What German POWs Lost When the War Ended

On May 8th, 1945, 371,000 German prisoners of war were inside the United States. By September, there were more. By the end of August, 14 of them had been hanged at Fort Leavenworth. They were held in more than 500 camps across 46 of the 48 states. That morning, most were asleep. Some were already out on work details, cutting timber and picking cotton.

Most were working. Cotton, timber, canning, farm labor at a minimum of 80 cents a day paid in scrip. All hard currency had been confiscated when they landed. A camp looked like this. Wooden beams under black tar paper, mineral surfaced roll roofing. The same buildings for the guards as for the prisoners in the same rows behind the same wire.

In Reims, at 2:41 in the morning on May 7th, General Alfred Jodl signed. On May 8th, President Truman announced it by radio. Field Marshal Keitel signed again in Berlin. Inside the wire, the day is thinner than the record suggests. Camp Hearn in Texas held 3,855 men that morning. In Iowa, Camp Algona was still filling up.

The work details still went out. The quotas still applied. Nothing in the surrender documents changed the status of a single man behind American wire. And nothing in the camps changed that week. A month later, the Provost Marshal General’s office declassified its re-education program. Brigadier General B.M. Bryan explained the calm.

There had been, in his words, no serious demonstrations in camps. That is the Army’s own account of the day the war ended. Nothing happened. No riots, no mass refusals, no collapse of order. What changed for these men came later, and it came from Washington. The reason is in the 12 months before it. By May 1945, most of these men had been tracking the collapse of Germany for the better part of a year.

The camps were not sealed. Prisoners read American newspapers, bought at the canteen, radios were permitted. At Camp Hearn, there were secret shortwave sets hidden under the barracks, pulling news out of Germany daily. They also had their own press. By March 1945, 44 camp newspapers were being written and printed by prisoners.

By that summer, there were 137 of them. The army surveyed those 44 papers that March. 25 were Nazi. Eight were strongly Nazi. Seven were non-political. One was religious. Three out of 44 were anti-Nazi. So, the collapse reached them in installments rather than in one announcement. And who told them mattered, because the men doing the telling had been captured at different times and believed different things.

The Africa Corps men, taken in Tunisia in 1943, held on to belief in victory longest. They called the men captured later in France “traitors and deserters” for saying otherwise. The first large batch of Africa Corps prisoners was captured in Tunisia in May 1943 and shipping to America began at once. By January 1945, there were 375,000.

130 base camps and 295 branch camps. In February 1945, politicians from rural states were asking for 100,000 more prisoners to work the farms. Inside the compounds, the men who ran them were mostly not the Americans. At Camp Hearn, a Nazi-infiltrated German postal unit kept a written list of anti-Nazi prisoners to be dealt with after the war.

That control had already killed men: Werner Drechsler, Johannes Kunze, Hugo Krauss, Hans Geller, Horst Günther. Five prisoners killed by other prisoners between 1943 and 1944. Krauss was German-born and New York-raised. At Camp Hearn, on the 17th of December 1943, he was beaten with clubs, nail-studded boards, and a lead pipe.

He died 6 days later. Geller was beaten at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, on the 22nd of March 1944 and died the next day. 2 weeks later, Horst Günther was strangled and hung with a tent rope at Camp Aiken. In early 1944, the journalist Dorothy Thompson published on Nazi cadres dominating American camps. Eleanor Roosevelt raised it with the president and with Major Maxwell McKnight.

In the autumn of 1944, the army created a special projects division under a Scottish-born poet, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Davison, a University of Colorado professor who had served in British naval intelligence. The Geneva Convention forbids indoctrination of prisoners. Article 17 encourages intellectual diversion.

The program was built in that gap, and it was classified. On the 31st of October, it opened at Van Etten, New York. On the 27th of February, 1945, it moved to Fort Curney, Rhode Island. 20 acres over Narragansett Bay. Barbed wire, but no guard towers, and no armed guards. About 85 vetted anti-Nazi prisoners were transferred in. Writers, professors, editors.

They signed away their ranks and their allegiance to Hitler, and the American officers addressed them as mister. In the first week of March 1945, they produced a newspaper called Der Ruf. 11,000 copies, 5 cents each, on sale in 134 camp canteens. The reception was not neutral. At Camp Trinidad, Colorado, Nazi prisoners were caught burning the paper.

