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Chapter 7 Exorcising the Beast: The Reeducation of German POWs in the United States He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. —Samuel Johnson The reeducation program, dubbed the intellectual diversion program, was a belated and poorly orchestrated attempt to teach German POWs the value of democracy. This project began secretly because the Geneva Convention outlawed attempts to denationalize POWs. Any reeducation efforts might be seen as brainwashing or denationalization. The program began very slowly in 1944 with additional restrictions and specific additions to the reading materials already available to the POWs. Emphasis on German history and culture and American democracy and history within the normal education programs also constituted a subtle way of reeducating POWs. These methods remained largely voluntary and mostly secret until after Germany surrendered. Once the war in Europe ended, the United States no longer feared reciprocal action against American servicemen held as POWs by Germany. The program picked up some momentum with the creation of a Special Projects Division (SPD) charged specifically with reeducation. A national POW newspaper , Der Ruf, written by a specially selected cadre of anti-Nazi POWs assisted by members of the SPD, provided carefully measured literature by POWs to POWs. Officials also scoured the camps to find groups of reliable anti-Nazi POWs to volunteer for four training programs being set up across the country. Programs at Camp Kearney, Rhode Island, and Fort Getty, Rhode Island, introduced the men to postwar government administration and democratic traditions . The POW camp at Fort Wetherill, Rhode Island, allowed the men to train to be postwar police officers. Camp Eustis, Virginia, provided a six-day crash course in democracy for nearly 20,000 POWs. Unknown to the POWs, those 118 Exorcising the Beast who volunteered received early and direct repatriation to Germany, while the rest went from the United States to France, Great Britain, or other countries, where they provided compulsory labor until as late as 1949. The program had obvious limitations. One of the most glaring was the relatively small number of POWs who received direct training, about 30,000 out of a population of nearly 371,000. A second involved the selection process. The POWs were chosen from among the reliable and trustworthy and, specifically, anti-Nazis. In other words, the men being reeducated about the German government and history were the ones least in need of it. Other problems included the haste with which the program was put together and the lack of properly trained or skilled personnel to run it.1 Ultimately, the segregation of POWs within the camps on the basis of nationality and ideology, designed to limit violence, transformed into a plan to reeducate them. The United States hoped that these men would reshape postwar Germany, and others foresaw using them as leverage against the Soviet Union in the coming Cold War. Henry Cassidy, in a November 1944 article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “What to Do with German Prisoners: The Russian Solution,” suggested that the United States reeducate German POWs in democracy . He argued that the Russians had no qualms about converting their German POWs to communism and feared the impact that such forced indoctrination on such a large number of Germans would have on the political orientation of postwar Germany.2 The Impact of Books, Movies, and Der Ruf Among the first things that the United States modified in seeking to reeducate the POWs were the list of books that prisoners of war were permitted and publication of the POW paper Der Ruf. POWs were now allowed only certain titles of books, and the publication of Der Ruf, which began to be published nationally . In May 1945, officials distributed copies of twenty-four different books published in German by the Infantry Journal under the series title Bücherreihe Neue Welt (New World Bookshelf) to the POW canteens and libraries. The titles included Amerika by Stephen Vincent Benet, Achtung Europa and Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann, and Wem die Stunde schlägt by Ernest Hemingway. The military surveyed several camps to gauge the extent to which the POWs accepted these books. A representative from Halloran General Hospital at Staten Island, New York, commented, “We received the initial shipment of 105 books, and these were in the prisoner of war canteen the first day after their arrival,” adding, “Your last shipment of 105 books were sold about an Exorcising the Beast 119 hour after arrival.”3 The representative from the...

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