A German Prisoner of War and his memories of the experience

I found the following narrative on a German genealogy website, GenWiki. The text here is a translation of that narrative, and I added links to articles in Wikipedia that might help the reader in full understanding of the experience by H.A.

Experience report

As a prisoner of war in the USA (April 8, 1943 to November 30, 1945). [Original at GenWiki.]

By H.A., prisoner of war in America from April 8, 1943 to November 30, 1945

German invasion of Russia, World War II

I am a German prisoner of war who has returned home from imprisonment in the United States. Before the war, I represented a scientific publisher abroad, which perhaps enabled me to keep a more open eye than was possible for those who lived in Germany at the time. I had been a soldier since the beginning of 1940, participated in the invasion of Russia and the winter battle before Moscow, followed the fighting in the Crimea the following year and came to Africa at the beginning of 1943, where I was captured by the British 8th Army, which handed me over to the Americans two months later. I am one of 360,000, and during a nearly three-year stay in the United States, I saw the change that some Third Reich soldiers went through when they were transplanted into the American climate.

Afrikakorps in the Sahara

The ship had taken four weeks to cross [the Atlantic Ocean]. Although we were in a hatch, conversations with the crew had been possible, a newspaper had come here and there, so that every day that brought us closer to the American continent added a few tiles to the mosaic picture that everyone saw of the fabulous country. Opinions clashed violently, passionate prejudices dominated every conversation, and gradually an official view emerged. No one could say where it came from, but it was there; you suddenly knew what you had to think about America. Everyone had to comply with it. You could only be more open in occasional private conversations. So already on the crossing a small group came together, which moved as a silent and face-saving community within the majority. And this state should characterize life in the years to come.

Norfolk, Virginia on the eastern seaboard

We landed in Norfolk, Virginia. The harbor was swarming with warships of all kinds, dirigible airships (so-called blimps) and aircraft patrolling above them. In a very short time we went through delousing, showers, registration and soon stood in an overarching terminal, through which a heavy Pullman car slowly pushed. We rode through Virginia, the oldest in the United States (originally thirteen). It was a warm summer day outside, the landscape gently rolled, fields and meadows broken up by groups of trees and parks. The small stations through which the train flew bore Old English names. People sat reading or chatting on the open porche of their bright wooden houses, glittering cars rolled over the asphalt streets, the occupants waved to us by slightly raising their hands as if they said "Hello". Before each of the unguarded railroad crossings, the locomotive bumped its mighty horn.

Skat winning trick

Pullman sleeping car

The African Corps fighters were used to winning. Some looked out of the window with a still face, others made derogatory comments, many played skat all day. Across from me was an officer disguised as a sergeant with a face of a district chief, whose skin seemed to have swum away from him. He was sitting upright and looking offended. One noticed that he deliberately avoided looking at America. He spoke only once. When the train passed a factory site, in front of which hundreds of sparkling automobiles were parked, he said: "They put extra of them out because of us." When we woke up on the third morning and the train was still racing across the country, he was heard again. This time he said: "They're deliberately driving us around in circles." - I never saw him again, but I met his spirit daily afterwards.

Oklahoma in the center of the USA

On the evening of the third day of travel, we reached our camp in Oklahoma State, which was to become our home for the next year and a half. The "POW camps" in America were really "set up especially for us". Divided into 12 companies, about 3000 men lived in each camp. We had every conceivable convenience, from catering to German standards to the possibility of taking a shower at any time of the day or night. There were sports fields, theaters, a library, an entertainment room and a canteen where you could buy things that had long ceased to exist in Europe. American doctors and German medical personnel took care of the sick in three exemplary areas; whoever had a fever was immediately taken to the hospital. 

Hitler and subordinates
give the "Heil" salute at Nürnberg

The Americans ran the camp, but left the internal administration to our own devices. As if by secret sign, all the positions in charge were suddenly filled with men of the same kind. Little Germany emerged, an outpost of the Third Reich in the middle of the enemy country. The Christian, the cultivated man - they went into hiding. The "fighter" prevailed. Whoever found anything acceptable in America was a "traitor".

Camp newspaper at Camp Gruber

Camp newspaper in Camp Gruber

The American officers and men were friendly, human, and concerned about our welfare [at Camp Gruber]. Their lack of "attitude" was promptly misunderstood and interpreted as a weakness. A camp newspaper appeared, edited by men who had become "tough" in the iron school of their country's central press. Their age was around twenty and they had played a role in youth education in their homeland in better days. They were particularly good at interpreting America's free press. In order to make their comments more effective, the American newspapers that came into the camp were bought up and burned by the German camp administration, and only the German newspaper produced in the camp was allowed to be read. It reported such considerable losses inflicted on the enemy that even the stupidest had to clearly expect the impending collapse of America. 

