Nazi Summer Camp
You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC and NPR.
Jad: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
Robert: I'm Robert Krulwich.
Jad: This is RadioLab, and today...
Robert: What we're going to tell you is an old story it's about 70 years old. But it's really not as old as that at all because you'll notice that it hasn't ended.
Jad: And it comes to us from reporter Karen Duffin.
Karen: Yeah.
Jad: Okay, so where to start? Do you have a sense of where to start?
Karen: I feel like I can blame - well I can, I can blame this on my dad.
Man's Voice: And that's the house I grew up in, just so you know.
Karen: Oh, right.
Man's Voice: Well that was my bedroom window.
Jad: This is Karen and her dad looking at pictures of his childhood home.
Karen: He grew up in this tiny town in Idaho called Aberdeen.
Jad: On a potato farm.
Karen: He loves to talk about the farm. Like he thinks we should all live on a farm. So we were talking one day, and he mentions very casually as if it's like something we all know, he says, “Yeah back when we had Nazi prisoners of war working on our farm.” And I was like, time out, what?
Robert: Really? That's it? It was just parenthetical?
Karen: Yeah it was totally like, “Yeah we were picking potatoes, and then yeah Nazi prisoners of war were helping us.”
Karen's dad: Sort of remember how old I was just by how tall the guards were. They were very tall.
Karen: He was only three or four at the time.
Karen's dad: Very, very tall.
Karen: Do you know if there were like dozens of prisoners or just like a handful.
Karen's dad: No, there was a bunch.
Jad: I didn’t even know there were prisoners of war, Nazi prisoners of war in America. Ever.
Karen: Yeah, me neither. So, after I talked to my dad, I ended up calling this historian. (Kathy’s voice: Kathy Kirpatrick) because I wanted to know, is this just an Aberdeen thing?
Kathy: No. Like you were talking about Idaho.
Karen: She told me in Idaho alone…
Kathy: There’s branch camps in Aberdeen and... Blackfoot... and Emmett... and Idaho falls.
Karen: There were 23 different camps. Generally, you had prisoners that were in churches…
Kathy: Tent cities…
Karen: In Paul. Rodeo grounds. Dormitories. High school gyms. And this was the case all across the country.
Kathy: The only state that did not have prisoners of war was Vermont. At the maximum we had over 371,000 Germans, 51,000 Italians, and 5,000 Japanese.
Karen: Almost half a million people.
Jad: Oh my god.
Robert: Ohh.
Karen: Why does nobody know this? It doesn’t even strike a little chord, that maybe once I learned about it in Junior high school.
Kathy: No. This was not talked about. We just don’t talk about it. We just don't... I think we don’t… I don't know.
Jad: But today we are going to talk about it. Not just because it's a cool historical thing. But because it raises a question.
Reporter: Breaking news this noon. A stunning report looking into how the CIA interrogated detainees.
Jad: A question that...
Reporter: …on top secret interrogation tactics…
Jad: …you know, with the torture reports…
Reporter: Bizarre, even sadistic treatment...
Jad: …and Abu Ghraib…
Reporter: Prisoners being abused by American soldiers…
Jad: …Guantanamo Bay, that we're still trying to answer today. That is when you capture an enemy soldier, take them out of the battle, out of the fight, how should you treat that person?
Robert: And if both sides agree to follow certain rules, and one side doesn't, what do you do?
Jad: And the interesting thing was that 70 years ago this question was playing out in this really dramatic way in all of these towns across America.
Karen: There were about 200 base camps, that were huge. They were like, up to 8,000 people.
Jad: And by the way that's like 70 times the size of Guantanamo Bay, currently. In any case, as she was researching, Karen started to zoom in to one camp in particular.
Karen: So, this is really illustrative of what happened. There's this one camp in Aliceville, Alabama. It's this tiny town of like 1,500 people. But the camp has 6,000 people.
Jad: Wow that’s like 4 times the size of the town.
Karen: Yeah. So I went and interviewed a bunch of people, guards, prisoners, locals, from Aliceville.
