for Vichy and at least one man who was a citizen of the United States of America. They picked cotton in Lincoln Parish.

They cut timber in the piney woods. They built roads that people still drive on. They played soccer. They put on plays. That a radio station in Shreveport broadcast their music into the homes of the very people whose sons were fighting their army in Europe. And in one corner of this camp in a compound that no inspector was allowed to enter, the United States government hid a submarine crew whose own families had already been told they were dead.

This is the story of Camp Ruston. It begins as all of it begins, before dawn on the first day of September, 1939. At 4:45 in the morning on September 1, 1939, the German pre-dreadnought Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military depot at Westerplatte, Danzig. She was an old ship of the previous war, serving as a training vessel, and she had come into the harbor on what was announced as a courtesy visit. She fired at point-blank range.

Across the frontier, more than a million and a half German soldiers crossed into Poland from three directions from the west, from East Prussia in the north, and from Slovakia in the south. The word the world would learn for what happened next was Blitzkrieg, lightning war. Armor moving faster than the defenders could reorganize.

Aircraft striking the roads behind the front so that reinforcements never arrived. Poland fought for 5 weeks. Britain and France declared war on the 3rd of September. It made no difference to Warsaw. What followed over the next 20 months was the fastest conquest of a continent in recorded history. Denmark fell in a single day, Norway in 2 months, the Netherlands in 5 days, Belgium in 18.

France, which had held the German army for 4 years in the last war and buried a generation doing it, France signed an armistice on the 22nd of June, 1940. By the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler stood in Paris. There is a photograph of him at the Trocadero with the Eiffel Tower behind him. He is smiling and across the channel Britain stood alone.

>> [clears throat] >> In the United States 3,000 miles from all of it, the mood was complicated. There were Americans who believed this was Europe’s war and Europe’s problem and there were a great many of them. There were Americans who believed that a world in which one man controlled the industrial capacity of the entire European continent was a world in which the United States would eventually have to fight anyway and that it was better to fight it with allies still standing.

President Franklin Roosevelt belonged to the second group. In March of 1,941 not 1,940 as the story is sometimes told, but March of into law the Lend-Lease Act. The United States would supply Britain with the material of war, rifles, ammunition, aircraft, ships, trucks, boots, food. Not soldiers, not yet.

The Germans understood exactly what this was. A neutral country does not arm one belligerent against another, but Hitler for the moment did not want an American war and so the guns and the tanks and the tin meat crossed the Atlantic while the U-boats hunted the ships that carried them and the fiction of American neutrality held. It held until December.

On the 7th of December, 1,941, Japanese aircraft struck the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Four days later, on the 11th of December, 1,941, Germany declared war on the United States. The fiction was over and a country that had spent two decades convincing itself that the last war had been the last war began very quickly to build.

One year and five months after Pearl Harbor the German position in North Africa collapsed. The campaign there had run since 1,940 Back forth across a strip of desert coastline 1,800 mi long. And for much of it, the Germans had the better of it. The Deutsches Afrika Korps arrived in February of 1941 under a commander named Erwin Rommel. And Rommel did to the British in the desert what German armor had done in France.

He moved faster than his enemy could think. The British press, in a kind of exhausted admiration, started calling him the Desert Fox. But there is a limit to what genius can do against arithmetic. In October and November of 1942, at a railway halt in Egypt called El Alamein in Egypt, 60 mi west of Alexandria, not in Tunisia. As the story is often garbled, the British Eighth Army under General Bernard Montgomery broke the Axis line in 12 days of grinding attritional battle.

Montgomery had more men, tanks, and more ammunition, and he used all of it. Rommel had a supply line that ran across the Mediterranean the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force were slowly closing. Four days after Montgomery’s breakthrough, American and British forces landed in Morocco and Algeria, Operation Torch.

The Axis in Africa was now caught between two armies, and it had nowhere to go but backward into Tunisia, into a shrinking pocket around Tunis and Bizerte. The pocket held through the winter. It broke in May. On the 13th of May, 1943, the last organized Axis resistance in North Africa surrendered. Rommel was not there.

He had been evacuated to Germany 2 months earlier, sick and out of favor. What remained behind was an army, roughly a quarter of a million German and Italian soldiers, laying down their weapons on the beaches and in the olive groves of Cap Bon. 250,000 men. The Allies had just won a campaign. They had also just acquired a problem so large that nobody had a plan for it.

Here is the thing about victory that no one puts on a recruiting poster. Every prisoner you take is a man you must now feed. >> Every day. >> Twice, three times a day. He must be guarded, which means soldiers who could be fighting are instead standing in towers. He must be given medical care. Under the Geneva Convention of 1,929, which Britain and the United States had signed and intended to honor, he must be allowed to write letters home, receive mail, be visited by neutral inspectors from the International Committee of the

Red Cross, and be held in conditions no worse than those of the detaining power’s own garrison troops. Britain in the spring of 1943 could not do this. Britain was an island under blockade. Its food came by convoy through the deadliest water on Earth. Its ports were bombed. It had already absorbed prisoners from earlier campaigns and had nowhere to put a quarter of a million more.

And every ton of bread that went into a prison camp was a ton that had crossed the Atlantic through the U-boat lines to get there. So, the British asked the Americans. The logic was efficient in a way that only wartime logistics can be. Ships were crossing the Atlantic westbound anyway, empty, having delivered troops and supplies to the European theater.

Empty ships are wasted ships. Fill them with prisoners. Send them to a country with unlimited food, unlimited space, and no bombers overhead. The United States War Department did not want them. There is no polite way to say this. The War Department resisted, argued, and finally agreed, and then had to invent from almost nothing a national prison system for foreign soldiers.

What followed was one of the least remembered construction efforts of the American war. Camps went up in 46 of the 48 states. Some were vast purpose-built installations. Some were tent lines attached to existing army posts. Some were converted Civilian Conservation Corps camps left over from the Depression.

Before it was over, the United States would hold roughly 425,000 Axis prisoners on its own soil, of whom something on the order of 370,000 were German. They came in through the ports of embarkation on the East Coast, principally in New York and Virginia, Norfolk, Newport News. There they were processed, photographed, fingerprinted, sorted, and put on trains.

And the trains went south. They went south for reasons that had nothing to do with hospitality. The War Department wanted prisoners far from the coast, far from the shipyards and aircraft plants and refineries that were the arteries of American war production. It wanted them where the winters were mild because heating barracks cost coal and coal was rationed.

And it wanted them where there was work because under the Geneva Convention, enlisted prisoners could be required to labor provided the labor was not war-related and they were paid for it. The American South in 1943 had a great deal of work and almost nobody left to do it. Every young man who could pass a physical was in uniform or in a defense plant.

The cotton was in the fields, the timber was standing. Louisiana would take more than 40 prisoner of war camps. One of them would be the largest in the state and one of the largest in the country. It would sit 7 mi outside a town of about 8,000 people in the red clay and pine hills of Lincoln Parish. The town was called Ruston. Ruston in 1942 was a railroad town, an agricultural town, and a college town in roughly that order.

It had grown up along the Vicksburg Shreveport and Pacific line in the 1880s and the railroad was still the thing that mattered most about it, a fact that would determine its role in the war more than anything else. Cotton and timber moved out on those rails, everything else moved in. The local college was Louisiana Polytechnic Institute, Louisiana Tech as everyone called it and as it is called today.

In 1942 it had a Navy V-12 program training young men to be naval and Marine officers. Boys who had been studying agriculture the year before were drilling on the quadrangle. 7 mi down the road, closer to the campsite than Ruston itself, was Grambling, then a small community of African-American families, built around a school founded at the beginning of the century to educate black students in a state that gave them very little else.

It would become Grambling State University. In 1942, it was a village with a college in it. In a state operating under the full legal architecture of Jim Crow, separate school, separate waiting rooms, separate water fountains, separate everything. Forced by law and by worse than law. Hold that fact. It will matter later.

And it will matter in a way that made some Americans who lived through it angry for the rest of their lives. In Ruston in 1942, the war was visible in the ordinary way it was visible everywhere in America. Blue Star banners hung in front windows, one star for each son in service. Victory gardens filled the backyards.