Germany's national holidays were celebrated "in the spirit of home". Lectures and training courses served to mentally “align” the camp. I particularly remember a lecture on “Heinrich v. Kleist as a fighter ”. This poet had foreseen the magnitude of our time and, in his Prussian dramas, presented the struggle against the plutocratic-Jewish world conspiracy with poetic symbolism: Armin was Hitler, Varus was Roosevelt and so on. Two years later - I studied German literary history at the University of Chicago through the "Home Study Department" - I received the topic to work on: "The Prussian conception of duty in the Prussian dramas Heinrich v. Kleists ”, and it was concluded that Heinrich von Kleist was more of a man than a man of duty and far more a successor to Lessing and Herder than a predecessor to Dietrich Eckart.

Referenced People

Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (1777-1811)	Armin, Hermann (18 BC – AD 21)	Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945	Varus receiving German leaders (46 BC - AD 9)
Franklin D. Rossevelt (1882-1945)	Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)	Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)	Johann Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923)

Camp Gruber library - author of book lending

But it was a long way before one could openly pursue such a degree. The camp was only gradually freed from its influence by transferring the wildest zealots to a special camp. Their successors were more willing to raise the teaching program to an objective level. They took into account the fact that we were in America: both sides were shown and the judgment left to the individual as far as possible. The intellectual barbed wire was gradually cleared away and the view cleared to see the rest of the world.

Fort Getty, Rhode Island

Now everyone could get hold of newspapers and magazines, films brought a welcome addition to the new image that was beginning to form. The camp library (eight thousand volumes) was redesigned, its special storage unit, which had an archive of 600 records, provided German music and literature, but also promoted an understanding of America. Twenty-three prisoners studied through the "Home Study Department" at an American university of their choice and were able to do the "Final Examination". There were still a considerable number of stubborn and indifferent people, but the air was clearer and lighter, and countless conversations gave us confirmation that the path we had chosen was the right one. That was the situation when I left the camp in the summer of 1945 with a group of like-minded people to start the second trip across America, which took us via the Mississippi to the east coast and from there via Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston to Fort Getty in Rhode Island.

Geneva Conventions of 1864,
1909, and 1924

Already during the war, American academics had suggested that German prisoners of war in the USA, through suitable teachers, should help them understand more closely American thinking and life. The proposals were rejected on the basis of the Geneva Agreement. It was only after the war ended that the war department in Washington put the idea into action and established the Fort Getty Prisoner of War School. During the previous months, commissions had traveled through all the camps to select suitable prisoners. The selection was made on the basis of written documents that had been collected about everyone from day one. Personal conduct and general character image were decisive. As far as possible, people were selected who could be expected to work in a spirit of reconciliation and understanding at home. Giving you a clearer idea of the America way of life before you head back home - that was the basic idea behind the school at Fort Getty.

University of Göttingen

Fort Getty is an island on the north coast of the Atlantic, nestled in the mansion-lined shores of the Narragansett Bay. This is New England, the spiritual and cultural cradle of America. Nearby are Boston and Harvard University, which, older than Göttingen, is the most prestigious educational institution in the country. A cheerful park landscape of controlled, severe loveliness extends over hundreds of miles, designed by people who have imprinted their spirit on it. It was the spirit of New England that carried our school, the democratic spirit of America: it was called trust instead of distrust, understanding instead of malice, voluntary discipline instead of coercion. Fort Getty was a school of goodwill. The polite decency of educated people prevailed here. We students had put aside our ranks, and it was only by chance that we learned that one had been a colonel or another had been an enlisted man. We had come together voluntarily in order to produce from the mouth of the professor a rounding of our world view, which everyone had preserved through years of distress.

T.V. Smith
(1890-1964)

Daily life was very different from that in a normal prisoner of war camp. Study had taken the place of eight hours of work, and soldier's respect for superiors had been replaced by human respect for their personality, which was expressed in civil manners. A depressed mood, which had already drawn hard lines on their faces, had given way to a new attitude to life and a new confidence. The atmosphere of trust connected teachers and students. Most of the teachers - even those wearing uniforms - were civilian scholars from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other well-known universities in the country, and some were politicians, such as T. V. Smith, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and congressman of the State of Illinois. They were all Democrats who were ready to die for their ideal, but who, from the bottom of their hearts, detested war as a means of resolving political differences. The "enemy", who came up to us in this form, wanted to work with us to find out which paths to take to avoid in the future those mistakes of the past.

