Radiolab - Nazi Summer Camp

Episode Date: May 22, 2015

Reporter Karen Duffin and her father were talking one day when, just as an aside, he mentioned the Nazi prisoners of war that worked on his Idaho farm when he was a kid. Karen was shocked ... and then immediately obsessed. So she spoke with historians, dug through the National Archives and oral histories, and uncovered the astonishing story of a small town in Alabama overwhelmed by thousands of German prisoners of war.  Along the way, she discovered that a very fundamental question  - one that we are struggling with today  -  was playing out seventy years ago in hundreds of towns across America: When your enemy is at your mercy, how should you treat them? Karen helps Jad and Robert try to figure out why we did what we did then, and why we are doing things so differently now. Produced by Kelsey Padgett.  CORRECTION: A previous version of this podcast stated that the Nuremberg Laws and the Mississippi Black Code could be viewed side by side at a museum in Nuremberg. We were unable to confirm the existence of such an exhibit. We were also unable to confirm that the Nuremberg Laws were literally copied from the Mississippi Black Codes. The audio has been corrected to reflect this. We've gathered more photos of Camp Aliceville here Special thanks to: Mary Bess Paluzzi, founding director of the Aliceville Museum  John Gillum, current Director of the Aliceville Museum Sam Love, a filmmaker who gathered the oral histories Ruth Beaumont Cook, who wrote a great book about Aliceville

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. And NPR. Okay, I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab and today. What we're going to tell you is an old story. It's about 70 years old. But it's not really as old as that at all.

Because you will notice that it has an end. And it comes to us from reporter Karen Duffin. Yeah. Okay. All right. So where to start? I mean, do you have a sense of where to start? I feel like I could blame.

Well, I can. I could blame this on my dad. And that's the house I grew up in, just so you know. Oh, right. No, that was my bedroom window. This is Karen and her dad looking at pictures of his childhood home. He grew up in this tiny town in Idaho called Aberdeen. Good all Aberdeen.

I forgot how much it was. On a potato farm. He loves to talk about the farm. Like, he thinks we should all live on a farm. It's pretty cool. So we were talking. one day. Let the record show.

And he mentions very casually as if it's like something we all know. He says, yeah, back when we had Nazi Prisoners of War working on our farm. And I was like, timeout, what? Really? It was just parenthetical? Yeah, it was totally like, yeah, we're picking potatoes.

And then, yeah, the Nazi prisoners of war were helping us. Sort of to remember how old I was just by how tall the guards were. They were very tall. He was only three or four at the time. Very, very tall. Do you know if there were, like, dozens of prisoners or just like a handful.

Oh, there was a bunch. I didn't even know there were prisoners of war, Nazi prisoners of war in America ever. Yeah, me neither. Okay. Yeah, so that was the first. So after I talked to my dad, I ended up calling this historian. Kathy Kirkpatrick. Because I wanted to know, was this just an Aberdeen thing?

No. Like you were talking about Idaho. She told me in Idaho alone. There's branch camps in Aberdeen and Blackfoot and Emmett and Fyler and Polly Lake, Idaho Falls. There were 23 different camps. Generally, you had prisoners that were in churches, tent cities, and hall, rodeo grounds, dormitories, high school gyms, sugar city. And this was the case all across the country. The only state that did not have prisoners of war was Vermont. Wow. At the maximum, we had over 3701,000 Germans, 51,000 Italians and 5,000 Japanese. Almost half a million people.

Oh my God. Why does nobody know this? I don't even, it doesn't even like strike a little chord that maybe I once learned about it in junior high school. No, this was not talked about. We just don't talk about it. We just don't. I think we don't. I don't know.

But today we are going to talk about it. And not just because it's a cool historical thing, but because it raises a question. Breaking news this noon, a stunning report looking into how the CIA interrogated detainees. A question that. You know, with the torture reports, bizarre, even sadistic treatment, and Abu Ghraib, prisoners being abused by American soldiers,

Guantanamo Bay, that we are still trying to answer today, which is, you know, when you capture an enemy soldier, take them out of the battle, out of the fight, how should you treat that person? And if both sides have agreed to follow certain rules and one side doesn't,

what do you do? And the interesting thing was that 70 years ago, this question was playing out in this really, dramatic way in all of these towns across America. There were about 200 base camps that were huge. They were like up to 8,000 people. And by the way, that's like 70 times the size of Guantanamo Bay currently.

