By: Dirk Vanover
V & M Staff


     Camp Pomona was closed as a CCC camp in 1941 and remained vacant until the Army took control in 1945 for use as a prisoner of war camp. The POW camp was opened in March 1945 and closed September 1945. In 1946, the camp was turned over to the U.S. Forest Service, which auctioned the buildings and designated the land as part of the Shawnee National Forest.
 
     Today, all that remains of the camp are the concrete foundations of the buildings. The old gravel road leading to the camp is overgrown with weeds, trees and plants and is not visible from the barely two lane road that goes in front of the camp. The narrow gap of the old road is difficult to find even for someone who knows where to look. Camp Pomona’s remains are situated about a half-mile off the road near the crest of a hill, and walking on foot through the knee-high weeds, fallen trees and spider webs is the only way to reach it.
 
     During its days as a CCC and POW camp it was remembered as being well-kept.
 
     “It was beautiful,” remembers Sanders, 71. “They had the usual barracks with tar paper and the white stripes down the walls and a deep well, and it was absolutely beautiful over there, and they had flowers out front.”
 
     Camp Ellis was also remembered as being kept in good condition.
 
     “It was well-kept because we had German POWs there,” recalled Marjorie Bordner, 90, who worked as a secretary at Camp Ellis and wrote a book about the camp entitled “From Cornfields to Marching Feet: Camp Ellis, Illinois.” “They…worked and kept it all polished up and looking great.”
 
     In his book “Nazi Prisoners of War in America,” Texas A & M history professor Arnold Krammer wrote that German POWs were held at former CCC camps for two reasons: the camps were unoccupied and already had barracks built in remote, rural areas, which reduced the possibility of escape.
 
     “They didn’t want to escape,” Albert recalled. “Where could they go? They had it better than their fellas in the fatherland. So, they were quite content where they were.”
 
     Pechmann agreed that the treatment the POWs received made many of them content to remain where they were.
 
     “We had it made, actually, here,” he said. “POWs were sorry the war was over already. They could have kept us longer here.”
 
Fitting in

     Albert and many of the other members of his family, who are all German by descent, said they did not feel threatened or concerned by having the POWs work on their farm.
 
     “They weren’t scary,” said Raymond Flamm who was 7 years old when the POWs worked on the farm. “I don’t remember being scared of them. It was just a novelty, nothing really impressive about it.”
 
     Charlie Vincent, 76, of Carbondale, Ill., remembers seeing the prisoners when he was living in Murphysboro, Ill., and meeting some of the guards at the camp.
 
     “I figured they were perfectly able to keep them locked up or prevent escape,” Vincent said.
 
     However, some other members of nearby communities were concerned.
 
     Clifton Swafford, 17 at the time, worked for his uncle when German POWs worked for Swafford Lumber Company near Murphysboro, Ill.
 
     “I think when we first heard it, we were [apprehensive],” Swafford said. “When we saw them working, we were fine. Our picture of them was of the Nazi regime in Germany, but most of these men were poor farmers who got pulled in. Most of them were lowly privates.”
 
     Swafford said the prisoners were kept isolated. However, Swafford remembers that the prisoners worked hard and did a good job, especially at some of the more difficult tasks that he hated—like shoveling sand.
 
     “I was glad to see ’em come along. Otherwise, I’d have had to do it,” Swafford said. He also believes that they were content working in the local communities.
 
     “I think they were just glad to get out and do something,” Swafford said.
 
     Even though the prisoners were isolated, it did not appear to keep their spirits down. They still had other means of attempting communication.
 
     “They were not allowed to talk to us,” said Bordner. “They whistled at us, I’ll tell you that much, but they could not communicate.”
 
     According to a column in Nightlife, a weekly newspaper in Carbondale, Ill., by Kay Rippelmeyer-Tippy, an academic adviser at Southern Illinois University and a researcher of southern Illinois history, many of the prisoners at Camp Pomona were captured “in May 1943 near Tunis, North Africa” and were part of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps.
 
