By: Dirk Vanover
V & M Staff


The local treatment

     The prisoners also appeared to be treated well by both their captors and the locals.
 
     “My guess is that such prisoners in the U.S. did better than those held captive by either side in Europe--not necessarily out of great intention to make them better off, but simply because resources were so much more plentiful,” said Sherry.
 
     Besides just following the rules of the Geneva Conventions, the protection of American prisoners of war was also a factor in the U.S. treatment of German prisoners.
 
     Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson is quoted in a May 21, 1943, New York Times article as saying that he hoped “the humane and considerate treatment that War Department policy will accord to America’s prisoners of war will be reflected in similar treatment of American soldiers who are prisoners of war of the Axis powers.”
 
     In a May 5, 1945, memo from Major F.J. Dvorak, the camp’s intelligence and political officer who was evaluating the prisoners’ mood, a passage from Pomona detainee Unteroffizier (equivalent to an American sergeant) Hans Grassy’s letter home is quoted to show some of the attitudes toward Americans.
 
     In the letter Grassy says, “Erfurt is in American hands! If you and the children are treated as well as I have been treated during my internment, I need not worry any longer. The Americans have always treated me like a human being.”
 
     Dvorak quotes another POW’s letter to further show the accepting attitudes toward Americans some prisoners were developing.
 
     POW Alfons Buschel wrote to his sister, “The Americans are humane and mean well. I can judge them better than you at home, since you were told propaganda lies about them.”
 
     A story often repeated by the Flamm family shows at least one of the German prisoner’s acceptance and appreciation of the U.S. military for its treatment of POWs. The story was told to the Flamm family by one of the guards at Camp Pomona, although the family members are uncertain whether it occurred on their farm or another.
 
     As the German POWs were working in the orchards picking peaches, their guard became tired. The guard propped himself up against a peach tree and fell asleep with his gun by his side. One of the German prisoners noticed the guard asleep and walked over to him and took the soldier’s shells out of his gun and hid them. He did not want any of his fellow POWs to get a hold of the loaded gun and do something to change the way they were being treated.
 
      Later, the camp commander was visiting the different work groups on the farms. The German prisoner then woke up the soldier and gave him the shells. He did not want the guard to get in trouble.
 
     Pechmann also tells a similar story. When he was working in a canning factory in Wisconsin, the camp commander came out to visit the prisoners working on the night shift. As the POW overseeing the other workers, Pechmann delivered his report to the commander who then asked him where was the guard. He told the commander that he thought the guard was getting food in the dining room, and he would go get him. Pechmann went back to the room and found the guard sleeping on two benches pushed together with his gun at his side. Pechmann woke up the guard so he could speak with the commander..
 
     “In no time flat he was awake,” Pechmann said.
 
     After a visit by the International Red Cross to Camp Galesburg, an Oct. 25, 1945, memo at Archives II stated that a spokesman for the prisoners told the Red Cross “that the prisoners of war were well pleased with their treatment at this camp.”
 
     At Camp Ellis, discipline as part of treatment was still enforced, but it did not appear to be a major problem. In April 1945, 37 of the more than 3,000 detainees were disciplined. Offenses for which prisoners were punished included being late for work detail, improper performance of assigned task, failure to obey orders, prejudice against good order and discipline and malingering.
 
     In her research of Camp Ellis, Bordner discovered that four official deaths were listed for German POWs, but one of them was a duplicate. She recalled that when one of them did die, the POWs were allowed to perform a ceremony for the prisoner in a Macomb funeral home.
 
     “It was done with a color guard from the POW camp, done as it would have been done in their own environment,” Bordner said.
 
     Pechmann added that while he was at Camp Ellis the POWs were buried with full military honors.
 
     In a May 3, 1945, report, Camp Ellis had not had any escape attempts or any court martial trials since December 9,1944. Escape attempts, however, did occur.
 
     Ellis noted in his article that in 1947 the War Department reported that 2,222 of the prisoners held in the United States had attempted to escape and that 17 were still at large. Of the prisoners who attempted to escape, 56 were shot while trying to escape.
 
     Krammer wrote in his book about one of the more notorious escapees. Reinhold Pabel was a prisoner at both Camp Ellis and Camp Grant, Ill. He took correspondence courses from local universities and later wrote a book about his experiences called “Enemies are Human.”
 
     Krammer wrote that Pabel managed to escape from Camp Grant and disappeared into the mainstream of Chicago life. Pabel was hunted by the FBI and eventually caught and deported in 1953.
 