Thomas Sweet: It was quite a day.
Karen: That’s Thomas Sweet. He worked in Aliceville. And he told me that the day that the prisoners came, so a thousand of them came at first, and the police were like nobody is allowed out on the street.
Thomas: But when word got out that the first train load was coming. Everybody rushed out on the street.
Man 2: The day the train came in, there wasn’t supposed to be any townspeople. But of course there was.
Woman 1: Everybody was out.
Man 2: The road was lined with kids from 3 years old up to people 70 years old.
Karen: So these voices are from an oral history project that was recorded in 1994 about the prison camp in Aliceville.
Woman 1: So we all climbed the lumber pile so we can could see them when they got off the train.
Karen: So everybody’s nervous because they have these images in their head.
Man 2: In my mind, just like a lot of people in Aliceville they didn't know what kind of devils we was gonna get off that train — some guys with horns on their head.
Karen: So these prisoners sent to Aliceville were actually parts of Rommel's Africa Corp. And these guys were the most feared of Hitler’s fighters.
Man 2: They were supposed to be the elite.
Old reporter: So called Nazi supermen.
Karen: The Nazi supermen right? So the train pulls up.
Man 2: They stop right on the main highway.
Karen: Doors open and then hundreds and hundreds of German soldiers get out.
Woman 1: And they were marching. With their German march.
Karen: And they're singing their military songs in German. (recording of German military song)
Woman 2: Tell us about what it was like, with what you thought when they got off the train. What did they look like? Did they have on uniforms?
Woman 1: Oh, yes.
Karen: So when you listen to the oral histories, it's really clear that this was a really complicated moment for the people of Aliceville.
Woman 3: The people of Aliceville were scared to death.
Man: I didn't know whether I was gonna be mad at them when they first came in, or what, but when I saw they were just a bunch of whipped kids...
Woman 3: There was a feeling of concern in our hearts for them.
Man 2: When I seen them they was nothing but a bunch of young kids...
Woman 4: How young they were.
Man 2: Haggard looking, washed out, and beat...
Woman 4: Winded. And some of them, just maggots. Oh, just gruesome.
Man 3: You could tell they'd been through a rough time.
***
Hans: Oh, it was awful for us.
Karen: That's Hans Copera. He was one of the prisoners stepping out of the train that day. He'd been drafted in the army against his will, captured in North Africa, and then he was sent to America at the bottom of this big cargo ship.
Hans: And then one room they crowded 700 people. You couldn't even sit. There was no toilet of course. We had only tin boxes. We all were wet, soaked with urine. It was awful. It was an awful trip.
Man 3: And you uh, kind of had to feel sorry for them.
Karen: But on the other hand, and you hear this too in the oral histories, the people in Aliceville are thinking, “These are Nazis. These are the men who were killing our sons.”
Woman 5: You know I had three brothers overseas at the same time. So we didn't like 'em. That's just the way we felt.
Karen: Okay. So there's that question in people's mind. And this is playing out all across the country. Here's the enemy at your mercy. What do you do? How do you treat them? They're in your hands. Nobody's watching. You can do whatever you want with them at that point. In theory.
Jad: But in practice?
Karen: Actually, this was a significant moment for the world. I mean 14 years before a bunch of countries had got together and they'd made up rules for exactly this kind of moment.
Reporter: In 1929, in Geneva, long before Hitler and his partners began to eye the real estate of the world, there was an international conference. Here nations solemnly promised to uphold the rules covering the treatment of prisoners of war.
Arnold: Oh it was a series of do's and don'ts.
Karen: That's historian Arnold Kramer, he's a professor at Texas A&M. Some of the rules he says are pretty basic.
Arnold: That women and children should be protected.
Karen: So you had to give prisoners a certain amount of food...
Reporter: Prisoners are entitled to the same quality rations, clothing, and living quarters as are afforded our own troops.
Karen: And then there's rules about medical attention, labor.
Kathy Kirkpatrick: While the Geneva conventions says yes you can use people for labor…
Karen: Kathy Kirkpatrick again.