There were ration books for sugar, for coffee, for gasoline, for shoes. There were scrap drives. There was a constant low anxiety in the post office when the mail came. And then in September of 1942, the government came and bought 770 acres of pinewoods west of town. The price was $24,200. The contract went to the T.L.

a Ruston firm, working under the supervision of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Construction began in September 1942. What they were building, on paper, was not a prisoner of war camp at all. This is the first thing about Camp Ruston that surprises people, and it is documented. The facility was originally designated an enemy alien internment camp.

Its intended population was civilians internees of Japanese ancestry, and possibly, under plans that were discussed and never carried out, civilians of German and Italian descent as well. That is what the ground was bought for, families, not soldiers. Those plans dissolved. The government’s mass internment of Japanese Americans was concentrated in the Western states.

In the camps whose names are now part of the American memory, Manzanar, Tule Lake, Heart Mountain, Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas, the need for additional alien internment facilities evaporated. And at almost exactly the same moment, the need for a completely different kind of camp became overwhelming.

So, the blueprints changed and the men kept building. They built it to a standard war department plan because everything in the American war was built to a standard plan that was the secret of American production, the thing that made it possible to build 20 camps at once with the same drawings. Barracks of wood frame sheathed and covered in tar paper, mess halls, kitchens, latrines in separate buildings at the end of each compound, administrative offices, housing for the American garrison.

The land was raw. The camp was cut directly out of the piney woods. And the woods offered nothing, no water. >> [snorts] >> Nope. All of it had to be laid from scratch. Three wells were drilled, a water tower went up over the tree line, the tallest thing for miles, visible from the highway. And around the whole of it, the fences went up, barbed wire in double lines, guard towers at the corners and the intervals with searchlights and telephone lines and a clear field of view down the length of the wire.

Inside the wire, the space was divided. Three large compounds for prisoners separated from one another, a full modern hospital compound, a compound for the American personnel. The enlisted barracks were designed to hold a maximum of 50 men each, two rows of bunks running the length of the building, one down each wall at either end, and a bare board floor between.

The total cost of construction was two and a half million dollars in 1942 dollars on land that had cost 24,000. By the end of the year it was finished a small city of tar paper and pine standing empty in the woods of Lincoln Parish waiting for 4,000 enemies who had not yet been captured. The first people to live at Camp Ruston were not German soldiers. They were American women.

The problem was timing. The camp was finished at the end of 1942. The great mass of Axis prisoners would not be taken until Tunisia collapsed in May of 1943. For months, the United States Army owned a brand new, fully equipped, two and a half million dollar installation in North Louisiana with absolutely nobody in it.

The Army does not leave assets idle. In the spring of 1943, Camp Ruston became a training center for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The WAC had existed for less than a year. It had been created by an act of Congress in May 1942. Over resistance that had been open, loud, and frequently contemptuous, the arguments in the congressional debate had included the suggestion that women in uniform would destroy the American family.

The Corps was authorized anyway because the Army had run the numbers and discovered that there were tens of thousands of jobs in the military that did not require a man. And that every one of those jobs filled by a woman released a man for combat. In April recruits arrived at Camp Ruston and formed the 42nd Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps regiment.

Picture it because it deserves to be pictured. The trains coming into Ruston and off them stepping women from all over the country from farms in Iowa, from offices in Chicago, from small towns not unlike this one. Most of them having never been more than 100 [clears throat] miles from home.

Arriving at a raw pine camp in the Louisiana heat with a water tower standing over it and the sound of insects so loud at night that recruits wrote home about it. Their training was not decorative. It included infantry drill, physical conditioning, customs and courtesies, defense against chemical attack, and regulations. They marched, they ran, they stood inspection.

They learned to salute and to be saluted. Some received specialized instruction in motor transport, which meant driving jeeps and 2 and 1/2 ton trucks and performing minor field repairs on military vehicles. They lived in the barracks that had been built for 50 men. It lasted about 3 and 1/2 months.

In that time, somewhere between 2 and 3,000 WAAC recruits went through basic training at Camp Ruston. The sources disagree, and nobody has reconciled them. And the whole time everyone involved knew it was temporary. The arrangement had been made under an explicit condition the core would vacate the camp on 30 days’ notice if the prisoners came.

In July 1943, 2 months after the surrender in Tunisia, the notice came. The women packed and left. The army painted over what needed painting, and the camp stood empty again, but only for a few weeks. There is a detail here that is almost too neat to be true, and yet it is in the record. The barracks that would house Rommel’s Afrika Korps had, weeks earlier, been full of American women learning to defend themselves against poison gas.

The prisoners came on the 14th of August, 1943. There were 300 of them, all enlisted, all veterans of the Deutsches Afrika Korps, Rommel’s army. The men the American newsreels had spent 2 years describing as the finest soldiers in Hitler’s Reich. They came by rail because the rail line was the reason the camp was here.

They had crossed the Atlantic in the holds of returning transports, been processed at the East Coast ports, and been on trains for days. They arrived filthy, exhausted, and in many cases still wearing the tropical uniforms they had surrendered in desert khaki, faded almost white by two years of African sun.

And the town came out to look at them. Ruston did not welcome this. That needs to be said plainly. Because the story of Camp Ruston is usually told as a story of friendship, and the friendships were real, and they came later. What came first was fear and fury. The people of Lincoln Parish had sons in the Pacific and sons in Europe.

They had blue stars in their windows, and some of them gold stars, the star you hung when the sun did not come back. They read the newspapers. They saw the newsreels of the blitz of Rotterdam, of Warsaw. They had been told for four years that these men were the enemy of civilization itself. And now the government proposed to put 4,000 of them 7 mi up the road, feed them army rations, and let them out to work in the fields.

Letters were written to Washington. People said out loud and in that this was absurd, that Germans were being brought to Ruston, that there were grandchildren here, that somebody ought to tell President Roosevelt exactly what they thought of it. Nobody in Washington was listening. The camps were going up in 46 states, and the arithmetic was not negotiable.

So, the townspeople did the only thing available to them. They came out and they looked. There are accounts of people standing along the road and near the depot to watch the columns come in, wanting to see the supermen. What they saw were young men, very young. Most of them 19, 20, 22. Thin, sunburned to the color of brick. Some of them limping.

Some with the flat, emptied out expression of men who have been marched, shipped, counted, and marched again for 3 months, and have stopped asking where they are going. They did not look like the newsreels. That gap between what the town expected to see and what it actually saw is where the entire long, strange, uncomfortable story of Camp Ruston begins.

Not with forgiveness. Nobody forgave anything in August of 1943. Just with a small involuntary recognition on both sides of the wire that the other party was made of the same material. Inside the gate, the machinery of internment took hold. The men were stripped of the uniforms they had arrived in.

This detail matters enormously, and it is the single most commonly falsified thing about Camp Ruston, repeated in books and documentaries for decades. The prisoners did not spend the war walking around North Louisiana in Wehrmacht uniform. They were issued American khaki surplus stock left over from the First World War, 25 years old, pulled out of depots where it had been sitting since 1918.

1918. And on the back of every shirt and every coat, and on the front of both trouser legs, the letters were painted W, prisoner of war, large enough to read at a distance, large enough to see through a rifle scope from a guard tower. Impossible to hide, impossible to remove, and impossible to mistake for civilian clothing if a man got over the wire and out into the pine woods.

Photographs exist of prisoners at Camp Ruston in German uniform. There are perhaps a handful. They were taken on specific, rare occasions, men posing for Christmas cards to send home, and men standing at the graves of comrades who had died in captivity. That was all. Every other day of the war, 4,000 German soldiers in Lincoln Parish wore the discarded clothing of the American army that had beaten their fathers. They were counted.

They were assigned to compounds, and the compounds were organized the way the War Department organized every camp in the country, by rank, by service branch, and critically, by politics. That last category is the one most people do not expect. The American authorities understood something about their prisoners that took them time to learn and cost them dearly in some other camps.

A German prisoner population was not one thing. It contained committed National Socialist men who believed, who had believed since 1933, 1933, and who considered surrender a betrayal and considered any comrade who cooperated with the Americans a traitor to be dealt with. It contained men who had never believed any of it and had been conscripted anyway.