     Rippelmeyer-Tippy wrote, “Having heard that Americans treated their prisoners humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, (unlike the Soviets) the near-starved bedraggled German troops walked into the American lines to surrender as PWs.”
 
     She also wrote that many of the prisoners were amazed by the vastness of the United States and were shocked that the United States was not devastated from bombing as their government had told them. They were also amazed by the upholstered seats on the trains, which were remarkably better than the benches they had to sit on while being transported in Germany.
 
     “Many saw immediately that they would be treated better as an American prisoner of war than they had as a German soldier,” Rippelmeyer-Tippy wrote.
 
     The prisoners were being treated so well that some members of the American public became upset.
 
     “The most common public grievance was that the army was pampering the prisoners, lavishing on them excellent food and easy work, even as American boys were laying their lives on the line. Military authorities rejected these accusations, by claiming mere adherence to the Geneva Convention[s],” Robin wrote in his book.
 
Getting to work

     Many of the prisoners from Camp Pomona worked for local farms, lumber yards and in the forest preserves. According to a May 15, 1945, memo, the branch camps of Pomona, Hoopeston, Washington and Galesburg had 527 prisoners involved in farm work, 87 in pulpwood cutting and 88 in food processing.
 
     Pechmann was sent to Camp Hoopeston and helped harvest asparagus early in the morning.
 
     “After that was done at 8 o’clock we had nothing to do all day long, bumming around, playing soccer or playing cards or just loafing,” he said.
 
     Pechmann and the other prisoners were kept in an old two-story machine shed on the grounds of a local canning factory. He said the camp was only there for a few weeks until the asparagus harvest was complete. After his time at Hoopeston, Pechmann was sent to camps in Wisconsin and harvested corn, peas, beats, onions and hemp to be used for manufacturing ropes. He also worked in a canning factory in Wisconsin.
 
     In a memo at Archives II dated Sept. 10, 1945, after a visit to Camp Waterloo, it was noted that the camp had 105 men and “ had been established to furnish workers for the tomato crop. The camp commander expected the camp to be closed within a short time.”
 
     An August 1945 memo at Archives II shows that 278 prisoners were housed at Camp Gibson City. Robert Crossman, a local historian, said that many of the POWs worked at the former Stokley canning company and Central Soy processing plant.
 
     “They [Stokley] housed and fed them,” Crossman said. “Some farmers used them for farm labor because the healthy men were overseas.”
 
     According to an Oct. 15, 1945 memo at Archives II, the POWs at Camp Galesburg lived on the back end of the Mayo General Hospital in “old one-story CCC barracks brought in from somewhere else” and consisting of seven buildings, four 50-man barracks, one combined supply and recreation building, one combined kitchen and dining hall, and one latrine, shower and wash room building.
 
     The memo also said that the prisoners worked for the hospital performing minor duties such as cleaning and on local farms.
 
     As Krammer noted in his book, the experiences of POWs in the camps around the country could differ completely.
 
     “For example,” he wrote, “the experiences of POWs at Camp Grant, Illinois, who worked in the Sycamore Forest Preserve and Marmalade plant, in no way resembled the conditions encountered by the prisoners who picked cotton in the 110 [degree] heat of Camp Mexia, Texas, or harvested sugarcane near Camp Livingston, Louisiana.”
 
     In a Sept. 17, 1943, New York Times article, the war department is quoted as saying, “They have harvested peanuts in Georgia and South Carolina, tomatoes in Indiana, corn in Iowa, have picked cotton in Texas, dug potatoes in Missouri and worked on a variety of nonagricultural jobs in sections. One group now is engaged in constructing a dam for flood control in Oklahoma.”
 
     The prisoners at Camp Pomona were transported to work each morning in the back of farm trucks that had large stakes coming out of the beds. In his article “Diversity, Dynamite and Detention; The Story of the CCC and Camp Pomona,” Harry Ellis described the clothes of the German POWs as being “dyed green and had large white ‘PW’ everywhere, including the pant legs and cap.”
 
     “The arrival of German POWs was not advertised and local residents (accustomed to seeing CCC boys being trucked to work areas) not knowing what the PW signified, may have assumed it was another Roosevelt Project,” Ellis wrote.
 
