Have been going down a deep rabbit hole on this subject since I recently discovered a new youtube channel named WW2 Tales. I remember we have discussed Camp Hearne here before and there are many references to that one but also of many other camps.

The US strictly adhered to the Geneva Conventions, housing, feeding and overall living conditions were superb. They were well treated and vastly surprised by the abundance of food, electricity, prosperity, and human dignity afforded them.

But what seemed to shock them the most was the food. Both quality and quantity. Japanese, Italian, Hungarians and Germans were blown away by candy bars, Coca Cola, fresh milk bread and vegetables, desserts. Religious services, recreational activities, libraries, educational classes, musical and artistic expression not only allowed but encouraged by their "captors."

They saw firsthand how democracy worked, how Americans were fundamentally good and charitable as many POWs worked alongside American civilians on farms, in canneries and other industries to support the war efforts. Better than any propaganda campaign ever devised. Anyway I found it very interesting and a helpful reminder in this fractured time that the US is not the bad guy in the world.

ETA: Aw crap. Won't let me embed. Go to the named youtube channel to view them.

Funniest story I heard was about a couple Germans in a West Texas camp who stole a map. They saw the Pecos River nearby and made plans to escape, building a raft in secret and stashing supplies for a dash to the Gulf.

They sneaked out one night and walked cross country only to discover that a river in West Texas is only a few inches deep most of the time.

aggiehawg said:

---

Have been going down a deep rabbit hole on this subject since I recently discovered a new youtube channel named WW2 Tales. I remember we have discussed Camp Hearne here before and there are many references to that one but also of many other camps.

The US strictly adhered to the Geneva Conventions, housing, feeding and overall living conditions were superb. They were well treated and vastly surprised by the abundance of food, electricity, prosperity, and human dignity afforded them.

But what seemed to shock them the most was the food. Both quality and quantity. Japanese, Italian, Hungarians and Germans were blown away by candy bars, Coca Cola, fresh milk bread and vegetables, desserts. Religious services, recreational activities, libraries, educational classes, musical and artistic expression not only allowed but encouraged by their "captors."

They saw firsthand how democracy worked, how Americans were fundamentally good and charitable as many POWs worked alongside American civilians on farms, in canneries and other industries to support the war efforts. Better than any propaganda campaign ever devised. Anyway I found it very interesting and a helpful reminder in this fractured time that the US is not the bad guy in the world.

ETA: Aw crap. Won't let me embed. Go to the named youtube channel to view them.

---

That YouTube Channel is very interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/@WW2Tales




There are several of these channels out there.
...and they can get repetitive, even within their own video, but still interesting.

Was told stories (can't remember details now) when I was younger about some Germans in Garwood, TX during WWII.

My dad, his siblings, and his parents were all rice farmers out there…don't think they had any Germans helping them specifically but it was some other farmers out there during the war….they DID NOT want to leave and go back home once the war was over….

Since Italy surrendered early in 1943, thanks to Patton and most Italians had been captured in Tunisia when Rommel's Afrika corps fell apart and the Italians largely has not bought into the Nazi stuff, they saw the Allie' conquering Italy as more as a liberation for their country. They were happy and the vast majority of them signed on to help the American war effort to defeat the Nazis.

LOL. Have another episode on in the background. They called Camp Hearne by the nickname of the "Fritz Ritz."

Here is a book you maybe interested in about a camp in Huntsville, TX on Country Campus.

The Enemy Within Never did Without

https://a.co/d/ic5cGWN

I grew up very near there. It's 50 min drive from College Station. Used to be owned by Sam Houston State but now owned by a private owner

Just ran across a video on my YouTube feed about a downed WWII Japanese pilot that was captured and taken aboard one of the aircraft carriers. Japanese propaganda about the American devils was that they would execute or starve him. Instead, they treated his wounds and gave him more food than his squadron had had in three days. What really blew his mind is that they gave him a choice of vanilla or chocolate ice cream, because who can afford to have their warships accommodate a luxury like that? After the war he became a preacher in the US.

Thank you. I'll check it out.

96AgGrad said:

---

Just ran across a video on my YouTube feed about a downed WWII Japanese pilot that was captured and taken aboard one of the aircraft carriers. Japanese propaganda about the American devils was that they would execute or starve him. Instead, they treated his wounds and gave him more food than his squadron had had in three days. What really blew his mind is that they gave him a choice of vanilla or chocolate ice cream, because who can afford to have their warships accommodate a luxury like that? After the war he became a preacher in the US.