Kathy: you also should be paying people for labor. The rate of payment was 80 cents a day.
Karen: So the Geneva conventions are this kind of this attempt to civilize the most uncivilized thing, which is war.
Arnold: You see the first world war was so horrific.
Karen: Hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in POW camps.
Arnold: There were no real regulations with regard to prisoners. Sides did almost anything they wanted.
Karen: So the Geneva conventions of 1929 was an attempt to kind of set things right.
Arnold: Because people just couldn't fathom another war to end wars.
Thomas: We were well trained in the Geneva convention.
Karen: That's Thomas Sweet again. He was actually one of the guards at Aliceville. And he said that even before the POWs arrived, the Geneva conventions were drilled into their head. They had lectures, the rules were posted in the rec call, and in the officers' club.
Thomas: We had to… the prisoners had to be treated the same as you would your own fellow soldiers.
Karen: Which sounds kind of basic, but for someone like Hans who's stepping off this train and wondering how is he gonna be treated..
Hans: It was... I should say, really it was a sort of... heaven.
***
Thomas: When they got in, the barracks were all laid out.
Woman 3: The barracks were fresh, clean.
Thomas: The towels and shaving equipment for each one on each one's bunk.
Karen: The prisoners washed up. And the guards opened up the cafeteria.
Walter Feltholder: And then we got to eat good things.
Karen: This is Walter Feltholder. He was another prisoner at Aliceville.
Walter: We got to eat white bread. American white bread. And we got to eat peanut butter. I did not know what peanut was. And it tasted wonderful, wonderful. It was the best dinner I ever had. And I, always, when I think on good times, then I think on peanut butter. (laughs)
Karen: And here's the funny thing. As you look into this, you realize we're not just following the Geneva Conventions, the letter of the law. We're going above and beyond. And according to Hans, what started out as a great thing getting all this food ended up to be kind of a problem.
Hans: The boys came to me, every day, please tell them we don't want to have so much ham. And the sergeant came to me who heard that don't tell the captain that you are going to throw it away. No, no no take it and make a hole in the sand and put it in the sand.
Karen: So they buried the ham.
(staff laughter)
Hans: And a lot of it. Buried a lot of the ham. Because we didn't know what to do with it!
Karen: And they also didn't like corn, but they kept getting corn, and so they buried corn. And they'd get caught because corn starts growing!
(staff laughter)
Karen: So everyone's like, “Wait a minute!”
Robert: Very bad corn hiding!
(orchestra playing)
Karen: Within two months they have an orchestra, within a year they have three orchestras.
Jad: This is uh, POW-led orchestras?
Karen: Yes.
Jad: So they're being given instruments?
Karen: They're making instruments, the locals are donating instruments, the YMCA is giving instruments.
(recording of POW orchestra)
Karen: They open a school. You can learn anything from pottery to mathematics, almost any language you want to learn. And they set up correspondence programs with the local universities. You can get credit.
Thomas: They had soccer games just about every day. They drew big crowds.
Karen: They had a newspaper. Their newspaper was called The Fenced Guest, and they had poetry. They also did a lot of theatrical productions.
Kathy: And sometimes there were regular art shows.
Karen: So this is where things get a little bit strange.
Allen Van Ders: On December 18, there was another art exhibition.
Karen: This is a woman named Allen Van Ders whose father was POW at the camp. And here she is reading from her father's diary.
Van Ders: December 12, the Fuhrer, that means Hitler, had sent 12,572 dollars to open the art exhibition in Camp B.
Jad: So wait, she's saying, Hitler sent money to the camp for an art thing?
Karen: Yeah.
Jad: While... while we're fighting Hitler he's sending money.
Karen: Yeah.
Jad: While we're fighting Hitler.
Karen: While we're fighting Hitler.
Jad: That's... really strange.
(advertisements)
***
Jad: I'm Jad Abumrad.
Robert: I'm Robert Krulwich.