It contained Austrians who had been annexed and Poles from territories Germany had absorbed and men from a dozen occupied countries who had been given a choice between a German uniform and something worse. Put those men in one barracks and there will be violence. There was violence at camps across America. Men were beaten.

Men were killed by other prisoners, tried by American courts and executed. So, the camps were sorted. Hardcore Nazis were segregated where they could be identified. Officers were housed apart from enlisted men as the Geneva Convention required. Some camps became almost entirely Africa Corps or Luftwaffe or naval.

Camp Ruston by design was an Africa Corps camp first. The flow of prisoners did not stop. Through late August through September, the trains kept arriving. By October 1,943, 2 months after the first 300 men walked the gate, Camp Ruston held 4,315 prisoners. 181 of them were officers. The three original compounds were full. A fourth was built in the far northwestern corner of the property for officers only barracks constructed to hold fewer men with more room and more privacy because that too was what the convention required. And Camp Ruston

became something more than a camp. It became a base camp, the administrative center for a network of eight smaller branch camps scattered across North Louisiana at Bastrop, at Lake Providence, at Tallulah, at West Monroe from which work details went out into the farms and forests of the region. 4,315 men.

For scale, the entire population of the town of Ruston in The prisoners were now half the size of the town that had petitioned Washington to keep them out. Two men from that first year deserve to be named because the record keeps their names and because what happened to them says more than any statistic. The first is Hans Stollberg. He was a lieutenant, a tank officer in the Africa Corps captured in North Africa.

His exact age at capture is not established in the surviving records and it will not be invented here. The honest description is a junior officer, young enough that the drawings he made in captivity were of the automobiles of his childhood. Because that is what Stollberg did at Camp Ruston, he drew. As an officer, he could not be compelled to work.

The convention exempts officers from labor and 181 men at Camp Ruston fell under that exemption. Officers could work if they wished. Many chose to out of boredom because the days behind wire in Louisiana were long and empty and identical. Stollberg chose to. He worked as an assistant to one of the camp’s civilian accountants. And in his hours off, he drew cars of Weimar Germany, the cars from the streets of Cologne where he had grown up, the machines a boy memorizes before he is old enough to drive one.

He drew them from memory on whatever paper the camp could provide in a pine barracks in Louisiana while the war ground on without him. When he left, he gave the drawings to the accountant. Keep that in mind. We will come back to those drawings near Arcadia almost 50 years later. The second man is Heinz Letau. Letau was born in 1909.

He was a major in the Luftwaffe, but the uniform was not the point of him. He was a scientist, a meteorologist, one of the serious ones, a man who had spent his professional life studying the behavior of the layer of air closest to the ground. He would spend a portion of this war as a prisoner in Louisiana in a camp where the American War Department would eventually establish an educational program supplied with books borrowed from the library of Louisiana Polytechnic Institute down the road.

And after the war, he would emigrate to the United States, take a professorship, and become one of the most significant meteorologists in the country, a founding figure in the field of boundary layer meteorology at the University of Wisconsin. A Luftwaffe major held behind American wire who would end his life shaping how American science understands the atmosphere.

The camp is full of men like this. Doctors, engineers, professors, painters, musicians. A novelist, though he has not arrived yet. Camp Ruston in 1943 was not a camp full of professional soldiers. It was a camp full of the ordinary professional class of a country that had put its entire ordinary professional class into uniform.

And then there was Ludwig Staudinger, Jr. He was born in Germany in 1921. His family emigrated to the United States when he was a boy and settled on the West Coast, Washington orchard country, apples and hops, a long way from anywhere. He grew up American. The family [clears throat] became American. When the war began in Europe, Lud Staudinger, Jr. was in his late teens.

>> [clears throat] >> And something in him, loyalty to the country of his birth or the particular vulnerability of a young man to a story about destiny or something he never fully explained to anyone whose account survives pulled him back. He left Yakima before the United States entered the war, before Pearl Harbor.

He crossed back to Germany and joined the German army. He fought in the early years. He was captured by the British. And then through the machinery of Allied prisoner transfer, the trains, the transports, the East Coast ports, the sorting, the rail lines south, Ludwig Staudinger, Jr.

, naturalized citizen of the United States of America, was delivered as a German prisoner of war to a camp in the state of Louisiana. He came home in the hold of a ship wearing the uniform of the enemy, and he was locked up in his own country. The records indicate he was the only American held as a prisoner of war at Camp Ruston. Think about what that means for the man in the barracks.

Every other prisoner in that compound could tell himself a straightforward story. I lost. I am far from home. And one day the war will end and I will go back. Startinger was already back. He was 2,000 mi from the town he had grown up in in a country whose language he spoke without an accent being counted twice a day by young men who could have been his neighbors.

There was no version of the end of the war that returned him to anything. Stand at the wire in October of 1943 and look at what has been assembled in the pine woods of Lincoln Parish. 4,315 men, 181 officers, four compounds, a hospital, a garrison, a water tower, and eight branch camps feeding work details out across North Louisiana.

Germans, yes, but also Italians and Austrians and Poles and Czechs and Yugoslavs and Romanians. More than 100 Russians who would ended up in German uniform and would in time become the darkest story this camp produced. Men from Chechnya whose Islamic dietary requirements the United States Army in North Louisiana had to work out how to meet and did.

And around them, a community of about 8,000 people who had asked the government not to do this and had been overruled who were about to spend 3 years watching enemy soldiers pick their cotton, cut their timber, repair their fences, and eat lunch in their fields while their own sons were somewhere in Italy or the Pacific.

And while black Americans in this same parish who paid taxes into the same treasury that fed these prisoners could not sit down in the same room to eat. Nobody at Camp Ruston in October 1943 knew what was coming. They did not know that in 8 months in the Atlantic off the coast of West Africa the United States Navy would do something no American force had done since 1815 and that the consequence of it would arrive here at this camp in this compound under a secrecy so absolute that men and women who worked inside these fences would be told that speaking

of it could end with a court-martial. They did not know that an entire submarine crew was coming whose wives and mothers in Germany would be handed notices saying they had died at sea. They did not know that on a night in 1945, this camp would gather its prisoners into a room to watch a film and post armed military police along the walls before the projector started.

They did not know that when peace finally came, some of these men would beg not to be sent home. For now in October 1943, there is only the water tower over the pines, the searchlight sweeping the wire, 4,000 men in 25-year-old khaki with two painted letters on their backs, and the sound of the wind coming through the piney woods that everybody said in the dark sounded almost like water.

The winter of 1943 into 1944 was the quiet time at Camp Ruston. That is not the same as saying it was easy. Ask any man who has spent a year behind a fence he did not build in a country he cannot name on a map doing the same work on the same red dirt every day while the war he lost keeps going without him. Boredom is not nothing.

Boredom is the enemy that gets men killed in prison camps and every camp commander in the American system knew it. So, Camp Ruston filled the days. The soccer field was the center of everything. The Germans called it Fußball and they played it the way men play a game when the game is the only thing in the day that belongs to them hard, loud, and constantly.

The Americans could not make sense of it at first. Then some of the guards started watching from the towers and then from the fence line and then a few of them came down and played. That is in the record and it should not be smoothed over into something sentimental. These were armed men guarding enemy soldiers and there were rules, and the rules were enforced.

But, sport did something that no policy could have engineered. It put a 20-year-old from Bavaria and a 20-year-old from Arkansas on the same patch of grass with the same objective, and it turned out that neither of them up close was what the newsreels had promised. There was an orchestra. There were men in that camp who had been professional musicians in Germany before somebody handed them a rifle.

And they organized themselves, and they played waltzes, foxtrots, jazz American jazz, the music Hitler’s government as degenerate played by German prisoners in Louisiana. And in one of the strangest facts of the entire American home front, radio station KWKH in Shreveport broadcast a program of their music.

Sit with that a moment. In 1944, a family in north Louisiana with a son in the Pacific could turn on the radio in the evening and listen to a concert performed by German soldiers 7 mi up the highway. There were classes. American staff and qualified prisoners taught chemistry, mathematics, and political theory.

There was a library stocked in part with books borrowed from Louisiana Polytechnic Institute. Some prisoners enrolled in correspondence courses from major American universities and did the coursework in a tar paper barracks. And there was craft, the thing that always happens when you give bored men time and materials.