---

Japan was confused why we had ships in the Pacific that just made ice cream. They knew it was some sort of a supply ship but couldn't figure out what they were supplying. Ice cream?

If we can afford that, what couldn't we afford? Quite demoralizing for them when they finally figured it out.

techno-ag said:

---

Funniest story I heard was about a couple Germans in a West Texas camp who stole a map. They saw the Pecos River nearby and made plans to escape, building a raft in secret and stashing supplies for a dash to the Gulf.

They sneaked out one night and walked cross country only to discover that a river in West Texas is only a few inches deep most of the time.

---

There were also some U-boat prisoners in a camp in AZ, they planned to take the Salt River to Mexico. Over 20 of them escaped only to get to the trickle that was the Salt River in the AZ desert. They were recaptured in short time.

96AgGrad said:

---

Just ran across a video on my YouTube feed about a downed WWII Japanese pilot that was captured and taken aboard one of the aircraft carriers. Japanese propaganda about the American devils was that they would execute or starve him. Instead, they treated his wounds and gave him more food than his squadron had had in three days. What really blew his mind is that they gave him a choice of vanilla or chocolate ice cream, because who can afford to have their warships accommodate a luxury like that? After the war he became a preacher in the US.

---

Our guys ate well. Herman Wouk in Winds of War noted the German and Russian troops lived off scraps while the Americans had pounds and pounds of food from home. Plus cigarettes, candy bars and other stuff.

not trying to buzz kill, but, imho Americans have been historically savage towards more primitive cultures or non-western cultures we've dominated - ie American Indians and Africans, with obvious progress made in the last +100 years. What we did to Japanese and Japanese Americans during the war was relatively tame. But they didnt get a pass like, say, Italians or German Americans in the hill country. Things might've been different for them too if WWII had turned out to be a losing proposition.

Don't get me wrong - we're the best humanitarians, across the board...but in the end, we're just a collection of flawed human beings, capable of some really bad behavior.

Quote:

---

Our guys ate well. Herman Wouk in Winds of War noted the German and Russian troops lived off scraps while the Americans had pounds and pounds of food from home. Plus cigarettes, candy bars and other stuff.

---

Our logistics for supply lines were superior. As we demonstrated again during the Berlin Airlift after the war.

Thanks to all responders here. I have been kind of down about how America is being dissed currently both inside and out. Thought a reminder of how we actually acted when we had every reason not to, emotionally, largely refrained from retaliating against the individual soldier. It was the Nazi regime we were fighting, their leaders.

Ditto for the Japanese who could not fathom that with their Bushido Codes.

Sid Farkas said:

---

not trying to buzz kill, but, imho Americans have been historically savage towards more primitive cultures or non-western cultures we've dominated - ie American Indians and Africans, with obvious progress made in the last +100 years. What we did to Japanese and Japanese Americans during the war was relatively tame. But they didnt get a pass like, say, Italians or German Americans in the hill country. Things might've been different for them too if WWII had turned out to be a losing proposition.

Don't get me wrong - we're the best humanitarians, across the board...but in the end, we're just a collection of flawed human beings, capable of some really bad behavior.

---

Because the Germans did not attack Houston from the Gulf. Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and threatened the West Coast. Not defending internment camps out there but that threat was much more real.

But after the fall of Guadalcanal, those captured Japanese soldiers were not mistreated.

https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Prisoners-America-Arnold-Krammer/dp/0812885619

By a legendary A&M history professor, may he rest in peace. Fantastic.

Thank you!

Camp Hearne, a/k/a the "Fritz Ritz" is mentioned many times. Just click on the youtube option to watch.

Hereford, Texas, had an Italian POW camp. They did cut rations at one point due to Axis powers cutting rations for US POWs.

Prisoners were working nearby farm fields. Some guards would shoot rabbits and allow the POWs to smuggle them back to camp

I have more stories on that camp, will try to post later

jokershady said:

---

Was told stories (can't remember details now) when I was younger about some Germans in Garwood, TX during WWII.

My dad, his siblings, and his parents were all rice farmers out there…don't think they had any Germans helping them specifically but it was some other farmers out there during the war….they DID NOT want to leave and go back home once the war was over….

---

Similar story from Liberty, Tx. Rice farmers were very short of labor in 1943 for harvest and requested pows. 800 plus German pows were housed at the local Trinity valley livestock exposition facility and worked the rice industry for various farms in the area thru 1945. They were paid for working and could use part of their wages for items locally. I heard these stories years ago and that they were very good workers.
A google search has lots of stories on the Liberty pow camp and the industry during the war.

