When I got back from more basketball tonight, my parents were watching a show on PBS called History Detectives. They were talking to some woman from Hearne, Texas, who thought that some land her ancestors owned housed an internment camp during World War 2. An internment camp for Germans.
This sounds crazy right? It's not. Apparently at one point there were over half a million German POWs being held on American soil. Sure enough, the government appropriated 300 acres of this woman's family's land and built a POW camp, right in the middle of Texas. You see, it turns out that there's a provision in the Geneva conventions about what kind fo climate prisonerts can be kept in. Soldiers held in Hearne, Texas had been captured while fighting in North Africa, and the Powers That Were decided Texas had the most North-Africa-Like climate of any allied territory.
Imagine being drafted into the German army, being shipped off to Africa, suffering some of the first German defeats of the war, being taken prisoner, and then being shipped off to Texas! You just have to be thinking, "Was?" Then when you get there, they're allowed to put you to work, including in agriculture, so you wind up picking cotton. They hold old photos of the prisoners doing exactly that. THat kind of culture shock has to be near-fatal.
There was also a slightly scary bit about the underground activities of former Nazi party members. They published an underground newspaper inside the prison and even built a short-wave radio they used to contact other POWs. They ran their side of the camp until they murdered an informant one night and the guards segregated the prisoners by ideology.
So I thought that was a cool story and I wanted to share it.
1 comment:
It makes sense that we'd have POW camps for Germans -- at first, when you said internment camp I was thinking it was for German-Americans, like the Japanese internment camps -- but the part about the Geneva convention and climate is bizarre.
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