In amerikanischer Kriegsgefangenschaft: Berichte deutscher Soldaten aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (review)

Germany's memories of the Second World War, like the histories of any country's major events, recede into the past in stages. For instance, the terror-bombing of civilian centers is only now coming into focus. The forced evacuation of East European Germans is another late surfacing topic, as are the experiences of an estimated eleven million German war prisoners in Allied captivity during the course of the war. While recollection of German experiences in Russian hands is still too sensitive for the general public, books and television documentaries about the German POWs in America, in particular the great films by Wolfgang Schoen on ZDF, are becoming quite popular. The excellent book under discussion here is an example of a subject which is poised to enter the mainstream.

Prof. Wolfgang Schlaucht has produced a sweeping, very readable, and respectably thorough story of the German POWs in America. Special attention is given to New Mexico since Schlaucht recently cosponsored, along with historian Robert Hart, a surprisingly successful exhibition on German POWs in New Mexico by the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum. Drawing on the recollections of two dozen former POWs, Schlaucht first provides a brief overview before turning the remainder of the volume over to their individual voices. Some were captured in North Africa, others in France. Each man recalled the good food, the boredom, particular events, occasional escapes, and repatriation in 1946, generally into the unsympathetic hands of the British or French. Their recollections are often illustrated by camp photos, canteen coupons, and nostalgic POW poems about home and the great adventure of their young lives in America. Artistic sketches by former POW Ernst Kopp are scattered throughout as well as a selection of attractive paintings by Thomas Naegele, a one-time U.S. Army-POW liaison, now a famous New York artist. The reader gains a substantial understanding of the POW experience from these recollections.

Four additional stories follow from POWs who were held in the local Camp Las Cruces, New Mexico; homage, one assumes, to the New Mexico Museum whose exhibition probably sparked this volume. The story wouldn't be complete without representative stories of those former POWs who immigrated back to the United States, in this case, to Arizona and Michigan, where they still live today. Finally there are twelve stories by POWs who were captured so late in the war that they were held in American camps in Europe. Their experiences of overcrowded, muddy compounds with poor food, were hugely different from those who spent the war years in America. However, lest anyone believe the foolish myth that hundreds of thousands were intentionally starved to death on orders from General Eisenhower, author Schlaucht includes a definitive essay by German historian Prof. Rolf Steininger of the University of Innsbruck which proves that such an atrocity never occurred. The book closes with a brief discussion of the available literature and a competent bibliography containing the twenty major books on the subject, in both German and English.

Schlaucht's volume is a balanced snapshot of the experiences, albeit shaded by the patina of sixty years' time, of the 378,000 German soldiers who spent the years 1942-46 behind wire fences in America. With this book the topic enters the German mainstream.