Came across the videos this morning and it is addictive to watch. Only thing missing is Ken Burns reading letters to home.

https://www.kvue.com/video/news/history/269-8ec6e820-9277-49de-8a0a-55a5dcbacb78

Camp Swift between Bastrop and Elgin housed more than 10,000 German POWS. Many were loaned out to local farmers to work in agriculture, and even got paid. Some returned after the war to become citizens and I met one in the McDade area back in the late '80s.

Bighunter43 said:

---

https://www.kvue.com/video/news/history/269-8ec6e820-9277-49de-8a0a-55a5dcbacb78

Camp Swift between Bastrop and Elgin housed more than 10,000 German POWS. Many were loaned out to local farmers to work in agriculture, and even got paid. Some returned after the war to become citizens and I met one in the McDade area back in the late '80s.

---

Sometimes they were paid in cash but mostly in camp script that they then could use in the camp canteens to buy even more food and other needed toiletries.

For those that were working farms in their area, they were paid the same as any other civilian worker.

A friend of my parents in Tennessee had been a guard at Camp Hearne during the war. He claimed that Hogans Heroes was based on a book written by a German prisoner at Camp Hearne, but the two sides were obviously reversed for the TV show.

I've never been able to find any substantiation for his story but it kind of makes sense. No POW camp in Germany was staffed by such idiots as at Stalag 13 and I doubt that the Germans would allow the American POWs access to German towns or free access in or out of the Stalag offices.

The POW camps in America, on the other hand, did allow German POWs passes to leave the camp to work in nearby farms, towns, and homes. My guess is that we did not put our best and brightest officers in command of such camps, nor did we have high expectations for the security of and discipline within the camps.

Has anyone else read or heard anything that would corroborate or contradict my parents' friend's story?

aggiehawg said:

---

Sid Farkas said:

---

not trying to buzz kill, but, imho Americans have been historically savage towards more primitive cultures or non-western cultures we've dominated - ie American Indians and Africans, with obvious progress made in the last +100 years. What we did to Japanese and Japanese Americans during the war was relatively tame. But they didnt get a pass like, say, Italians or German Americans in the hill country. Things might've been different for them too if WWII had turned out to be a losing proposition.

Don't get me wrong - we're the best humanitarians, across the board...but in the end, we're just a collection of flawed human beings, capable of some really bad behavior.

---

Because the Germans did not attack Houston from the Gulf. Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and threatened the West Coast. Not defending internment camps out there but that threat was much more real.

But after the fall of Guadalcanal, those captured Japanese soldiers were not mistreated.

---

I will defend the internment camps in light of the time they were implemented. We had just seen the deaths of more than 2000 Americans at Pearl Harbor in an underhanded attack. What I mean by that is the well documented delay in the Japanese ambassador presenting a declaration of war in Washington DC, which finally came after the attack in Hawaii had commenced. There is a reason the term "sneaky Japanese" existed. We had no idea who among the Japanese American population might have been a saboteur. It is easy to cast judgment on this from 80+ years later, but at the time there was a real concern over what any of these people might have been capable of. The camps were the correct choice.

One might ask why German Americans or Italian Americans were not similarly interned, and that is a fair point, but my answer would be neither the Germans nor the Italians attacked us as did the Japanese.

https://thetexasbucketlist.com/2024/08/the-texas-bucket-list-camp-hereford-pow-chapel-in-hereford/

Good story about the Hereford camp. Prisoners worked on farms in the Umbarger area (between Canyon and Hereford) and were fed well when working.

In gratitude to the locals, they did some amazing art work in the Catholic Church in Umbarger.



They also built grain elevators at Happy, Texas, and were given some of the concrete to build a small chapel in honor of five comrades who died at Hereford. They were originally buried there, but bodies were returned to Italy after the war.





There was a German POW camp in the eastern Panhandle near McLean. Little remains today.

Quote:

---

One might ask why German Americans or Italian Americans were not similarly interned,

---

Some were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_City_Internment_Camp

Krammer had a great story about the prisoner that escaped and reached out to him after he read one of the books about prisoners of war in Texas.

KingofHazor said:

---

A friend of my parents in Tennessee had been a guard at Camp Hearne during the war. He claimed that Hogans Heroes was based on a book written by a German prisoner at Camp Hearne, but the two sides were obviously reversed for the TV show.

