News-Info-Alerts

Re: German POWs in the US

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: April 07, 2002

"German POWs toiled at Sanford Naval Air Station

By Jim Robison | Sentinel Staff Writer

German prisoners of war were held in Florida before the United States entered World War II.

Among the early prisoners was the 52-member crew of the Arauca, a German freighter that escaped into port at Fort Lauderdale in mid-December 1939 to avoid a British cruiser.

A standoff lasted for more than a year while the British Orion kept the Arauca from leaving port. The crew eventually was arrested after Congress passed a law limiting how long foreign ships could remain at U.S. port. The crew members were jailed in Broward County.

Soon, many other POW camps were built in Florida. The United States opened camps for 378,000 prisoners of war from 1942 until mid-1946. Florida had 25 of those camps. The largest was at Camp Blanding in Starke, which held more than 1,200 Germans. Each of the others in Florida held 250 to 300 prisoners.

In 1945, German prisoners worked at the Sanford Naval Air Station, which is now Orlando Sanford International Airport. Their camp was set up at the Orlando Army Air Base in late 1944 for 600 to 750 POWs. That site is now Orlando Executive Airport.

The first 68 German prisoners arrived at the Sanford base on July 13, 1945. They were assigned to jobs in the mess and as mechanics, machinists and "general work details," according to military records.

"Whenever extra labor was needed in the scrap yard, it was usually performed by the prisoners," according to a Navy report compiled after the war. "It fact, great care was used in mapping out the work for the prisoners to ensure that they were kept busy and alleviated the shortage of other types of labor."

Florida employers paid the U.S. government for prison laborers. The Germans earned 80 cents to $1 a day for their work in citrus groves, packinghouses, lumber mills, laundries, canneries, building-supply yards, plant nurseries, garages, cement plants and box factories.

German POWs were even seen at Daytona Beach's segregated beach. They were allowed a day to relax on the same beach that excluded black Floridians, black tourists and even the black soldier-guards.

The POWs ended up on U.S. soil because the Nazis controlled much of Europe, leaving the Allies few choices. Holding German POWs across the Atlantic was safer than setting up prison camps in Britain.

Some of the prisoners had been captured in Africa. About 100 members of Field Marshal Erwin "Desert Fox" Rommel's elite Afrika Korps picked oranges from Lake County groves. Their camp was east of Leesburg at what is now the campus of Lake-Sumter Community College.

Many of the Florida prisoners were German U-boat sailors. German boats operated along the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean. There are even scattered historical references to U-boats spotted in the St. Johns River.

Some of the prisoners clashed among themselves. Some remained strong supporters of the Nazis. Others had been drafted and forced into the military. They also clashed with U.S. soldiers serving as guards.

Thomas Burch, now 85 and living in the Florida Panhandle at Wewahitchka, was a U.S. Army prison guard in Clewiston during the summer of 1943. He had been trained in Geneva Convention policy, but he struck a defiant prisoner with an empty Coke bottle, leaving the German unconscious and bleeding.

"The next day, the commanding officer up in Jacksonville called me and told me he wished I would have killed the man," Burch recently told The News Herald in Panama City.

Guards taunted prisoners, urging them to escape. Some tried and were shot.

Despite the confrontations, Burch told a reporter he eventually built strong friendships with several prisoners.

"They were just like we were, but smarter," Burch said.

German sailor Paul Kurowsky was 20 when a U.S. plane bombed his U-boat and a U.S. ship rammed and sank it. The crew of a U.S. destroyer rescued him from the sea. Years later, with the help of reporters for the Orlando Sentinel, he tracked down two of those rescuers and thanked them for saving him.

The German was imprisoned at Camp Blanding and worked for 80 cents a day repairing boats. Others picked fruit and worked in vegetable fields. They paid 10 cents a bottle for beer and the same for packs of cigarettes at the camp exchange.

Treated fairly at the camp, Kurowsky came to admire the United States.

Sentinel staffers and a retired U.S. Navy officer in Orlando helped reunite -- by telephone -- the German prisoner and some of the crew of the USS Lea.

The late Ormund Powers wrote in 1997 about the POWs in Lake County: "When it became time for the Germans to go home, most local people who had had dealings with them were convinced they were good men, hard and dedicated workers trying to serve their country -- but on the wrong side in that war."

A recent letter to the editor from Alan Lunin, a law-office consultant from Oviedo, touched on a similar point when he wrote about American attitudes toward treatment of Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or wherever else the United States might hold prisoners in its war on terrorism.

He wrote of the German prisoners during World War II: "Many of these were young men whose formative years had been spent being indoctrinated in Nazi propaganda. They knew about how vile and degenerate the Americans were.

"But these POWs were treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. They were properly housed. In a time when American civilians were under rationing, these men were given the same food as American military personnel. They were treated with dignity and respect.

"When these men went back to Germany, they told their fellow Germans how wonderful the Americans were. Some of them even immigrated to the United States. In the period of the Cold War, these men would tell people of the American values that they had seen in action."

Before returning to their homeland, some of the German prisoners held in Florida were required to rebuild the damage the Nazi war machine had caused in England and Europe.

Find out more: The University Press of Florida's 11-book Florida History and Culture Series includes Robert D. Billinger Jr.'s chronicle of the Florida POW camps, Hitler's Soldiers in the Sunshine State: German POWs in Florida (University Press of Florida, $24.95, hardcover, 262 pages).

Jim Robison can be reached at jrobison@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5137.

© Orlando Sentinel "