     During a time when many young men were fighting in war, the POWs were able to provide relief during a labor shortage for most of America.
 
     "There was a shortage of help on account of a lot of people being in the service,” recalled Leonard, who worked on the farm at the time. “It was a big help. The only way we could have gotten our crop harvested was with those fellas and those Jamaicans.”
 
     Leonard, Albert and Sirles all remember using Jamaicans that the government brought in to work on local farms.
 
     “We had German prisoners and we had Jamaicans, and the German prisoners were much better workers than the Jamaicans,” Albert said.
 
     The local farmers appreciated the government’s efforts to provide them with labor during the war, especially allowing the POWs to work.
 
     “I thought it was neat they were letting these men come and work because I knew they were having a hard time finding workers,” said Rose Marie Flamm, who lived on the farm. “These guys were just like American soldiers in Germany. These fellas didn’t want war anymore than we wanted war.”
 
The national treatment

     The beginning of a March 19, 1945, Time article titled “Legion of Despair” shows the public had questions about the treatment of POWs.
 
     “Congressmen charged that the Army’s handling of prisoners of war was a ‘national scandal;’ a Senate committee had started an investigation,” begins the article. “Reports from camps around the country had the U.S. people concerned. There were questions they wanted answered: 1) how are prisoners (particularly Nazis) acting; 2) how is the U.S. treating them; 3) what will be the results of U.S. treatment—will they simply be to return a cadre of well-fed Nazis to Germany after the war?”
 
     Though many people regard America’s treatment of prisoners of war during World War II as benevolent, the Time article shows that during the war disputes continued over the treatment of prisoners.
 
     During World War II, great effort was taken by the War Department to ensure adherence to the Geneva Conventions.
 
     Papers at Archives II document visits to Camp Ellis and many of its branch camps from representatives of the International Red Cross and the International YMCA to check the camps and treatment of POWs.
 
     The Geneva Conventions dictated the conditions the prisoners were to be kept in, the amount of work they could be expected to do, the amount of food they would receive, and the amount of pay.
 
     Officers could not be forced to work unless they wanted to, and non-commissioned officers could only work in supervisory roles. Prisoners were not supposed to work in areas directly related to the war effort, and they were to work the standard day as a regular laborer and receive the standard pay.
 
     At Pomona, the POWs who worked would receive 80 cents per day in addition to a stipend from the government. The farmers who hired the POWs would pay the government 50 cents per hour, the standard wage of the time.
 
     At Flamm Orchards, the prisoners would work nine-hour days, unless it rained. A bill from the government showed that from Aug. 12 through Aug. 18, 1945, Flamm Orchards employed an average of 32 POWs daily, which cost the farm $914 for the week..”
 
     “P.W.s have saved crops, released service troops for other jobs, and the U.S. government last year rang up about $10,000,000 on the deal,” Time magazine reported in its May 19, 1945 article “Legion of Despair.”
 
     Krammer wrote in his book, “Unlike England, for example, which made adjustments in the guidelines when the situation demanded, or the Soviet Union, which made absolutely no pretense of following any international guidelines, the United States followed the Geneva Conventions to the letter.”
 
     Krammer continues, “Prisoner of war camps, for example, had to be constructed to standards of an American camp. The Geneva Conventions was taken so seriously that in camps which did not have enough barracks space to house both prisoners and guards, compelling the POWs to live in tents temporarily, the guards were ordered by the camp commanders to live in tents as well, while the barracks remained empty!”
 
     If Pechmann were to have a complaint about his treatment, it would be with how long it took before he returned to Germany after the war. He said the Geneva Conventions dictates that POWs are to be returned to their country 90 days after the end of the war. Pechmann did not return to Europe until June 1946, more than a year after the surrender of Germany, and then spent additional time in France before going AWOL so he could attend a friend’s wedding in Germany.
 
     “I don’t feel bad about it. I don’t hold it against America,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’m happy about it because it gave me a home. I was homeless.”
 


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