     Pabel’s case was rare and many escapees were captured fairly quickly.
 
     Krammer quotes former Sheriff Harold Ellsworth of Lewiston, Ill., which was near Camp Ellis, about the majority of escaped POWs.
 
     “Fact is,” Ellsworth said, “they made us feel kind of sorry for them, these German escapees. We would find them there, in the streets, without a word of English, in Bloomington, in Peoria, in Galesburg; or else in the woods, completely lost like strayed sheep. Yes, I tell you, it was rather pitiful. Besides, local people weren’t afraid of them. When they met up with one, they called us; we came, put a hand on their shoulder, and gently brought them back to camp.”
 
     Pechmann remembers that three POWs escaped from Camp Hoopeston. The prisoners stole a car and drove to the southern United States while attempting to make it to South America. He said they ran out of food and asked a farmer for some. The farmer gave them food, but he also called the sheriff who came and arrested them. When they were returned to the camp, Pechmann said they received a bread and water diet for two weeks as punishment.
 
     Of the incident Pechmann said, “Why would anybody escape when you have plenty to eat, no shooting, has a roof over his head? Why would he go over there to get court-martialed and put on the front line again and being shot at again?”
 
     Bordner does not recall many successful escape attempts from Camp Ellis.
 
     “They got by with it for a while, but to my knowledge nobody made it permanent,” she said. “They gave it a try of course. I can’t blame them I guess.”
 
     However, Bordner adds that some of the former POWs held at Camp Ellis have returned to visit where they were held.
 
     “They all wanted to come back and see where they were treated so well, where they got all this good food,” Bordner said.
 
     Adolph Flamm, who was one of the family members in charge of running the farm during World War II, told a story to his son Norbert, who then passed it on to his siblings Rose Marie, Raymond and Albert.
 
     After the war, one of the Germans who worked on the farm sent Adolph a letter and asked him to sponsor him in returning to the United States. Adolph threw the letter away and did not respond. He did not want any anti-Nazi backlash and wanted to protect his mostly German immigrant family from being accused of collaboration.
 
     “Years later,” remembered Raymond, “he said that was one of his biggest regrets—that he never responded to that guy.” Nevertheless, the Flamm family believes the prisoner did appreciate the treatment he received while on the farm or he would not have asked Adolph to sponsor him.
 
Home cookin’

     Rose Marie was 18 years old and lived with her father, Adolph, and the rest of her family across from the farm. Her father was one of the four Flamm brothers who owned the farm, and he was in charge of telling the men where they would need to work each day.
 
     Although she was not allowed to communicate with the POWs, she remembers hearing that for lunch each day they would have bologna, bread and coffee.
 
     “I don’t know how much it was, but it was, according to regulation, the amount given. And, while picking peaches and carrying a heavy ladder in the hot weather by the middle of the afternoon they didn’t have much energy to do anything,” Rose Marie said.
 
     According to a memo after a visit by the Provost Marshall General’s office dated Sept. 20, 1945, the prisoners were on a 3,700-calorie diet.
 
     She remembers that one Sunday her father asked her mother to cook some of the chickens for the prisoners to eat. Rose Marie and her sisters helped their mother cook, and then a worker on the farm took the chickens to the POWs.
 
     “The orchard boss, the man in charge of telling them where to pick, he said on those days when they were given food, they picked twice as many peaches as on the days they didn’t get food in the afternoon, which was understandable because they didn’t have enough, but they were being fed according to international law,” she said.
 
     Rose Marie and her younger brother Raymond also vividly remember that on another occasion their mother cooked about 12 dozen doughnuts for the prisoners.
 
     “We couldn’t wait to get home from dinner that day because we’d always get at least some doughnut holes. They made about 12 dozen, and when we got home there was not even one hole left. The prisoners got them all,” she said.
 
     Sanders also remembers that the prisoners ate well. Her father hauled garbage away from the camp to feed their hogs, and she remembers seeing the leftovers the prisoners did not eat.
 
     “There was dozens of loaves of bread they’d end up throwing away,” she said. “They ate well. They were treated well.”
 
     Pechmann said he ate well during his time in American POW camps.
 
     “I got captured I weighed 128 pounds. Two and a half years later in 1946 when they shipped us away, I weighed 185,” he said.
 