I've never been able to find any substantiation for his story but it kind of makes sense. No POW camp in Germany was staffed by such idiots as at Stalag 13 and I doubt that the Germans would allow the American POWs access to German towns or free access in or out of the Stalag offices.

The POW camps in America, on the other hand, did allow German POWs passes to leave the camp to work in nearby farms, towns, and homes. My guess is that we did not put our best and brightest officers in command of such camps, nor did we have high expectations for the security of and discipline within the camps.

Has anyone else read or heard anything that would corroborate or contradict my parents' friend's story?

---

For one thing all of America served as the camp. Where were they going to go? Most did not know English. They couldn't exactly hop on a boat and go home. So they were allowed the "freedom" to go work on local farms and such.

KingofHazor said:

---

A friend of my parents in Tennessee had been a guard at Camp Hearne during the war. He claimed that Hogans Heroes was based on a book written by a German prisoner at Camp Hearne, but the two sides were obviously reversed for the TV show.

I've never been able to find any substantiation for his story but it kind of makes sense. No POW camp in Germany was staffed by such idiots as at Stalag 13 and I doubt that the Germans would allow the American POWs access to German towns or free access in or out of the Stalag offices.

The POW camps in America, on the other hand, did allow German POWs passes to leave the camp to work in nearby farms, towns, and homes. My guess is that we did not put our best and brightest officers in command of such camps, nor did we have high expectations for the security of and discipline within the camps.

Has anyone else read or heard anything that would corroborate or contradict my parents' friend's story?

---

Have no first hand knowledge about Hogan's Heroes bein inspired by that, like at all. Radios were common but only on the receiving end. Camp guards may have been 4F for active service but could be Military Police, I'd suppose.

But in reality, most German soldiers (or Italian and Hungarians for that matter) were conscripts. Not Nazis.

But even the rea Nazi fanatics saw they never stood a chance when confronted by American abundance and manufacturing capabilities. Our agriculture capabilities alone, using farm machinery, meant a combine could do in one hour what would take 100 German men, days to finish.

We were very much advanced in a lot of manufacturing technology that Hitler redirected towards military use only. They might have gotten there with a more industrialized diversification. As Exhibit A I draw your attention to the early days of the Ukraine war. What did we see? Ukrainians with tractors, that were involved in the war effort, for whatever reasons.

Conventional wisdom was that Russia would overrun and starve out Ukraine withon a few days or weeks. But that did not happen.

Having said all of that, God gave us some breaks whn we needed them. Midway was sheer miracle.

Quote:

---

For one thing all of America served as the camp. Where were they going to go? Most did not know English. They couldn't exactly hop on a boat and go home. So they were allowed the "freedom" to go work on local farms and such.

---

Tell me you have not watched one video without admitting you know zero about this subject.

We had also the experience in World War I of the Germans in America remaining fiercely loyal to the U.S.

And even though Germans were not interned, they were definitely endured some discrimination. My granddad, who was a first generation German-American and an Army officer in World War 2, wondered why he wasn't ever stationed overseas. He inquired of a friend who was a detailer in the Army, and the friend told him that it was because he was German-American.

Coincidentally, he was also a young officer in World War 1 and was never sent overseas. I never heard one way or the other, but suspect that may also have been due to his German heritage.

OSS/CIA started its relationship w/ organized crime in WW2. Sicilian Mafia that controlled the docks in NYC after several sabotage incidents. OSS and Naval Intelligence enlisted their help and it stopped.

Has gone on since.

aggiehawg said:

---

Midway was sheer miracle.

---

And great code breakers, which may have been a miracle itself.

KingofHazor said:

---

aggiehawg said:

---

Midway was sheer miracle.

---

And great code breakers, which may have been a miracle itself.

---

Heard of the Fat Electrician youtube channel? He has an episode about when the US captured a German U-boat that was sinking and towed it back. That is where they obtained Enigma machine.

aggiehawg said:

---

Quote:

---

For one thing all of America served as the camp. Where were they going to go? Most did not know English. They couldn't exactly hop on a boat and go home. So they were allowed the "freedom" to go work on local farms and such.

---

Tell me you have not watched one video without admitting you know zero about this subject.

---

Yes ma'am. Probably not the ones you are talking about. But I read quite a bit about the camps back when they opened up Camp Hearne to tours. See my story about the guys in West Texas planning an escape on the Pecos. Where were they gonna go if they escaped? They walked back to the camp and asked to be let back in.