Interesting book on N.H. WWII POW camp

[oldbrownhat]

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):

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

 

[Rudi]

Any German who did not fall into the hands of the Soviets was grateful.

 

[Liftrat]

"Verrrry interestink", as they used to say. There was a P.O.W. camp in my neck of the woods (Fraser, CO), but I think it was populated with more run-of-the-mill prisoners, and the cold kept them from straying too far. Thanks for the link; I might have to read the book. .

 

[LoboGunLeather]

I have met several former German soldiers here in southern Colorado. WW2 POWs worked on farms and businesses in this area, and quite a few returned here to live after the war.

There was also a Japanese internment camp near Lamar, Colorado. The detainees there (Camp Amache) were mostly first and second generation Japanese families, many of them US citizens. Those folks also served in agriculture and business during their forced detention. Interestingly, the governor of Colorado strongly opposed Mr. Roosevelt's detention of Japanese-Americans during WW2.

 

[Greyman50]

Have met quite a few former WWII German POWs. There is a excellent book about the difference GI’s felt and dealt with POWs in WWII. Remember several USMC Divisions took No more POWs after 1943…

 

[S&W Fan]

The flip side of that coin is Camp Shelby, Mississippi. It was a camp for captured Afrika Corps soldiers. At one point the camp discovered a swastika with arrows pointing towards their barracks trampled in to the grass in the hopes the Luftwaffe wouldn't bomb them when Germany attacked us. There's a great military museum at Camp Shelby if any of you visit the area around Hattiesburg. I was there in '05 for my son's departure ceremony for his first deployment.

My father took many photos during his time in Europe during WWII, one shows a group of soldiers lined up sitting in an open field-they were captured Germans. On the back he wrote "And they called themselves The Master Race". The rare times he talked with me about his service and that photo he said he wouldn't have thought twice about shooting any that tried to escape. I will see if I can find it in the 100 or so photos I have after dad passed in '92.

 

[GypsmJim]

Most Germans were honest, hard working God fearing people who felt no ill will against Americans. They fought only because they knew if they didn't an SS officer would put a bullet in the back of their head.

 

[S&W Fan]

My father didn’t come across most of those.

 

[dmar]

Most Germans were honest, hard working God fearing people who felt no ill will against Americans. They fought only because they knew if they didn't an SS officer would put a bullet in the back of their head.

That’s exactly what I was told by a German veteran. I was in Germany back in the late 90s with my girlfriend at the time. We were staying at a hotel, and I was alone one night waiting for her to come down to go out to dinner.

While I was waiting I figured I’d grab a beer at the lobby bar. Well, the bar was full of older, distinguished looking guys, sharply dressed in nice suits. Dumb me, I figured they were there for a school reunion, or sports team reunion, or something. Well, I initiated conversation with a few of the guys, and yup, they were WWII veterans gathered for a reunion.

At first I thought they’d not be very friendly to a young American, but they were very nice and we talked a bunch. As the conversation progressed, I point blank asked one guy how he felt about Hitler, and the Nazi cause. He was very honest and told me that in Germany, at that time, if you didn’t step up and join the fight, you’d be done. He said it was a miserable experience, with awful devastation.

 

[Redcoat3340]

Great book. I read it many, many years ago, then reread it just before a visit to northern NH. The prisoners mostly worked in the lumber industry, either harvesting trees or in the mills, or on local farms. They were fairly intergrated into the community it seem to recall, many spent holidays with local families. A surprising number (to me, at least) married women they met (they were repatriated back to Germany and then returned to the US).

I finally got a chance to visit about a dozen years ago when my wife and I took a "2nd Honeymoon" back to NH. There's a roadside marker near where the camp used to be.

We bought some apples (it was fall and they'd just come off the tree) and chatted a bit with the lady who had the "stand." She said they get a couple of visitors a year, people like me who'd read the book and wanted to see the town.

I don't imagine much has changed. The road is probably a bit better, but it's pretty far out in the "country." Some newer homes but most of the buildings in town aren't new. Nice covered bridge too, as I recall.

I guess I'll be looking in the garage for the box with that book in it. Probably time to reread it. As I now live in the Pacific Northwest, I doubt I'll be visiting. Maybe a trip on google earth.

If you are interested in that time period it's a very different perspective on WWII.

