Just read a NYT review of "Stark Decency", a 1988 book about the POW camp in Stark, NH where a bond developed between the prisoners and guards. It's a long review, but I also found a 1994 L.A. Times article on it.
...What made the camp unusual was that its inmates were mostly members of the 999th Division, an assembly of dissidents, communists, socialists and perceived misfits who had once been imprisoned by the Nazis.
The 999th was created by Adolf Hitler to give members a chance to redeem themselves for Germany. Generally, they were older and better educated than regular German troops, wiser to the ways of the world and more cosmopolitan. Some spoke not only German but also French, English, Dutch, Italian and Norwegian...
...There were escapes, though all POWs eventually were caught...
...The most successful escape was made by an artist fluent in several languages who made his way to New York City and was getting by drawing portraits of visitors to Central Park. But three months after he fled Stark, he ran into the camp’s interpreter at Penn Station. The irony was multiplied when both men turned out to be from Vienna and had lived a few blocks apart...
...One day some guards were humming “Don’t Fence Me In” and, when a German POW asked what the tune was, the guards taught him the words.
“The next morning all the Germans were singing it, in German and English,” Koop wrote.
Forty years later, in Stark Town Hall, former prisoners of war and their families, former guards and their families, former civilian foremen and their families, and the people of Stark all linked arms and sang, ‘Don’t Fence Me In.’
“There was not a dry eye in the hall,” Koop said.
And from a Reddit thread on German prisoners who decided to stay in the US (or Canada as we had POW camps here as well):The 999th was created by Adolf Hitler to give members a chance to redeem themselves for Germany. Generally, they were older and better educated than regular German troops, wiser to the ways of the world and more cosmopolitan. Some spoke not only German but also French, English, Dutch, Italian and Norwegian...
...There were escapes, though all POWs eventually were caught...
...The most successful escape was made by an artist fluent in several languages who made his way to New York City and was getting by drawing portraits of visitors to Central Park. But three months after he fled Stark, he ran into the camp’s interpreter at Penn Station. The irony was multiplied when both men turned out to be from Vienna and had lived a few blocks apart...
...One day some guards were humming “Don’t Fence Me In” and, when a German POW asked what the tune was, the guards taught him the words.
“The next morning all the Germans were singing it, in German and English,” Koop wrote.
Forty years later, in Stark Town Hall, former prisoners of war and their families, former guards and their families, former civilian foremen and their families, and the people of Stark all linked arms and sang, ‘Don’t Fence Me In.’
“There was not a dry eye in the hall,” Koop said.
Wilhelm Sauerbrei...returned to Hearne, Texas, and gave a very excellent quote to sum up the POW experiment when interviewed by a newspaper:
"I'll tell you, pal, if there is ever another war, get on the side that America isn't, then get captured by the Americans— you'll have it made!"
And with that, A Happy New Year / Frohes Neues Jahr / Guten Rutsch to all "I'll tell you, pal, if there is ever another war, get on the side that America isn't, then get captured by the Americans— you'll have it made!"

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