In front of the barracks, they built miniatures out of rock and cement and mud, models of the buildings of home, castles, windmills, monuments. In the Africa Corps compound, there was a mock-up of a sports complex about 10 ft square built by men who had last seen the real thing before the war. They were building Germany out of Louisiana clay because they could not go there.

Every compound had a canteen. Prisoners could not hold American currency, so they were paid in script camp money good only inside the wire, and they spent it on pens and pencils and notebooks, on magazines and newspapers and paperback books, on tobacco and playing cards. Until the middle of 1945, they could buy soft drinks, candy, cookies, and beer.

Remember that sentence? It is going to come back and it is going to bite. The food was good. There is no honest way around this. Under the Geneva Convention, the detaining power must feed prisoners on the same scale as its own garrison troops. And the United States Army in army in the history of the world. The prisoners ate what the guards ate.

And because there were professional cooks among the prisoners, real ones, men who had run kitchens in civilian life, the Germans frequently ate better than the Americans out of identical ingredients. One Luftwaffe pilot summed up Camp Ruston in a line that got repeated for decades afterward. He said it was a tough camp, but by German standards, it was still like a vacation.

He was not being ungrateful. He was doing arithmetic. In the winter of 1944, his mother in Germany was standing in a ration line, and his cousins were in Russia, and the cities were burning from the air night after night. Louisiana was hot and boring, and it was the safest place any of these men had been since 1939, and prison camp life was not leisure.

Compound chores were mandatory. The camp was kept immaculate with attempts at landscaping. Enlisted prisoners worked in the maintenance shops, in the guards’ mess hall, in the hospital, in the laundry. And then, most of them, they went outside the wire. The work program is the part of this story that put German soldiers into the daily life of North Louisiana, and it is the reason anyone in Lincoln Parish still has a story to tell.

Enlisted prisoners could be required to work. They were paid 80 cents a day in script for the standard detail. They went out in trucks under guard to farms and to timber tracks and to government facilities, including Barksdale Army Airfield over near Shreveport. They cut pine, they mended fences, they tended crops, and they picked cotton.

Every account agrees on cotton. Cotton was the one that broke them. You’d have been over in the Louisiana sun, dragging a sack that gets heavier every hour. And the bolls cut your fingers open in the first days until the skin builds. German soldiers who had crossed the Western Desert under Rommel came back from cotton fields in Lincoln Parish and said it was the hardest physical labor of their lives.

And out there in those fields something happened that nobody in the war department planned. The farmer who came out to the field was usually an old man because the young men were gone. His hired hands were gone. His sons were gone in Italy, in the Pacific, or or under a white cross somewhere. And here were 10 or 12 young men in khaki with PW painted on their backs doing the work his son should have been doing.

They worked beside each other for 10 hours. They ate at the same time. Some of the Germans spoke a little English. Some of the farmers’ families were of German descent themselves and could manage a few words back. There are a great many accounts collected decades later from both sides of prisoners and local people becoming what everyone involved insisted on calling friends.

Guards posed for photographs standing casually with Axis prisoners in the timber. Farm wives sent food out to the field that they were not required to send. Furniture the prisoners built by hand ended up in Ruston homes and is still in some of them. None of that erases what those men’s army had done in Europe. Nothing does.

But it is the truth of that ground in that year and it was recorded at the time. Now go across the Atlantic to the water off the west coast of Africa on the 4th of June, 1944, two days before Normandy. There is a hunter-killer group at sea built around the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal under the command of Captain Daniel Gallery Gallery Jr.

Escort were small, slow, and built fast sailors called them Jeep carriers. Less kind. Combustible, vulnerable, and expendable. Around Guadalcanal ran a screen of destroyer escorts. Chatelain, Pillsbury, Jenks, Pope, Flaherty. They had sailed from Norfolk in the middle of May to hunt submarines off the Canary Islands and they had found nothing.

Weeks of nothing. Fuel was running low. Gallery gave the order to break off and set course for Casablanca to refuel. 10 minutes after the turn USS Chatelain reported sonar contact. 800 yards. The whole formation came alive. Wildcat fighters off Guadalcanal spotted the shape under the water and fired into it to mark the position.

Chatelain ran in and put a pattern of depth charges over it set shallow. The sea lifted and one of the pilots came up on the radio with the line that has been quoted ever since shouting that they had struck oil that the submarine was surfacing. Six and a half minutes after first contact U-505 came up. She came up hurt.

Her lights were gone. Her electrical machinery was dead. Her rudder was jammed hard over so she could not run straight. She could only turn slow and wide like an animal circling with a broken leg. And the Americans opened up on her. Chatelain firing, Pillsbury firing, the Wildcats coming in low with their 50s walking rounds across the deck and the conning tower.

Her commanding officer was hit in that barrage. His name was Harold Lang. He was born in 1903 which made him about 41 years old that afternoon old for a U-boat skipper in a service where crews were commonly in their early 20s. He held the rank of Oberleutnant zur See der Reserve. He was a reservist, a merchant marine officer before the war, a professional seaman rather than a career Kriegsmarine man.

Lang went down on the bridge badly wounded in the legs. Convinced his boat was finished and flooding, he gave the order every submarine commander is trained to give and every one of them dreads. Abandon ship. Scuttle her. And here is the moment the entire war pivots on, not the battle, the seconds after it.

The crew obeyed the first order so fast that they did not complete the second. They went up the ladder and over the side into the Atlantic with the boat still under them. And the things a U-boat crew is absolutely required to destroy before that happens, the things every one of them had been drilled on since training were left sitting where they were.

The measures necessary to scuttle her were left incomplete. And down in the radio room, untouched, sat the Enigma cipher machine and the code books. The most closely guarded secrets of the German navy floating on the surface of the ocean, abandoned. Chatelain, seeing the boat still turning, thought it was maneuvering to attack and put a torpedo into the water.

Ceasefire was called. Then Pillsbury put over a boat with an eight-man boarding party led by Lieutenant Junior Grade L. David. Understand what those eight men did. They rode toward a sinking enemy submarine that they had every reason to believe was rigged with demolition charges on a timer. And they climbed down through the hatch into the dark, into a steel tube filling with water, not knowing whether they had 5 minutes or 5 seconds. They cleared the boat.

It was empty. Then they went to work closing valves, plugging the inrush, disconnecting demolition charges by hand, and passing up armfuls of documents, charts, signal logs, code books. Albert David was awarded the Medal of Honor. Meanwhile, Chatelain and Jenks were pulling Germans out of the water. 58 of them came out alive.

Three were wounded including Lang. One man was dead, killed by gunfire on the deck of his own boat, and his body was brought aboard wrapped in a blanket. The prisoners were given US Navy survivor issue clothing and put below. And then the United States Navy did the strangest thing of the day. It kept the submarine. They rigged a tow.

They disconnected the engines from the motors so the shafts would spin as she was dragged, charging her own batteries. And when the batteries came up, they restored power and ran her own pumps to dry her out. Guadalcanal towed her for 3 days until a fleet tug arrived. Two weeks later, under total secrecy, U-505 was brought into Bermuda.

The first enemy warship captured on the high seas by the United States Navy since 1815. And Captain Gallery, who had just handed the allies an intelligence prize beyond calculation, was reportedly and furiously told by his superiors that he had done something reckless because there was now a hole in the ocean where a submarine full of secrets used to be.

And if the Germans figured out what had happened, every one of those secrets was worthless within a week. The code books mattered. American cryptanalysts were able to break coordinate codes that had defeated them before, which meant better intelligence on where the U-boat patrol lines were, which meant convoys routed around them and hunter-killer groups sent into them.

Men who never heard the name U-505 got home to their families because of what was in that radio room. But all of it depended on one thing. The Germans could never ever find out that the crew was alive. Here is what a state secret looks like when it is made of human beings. 58 German sailors were now a problem the United States had to solve. They could not be killed.

That is not a thing the United States was going to do. And it was not going to be proposed. They could not be released. They could not be treated as ordinary prisoners of war because ordinary prisoners of war get their names sent to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. And Geneva forwards those names to the German government.