Seven officers were transferred to the disciplinary camp at Alva, Oklahoma. At Camp Helen, Texas, prisoners rejected the first issue as Jewish propaganda unfit for men. At Camp Fanning, the canteen manager pulled it from sale and was put on bread and water. An American lieutenant at Fanning reported the result.

Every copy sold within minutes of going on sale, and more had been ordered. The paper was read. That was not the same as being believed. American censors read the prisoners’ mail. One letter home that spring on the re-education newspaper. It was supposed to be a political re-education for us. But we are Nazis, and we will remain Nazis, and only laugh about it.

And through all of it, Der Ruf took no strong political position. Not once in the issues before the surrender. The paper the army had built to change minds said almost nothing until the 8th of May. There was no single announcement. At Fort Cearney, a loudspeaker stood on the mess hall roof. At Camp Hearne, shortwave sets hidden under the barracks had been pulling news out of Germany for months.

Camp Hearne, Texas, held 3,855 prisoners on the 8th of May. Camp Algona, Iowa, would not reach its own peak population for another 4 months. The men in those camps did not need to be told what had happened. They had been reading it. Camps subscribed to American newspapers. Radios were permitted, and at Fort Cearney, a loudspeaker stood on the mess hall roof.

What the surrender changed was the camp press. Der Ruf had held back from strong political positions until the 8th of May. After it, the paper turned openly political. On the 15th of May, 1945, on page three, Der Ruf printed a photograph of the citizens of Weimar being walked past the corpses at Buchenwald. The paper was printed on offset presses at the Adjutant General’s Recruiting and Publicity Bureau on Governor’s Island, New York.

500 mimeographed English copies of each issue went to Washington. Its masthead said it was edited and prepared by and for German prisoners of war. The eagle on the front stood on a book instead of a swastika. Captain Robert Kunzig, who commanded Fort Cearney, described the method as indoctrination by correct facts.

“German soldiers,” he said, “were not used to correct facts, and did not believe the paper until events proved it right.” That is a claim made by the men who ran the program. The measurable part is circulation. The first issue in March was 11,000 copies. By October, the 15th edition printed 75,000 and sold more than 73,000.

Selling is not agreement. One prisoner wrote to the editors that a Nazi came to his bunk, called him a traitor for reading it, and threatened to kill him. He wrote that he kept reading. Another, Private Bruno Wittmann at Camp Hood, Texas, wrote that what he liked most was the truth in it, even when the truth was bitter, and that many eyes had now been opened.

And when the paper reported that Hitler had declared war on the United States, one prisoner wrote back asking whether the editors could not lie any better than that. Wittmann, the man threatened at his bunk, and the man who accused the editors of lying, same program, same month, three different men. The variation was not in the announcement.

It was in the compound the announcement landed in. At Camp Trinidad, Colorado, the paper was burned. At Camp Aliceville, Alabama, the camp newspaper Der Zaungast took a new editor in late February 1945, and its tone turned nonpolitical. At Camp Butner, North Carolina, 200 prisoners had struck over pay in February.

The strike was broken with tear gas grenades, and two courts-martial followed. By June, Butner also held a United Nations compound. 332 Czechs, 150 Poles, 147 Dutch, then French, Austrians, Luxembourgers, and one Lithuanian. All of them had been captured in German uniform. The surrender meant something different in that compound than in the one next to it, inside the same fence, on the same morning.

At Fort Kearny, it meant almost nothing because the 85 men there had already broken with the Reich in writing. Alfred Andersch arrived at the camp that May at night. Andersch had been an inmate of Dachau before the war. He deserted in Italy in 1944 by bicycle. He later called the American camps a golden cage and at Fort Kearny said he learned democracy.

Franz Wischnewski, a 24-year-old prisoner artist, was pulled out of Camp Ruston with no explanation and put on a three-day train ride with guards who, by his account, acted as though they wanted to kill him. He was being transferred to Rhode Island to work on the newspaper. Nobody had told him. The secrecy of the program meant that many of the men inside it did not know where they were going.

That secrecy ended in June. The Provost Marshal General’s office issued a press release and the re-education of German prisoners of war became public American policy for the first time. Something else changed that month and the prisoners felt it before they read about it. The office of the Provost Marshal General cut rations, ended canteen food sales, and raised the work quotas.