Jad: And this is Radiolab. And to get back to our story…
Robert: Here’s Karen Duffin.
Karen: Okay, so…
Jad: So okay with Hitler's Christmas gift to the art show… and the ham... and the band… did people in the, outside the camp know what was going on inside?
Karen: You know, once they start, I think it was in 1943 was the point at which we started realizing we're running out of American men to do labor. And we look around and realize well actually we have quite a few men to do work here.
Man 2: Lot of them prisoners working on the farms down there, picking cotton, peanuts.
Karen: So some of the farmers would bring them in the house for lunch. They would drink with them.
Man 4: They were drunk
Karen: There’s some really funny stories of…
Man 4: It was probably moonshine.
Karen: …the prisoners getting drunk with the farmers. And then they'd get in trouble because they’d get home late. One of the biggest things the War Department starts saying when they’re sending these men out is, “If you make friends with these POWs, it's against the rules.” But they do it all the time.
Robert: Did anybody fall in love with anybody?
Karen: Oh yeah. I mean, not a lot, but it definitely happened. So as these prisoners are out in the community, they're forming friendships, a few of them are falling in love. Word starts to get out about how they’re being treated. And meanwhile, across America there’s rationing. So when they learn that the POWs are getting food that they might not be getting, a lot of the American public, they get pissed. Especially this radio guy… Walter Winchell who sort of made this his cause. They call him the Rush Limbaugh of WW2.
Jad: Was he that well known?
Robert Krulwich: Walter Winchell was one of the most famous reporters in America. (imitates Walter Winchell) And he spoke in this funny nasal voice.
Karen: Oh my god that's exactly what he sounds like. So in any case, when he finds out about the Nazi POW program, Walter Winchell just starts to rant about it.
Winchell: The United States Army caters to the Nazis, as though they were kings. They get more food than our soldiers get. Ponies. Radios. Luxuries. And all sorts of leniency beyond imagination.
Karen: And he would do this week after week.
Winchell: We coddlers over here won’t have any Nazis to fatten up on steaks, butter, ham and bacon, chopped chicken liver…
Karen: People start writing articles in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, citizens start flooding the War Department with letters.
Winchel: I know sir that your YMCA… does all it can to make Nazi war prisoners over here comfortable…
Karen: And in the meantime, according to Thomas Sweet, inside the camp, some of these prisoners are starting to get kind of bold.
Sweet: For a couple of nights they cut out swastikas, and they took the kite, and was flying the kite and had the swastikas in the box underneath the kite with a string down to the ground. And they handed the string to one of the guards and said, “Pull this string.” And when they pulled the string the trap door opened on the gadget they had made and all these swastikas started falling all over the camp and in Aliceville too and the townspeople started calling the base mad about that.
Karen: Add to that, we don’t have enough men to guard a lot of these camps, so the prisoners are starting to get more and more control of the camp.
Sweet: The prisoners had the run of the camp.
Karen: And in some cases the Nazi hardliners would start to torment the non-Nazis. They would threaten them, they might beat them up. There were even a couple of murders.
Robert: Who was not a Nazi inside of these camps?
Karen: If you had been drafted but you weren’t idealizing…
Robert: Oh, I see.
Karen: So the perception coming out of these camps is we’ve created these hotels on American soil where Nazis could start radicalizing. And people get so mad that there's actually a Congressional investigation into the coddling of prisoners of war. So I spent a lot of time going at the National Archives trying to get at like, what are the arguments? And here’s kind of how it went. You have this Congressman on one side, Richard Harless, and he’s saying you’re coddling them..
Harless: Congressman Harless of Arizona calls the Nazi prisoners of the United States pampered and privileged!
Karen: And on the other side you have the guy who’s now running the prisoner of war program, Arthur Lurch. And he's basically saying no.
Lurch: "We do not coddle them!"
Karen: He says we’re just following the Geneva Conventions. And the reason that he gave is the same reason that Joe Biden would give almost 60 years later.
Biden: And there’s a reason why we sign these treaties. To protect my son in the military.
