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Chapter 6 Idle Hands: Recreation and Intellectual Diversion behind Barbed Wire The point is not that these Germans, from a cattle-breeder’s standpoint, are great, strapping huskies who can on occasion smile and murmur expressions of gratitude and touch our tooeasily -touched hearts. It is not the bodies of these men, however formidable, which are our enemies. It is their minds. These have been corrupted by beliefs which, in Hitler’s proud boast, have “brutalized” their holders. These beliefs are contrary to everything in which we ourselves believe and for which we hope. They not only contradict, they deny and imperil what are the foundations of our faith. —John Brown Mason By the end of World War II, nearly half a million Axis POWs resided in camps in the States, almost 400,000 of them Germans. The United States began holding prisoners as early as December 1941; the last left in 1947. Such a large number of men held for this long period of time caused trouble if left unoccupied.1 The labor program proved helpful but only filled eight to ten hours a day. Many did not work and all were guaranteed one day off per week. This meant that prisoners spent most of their time in the camps. The Geneva Convention only vaguely mentioned recreation and intellectual diversion. Article 16 allowed freedom of religion within the camp, and Article 17 stated simply that “so far as possible, belligerents shall encourage intellectual diversions and sports organized by prisoners of war.”2 The War Department, the ASF, and the PMGO had to interpret these articles. They did so in a broad fashion while providing government support in ways that benefited the POWs’ physical, spiritual, and intellectual well-being. 104 Idle Hands Religion The U.S. government supported POWs’ practice of religion. When there was no German priest or preacher in the camp, civilian clerics performed services. Nearly all the German POWs belonged to either the Lutheran or Catholic faith. The Wehrmacht, like the U.S. Armed Forces, had chaplains who accompanied soldiers at the front. These men, like medical personnel, represented a protected class of POWs but many performed as active soldiers rather than members of the clergy. John Brown Mason, a member of the Internees Section of the Special War Problems Division of the Department of State, noted the difficulty locating POW clergymen, since the “German Army provides only one chaplain for each division, as against between one and three for an American regiment.”3 The PMGO discovered that only nine POWs officially acted as chaplains and most of them were “members of the Gestapo or other police organizations and their assignment as chaplains constituted a secondary duty.”4 These men of the “cloth” were prohibited from preaching to the POWs. This left the military to rely on POWs who had been preachers in civilian life but through draft or enlistment had become regular troops. These soldiers were treated unofficially as protected personnel. When they were in camps with the POWs, they performed the religious ceremony. Even then, some of the Nazis slipped through the cracks and used the platform to spread their own message. For example, Captain William F. Raugust recommended that Protestant POW preacher and officer Rudolf Sebold be stopped from conducting services at the Memphis ASF Depot because he was “noncooperative and troublesome.”5 Sebold’s position of authority within the camp concerned the military to the extent that General Archer Lerch, the PMG, ordered that he be monitored or removed. By February 17, 1945, about a month after the visit, Sebold’s true Nazi character had been revealed and Major Maxwell McKnight, acting director of the Prisoner of War Special Projects Division, transferred Sebold to the Nazi camp at Alva, Oklahoma.6 Individuals conducting religious services, whether POWs, army chaplains , or civilians, had a set of rules to which they adhered. They could only discuss religious matters, could not relay written messages, and had to be accompanied by U.S. military personnel.7 The mission of the military, therefore, became one not only of adhering to the Geneva Convention but also of using religion to control and eventually reeducate POWs. American churches had a similarly sincere mission—to bring the POWs back into the Christian fold. The division of POWs into separate camps and compounds and the separation of officers from enlisted men led to many groups not having access to Idle Hands 105 religious personnel. When this happened, the military allowed the U...

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