The official reason was that American civilians complained the prisoners ate too well. The real change was legal. Germany was defeated, so the Geneva Convention no longer constrained the War Department in the same way. Prisoners who missed their work quotas were put on bread and water. Enlisted men were paid a minimum of 80 cents a day in script and the work went on through the summer.

In July, Fort Bragg began running 36 courses a week for prisoners. 25,000 graduates of the democracy courses would be moved to the front of the repatriation queue. Fort Kearney’s prisoners were not typical and the army knew it. In September, at Camp McCall in North Carolina, prisoners formed four political parties and elected a camp spokesman.

That was 4 months after the surrender and it was voluntary. Nothing like it had been possible in most camps in 1944 when the men keeping order in the compounds were Nazis. In mid-July, the Nazi postal unit at Camp Hearne was broken up. On the 29th of June, 154 prisoners rioted at Fort Dix. The record holds those.

Much of what circulates about this period, it does not. The Americans had banned observance of Nazi holidays in the camps. Prisoners marked them anyway, in secret. That practice is recorded before the surrender. The record does not say what happened to it after. What is recorded is the machinery of control coming apart.

In mid-July 1945, the Nazi-infiltrated German postal unit at Camp Hearne was broken up and its members transferred out. That unit had handled the mail for German prisoners across the United States. It had also compiled the list of men to be dealt with after the war. It was disbanded 2 months after the war. How many prisoners were committed Nazis is still disputed.

Former prisoners told the historian Michael Waters they were a very very small minority. Left alone by what one called the silent majority. The American chaplain at Camp Hearne put the figure at half the camp and said they would kill anyone who criticized Hitler at the earliest opportunity. Both accounts describe the same camp. Arnold Kramer interviewed former prisoners for decades.

He never met one who admitted to being a Nazi and never met one who did not call the camps the time of his life. They were remembering Texas, not what followed. Both statements come from men recalling a period decades earlier to an American historian. That is the evidence base for most of what is known about how prisoners felt in 1945.

The contemporary evidence is thinner and harder. On the 29th of June, 1945, 154 prisoners rioted at Fort Dix, New Jersey. They were former Red Army men who had been captured in German uniform and they were facing repatriation to the Soviet Union. Two of them hanged themselves. 15 unused nooses were found afterwards.

The record fixes those deaths to a date. Others are less certain. Historians, including Arnold Kramer, hold that many prisoner deaths recorded as suicides in American camps were probably murders by other prisoners. The other response was escape and its motive had reversed. In December 1944, 25 prisoners had escaped Camp Papago Park, Arizona through a tunnel 178 ft long.

That was an escape from captivity. On the 4th of August, 1945, Kurt Rossmeisl walked out of Camp Butner and lived in Chicago as Frank Ellis until 1959. On the 21st of September, Georg Gärtner escaped at Deming, New Mexico specifically to avoid being repatriated to a Silesia now held by the Soviets. He stayed missing for 40 years.

By the autumn of 1945, men were no longer escaping American camps to get back to the war. They were escaping to avoid being sent to what was left of home. Inside the reeducation program, the same summer produced its own quiet failures. On the 28th of June, the Der Ruf staff petitioned to be sent home. They wrote that the paper could not keep up its old standard of quality and liveliness behind barbed wire.

Major Maxwell McKnight, the deputy running the program, backed them. On the 6th of August, Professor Howard Mumford Jones, the program’s educational consultant, held a farewell party at Fort Kearney. He had resigned after being red-baited out of the job. Nine days later, on the 15th of August, American staff and German prisoners at Fort Kearney celebrated the Japanese surrender together.

The German representatives congratulated the American officers on the Allied victory. They promised to cooperate with all their strength in the reconstruction of a new Germany, in a peaceful Europe, on principles of democracy and humanity. That was 85 men in a camp with no guard towers.

Across the rest of the country, the picture was measured a second time that autumn. The army surveyed 80 camp newspapers, up from 44 in March. 24 were now democratic. 18 were strongly anti-Nazi. 32 were non-political. Three religious, two militaristic, and one was a Nazi paper in disguise. In March, 33 of 44 had been Nazi. Whether that measured a change of mind or a change of what was safe to print is the argument that has never been settled.

Both readings have serious historians behind them. One survey of about 22,000 prisoners found 74% leaving with an appreciation of the value of democracy and 10% still militantly Nazi. The historian Ron Robin, working from the same archive, concluded that the program was manifestly ineffectual and that camp surveys found no change in most prisoners’ views at all.

