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32 MURDER AND MARTIAL JUSTICE CHAPTER 3 Hang Him One Head Higher” Papago Park, where Werner Drechsler died, is now the Phoenix zoo and botanical garden. But during the war, “at least for the 3,500 sailors and 120 officers surrounded on all sides by barbed wire” and desert,1 it was a hell of brownish-pink lava. one ensign marveled, “There was nothing, absolutely; not a house, nor tree, nor plant for dozens of kilometers all around. Not a drop of rain, 120 degrees in the shade, and in the rubble of the desert all the scorpions and rattlesnakes you could want.”2 inside the wire, there were shortages of everything but prisoners. in January 1944, when the naval prisoners from stringtown, oklahoma, arrived in the still-unfinished camp, it contained around 1,600 men. They kept coming by the trainload. Nazis and anti-Nazis were dumped together. in march, an inspector from the PmG’s office called Papago Park “a very difficult” place, with “numerous political agitators” stirring up “strong opposition to all cooperation with camp authorities.”3 The Americans blamed Fregattenkapitän Juergen Wattenberg, the camp spokesman, for this situation. He often told prisoners that the Führer expected them to make trouble. He and the chief quartermaster from his boat, Franz Hox, the spokesman for Compound 4, encouraged prisoners to use their Geneva right to complain to the red Cross and the Protecting Power. on February 19, Hox wrote that when the 507 men in his compound arrived, there had been only sixty-eight tubes of toothpaste and sixty bars of soap on hand for the entire camp. The classrooms had no furniture. Furthermore, the American officer in charge of the compound refused to discuss any issue or allow Hox access to the commandant. The chief of the swiss Legation’s Division of German interests stiffly requested the state Department to remind 32 “ “HANG HIM ONE HEAD HIGHER” 33 the Provost marshall General that according to Geneva Article 42 “prisoners of war have the right to inform military authorities of their requests.”4 Capt. Wattenberg complained effectively about every breach of the prisoners’ Geneva rights. The camp’s commandant, Col. A. H. means, was obliged to write an explanation to the swiss and to his superior, maj. Gen. mcCoach of Ninth service Command. mcCoach also received—and resented —a smart reprimand for lax conditions at Papago Park.5 Wattenberg had a long history of matching wits with his captors. early in the war, he had walked away from a camp in Argentina, where more than a thousand Germans had been interned after the scuttling of the Graf Spee to prevent its capture. Next, he had commanded a u-boat, which the Americans sank in september 1942. While he was being interrogated at Fort Hunt, the royal Navy asked oNi to grill him about “escape possibilities in the Argentine.” He gave so little information that oNi was reduced to sending its ally excerpts from the Argentine Congressional record.6 Wattenberg was sent to Camp Crossville, Tennessee, where he became spokesman because of his rank. soon, he issued a noncooperation order. if any officer so much as spoke to an American, he demanded a detailed report . An anti-Nazi officer turned informant because he feared a plot to haul him before a kangaroo court, hang him, and destroy his body in a mayday bonfire. The Germans called him crazy, but a G-2 report described this officer as a member of the German Abwehr (Army intelligence) and an almost entirely reliable source. According to him, the “officer-ringleader” (Wattenberg ) not only urged “a constant spirit of rebellion,” but he had actually arranged for an uncooperative subordinate to be killed by American guards, then had made a martyr of him and told everyone how to testify when the death was investigated. The informer also named other troublemakers, especially NCos, who acted as camp Gestapo, communicating with the officers through their orderlies.7 Another Crossville prisoner, a doctor, offered information about Wattenberg in exchange for protection and a chance to continue his research in endocrinology . According to him, “about 30 percent” of Crossville’s prisoners were Nazis. The other 70 percent, he said, were terrorized anti-Nazis.8 After naval prisoners were segregated into special camps, the notorious Wattenberg became spokesman at Papago Park. He had nothing to do with Drechsler’s lynching there, but he fit the War Department’s image of a Nazi terrorist ringleader so well that...

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