By: Dirk Vanover
V & M Staff


     Returning from milking the cows and feeding the hogs, Albert Flamm, 13, heard music near the corncrib and the hog house on his family’s farm in Cobden, Ill. He walked toward the source of the music and spotted a group of German prisoners of war singing songs as one played a guitar.
 
     It was a holy day of obligation—Aug. 15, 1945, the feast day of the Assumption of Mary—for his Catholic family, and Albert was supposed to follow his family to church. Instead, he turned his milk bucket upside down, sat on it and listened to the singing.
 
     “One of ’em was actually a movie star,” Albert, now 73, remembers. “I might just be possibly fabricating that, but I think I can remember that being the case. There were some pretty fine people in it.”
 
     Albert’s experience is one of many that occurred on the farm of Adolph Flamm and Sons, now Flamm Orchards, and other areas of southern Illinois during World War II.
 
     Between March and September 1945, more than 300 German prisoners of war were held at a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp northwest of Pomona, Ill. The camp was a branch camp of Camp Ellis, near Table Grove, Ill, which housed nearly 4,000 German prisoners.
 
     In early 1945, Camp Ellis was the largest camp in the Sixth Service Command detaining three officers, 231 non-commissioned officers and approximately 3,200 enlisted men according to documents from the Office of the Provost Marshal General at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Md., (Archives II). A “Meritorious Camp” award from the Sixth Service Command was given to Camp Ellis on July 17, 1945, for distinguished treatment of prisoners.
 
     Prisoner of war camps in the United States during World War II demonstrated a U.S. commitment to humane treatment, brought Americans close to the enemy to educate Americans about how Axis soldiers were human, and provided abundant labor for manual jobs that could not be filled by the 11 million U.S. soldiers in uniform overseas.
 
     About 500 prisoner-of-war camps in the United States held nearly 426,000 Axis prisoners in 1945. At the program’s high point during May 1945, 371,683 German prisoners were held captive in the United States.
 
     “We have a lot of people today who don’t even know that there was a war prisoner camp there, which seems strange—living here I just always knew it,” said Betty Sanders, who lives 1 ½ miles away from the former Camp Pomona.
 
     Those who did have contact with the camp and the prisoners have no trouble remembering.
 
     “I think there is no great mystery or cover-up here: huge chunks of the war have receded from popular memory, and this is merely another (and not that huge) chunk. But memory isn't uniform either--in the communities near where [World War II] prisoners were held, I'm sure it's a good deal sharper,” said Michael Sherry, a professor of history at Northwestern University.
 
     The memory of the former POW camps across the nation continues to dwindle as time passes.
 
     “When I was in high school, there was about 35 people around Cobden that grew peaches,” said Leonard “Slim” Flamm, who worked on the farm during World War II and continues to supervise at Flamm Orchards. “They didn’t all use [POWs], but there was several that used ’em, but there’s nobody in business anymore.”
 
     Newspapers and magazines published stories about the POW camps, but not often. Documents at Archives II contain an April 1943 letter from Lewis A. Randolph of the Macomb Daily Journal requesting information that “may be permissible to print” about the building of Camp Ellis. Brigadier General B.W. Bryan, director of the aliens division, responded, “The fact that an interment camp is now under construction at Camp Ellis, Illinois, is correct. However, it is not customary to release this information for publication.”
 
     Ron Robin wrote in his book “The Barbed Wire College” that “this large presence of belligerents [German POWs] dispersed throughout the United States could not, of course be kept a secret.” This became evident in the number of articles published later in 1943 in national news media such as the New York Times and Time magazine.
 
     Yet, even some of the men fighting in Europe were not aware that the prisoners they were capturing were being brought back to the United States.
 
     Edwin Flamm, 80, from Cobden, was 20 years old when he was in Europe during World War II. He served in a supply depot for Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army and began serving in continental Europe a few days after the D-Day invasion. Edwin remembers seeing German prisoners surrendering to the Allied soldiers and being marched in long lines, but he could not imagine that they would end up working on his family’s farm.
 