Some prisoners volunteered to fight against Japan. Others signed the democracy courses because graduates were promised an earlier place on the boats home. 25,000 signed. Motive and belief cannot be separated in the record. What can be counted is that 25,000 men completed the courses and that the queue they were promised moved very slowly.

Within weeks of the surrender, the atrocity films reached the American camps. No newspaper and no course had prepared them for it. The prisoners named the films before the army did. Knochen films, films of bones. Attendance at films in the camps had always been voluntary. The atrocity films were not.

Prisoners were marched to darkened camp theaters with armed military police standing at the back. The footage came from the signal corps. Buchenwald was liberated on the 11th of April. A memo from Allied Headquarters on the 25th ordered cameramen to make complete still and motion pictures of the camps. The same reels were entered at Nuremberg as prosecution exhibit 230 on the 29th of November 1945 under the title Nazi Concentration Camps.

They were shown across the country through the summer of 1945. The reactions that survive run in every direction. Refusal to believe the screen. Accusations that the Americans had staged the footage. And at Camp Butner, by one contemporary report in the New Yorker that November, a thousand prisoners burned their Wehrmacht uniforms after a screening.

Every later account traces back to that single report. The argument reached print on the 1st of August. General Hans Jürgen von Arnim, the highest-ranking German prisoner in America, published an open letter on the front page of Der Ruf. He wrote that neither he nor any captured officer had known about the concentration camps.

Two pages later, the prisoner editors answered him. The camps, they wrote, had been known since 1933, and the officers were, at the least, guilty of silence and passivity. That exchange ran in a newspaper printed by the United States Army. 14 German prisoners sat under sentence of death on American soil for killing their own.

Werner Drechsler at Papago Park, Johannes Kunze at Tonkawa. Every one of those sentences had been waiting on Germany. On the 3rd of July, 1945, the Judge Advocate General, Myron Kramer, wrote that the threat to execute American prisoners of war had been removed by reason of the Allied military victory over Germany. He recommended that each sentence be confirmed and carried out.

President Truman signed a one-sentence order the same day. The end of the war had not prevented the executions. It had made them possible. The hangings were carried out at Fort Leavenworth on the 10th, 14th, and 25th of July, and the 25th of August. The last group of seven was the largest mass hanging in 20th century America.

The men were held in the prison building, walked to a warehouse, and up to the second floor. The scaffold had been built inside an elevator shaft. They were buried in the back row of the prison cemetery. Two days before the first hangings on the 8th of July, an American guard named Clarence Bertucci climbed a tower at Salina, Utah at midnight and fired a machine gun into the tents.

Nine German prisoners were killed and 19 wounded. Time called it the midnight massacre. Bertucci was never court-martialed. He was sent to a military hospital in New York. And through all of it, the camps stayed full. On the 15th of September, 1945, Camp Algona reached its all-time peak of 5,452 prisoners. 4 months after the surrender.

The drawdown began in November, 1945. 2,000 prisoners shipped out of Camp Algona. The last prisoners left Camp Hearn in December and the camp closed in January, 1946. A camp report from Dos Palos, California, dated the 12th of February, 1946, reads, “1,692 German prisoners of war waiting for repatriation.” Camp closed.

Leaving America was not the same as going home. Under an agreement with the allies, roughly 130,000 prisoners were British owned. They were landed at Liverpool and told on arrival that their captivity would continue. German prisoners in Britain numbered 385,000 that June and peaked at 402,000 in September, 1946. Britain began repatriating them that same month.

Others went to France. By March 1947, 630,000 German prisoners were under French control, 55,000 of them in the coal mines, cutting a fifth of French coal production. When the last of them left the United States is not settled. Camp Hearn’s history puts the American repatriations complete by January 1947. A later American diplomatic note gives the 30th of June, 1947.

The 26th and last issue of Der Ruf appeared on the 1st of April, 1946, closing with a photo supplement titled “Farewell to America.” Professor Howard Mumford Jones had told the first graduating class what waited outside the wire. “You are not loved. The name of Germany is not a pleasant word.

Prepare to face contempt and misunderstanding and hatred.” One returning Fort Kearney prisoner, meeting American combat troops in occupied Germany, reported that they showed him their fists and called it a disappointment. That was the welcome for men who had spent the war in Texas and Iowa.