Same as in 732.
Posted on 01/16/2015 4:21:19 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Bulge? What Bulge?
My dad was an engineer who helped design industrial processes. He worked with a plant engineer he knew as “Gus,” a former German POW who spent the war on a farm in Louisiana. Same story; Gus found a way to get back to the USA as a citizen. He said that all the German POWs he was with lived in a barracks with minimal supervision, went to the farms during the day, came back at night, and got Sunday passes to go into town.
I don’t think that would have happened had Gus been a POW in the east. He was lucky.
Sounds like they were unescorted. I'm having difficulty thinking through why and how the powers-that-be allowed that.
:-)
Spoiler alert!
There was a large farm near our family’s farm in Sac County Iowa that used Italian POWs for labor. My Dad, who was nine when we entered the war, told me about seeing them walk to town to go to the movies. No guards or anything. They were pretty much treated the same way as the hired hands.
It isn't like they were going to go anywhere.
Here is some Tennessee home front lore:
Three German submariners who escaped from Crossville came upon a mountain cabin. Out came "granny," who told them to "git." When they did not leave, she shot one of them dead. When a local deputy arrived and told her of the circumstances, the woman sobbed, claiming she would never have fired had she known they were Germans. "I thought they wuz Yankees," she said.http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=1076
I notice that the countries that made up the western front in January 1945 - France, Germany, Belgium - in January 2015 comprise the western front in the war with radical Islam.
The rumors regarding Hitler had a long tail. There was an article in the Readers Digest about Hitler living in South America in 1962.
That’s hilarious.
I would imagine there was some screening going on. Ardent, arrogant Nazi SS types probably didn’t get that treatment. The regular Wehrmacht stiffs were OK. And as fso301 pointed out; where were they going to go?
After all, this was the United States of America. They had it better here as POWs than they had it back in Germany. That’s why so many tried to come back.
Same as in 732.
And they are not fighting it particularly well.
Excellent points all. I suppose as long as the POWs were on good behavior, avoiding serious incidents of crime or sabotage, they could be permitted some leniency. I imagine that was explained to them, which would encourage self-policing.
They probably segregate the officers, SS and give the non rated more slack.
Makes sense. Thanks.
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