Robert: We don’t torture them, they don’t torture us.
Karen: Reciprocity.
Biden: That’s why we have these treaties! So when Americans are captured. They. Are. Not. Tortured. That's the reason! Case anybody forgets it. That's the reason!
Karen: One problem though. Just one month after that hearing in 1944…
Reporter: Unarmed and defenseless American prisoners fell to the machine guns of our enemies.
Karen: …news breaks that 84 American soldiers, prisoners of war in Germany, are gunned down. After they surrendered.
Reporter: Four weeks later their frozen bodies, hands and ankles bound, were found where they fell.
Karen: We then go on to liberate Americans soldiers from POW camps in Germany and we find misery. Nothing like Aliceville.
Reporter: American prisoners of war report inhuman inhospitable conditions.
Karen: Walter Winchell gets back onto the airways.
Winchell: Attention people of the United States.
Karen: He says look, reciprocity has not worked. Our generosity…
Winchell: Has not been reciprocated. And our boys were not treated the same. Prisoners of war have been protected as much by our red tape as by the one sided Geneva Convention Rules!
Karen: And a few months later? Things get even worse.
Reporter: It was impossible to fully realize the horror of the Nazi Concentration camps!
Karen: We start going into concentration camps.
Reporter: …learn the incredible truth! That man had indeed sunk below the level of animal bestiality!
Karen: And we start seeing what the Germans had done, what the Nazis have done.
Reporter: Thousands of dead bodies were piled everywhere! Most never had received the dignity of burial. But what was even more frightening were the living dead left behind.
(ominous music)
Karen: So Congress decides to hold a second investigation into the treatment of prisoners. But this time it's real soul-searching. We'd just seen the full horrors of the Holocaust, so, we're thinking, you know, anything we do to these guys at this point they deserve. And we’ve also realized we're not getting reciprocity so we don't really have a practical reason to treat them well anymore. So at this point the question has really become, do we continue to be good, even when we're not getting anything in return? And the kind of amazing thing to me is that we decide, yeah, we're gonna stick to the Geneva conventions.
Archer Lurch: He gets up and he says we're not going to lower ourselves to Nazi standards. We are not gonna let the enemy decide who we are as a country.
Jad: And that argument stuck?
Karen: Yeah.
Arnold Kramer: I think most people associated with the prisoner camps felt that we treated them well, not because they treated ours well, but because we were decent people, and we probably would have done this anyway.
Reporter: But what makes us American is not our blood, but it’s the tradition we inherited. It’s tradition, not blood, that patterns the way we think, and act, and feel.
David Goldfield: There's a great belief, that we have a special mission. And we have a special history.
Karen: This is David Goldfield. He’s a historian at UNC Charlotte.
Goldfield: And that's the ideal. But, no. You only have to look at the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
Karen: He says, don’t forget. Right as we’re giving the Nazis massive amounts of ham, we're also rounding up thousands of Japanese citizens. Citizens! And we’re throwing them into these cramped camps that were way worse than Aliceville. And if you asked David, why are we treating the Germans so much better?
Goldfield: They looked like us.
Reporter: These people look alright. The mail man. The farmer. They all look like the folks back home!
Goldfield: The major reason: race.
Karen: The Germans were white. They seemed familiar.
Goldfield: There was a connection between the German POWs and the folks in the American South. Not only because of the ethnicity of the German POWs. Not only because of their economic benefit to the region.
Jad: David told us he’s looked at the historical documents. And he thinks the German laws against the Jews were essentially…
Goldfield: Copied! From the Mississippi black codes.
Jad: We couldn’t confirm that they were literally copied. But there are similarities. And a bunch of official Nazi documents from that time praised Southern race laws.
Goldfield: So there was already a connection between the American South and Nazi Germany.
Jad: This is the most horrifying thing I’ve heard in a while.
Karen: I know.
Jad: I mean is it really true, that all the niceness was just a perverse form of racism?
Paul Springer: Well, I would say that racism plays an enormous role in why Japanese citizens were interned in the first place. I don’t think there’s any question about that.