And the German government publishes them. And a woman in Hamburg who has been told her son is dead learns that he is alive in America. And then somebody in the German Naval High Command asks the only question that matters. Alive how? Alive from where? If the crew got off, what happened to the boat? Change the codes.

Every convoy route the allies had bought with that captured gone. So, the 58 men were unmade. They were held first in Bermuda, then brought to the United States and interrogated in Virginia at a Navy facility built for exactly this. And they were told nothing about where they were going. In July 1944, they were taken under heavy security to a railroad train.

The windows of the cars were nailed shut. Picture the trip, 2 days. Nailed windows in a southern July with no air moving. Men who had spent months in a steel hull now sealed inside a wooden one. Unable to see 1 mile of the country they were crossing. They did not know if they were going north or south.

They came off that train at the end of it with no idea where on earth they were and no idea, most of them said afterward, how far they now were from the sea. They came into Camp Ruston in late July 1944 and disappeared into a restricted compound in a far corner of the property, fenced off from every other prisoner in the camp.

The Camp Ruston records list 56 officers and men arriving. 58 had been pulled from the water. The two figures do not reconcile in the surviving paperwork and this account will not pretend otherwise. And then the Americans locked down the people who worked there. Every guard, every clerk, the nurses, the medical staff, the civilian employees, local people, people from Ruston with families in town.

All of them were sworn to secrecy and the penalty they were told about was not a reprimand and not a fine. They were told it was court-martial. Some of them understood the warning to include execution. Whether the government would ever have carried that out is a separate question and the honest answer is that it almost certainly would not have.

But that is what these people believed. That is what a woman who had grown up in Lincoln Parish, who went to church on Sunday with the neighbors, was told about what would happen to her if she mentioned at dinner that there were submarine sailors out at the camp and it held for the rest of the war and for years after it held.

There were people in Ruston who worked inside those fences every single day and went to their graves before they ever spoke about it. There were people at the camp men in positions of some trust who said afterward flatly that they never knew a submarine crew was there at all. 7 miles from a town of 8,000 people an entire submarine crew lived for over a year and did not exist.

They were not the only U-boat sailor in that and the second one is worth knowing. His name was Horst Blumenberg. The spelling appears both as Blumenberg and Blumberg in different records which is a small honest reminder of how these archives actually work. He was a German navy sailor from U-664. In August 1943, U-664 was caught on the surface in the Atlantic and attacked by aircraft from an American escort carrier.

The crew went over the side and the boat went down and then the men who had just sunk them tried to save them. The American aircraft came back around and dropped rafts and life vests to the Germans in the water and radioed for surface ships to come and get them. 8 hours in the open Atlantic, 44 men were pulled out alive and eventually taken to Casablanca and from there to Fort Meade, Maryland and Fort Virginia for interrogation.

Blumenberg cooperated with the Americans. That is why he ended up separated from his crew and sent alone to Camp Ruston the only man from U-664 there. He also became what the camp files called a problem prisoner. He attempted escape several times not as far as anyone could tell out of any belief that he would make it to Germany.

He escaped because being outside the wire for a few hours even knowing he would be caught and punished was worth it. Years later describing what it had been like under the water, Blumenberg said something that reaches across the whole distance of the war. He said that on a submarine you never know if you will be alive the next morning.

He said that when you sank a ship off the American coast or in the middle of a convoy, you would have a very bad feeling about the men in the water. And then he said, you train your brain not to think about it. Because tomorrow morning the same thing can happen to you. That is not a war criminal talking. That is not a hero talking.

That is a young man describing the only psychological equipment available to him, and it is the most honest sentence anyone connected with this camp ever said out loud. The International Committee of the Red Cross came to Camp Ruston. That was their job. And it was their right under the 1,000 929 Geneva Convention, which the United States had signed.

Neutral inspectors, Swiss usually. Sometimes representatives of the protecting power were entitled to enter any prisoner of war camp. Walk any compound, inspect the food in the barracks and the hospital, and speak with prisoners out of earshot of the guards. It was not a courtesy. It was the entire load-bearing structure of prisoner treatment in the Second World War.

And the reason it worked at all was reciprocity. American boys were in German hands. Every inspection of a camp in Louisiana was an argument for an inspection of a camp in Bavaria. The inspectors walked Camp Ruston and found a well-run installation. Good food, clean compounds, a functioning hospital, sports, a canteen.

By any standard applied in that war, a model camp. Then they came to the fence around the compound in the corner. And they were refused. Not once. On at least three separate occasions, Red Cross inspectors were turned away away from the U-505 compound at Camp Ruston. The crews’ names were withheld from Geneva.

The men were not permitted to write to their families. No letter went out. No letter came in. For more than a year in a country fighting a war described as a war for law itself, the United States held these men outside the law it had signed. Do not let anyone tell you those men were mistreated in the physical sense.

They were fed the same rations. They had the same medical care. Nobody beat them. In every measurable way, their conditions matched the rest of the camp. What was taken from them was the right to be known to be alive. And in Germany, the machinery of grief did what it always does. Wives were notified. Mothers were notified. Somewhere in a drawer in Hamburg and Bremen and 50 other towns, there was an official paper with a boat number on it and a date in June 1944.

Their sons were picking cotton in Lincoln Parish. There is no clean way to judge this. The American officials who made that decision knew exactly what they were doing and they made it anyway because the alternative was to hand the Kriegsmarine a warning that would have cost Allied sailors their lives in the North Atlantic.

And those sailors also had mothers. That is not a story with a villain. That is a story about what victory costs when it is bought honestly. And it is the part of the Second World War that the movies almost never show, the part where the good side does something it cannot defend on purpose with its eyes open because the arithmetic of the alternative is worse.

Eventually, the pressure eased. As the war approached its end and the intelligence value decayed, the men of U-505 came out of the corner. They were put on work details like everybody else. They sawed timber. They picked cotton. The crew of the most valuable capture in the history of the United States Navy spent the last months of the war doing farm labor in North Louisiana and the farmers had no idea who they were.

Through the autumn and winter of 1944, the war came apart for Germany. Normandy in June, Paris liberated in August, the Soviet summer offensive tearing the Eastern Front open, the Ardennes counterattack in December spending the last reserve of the German army for 6 weeks of gained ground and then losing all of it.

The Rhine crossed in March 1945. Inside the camp, the prisoners knew. They always knew. American newspapers were on sale in the canteen. Some of them read English well. Radio news reached them. The guards being human talked. By the spring of 1945, the men in that camp understood that the country they had been captured fighting for was going to cease to exist.

The younger ones asked whether their hometowns were still standing. Nobody could tell them. And then on a night in 1945, Camp Ruston gathered its prisoners for the monthly film. Movies were routine at Camp Ruston. Hollywood features. Documentaries part entertainment, part policy. Because in 1944, the War Department had launched a program to educate German prisoners in academic subjects and in democratic values.

Books, magazines, and films chosen deliberately. On this night, the men came in and filled the room the way they always did. Then the doors opened again and dozens of armed military police came in and lined the walls. The prisoners looked at them. Nobody explained anything. The lights went down and the projector started.

And what came up on that screen was the film shot by Allied cameramen inside the German concentration camps. The gas chambers, the mass graves, the bulldozers, the survivors at the wire who did not look like living people anymore. Footage shot by Allied cameramen within days of liberation. Unedited. Unnarrated. And unanswerable.

That is why the MPs were there. Whoever ordered that screening understood there was a real chance of a riot. There was no riot. The witnesses described silence. Men visibly shaken. Men staring at the screen in disbelief that their own government had done this. Some of them refused to accept it and said it was American propaganda.

And that reaction happened in camps across the country. But the accounts from Camp Ruston described something more common than denial and worse, recognition. Because most of these men were not SS. They were Africa Corps tank crews and Luftwaffe ground staff and submarine sailors. They had spent years telling themselves the thing every soldier tells himself, that they were soldiers, that they fought armed men, that whatever was happening in the East was not theirs.

And there is a line in the accounts of that night that says it plainly. It was one thing to kill in battle. It was another to be a murderer. They walked out of that room into the Louisiana night, back to barracks where they had built little clay castles of home in front of the door. And they had to carry the rest of their lives the knowledge of what home had actually been.