For this purpose, a study program was set up for the eight-week course, the framework of which were four main subjects: English, German history, "Military Government" and American history. The mornings were entirely devoted to English. The lectures in the other subjects alternately filled the afternoons. In the evening there were lectures by invited guests, some of whom were well-known personalities, who had previously been regarded as “intolerable” in Germany and have since enriched America with their knowledge and skills. Each class lesson or lecture was followed by a working and a discussion hour, which consolidated what was heard. The highlight of our course was Prof. T. V. Smith’s lectures on American history. He assumed knowledge of the fact and used history to explain the development of the American view of how people live together, of society.

It is difficult to tell whom of these men we owe the most. Certainly some had greater influence than others and left a lasting impression. The spirit of kindness and good will to meet the other half way, as well as the absence of prejudice made the guard at the gate and the sergeant who introduced us to the game of baseball appear to be the same well-rounded personality as the head of the school, Colonel Alpheus Smith, who, when one of us accidentally addressed him as "Major" and apologized afterwards, answered him with a laugh: "You may say Bill to me; that's what everyone calls me here.” Our hosts all showed that special mixture of reason and cheerful optimism. Their self-criticism on the one hand and their belief in the inviolability of the individual on the other helped us to rediscover values that had long been buried in us. The state regained the place of a necessary but not overly significant facility. As Germans, we no longer felt separate from the rest of western civilization and recognized the common duties that bind people all over the world.

We also learned at Fort Getty what differentiates American education from German education. For the English class, the students were divided into four classes based on their level of proficiency. The test lasted twenty minutes and was as follows: an American read short English sentences, everyone had to write down whether the sentence was incorrect or correct. In German, such a sentence would read something like: "The Americans have an innate aversion to baseball, ice cream and central government." Afterwards, two short stories were read in English, the content of which was to be reproduced in English.

System of phonetics

With a few exceptions, everyone was placed in the right class. The two lower classes learned according to a new, effective method America developed based on immigrant experience: a method of spoken word instead of written and grammar. The successes were remarkable; the students did not speak school English, but American sounds and idioms. In the third class they read, spoke, filed. The fourth class was doing linguistics. Two American anthropologists introduced us to their novel view of human language. They, too, only proceeded from hearing, from the sound, and have developed a phonetic system which, as yet unknown in Germany, makes any written language superfluous for the initiate and allows him to read and speak foreign languages as well. The starting point of their system is that written language does not reflect the sounds that it claims to represent. Good German and good English is what people speak. - These hours were particularly good to show us how young and impartial the Americans are. A practical goal leads them to practical solutions. They easily override the conventional and achieve results that are then often adopted by the world.

The “discussion” is nothing new, but in America it is an essential element in educating people to think independently and to respect the opinions of others. The discussion should be free, open, dispassionate and impersonal. It is essential that you are willing to compromise with your neighbors in order to achieve common goals. We first had to learn to discuss. It was the subject where we failed the most.

The lectures on German history were the only ones held in German. We saw each other in an American mirror and often hardly recognized each other. Here we were made to see how important it is for peoples to keep in touch with one another and for those who lock themselves up not only lose sight of the rest of the world, but also of themselves.
Prof. T.V. Smith taught in a completely unorthodox way. He started almost every lecture with a joke or a little story, which contained the main point of the lecture, and usually closed it with another "story", which once again clearly illustrated what was heard. His philosophical statements were never abstract, but always real-life and tangible. His humorous way of teaching initially seemed so strange that a fellow student, who is a professor at a German university in civilian life, described T. V. Smith as a "conferencier", a judgment that he willingly withdrew later in the course. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1883)

The eight weeks were over too quickly. We went home from Boston. The conversations that were held on board this time differed significantly from those on the outward journey. The development that we had all been through came to our minds more clearly than the thoughts that rushed our ship home. In the country that had been a “fortress” for twelve years and now suddenly faces a world that it no longer knows and with which it has to get along. I want to quote Emerson to express our experiences and hopes: “Whenever a person has come to the conclusion that there is no longer a church for him, only his faithful prayer, no constitution, but only the good and just manner with which he treated his neighbor; no freedom, only the insurmountable will to do right - then he will soon find help and allies; because the constitution of the universe will be on his side. "