     In his book, Robin wrote that the POWs were transported to the United States because it removed them from the battle lines, which reduced the chance of escape. It also freed up soldiers who would otherwise have to guard them, and better food and medical attention could be given.
 
     “The American solution to the POW problem was ingeniously simple,” Robin wrote. “The Liberty Ships transporting supplies and troops to the war zones usually had no defined mission for their return journey. American authorities could easily fill the empty hulls with captive enemy troops and channel them to the United States.”
 
     The prisoners sent to the United States could be used as labor in non-wartime industries such as farming and canning.
 
     In Illinois, there were three main prisoner of war camps located at Camp Ellis, Fort Sheridan north of Chicago, and Camp Grant near Rockford. Branch camps were also established. Camp Ellis’ branch camps were located in Pomona, Gibson City, Waterloo, Washington, Galesburg, Hoopeston, Streator and Milford.
 
     “It’s like migrant work. They shipped us out to different locations there for the harvesting,” said Kurt Pechmann, 83, a former German POW who now lives in Madison, Wis.
 
     Pechmann was captured in Italy Nov. 6, 1943, by British troops and brought to America by the U.S.’s Fifth Army. Pechmann spent the remainder of the war working in POW camps in Wisconsin and central and northern Illinois, including Camp Ellis and its branch camp in Hoopeston, before being sent back to Europe in 1946. He immigrated to the United States with his wife in 1952 and has lived in Madison since 1953.
 
     The War Department’s Office of the Provost Marshal General supervised the prisoner-of-war program and established how the POWs would be treated.
 
     Pechmann described his treatment as “excellent.”
 
     “They never bent a hair on us. We had plenty to eat,” said Pechmann.
 
     The treatment of prisoners of war has been in dispute lately because of U.S. treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Allegations of abuse at Guantanamo and photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib have called into question U.S. commitment to humane treatment of prisoners.
 
     The Bush administration claims that the people detained at these facilities are not guaranteed the rights provided under the Geneva Convetions. Bush and other officials maintain that though they are not required to, the detainees at Guantanamo are receiving treatment consistent with the Geneva Convetions.
 
     Glen Stassen, a professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said maintaining checks and balances is important when detaining prisoners of war and that international laws such as the Geneva Convetions and international onlookers such as the Red Cross are important in the process.
 
     “It’s what we know in U.S. history—concentrated power needs checks and balances,” Stassen said. “When you have guards over prisoners, the prisoners have no power. They can’t organize a labor union. They don’t have any power. It’s an absolute authority of guards over prisoners. You’ve got to have checks and balances.”
 
     During World War II, the treatment of prisoners of war was covered by the third Geneva Conventions, which was established in 1929. It was revised again in 1949 and continues to this day in the 1949 format.
 
     “We’ve always treated prisoners better than these [today],” Stassen said. “The problem is that these were taken out from under the protection of international law by the administration, and also they were not under protection of U.S. law.
 
     “Secretary of Defense [Donald] Rumsfeld worked to get the Muslim prisoners out of protection of international law. And, they disregarded what the International Red Cross was saying about the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and great atrocities happened. That’s going to happen when you try to get them out of international law,” Stassen said.
 
Origins of a POW camp

     Camp Pomona was built in 1934 as a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. The CCC was a program begun under Franklin Roosevelt during the depression to employ men in rural areas. Men at Camp Pomona helped build roads, bridges, dig ditches and work on the farms in the local communities.
 
     “They built in Murphysboro Park, the shell up there, went down into the forest preserve and built all of those bridges. They did a lot of good work,” said Helen Sirles, 94, of Alto Pass, Ill. “The CCC camp did so much good.”
 
     Before it became a German POW camp, Camp Pomona was also noted for being one of only 10 CCC camps in Illinois to have African-Americans living at the camp.
 


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