That was the night the war ended at Camp Ruston, not on the day of the surrender. That night. And back in the United States the American public found out what the prisoners were eating. It had been building for a long time. Newspapers ran stories. Congressmen received letters. The phrase that stuck was the one about about the Fritz Ritz, the notion that German prisoners were living in resort conditions on American soil while American boys died in the Hurtgen Forest and starved in Japanese camps in the Philippines.

The anger was not irrational. Consider the American family in the spring of 1945. Sugar rationed, coffee rationed, meat rationed, gasoline rationed, shoes rationed, a son in Europe or the Pacific or a son in a box. And in Louisiana, and Te- and Arkan- and 43 other states, captured enemy soldiers were buying candy and cookies and cold beer at the camp canteen.

Then the concentration camp footage reached American theaters. Ordinary Americans saw what the prisoners in Camp Ruston had just been shown. The pressure became unbearable. In May 1945, the Provost Marshal General, the officer responsible for the entire prisoner of war system in the United States, issued the order.

Foods available to prisoners were restricted. The sale of candy, cookies, beer, and soft drinks was prohibited. The canteen stayed open for pencils and notebooks and tobacco. The luxuries were gone. And here is why this small administrative act belongs in this story. The United States did not tear up the Geneva Convention.

It did not cut the rations below the required scale. It did not stop the medical care or close the library or shut down the orchestra under enormous, entirely understandable public fury. With the evidence of Nazi atrocity playing in every movie house in the country, the American government took away the beer and the candy and left the law standing.

That is a small thing. It is also measured against everything the 20th century produced, not a small thing at all. And in those same weeks it was over. On the 7th of May, 1,945, General [snorts] Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the German High Command, signed the unconditional surrender.

It took effect on the 8th of May, and the world called it VE Day. In Ruston, Louisiana, church bells rang and people came out into the street. Seven miles away, 4,000 men stood behind wire and listened to a country celebrating the destruction of their own. They had assumed, most of them, that this meant they were going home.

They were wrong, and the worst of it had not started yet. The war in Europe ended on the 8th of May, 1,945. The prisoners at Camp Ruston did not go home in May. They did not go home in June, or in September when Japan surrendered, or in October, or at Christmas. They stayed behind the wire in Lincoln Parish through the whole of 1,945, picking cotton in a country that was no longer at war with anybody, waiting for a decision that was being made by men who had never heard of them and who had much larger problems.

And in that waiting period, something happened at Camp Ruston that almost nobody in America knows about, and that the men who witnessed it never really got over. Among the 4,000 men at Camp Rucker stood were more than 100 Russians. They were the strangest population in the strangest camp in Louisiana and the way they got there requires an explanation that has no comfortable version.

In the summer of 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and in the first 6 months of that campaign the Wehrmacht took Soviet prisoners in numbers that have no parallel in the history of warfare. Something over 3 million men in 1941 alone. The German army had no intention of feeding them. It was not a failure of logistics. It was policy.

The majority of those men died of starvation, of disease, in open fields behind wire. Through the winter of 1941 into 1942. To a Soviet soldier standing in one of those enclosures in the snow, the German army eventually made an offer. Put on this uniform, work for us, carry ammunition, dig trenches, drive trucks, guard a rail line, or stay here.

Hundreds of thousands took it. Some were nationalists from Ukraine or the Baltic states or the Caucasus who had reasons of their own. Most were simply men who had done the arithmetic of the field they were standing in and chosen the thing that let them live until spring. Then in 1944, the allies landed in France and began taking German uniformed prisoners by the hundred thousand and discovered over and over that a substantial number of the men in those uniforms could not speak German. They went into the same system

as everybody else. The ports, the trains, the camps and over a hundred of them ended up at Camp Rucker, Russians in a camp built for Germans. The Russians at Camp Rucker stood understood their situation with perfect clarity and they moved fast. They wrote to the camp commander.

Declassified memoranda in the archive record what they asked for. They volunteered to fight the Japanese, not to be released, not to be given anything. They asked the United States to put them into uniform American uniform and send them into the Pacific against an enemy the United States was still fighting in a war where the casualty projections for invading the Japanese home islands were being discussed in numbers that made planners physically ill.

They were offering to go into that. The Americans said no. The request was denied. It was probably denied for reasons that seemed entirely sensible at the desk where it was decided you do not arm enemy prisoners. You certainly do not create a diplomatic incident with an ally by recruiting his citizens out of your prison camps.

That ally was Joseph Stalin. And in February 1945 at the Livadia Palace in Yalta on the coast of the Crimea, Stalin sat down with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to divide the post-war world. Among the many things settled at Yalta was the question of repatriation. Each power would return the others nationals it sounded administrative.

It sounded like paperwork. The Soviet position was that every Soviet citizen in Allied hands would be sent back. All of them. Regardless of whether they wanted to go. And there is a detail in the Camp Ruston record that stops you cold when you read it. At Yalta, Stalin specifically raised the Russian prisoners being held at Camp Ruston.

The leader of the Soviet Union in a room where the fate of Poland and Germany and half of Asia was being decided took the time to mention roughly a hundred men in a prison camp in the pine woods of North Louisiana. He wanted them back. The United States agreed. Here’s what the men in that compound knew and what the Americans guarding them may not fully have understood at the time.

Under Soviet law and under Stalin’s explicit orders, surrender itself was treason. Order number 270 issued in August 1941 declared that soldiers who allowed themselves to be captured were traitors and it reached their families. Returning Soviet prisoners of war, even men who had never worn a German uniform, went into filtration camps run by the security services when they came home.

Many went from there into the labor camp system. And these men had worn the German uniform. They knew what was waiting. They said so. They had been saying so since the day they arrived, which is why they had asked to be sent in to the Pacific instead. The transfer order came anyway. The Russians were moved out of Camp Ruston and shipped north to Fort Dix, New Jersey, called Camp Dix in the records of the period, the staging point for the ships that would take them across the Atlantic and hand them over. At Camp Dix, they broke.

The records and the news accounts of the time describe a riot. Men refusing. Men fighting the guards. Fires set inside the barracks. Prisoners burning down their own quarters because a man who is about to be put on a ship to his own execution has nothing left to bargain with except destruction. And in the middle of it, two of them went into a barracks, threw ropes over the rafters, and hanged themselves.

They chose that. >> [snorts] >> In an American camp with American soldiers outside the door, two men decided that dying in a wooden building in the United States was a better outcome than the country they were being returned to. That is not a metaphor for the Cold War. That is two men and a rafter. The rest went on the ships.

And after Camp Dix, the trail of the Camp Ruston Russians ends. The record stop. Nobody in Louisiana ever heard from any of them again. What happened to them after they were handed over is not documented in any archive available to the people who spent decades assembling this camp’s history.

They asked to fight for us, and we said no. And we sent them back, and they vanished. That is the darkest thing that ever came out of Camp Ruston, and almost none of it happened at Camp Ruston. It happened at a conference table in the Crimea, and in a barracks in New Jersey, and somewhere east of the Elbe where nobody was writing anything down.

Not everyone waited to be sent anywhere. Camp Ruston across 3 years saw 34 prisoners get outside the wire and stay out for more than 24 hours. 34 spread across a base camp, eight branch camps, and thousands of unguarded hours in open fields. That number tells you something important. German prisoners in the United States did not escape at anything like the rate of Allied prisoners in Europe.

And the reason is arithmetic, not contentment. Escape from a camp in Germany meant reaching Switzerland or Sweden or a partisan network hard, but the map allowed for hope. Escape from Louisiana meant crossing an entire continent or an entire ocean in surplus khaki with PW painted on your back in a country where you could not pass for local and had nowhere to go.

Most of the 34 were picked up within a day or two. Sunburned, bitten to pieces by insects, usually relieved. One was never recaptured. His name in the records is Charlie King. He was born on Christmas Day 1921. The records give his age at the time of the escape as 24. The exact date of the escape is not established. He spoke perfect German, perfect English, and Spanish. He was educated.

The guards who knew him believed he was an engineer or an architect. And the Americans who dealt with him liked him. That is in the record, too. A pleasant prisoner respected by the men who guarded him. King got out of one of Camp Ruston’s branch camps at Bastrop, Louisiana, and then he did what nobody else managed. He kept going.