In any case, as she was researching, Karen started to zoom into one camp in particular. So this is really illustrative of what happened. There's this one camp in Aliceville, Alabama. It's this tiny town of like 1,500 people. But the camp has 6,000 people. Wow, that's like four times the sounds of the town. Yeah. So I went and interviewed a bunch of people, guards, prisoners, locals from Aliceville.

It was quite a day. That's Thomas Sweet. He worked in Aliceville. And he told me that the day that the prisoners came, so a thousand of them came at first, and the police were like, nobody is allowed on the street. But of course... When word got out that the first train load was coming, everybody rushed out on the street.

The day the train came in, there wasn't supposed to be. any townspeople, but of course there was. Everybody was sad. The road was lined with kids from three years old up to people 70 years old. So these voices are from an oral history project that was recorded in 1994 about the prison camp in Aliceville. So we all climbed the lumber pile so that we could see them when they got off the train. So everybody's super nervous.

They have these images in their head. In my mind, just like a lot of people now. They didn't know what kind of devil was going to get off of that train. Guys with horns on their head. So these prisoners that were sent to Aliceville were actually part of Rommel's Africa Corps, and these guys were the most feared of Hitler's fighters. They were supposed to be the elite. So-called Nazi Superman, right?

So the train pulls up. They stopped right on the main highway. Doors open, and then hundreds and hundreds of German soldiers get out. And they were marching. with that German march. And they're singing their military songs at German. Tell us about what it was like when, what you thought when they got off the train.

What did they look like? Do they have them uniform? Oh, yes. So when you listen to the oral histories, it's really clear that this was a really complicated moment for the people in Aliceville. That people of Aliceville were scared today. I didn't know whether I was going to be mad at them

when they first came in or what, but when I seen there it was just a boy. bunch of whipped kids. There was a feeling of a concern in our hearts for them. When I seen them, there was nothing but a bunch of young kids. How young they were. Haggered looking and washed out and beat. Wounded.

And some of them, they're maggots. Oh, just gruesome. You could tell they'd been through a rough time. It was awful for us. That's Hans Copera. He was one of the prisoners stepping out of the train that day. He'd been drafted into the army

against his will, captured in North Africa, and then he was sent to America in the bottom of this big cargo ship. And in one room, they crowded 700 people. You couldn't even sit. There was no toilet,

of course. We had only tin boxes. We all were wet, full soaped with urine. It was an awful trip. And you kind of had to feel sorry for him. But on the other hand, and you hear this too in the oral histories, the people in Aliceville are thinking, these are Nazis. These are the men who are killing our sons.

You know, I had three brothers overseas at the same time. So we didn't like them. That's just the way we felt. Okay, so there's that question in people's mind, and this is playing out all across the country. Here's the enemy at your mercy. What do you do? How do you treat them?

They're in your hands. Nobody's watching. you can do whatever you want with them at that point in theory. But in practice? Well, actually, this was a significant moment for the world. I mean, 14 years before, a bunch of countries had gotten together and they'd made up rules for exactly this kind of moment. In 1929 at Geneva, long before Hitler and his partners began to eye the real estate of the world,

there was an international conference. Here, nations solemnly promised to uphold the rules covering the treatment of prisoners of war. Oh, it was a series of do's and don'ts. That's historian Arnold Kramer. He's a professor at Texas A&M. Some of the rules he says are pretty basic. That women and children should be protected. So you had to give prisoners a certain amount of food.

Prisoners are entitled to the same quality rations, clothing and living quarters, as are afforded our own troops. And then there's rules about medical attention, labor. While the Geneva Convention says, yes, you can use people for labor. Kathy Kirkpatrick again. You also should be paying. people, poor labor. The rate of payment was 80 cents a day. So the Geneva Conventions are this attempt to kind of civilize the most uncivilized thing, which is war. You see, the First World War was so horrific. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in POW W camps. There were no real regulations

with regard to prisoners. Sides did almost anything they wanted. So the Geneva Conventions of 1929 was an attempt to kind of set things right. Because people just couldn't fathom another war to end wars. We were well trained in the Geneva Convention. That's Thomas Sweet again. He was actually one of the guards at Camp Alisville. And what he said is that even before the POWs arrived, the Geneva Conventions were drilled into their heads.

