Lone Star Stalag: German Prisoners of War at Camp Hearne (review)

Of the more than 371,000 German prisoners of war (POWs) interned in the United States during World War II, about 80,000 ended up in Texas. Given this high number of German soldiers living in the state's 22 main and 48 branch camps, historians interested in the history of these men focused at an early stage on the Lone Star state. Despite the books and articles written on POWs in Texas since the second half of the 1970s, Michael Waters's study is a significant contribution to our understanding of POW history and shows how far this field has meanwhile progressed. Combining archival sources with oral history interviews of former prisoners, guards, and American civilians, Waters and his team of students also conducted the first intensive archaeological survey and excavation of a former POW camp site in the United States. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive study of a single POW camp, and Camp Hearne is itself a very good choice for such an endeavour.

Housing more than 4,800 German POWs from June 1943 to December 1945, the camp was the site of the German Postal Unit, which processed and despatched the mail for all German POWs in the United States from March 1944 to mid-July 1945. The lax security at the Postal Unit allowed the German NCOs working there to communicate with prisoners in other camps. In addition, Camp Hearne was the site of one of the five cases where German POWs murdered a fellow inmate. Corporal Hugo Krauss was severely beaten on the night of 17 December 1943 and died six days later from his injuries. All of this was already known, but Waters reconstructs the events at the Postal Unit and the murder case in hitherto unknown detail. Finally, between early September and mid-December 1945, Camp Hearne housed a small detachment of less than 500 Japanese POWs, who had been selected by the authorities to participate in a re-education programme.

Lone Star Stalag is a balanced and well-written book. Although it uses no German literature, its reliance on both German and American recollections makes it interesting, especially when discussing the question of "Nazi terror". While former POWs, for example, claim that the Nazis were only a "very, very small minority group" (p. 117) and left alone by "the silent majority" (p. 117), the American chaplain in charge of the camp's religious activities claimed that half of the POWs belonged to this faction (p. 115) and that they would gruesomely kill anybody making unfavorable comments about Hitler and the Nazi party "at the earliest opportune time" (p. 114). At times, Waters could have done more to interpret these conflicting views, especially as the question of how many POWs were Nazis and to what degree they ruled the other prisoners' lives remains one of the last controversies in this field. Nevertheless, Lone Star Stalag is an excellent, very informative and beautifully crafted book, richly endowed with photos, graphics, maps and tables. It can be highly recommended to everyone interested in the topic and should be a model for the studies of other camps in the United States.