He went south and west on foot and by whatever transport a man with three languages and no papers can arrange, and he crossed into Mexico. Mexico had declared war on the Axis in 1942, but it was not the United States. And its interior was a place where a stranger who spoke Spanish could disappear. King stayed there for months. Then he was in a serious truck accident and spent months more recovering from his injuries in a foreign country where he could not go to any authority for help.

When he could walk again, he made his way to a port and worked a passage on a ship back to Germany. He made it. He went the whole distance, Bastrop, to Germany on his own, through a hemisphere at war. And the FBI kept looking for him for years. The most human part of the story is the reason. One of his American guards remembered what Charlie King had told him, and the guard repeated it decades later in an interview.

King said he had to get back to Germany to take care of his mother. He was afraid she would fall into Russian hands. That is why the only man who ever beat Camp Ruston beat it. Not ideology, [clears throat] not duty to the Reich, which by then barely existed. A 24-year-old crossing two countries and an ocean because there was a woman at the end of it, [clears throat] and nobody else was coming for her.

Not everyone got out at all. At least nine prisoners died at Camp Ruston during its operation. Some died of wounds they had carried with them out of North Africa or the Atlantic. Some died of illness. One died from an attack by other prisoners. The remainder, in one line, that the most dangerous thing in a German prisoner compound was frequently other Germans.

And that men who cooperated with Americans or spoke against the regime were marked by their own comrades. Among the dead was a Russian major who died of a heart attack. They were buried in a small cemetery at the northeast tip of the property, near where the eastbound lane of Interstate 20 runs today. Men from Bremen and Cologne and Rostov, in the red clay of Lincoln Parish under wooden markers.

And one of those funerals produced the single most extraordinary act by an American civilian in this entire story. A German prisoner died. His comrades asked for the thing soldiers ask for everywhere. They wanted their national flag over the coffin. The flag of Germany in 1944 was the flag of the Nazi party. The swastika.

There was not one at Camp Ruston. Of course there was not. This was a United States Army installation. So, a woman named Myra Roberts, a civilian employee at the camp, a woman from Ruston, Louisiana, sat down and sewed one. She made a Nazi flag with her own hands in a country at war with the government that flag belonged to, so that a dead enemy soldier could be buried under it.

Think about what that took. Think about what her neighbors would have said. Think about what she was looking at while she cut the cloth, the same symbol that was on the newsreels, on the propaganda posters, on the arm of every villain in every movie playing at the theater in town that month. She did it anyway because a young man was dead a long way from his mother, and the men who carried him wanted to do it right.

Myra Roberts kept that flag for many years afterward. It was misplaced before it could be preserved in the archive. It is gone, but the fact of it is not gone, and it is one of the few things in the history of the Second World War that requires no interpretation at all. The bodies did not stay. After the war, all of the prisoners buried at Camp Ruston were exhumed and returned to their own countries, including a man named Ernst Paul, one of the Germans who died there.

The cemetery at the northeast tip of the property was emptied. Today, there is a highway. On the 3rd of February, 1,000 946, the last prisoner of war left Camp Ruston. The camp was officially closed in June 1,946, 5 months after the surrender of Japan, 9 months after the surrender of Germany. And here is the part the prisoners did not see coming, and the part that turns the ending of this story sideways.

Leaving Camp Ruston did not mean going home. The Allies had a problem in 1,946 that was as large in its way as the problem of 1,943. They were holding millions of trained German soldiers. Germany itself was rubble cities flattened, food supply collapsed, the economy non-existent, and four occupying armies dividing the ground between them.

Dumping millions of demobilized soldiers into that all at once was considered by the Allied governments to be an invitation to chaos. And Europe needed labor desperately. Someone had to clear the rubble, rebuild the rail lines, work the fields, and lift the mines out of the ground, millions of mines, laid by the men who were now available to remove them.

So, the prisoners were not repatriated. They were transferred. Men who had spent 2 and 1/2 years in Louisiana fed on American rations, working for 80 cents a day in script, playing soccer, listening to their own orchestra on the radio, were shipped back across the Atlantic and handed over to Britain, to France, to Belgium. Many were held for up to two additional years.

And here is the sentence from the interviews that men in Ruston repeated for the rest of their lives. Those two years in European hands were far worse than anything at Camp Ruston. Europe in 1946 and 1947 had nothing. There was no surplus. There were no American cooks making something excellent out of standard-issue rations. There were populations who had lived under German occupation for 4 years, who had buried their own, and who now had German prisoners handed to them to feed out of stocks that did not exist.

The work was harder. The food was less. The winters were the winters of 1946 and 1947, which [clears throat] were among the worst in modern European memory. Men who had complained about picking cotton in Lincoln Parish spent 1947 in France thinking about Louisiana. That is the twist that no one expects, and that the survivors insisted on.

The prison camp in the American South was not the hard part of their captivity. It was the good part. The hard part came after the war was over, and it lasted longer. The great majority eventually got home, and contrary to a persistent legend, only a very small number of prisoners stayed in the United States, a handful who were considered valuable and who wanted to remain.

One of them is worth the ending he got. His name was Karl Ernst Pfaff. He was a German naval ensign, 21 years old, and he came to Camp Ruston later than almost anyone because the boat he served on surrendered a week after the war in Europe was over. U-234 was a large submarine, a converted mine layer, and in the spring of 1945 she was sent on the most futile mission of the entire German war effort.

She was ordered to Japan. Her cargo was a catalog of everything the Third Reich had left to give away. Detailed plans for rockets, a disassembled jet aircraft in crates, technical documents, and roughly 560 kg of uranium oxide. There were two Japanese officers aboard as passengers. She sailed in April. On the 8th of May, Germany surrendered, and the order went out from Admiral Dönitz for all U-boats to surface and give themselves up.

Her commander, Kapitänleutnant Johann Heinrich Fehler, had a choice of who to surrender to, and Canadian warships were closer. Fehler chose the Americans. On the 14th of May, 1945, U-234 surrendered to the United States Navy in the North Atlantic. The two Japanese officers did not accept it. Rather than be taken, they killed themselves aboard the submarine, and the German crew buried them at sea.

And then the Americans came aboard and started looking for the uranium. They could not find it. The manifest said it was there. The boat did not appear to contain it. Karl Pfaff, 21 years old, trained as an engineer, and able to speak English, told them where it was. It had been built into a false wall around the base of the conning tower, concealed in the structure of the boat itself.

Pfaff showed them, and the United States took possession of 560 kg of uranium oxide in the summer of 1945, a fact that has generated speculation for 80 years and requires no speculation to be remarkable on its own. He was separated from his crew. The rest of the men of U-234 went to Papago Park, Arizona. Karl Pfaff went to Camp Ruston.

And Karl Pfaff never left the United States. He was permitted to stay, one of the rare ones. He became an American citizen. He took a job with a major American manufacturing firm and built a career and a life and he prospered. And he died in the early 2000s, an old man in the country he had been at war with when he was 21.

And more than once across those decades, he drove back to North Louisiana and walked the ground where the camp had been. He was not the only one who came back. Heinz Lettau, the Luftwaffe major who had been a meteorologist before the war, emigrated to the United States and became one of the most important atmospheric scientists in the country, a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The way air moves in the first 100 m above the surface of the earth, the layer where weather actually touches human beings, is understood in part because of work he did after his captivity. Alfred Andersch, who had deserted from the German army to the Americans in Italy in June 1, 944, became one of the significant and most argued about German novelists of the post-war era.

He wrote one known work of non-fiction about his years as a prisoner. It was about the Jewish camp doctor at Camp Ruston, a man named Fleischer, and the friendship the two of them formed behind the wire. A German soldier and a Jewish American doctor. >> [snorts] >> In 944, while the ovens were running in Poland, Andersch wrote about that and nothing else in his life demanded it of him.

Hans Göbler, an ordinary crewman off U-505, emigrated to the United States, became a fixture at submarine veterans gatherings and military air shows, and wrote the memoir that put the whole experience on the record, Steel Boat, Iron Heart. He gave an oral history in Ruston. It is in the archive. Cesare Puelli, an Italian officer captured in North Africa and held at Camp Ruston, went home to Italy and was an intellectual and a professor of art.