School camp

     At Camp Ellis, the prisoners were also exposed to education programs, one of which was aimed at refuting the national socialist way of life. Known as the Special Projects Division, this program was not advertised because it was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. The program’s effectiveness at altering the Nazi mindset is also unclear.
 
     Judith M. Gansberg, in her book “Stalag: U.S.A.,” wrote it was “one of the most remarkable and most successful training programs ever implemented under the auspices of the military,” and that “they virtually deactivated National Socialism in the POW camps.”
 
     Robin, however, does not agree, “When measured narrowly as just another sideshow of World War II, the reeducation of enemy POWs was of little lasting significance.” Later on he continued, “Reeducation neither altered the course of the war nor affected the immediate future of postwar Germany.”
 
     In addition to exposing the German prisoners to American cultural values and propaganda, they were also educated in practical areas.
 
     Some of the programs offered at Camp Ellis included learning French, Czech, boxing, table tennis, techniques of driving, courses in German Orthography, and Stenography elements of German shorthand. There were also 980 prisoners enrolled in English courses.
 
     “Many of them wanted to study English to learn more about this country,” Bordner recalled.
 
     Pechmann did not take advantage of many of the classes while he was at the camps.
 
     “They offered it, but, heck, it was too boring,” he said. He did take a few English classes, but learned only how to say a few phrases. “How do I know I’d come back to America again?” Pechmann said.
 
     The POWs also had correspondence courses from the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan, were shown movies three times a week and had music rehearsals.
 
     Krammer also wrote in his book that the Reich Ministry of Education in Germany offered full high school and college credit for any courses German POWs took while held captive in the United States, and 15 major universities in Germany and Austria agreed to accept the prisoners grades at face value.
 
     “While Germany’s Eastern Front lay in shambles and the Allies poised for the most massive invasion in the history of the world against Normandy, the German Reich took the time to supply their POWs with official booklets to note their educational progress in the United States,” Krammer wrote.
 
     While working and visiting the camp, Bordner met some of the people teaching the POWs and recalled the teachers being impressed by their new students.
 
     "They enjoyed their work with them because those people were there to learn, and you didn’t have to do any encouraging of them,” she said.
 
     The library at Camp Ellis also had 7,000 volumes as well as periodicals and newspapers for the POWs to read. In one camp memo, it was reported that the prisoners frequently requested the New York Times.
 
     The prisoners also requested the New Yorker Staatszeitung und Herold, which was approved and “may in the discretion of the camp commander be available to prisoners of war.”
 
     In the records of the Provost Marshal General’s office is a camp newsletter called “Die Lager Stimme” (The Camp’s Tune) that was created in German for the prisoners. It featured camp news, listing of events, poems by prisoners, questions and answers prisoners may have, and drawings and comics poking fun at the POWs’ life in the camp.
 
     The POWs in Camp Ellis were also shown materials to educate them about the United States.
 
     In a report after a visit by the International YMCA, it was said that the assistant executive officer “sent letters to every State Capitol for material, pamphlets, motion picture books, charts, et cetera, which could be used in the educational program in connection with acquainting the prisoners of war with the United States.”
 
     The report also said that some of the “material has been secured through the cooperation of the University of Illinois.”
 
     It also said that Camp Ellis’ anti-Nazi camp has “shown an interest in baseball and have shown a great deal of enthusiasm over this sport.”
 
     The prisoners at the camp were also shown films about the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. In a memo, the camps assistant executive officer stated “that the prisoners of war viewed these films in silence and that the Spokesman had told him after the showing that most of the prisoners of war were not only convinced of their authenticity but were also shocked.”
 
     Some of the prisoners began to show appreciation for American values and realized the country they fought for was dead.
 
     In her column, Rippelmeyer-Tippy also wrote that some prisoners, “after gaining new insight, some became so anti-Nazi that they requested transfer from the PW camp to join the Allied fighting forces.”
 
     In Dvorak’s memo at Archives II, there was an excerpt from Stabsfeldwebel (equivalent to an American staff sergeant) August Mathes’ letter to his wife in Mainz, Germany, “So, this is the end of Nazism. We were deceived and lied to for twelve years. These are the fruits of twelve years of Nazi regime; five years of war, millions of dead, no home left untouched. And all that because of a few megalomaniacs.”
 
     Some prisoners, however, hated the United States. Dvorak’s report also included a quote from a Nazi who would not accept the American way of life. The POW wrote, “Today they can occupy the Reich and take our land, but they can never conquer our hearts, which belong to our Fuehrer.”
 


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