Karen: That’s Paul Springer, a military historian.
Springer: Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.
Karen: He's not quite sure race explains all of this. He says you know what, you’ve gotta be careful. Because you’re comparing treatment of citizens to treatment of prisoners of war. And that’s different.
Springer: It’s not a fair comparison. For the case of why you treat the German POWs better… well, because they’re prisoners of war. The Japanese POWs were also exceedingly well treated. They were treated much better than the Japanese citizens of the United States. I think that's the comparison that's the comparison that’s probably more interesting. Which is, why did you treat enemy soldiers from Japan better than you treated citizens of the United States of Japanese heritage.
Karen: And he says, very simply, that with prisoners of war, it's because we had a rule…
Springer: Governing international law…
Karen: like the Geneva Conventions.
Springer: There’s no similar law at that time that says what you can and can’t do towards your civilian populations.
Jad: That’s interesting. So it’s like, maybe we’re not racist or noble. But both. And it’s the rules that allow us to be our better selves.
Karen: I mean, here's what I take from this. I think that in a time of war, it's incredibly difficult to be good to your enemy. It's not just about aspiring to be good, this American ideal, it's about having 97 really tiny tedious rules to tell you what you can do. And what you can't do. Because it would just be so easy not to be the person that you want to be in that moment.
Jad: This kind of makes you think back to February 2002.
Ari Fleischer (White House Press Secretary (2001–2003): Good afternoon, I have an announcement to make. President Bush today has decided that the Geneva convention will apply to the Taliban detainees, but not to the Al Qaeda international terrorists. The President has maintained United States’ commitment principles of the Geneva convention while recognizing that the Convention simply does not cover every situation in which people might be captured or detained by military forces as we see in Afghanistan today.
Reporter: What you're telling us is that the Taliban prisoners, detainees at Guantanamo will not get any more protections than they are already given under the Geneva convention. And what you’re telling us is that the Al Qaeda detainees will get fewer.
Ari Fleischer: No. There is no change in the protections they will be provided. They have always been treated consistent with the principles Geneva Convention, which means they will be treated well. If you’re looking for anything that will not happen as a result of this announcement it’s that they will not receive stipends from the American taxpayers. They will not receive musical instruments, courtesy of the United States military. They would have received those had they been declared POWs. They will continue to be treated well because they're in the custody of America.
Reporter: The concern, the debate here was about, if you don’t do it here, then U.S. soldiers could be mistreated abroad. Isn't that correct? Isn't that a big motivation here? To make sure that U.S. soldiers get the same kind of treatment?
Ari Fleischer: It's important for all nations throughout the world to treat any prisoners well. And that is something the United States always expects, and the United States always does. We have time for one more question. Hold it... Hold it… David, David we'll get one more... go ahead.
Reporter: Wasn’t this an important concern? I understand what the expectations are. But it was important for this administration to be able to say look, we want to be able to protect our soldiers in similar situations down the line. And if we don’t accord, if we don’t afford privileges under the Geneva Convention, then our soldiers could be in peril.
Ari Fleischer: David I was not in the NSC deliberations where various issues were raised, and so really there’s no way I could accurately answer that question.
Reporter: U.S. special forces, they often do not wear uniforms, they often do not wear their weapons outwardly, so if they were captured they would not be prisoners of war?
Ari Fleischer: The terms of the Geneva Convention would apply and those terms speak for themselves. Thank you everybody!
(instrumental music plays)
Jad: Thank you Karen Duffin and Kelsey Pagin. This is such a long and involved reporting process. Big props to them. Special thanks to Sam Love, the filmmaker who collected all those Aliceville oral histories.
Robert: And to John Gillham, and Mary Bess Pelutsi, current and former Aliceville Museum Directors.
Jad: Ruth Beaumont Cook, who wrote a great book about the Aliceville Camp.
Robert: And Nancy Waymack for research help.
Jad: I’m Jad Abumrad.
Robert: And I’m Robert Krulwich.