He came back for the Camp Ruston Symposium and donated a collection of material. Italian veterans of Camp Ruston held reunions in Italy for years. Horst Blumenberg, the U-664 sailor, the escape artist, the problem prisoner emigrated to the United States after the war and returned to Ruston several times in his later years, donating items to the collection each time.

And then there are the drawings. Hans Stollenwerk, the Africa Corps tank lieutenant, went home after the war and built a successful manufacturing business in Cologne in the city whose automobiles he had drawn from memory in a Louisiana barracks. In the summer of 1980, he came back and walked the grounds of the camp, and that is where he met a man named Vincent Spione.

It was one of the meetings that started Spione on 20 years of work and nearly 50 years after Stollenwerk left Camp Ruston, Spione found the drawings. They had been given to the camp’s civilian accountant in 1945 and had gone into a barn near Arcadia and stayed there. Pencil sketches of Weimar era cars made by a young German officer with nothing else to do, sitting in the dark of a Louisiana barn while the man who drew them grew old in Cologne.

Spione tracked him down and sent him copies. They reached Stollenwerk just days before he died. An old man in Germany at the end of his life opening an envelope from Louisiana and finding the cars he had drawn as a prisoner of war when he was young. In 1984, former prisoners came back to Ruston and joined local residents for a 40th anniversary reunion of a prison camp.

In 1995, several returned again for the Camp Ruston Symposium and con- the the they had made in Louisiana during the war. Almost all of it would have been lost. That is the plain truth about Camp Ruston, and it is the truth about most of the 400 odd prisoner of war camps that operated on American soil. The barracks came down not long after the prisoners left.

The site became a state tuberculosis sanatorium from 1,947 to 1,958, and then in 1,959 the Ruston Developmental Center. A facility for people with intellectual disabilities. The land where the compound stood became pasture for a Louisiana Tech livestock facility. Ordinary American forgetting doing what it always does.

Then in the summer of 1,980 a man named Vincent Speon met a former prisoner who had come back to visit the grounds. Speon was working at the site. He was not a professional historian. He was a man who listened to one old German talk about a place that no longer existed, and then [clears throat] went looking for the rest. He spent 20 years on it.

He collected oral histories from former prisoners, from the American guards, from the civilian staff, from the people in town who had been children when the trucks went by. He founded the nonprofit Camp Ruston Foundation and served as its president. He went into the national archives and worked the declassified files.

In 1,991 he tried to get the four surviving buildings onto the national register of historic places, and was told they did not qualify. Because the national register generally requires that a property be at least 50 years old, and the camp was 49. Speon petitioned for a waiver. He argued that if they waited there would be nothing left to list because the buildings were coming down.

On the 13th of December 1,991 P camp buildings were entered on the national register of historic places. In 1,994 he launched the Camp Ruston Documentation Project with Louisiana Tech and the Developmental Center. Funded in part by the Camp Ruston Foundation and by Mercedes-Benz, he traveled to Germany, to and to the former Yugoslavia, and sat down with old men and turned on a tape recorder.

In Slovenia, he recorded interviews with former Yugoslav prisoners, men who had been conscripted into the German army against their own country and ended up in Louisiana. A Slovenian newspaper covered his visit. The clipping is in the archive. And 1998, going through declassified National Archives records, Spionne found the internment documents for the crew of U-505.

It was known in Ruston that the submarine crew had been held there in secret. What was not known was that the institution which owns U-505 did not have it right. The submarine had been given to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in the 1950s through the efforts of Daniel Gallery, the officer who had captured her.

Chicago raised the money and brought her home. She is there today indoors, restored, one of the great museum objects in the United States. And the museum’s exhibit said the crew had been held in Bermuda, which was true for a matter of weeks and then wrong for the rest of the war. Spionne sent the museum the declassified files.

When the exhibit was updated, the record was corrected. If you stand in Chicago today and read about what happened to the 58 men who came out of that water on the 4th of June, 1944, 1944, you are reading something that was fixed because one man in Louisiana went through a filing cabinet. In 1994 and 1995, a Louisiana Tech graduate student named Mark Scalia ran an archaeological survey of the site.

He found and mapped the remnants of the original guard towers and the water tower. And he found a stone castle, one of the miniatures built by German prisoners out of rock and cement, still sitting in the dirt 50 years after the men who made it went home. Scalia later donated to the collection the entire body of National Archives records relating to Camp Ruston and wrote a book on the capture of U-234.

In September 2000, everything the documents, the photographs, the paintings, the carvings, the letters, the oral histories, the artifacts the prisoners themselves over was transferred to the special collections department at Louisiana Tech University, where it is kept and where researchers can still use it.

Among the items in that archive is a copy of Harold Lang’s log from the last voyage of U-505, the page this story opened with, the calm evening that never happened. It is there because a man went looking for it. And there is one more story, and it has to be told carefully. For years, people around Ruston have repeated an account that the German sailors of U-505 were escorted to Louisiana by a United States Navy baseball team, that a group of young ball players, including a teenage prospect signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers, was pulled out of bed in Norfolk in the

middle of the night, made to sign secrecy documents, and put in charge of guarding the most secret prisoners in America. And that out of boredom, they let the Germans out of the pen and taught them to play baseball. It is a beautiful story. It was published as a book, and there was a film in development, and it needs to be labeled honestly.

That account comes from family memory, a son telling his father’s story, and it has not been corroborated by the National Archives documentation the way the rest of this history has. Some of it may well be true. The men of U-505 did travel by train under heavy guard with the windows nailed shut, and they did play baseball in the camp, and Americans did teach German prisoners the game at Camp Ruston.

But whether a Navy ball club guarded that specific train is remembered, not documented. And a story this good is exactly the kind that deserves to be checked rather than repeated. That distinction between what is remembered and what is proven is the difference between history and folklore. And Camp Ruston has enough real history that it does not need any help.

Go out there now. Take Louisiana Highway 150 West out of Grambling. The west campus of Grambling State University sits on part of the old ground. Four dilapidated buildings remain pieces of the hospital compound and a warehouse owned by the state of Louisiana and by every recent account badly deteriorated. Every original barracks in the prisoner compounds was demolished not long after the men left.

North of the campus is the pasture. Louisiana Tech runs beef and hay on it. If you know where to look, you can find the outlines. That is what is left of a place that held 4,315 men at its peak, ran eight branch camp, and hid a submarine crew in its northeast corner while their mothers held their death notices. And here is the thing worth carrying away from it.

The United States of America, in the middle of the worst war in human history, took 370,000 German soldiers onto its own soil and fed them, and doctored them, and let them play soccer and put on plays and take university correspondence courses, and then sent almost every one of them home. It did not do this because it was soft.

It did it because the men in Washington understood that the treatment of prisoners is the one thing in a war that is fully within your own control, and that what you do with a defeated enemy is a statement about what you are. Made at the exact moment when nobody would blame you for being something worse.

It was not perfect. A submarine crew was hidden from the Red Cross in violation of a convention the United States had signed. More than 100 Russians were handed to Stalin over their own written objections, and two of them hanged themselves rather than go, and the rest disappeared. And across the American South in those years, there were places where German prisoners were served in rooms that black American soldiers in uniform could not enter.

Whether that particular scene played out in Lincoln Parish is not something the Camp Ruston archive settles one way or the other. What is certain is the arithmetic of the ground. This camp sat on the edge of Grambling, a black community with a college in it, in a state where the law separated everything, and the men who noticed that at the time and never stopped being angry about it were right to be.

All of that is true at the same time as the rest of it. Many of the prisoners said afterward that the American education program at Camp Ruston, the books borrowed from the college down the road, the classes in political theory, the free newspapers, the arguments was where German democracy started for them. That is what they said.

Men who came to that camp as soldiers of the Third Reich and went home to build a republic. 4,315 men. One water tower. 770 acres of pine. The buildings are falling down and the grass has grown over the concrete and the cattle do not know what they are standing on. But the log is in the archive, and the oral histories are on tape, and somewhere in a house in Ruston there is a piece of furniture built by hand in 1944 by a young man from Germany who was a long way from home, and who was fed, and who was let go.