 

[oldbrownhat]

Great book. I read it many, many years ago, then reread it just before a visit to northern NH...

I stand corrected. I had initially stated that it was a recent book, but in fact it was published by Univ. of Chicago Press in 1988. The LA Times article was about the same book.

 

[fordson]

My father, a WWII Vet and an ex-POW himself, had his “kitchen table vets group”. His group of friends, all WWI and/or Korean War vets, would gather round our kitchen table, drink coffee or a beer and swap war stories. It was good for them all. One friend, I remember his name as Paul, was a German soldier captured in North Africa and eventually sent to a POW camp near Kingston’s Canada. Paul and my father had something in common as they had both been POWs, but their experiences were radically different. I remember Paul saying he spent more time as a POW than as a serving soldier, and that his POW time was more enjoyable.
There was a successful escape from a Canadian camp - Oberleutnant Franz Von Werra. His story was published in a book and then made into a movie - “The One That Got Away”

 

[IAM Rand]

I once met a German WWII soldier. I remember him as a very large man, one you might imagine seeing in a movie. He told me he had served in South Africa. He told me he would eat raw onions to keep healthy. I like raw onions but, not like him. He picked up an onion and started eating it like an apple.

 

[Delta Expatriate]

The flip side of that coin is Camp Shelby, Mississippi. It was a camp for captured Afrika Corps soldiers. At one point the camp discovered a swastika with arrows pointing towards their barracks trampled in to the grass in the hopes the Luftwaffe wouldn't bomb them when Germany attacked us. There's a great military museum at Camp Shelby if any of you visit the area around Hattiesburg. I was there in '05 for my son's departure ceremony for his first deployment.

I have seen that swastika at Camp Shelby. I have a friend who had found it on previous trips looking for it and investigating the history of Camp Shelby. He pointed it out to myself and another friend on a trip to the Gen. Mickey Walker Museum at Camp Shelby. The swastika is in a wooded area a little off a gravel road. I don't think is was wooded when it was created (dug).
Some brush has now grown up around it. Another fact about Camp Shelby is that the Japanese unit from Hawaii (was it the 442?) that fought so well in the European theater trained there.

I too recommend that museum.

 

[oldbrownhat]

I once met a German WWII soldier. I remember him as a very large man, one you might imagine seeing in a movie.....

Not as large as Jakob Nacken, I'll bet!

 

[Delta Expatriate]

Clinton, Mississippi, also had a POW camp with a satelite camp in Indianola, where I once lived. Some of them were used as labor in the cotton fields - northern europeans working under the brutally hot delta sun. Some older citizens, who lived there during WWII, told me they remembered them singing as they went to work. I expect they preferred the work in the fields over service with the the German Army.

 

[GypsmJim]

That’s exactly what I was told by a German veteran. I was in Germany back in the late 90s with my girlfriend at the time. We were staying at a hotel, and I was alone one night waiting for her to come down to go out to dinner.

While I was waiting I figured I’d grab a beer at the lobby bar. Well, the bar was full of older, distinguished looking guys, sharply dressed in nice suits. Dumb me, I figured they were there for a school reunion, or sports team reunion, or something. Well, I initiated conversation with a few of the guys, and yup, they were WWII veterans gathered for a reunion.

At first I thought they’d not be very friendly to a young American, but they were very nice and we talked a bunch. As the conversation progressed, I point blank asked one guy how he felt about Hitler, and the Nazi cause. He was very honest and told me that in Germany, at that time, if you didn’t step up and join the fight, you’d be done. He said it was a miserable experience, with awful devastation.

I come from a family of poor hard working German farmers. My Grandpa came over in 1925 and sent money back every month to his siblings. By the late '30s all communications were forcibly stopped. My cousin said the SS came into their little village and killed any that would talk back. They all went with them. A cousin was killed in the war, and 2 others were never seen or heard from again.

The uncle of a girl I dated in College was the last surviving member of his platoon. He crawled to a local house and the German family fed him and healed him in the basement until the war was over.

My youngest cousin who had emigrated was a naturalized US citizen. He volunteered for the US Army or Navy, but he told the draft board he would fight the Japanese, but not in Germany because he was afraid he might have to kill his own family.

After the war, several family members emigrated and became US citizens.