Re: When POWs Were Treated Well

Date: June 18, 2004

"Meanwhile: Back when POWs were treated well

Sharon Young IHT

COLLEGE STATION, Texas When the steam train left Houston last Sunday carrying former President George H.W. Bush and his birthday party entourage for a nostalgic trip to the hot flatland of central Texas, they were hardly aware of the peculiar irony of their train trip. They were, in fact, retracing the steps of the last enemy combatants to be detained in prisons on American soil.
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Twenty miles away from the Bush Library in Hearne, Texas, are the remnants of what was one of the largest secret prisoner of war camps during World War II.
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After large numbers of enemy German fighters were rounded up and corralled into huge makeshift pens, mostly in the North African desert, the Allies realized there was a problem.
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"In 1943, there was simply no place to put captured German prisoners," explains Arnold Krammer, a history professor at Texas A&M, "so they were shipped to the United States."
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The captives were squeezed onto a few ships for the secret crossing. The number of enemy prisoners on American soil soon ballooned to over 398,000, tucked away in many southern towns, guarded by quickly recruited army guards.
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On the long train ride across the United States, former German POW Herman Blumhard feared the worst: "We would be slave labor; we would be abused, we would be starved."
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Instead, this is what he found: "They had 25 cots on either side of a big room. On each cot was toothpaste and shaving cream placed nicely, neatly. That surprised me so, and impressed me."
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After the bombings and battles he had survived, Private Walter Felthozer knew he would survive captivity: "We had had weeks with nothing to eat, so peanut butter and your American white bread and black coffee was the best dinner I have ever had."
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Before Iraq, Cuba and Afghanistan, before U.S. guards became known for disgusting and dehumanizing treatment of detainees, before the Bush administration thumbed its nose at international law, in 1943 guards were ordered to a strict interpretation of the Geneva Conventions.
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An officer, usually a newly minted lieutenant, was assigned to the prison camps specifically to uphold the "equal soldier" policy, even when running internal spy rings for information. The guards were rushed into service and untrained, but treating the prisoners as punching bags was not condoned. Those who could provide "actionable intelligence" were quickly found out, and once behind barbed wire, the rest were treated better than any POWs before or since.
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That they were white European detainees helped. "You have to remember, a large percentage of Americans are of German ancestry and the prisoners, they were like us," said Krammer, the Texas A&M historian.
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Such liberal treatment did not come from generosity of spirit, but from political strategy. Krammer: "Since the enemy had Americans in their hands, we felt if we took better care of theirs, they'd take care of ours."
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The enemy prisoners had more to fear from their fellow inmates than from their American captors. With not enough U.S. Army soldiers available to run the camps, the army had decided to let the prisoners police themselves.
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There was much violence and bloodshed in the camps, but the U.S. Army looked the other way. The hardline Nazi strongmen imprisoned with regular Wehrmacht conscripts often held secret tribunals and kangaroo courts. Hoods were used for vicious beatings by fellow captives if they critized the war effort.
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"The punishment was called 'the Holy Ghost.' In the middle of the night, they'd pull a pillow case over someone and beat him senseless and sometimes kill him," Krammer said. "There were many cases where they'd take them into the bathroom and hang them. Pin a note on them, saying, 'I'm despondent,' and the army let it be called a suicide."
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By 1946, all 425,000 enemy prisoners of war had left the United States. Many returned to become American citizens. As they reach their 80s, hundreds of others come back to visit, bringing their adult children with them. They want them to know Americans the way they did. They often break down in tears, recalling, they say, the compassion of an American experiment in wartime decency.
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"What the Americans did was bring back large numbers - really several hundred thousands young men - who liked and even loved the United States," said Rudiger von Wechmar, a lieutenant in Rommel's Afrika Korp who studied journalism while a POW and subsequently became a diplomat and, in 1980, president of the UN General Assembly. "That contribution to the peace of the world is immeasurable.”
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Sharon Young is a TV documentary producer whose father was the military intelligence officer at the prison camp at Hearne, Texas.

© 2004 the International Herald Tribune"