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Chapter 2 Sprechen Sie Deutsch? From Recruitment in the Third Reich to Incarceration in the United States Many of the prisoners were convicts, social rejects, hoodlums, psychopaths. Many were not even Germans, either, but foreign conscripts who . . . had been impressed . . . a catch-all, as the failing Reich, scouring its jails for military manpower, drafted common criminals and political prisoners alike—an unholy and explosive mix. —Wilma Parnell The heterogeneous group of “German” men who filled the POW camps in the United States joined the Third Reich at various stages of the war and as need demanded. Their differences further compounded problems already being experienced by U.S. officials. As the well-oiled Wehrmacht war machine that pounded Europe from 1939 to 1942 deteriorated under material and man power demands, German replacements began to include the morally questionable and the physically fatigued, plus many anti-Nazi Germans. Convicts and non-German recruits joined draftees and the aged, drawn from all over Europe , in a futile attempt to stave off defeat. An astounding 371,683 German POWs had entered prison camps in the continental United States by the end of May 1945. American GIs knew Italian soldiers from those in German uniforms but made few other distinctions and, overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of POWs captured between 1943 and 1945, barely processed these men. AlthoughaccustomedtoadegreeofinterservicerivalryintheU.S.armedforces, the GIs had no idea how deep these fissures ran across the Third Reich’s military . American captors could not conceive of how Germany’s long-standing 16 Sprechen Sie Deutsch? multiparty political system affected the degree to which these German POWs clung to the old tradition. Removing their captives from the battlefront was theirprimarygoal,andgiventheurgencyofthesituation,processingthePOWs in the field often only involved disarming them. Little thought was given to the differences between the men in German uniform. Besides, what would it matter if Fritz or Hans came from Austria or Poland or was a Democratic Socialist or National Socialist? They were still German, still the enemy, and all Nazis. Aryan mythology aside, the prisoners came from across Europe and Asia. Brown-skinned and brown-eyed soldiers of every conceivable age mingled with the “Teutonic” blond-haired, blue-eyed “German” youth. Germans and non-Germans and Nazis and non-Nazis mixed with the ideologically unsuitable , socially undesirable, and physically and emotionally unreliable. Some of these warriors used to feed the Nazi war machine had little or no grasp of the German language. While the Americans considered the German soldiers a homogenous group, the men in German uniform always remained conscious of the distinctions. ThedecisiontoputthesemeninGermanuniformsandintegratetheminto existing units, born of military necessity, dealt an ideological blow to many in the Third Reich who never truly approved of or accepted this dilution of the “master race.” After the British transfer of 175,000 men, the POWs entered the United States in three broad waves, the first from North Africa and southern Italy in 1943, the second from northern France after D-day in 1944, and the last from the winter of 1944 through the defeat of Germany in May 1945.1 POWs in each of these groups represented distinct variations in the moral, ideological, and national mixture of German military manpower. Despite these glaring differences, it took months for the United States to develop a screening process that went beyond differentiating among German, Italian, and Japanese. In late 1944, U.S. planners discovered variations among the German POWs, but attempts to segregate POWs based on nationality and ideology were slow. The following discussion demonstrates how this broad mixture of soldiers became members of the German army and later German POWs. The German army that invaded Poland in 1939 consisted of the best men the nation had to offer, full of élan, highly trained and disciplined, and heavily indoctrinated with Nazi ideology. The baptism by fire during the blitzkrieg years of 1939 to 1941 strengthened this tight integration. These quick battles gained the soldiers military prestige and experience at the cost of relatively low casualties. Rapid expansion on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, however, forced a change in the recruitment policies of a Wehrmacht already burdened with the war in North Africa and garrison- Sprechen Sie Deutsch? 17 ing units in occupied Europe. The war against the Soviet Union turned into a quagmire. Successes created larger front lines that needed to be manned, while reverses cost lives. A second seemingly subsidiary decision added to the toll,whenonDecember11,1941,GermanydeclaredwarontheUnitedStatesin...

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