They had lectures, the rules were posted in the rec hall and in the officers club. We had to, the prisoners had to be treated the same as you would, your own fellow soldiers. Which sounds kind of basic, but for somebody like Hans who's stepping off this train and wondering, how is he going to be treated. It was, I should say, it was really a sort of heaven. When they got in to the barracks had all been laid out. Barracks were fresh and clean.

They had towels and shaving equipment for each one on each one's bunk. The prisoners washed up, and then the guards opened up the cafeteria. Then we got to eat good things. This is Walter Feldtelter. He was another prisoner at Aliceville. We got a piece of white bread, of New American white bread, and we got peanut butter. I didn't know what peanut was. And it tasted. Wonderful, wonderful.

It was the best dinner I ever had. And I always, when I think on the good times, then I think on peanut butter. And here's the funny thing. As you look into this, you start to realize that we're not just following the Geneva Conventions, the letter of the law. We're going above and beyond. And according to Hans, what started out as a great thing getting all this food ended up to be kind of a problem. The voice came to me every day, please tell them we don't want to have so much ham. And the sergeant came to me who heard that and said, don't tell them.

Tell the captain that you are going to throw it away. No, no, no, no, no. Take it and make a hole in the sand and put it in the sand. So they buried the ham. And a lot of it. We buried a lot of the ham because we didn't know what to do with it. And they also didn't like corn, but they kept getting corn. And so they buried corn.

And then they get caught because corn starts growing. So everyone's like, wait a minute. Very bad corn hiding. Within two months, they have an orchestra. Within a year, they have three orchestras. This is a POW-led orchestras? Yes, yes. And so they're being given instruments?

They're making instruments. The locals are donating instruments. The YMCA is giving them instruments. They open a school. You can learn anything from pottery to mathematics, almost any language you want to learn. They set up correspondence programs with the local universities. You could get credit.

Wow. They had soccer game just about every day. They drew big crowds. They had a newspaper. Their newspaper was called The Fenced Guest, and it had, like, poetry. The Fenced Fetest Guest. Right. They also did a lot of theatrical productions.

And sometimes through regular art shows. So this is where things get a little bit strange. On December 18th, there was another art exhibition. This is a woman named Ellen Vanders, whose father was a POW at the camp. And here she's reading from his diary. December 12, the Fuhrer, that means Hitler, had sent $12,572 to open the art exhibition in Camp V. Okay, wait, she's saying that, wait, Hitler sent money to the camp for an art thing? Yep.

While we're fighting Hitler, he's sending money. Yeah. While we're fighting Hitler. While we're fighting Hitler. That's really strange. Coming up, the fence guests are unfenced, and the Nazis next door, and the Nazis next door begin an argument that we're still having to this day. I'm Tammy Pate from Spencer, Indiana.

Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Gay, I'm Jada Mumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab, and get back to our story. Here's Karen Duffin. Okay, so...

So, okay, with Hitler's Christmas gift to the art show and the hand, and the bands and all that stuff, did people in the outside the camp know what was going on inside? You know, and once they start, so I think it was in 1941 was the point at which we started realizing we're running out of American men to do labor. And we look around and we're like, well, actually we have quite a few men

who might be able to do some work here. A lot of them prisoners worked on farms down there, picking cotton, peanuts. So some of the farmers would bring them in the house. for lunch. They would drink with them. They were drunk. There's some really funny stories of like... It was probably moonshine.

The prisoners getting drunk with the farmers and then they get in trouble because they come home late. One of the biggest things that the War Department says when they start sending the men out is like if you if you make friends with these POWs, it's against the rules. But they do it all the time. Do anybody fall in love with anybody? Oh, yeah. I mean, not a lot, but it definitely happened. So as these prisoners are out in the community and they're forming friendships,

a few of them are falling in love, word starts to get out about how they're being treated. And meanwhile, across America, there's rationing. And so when they learn that the POWs are getting food that they might not be getting, a lot of the American public, they get pissed. Especially this radio guy, Walter Winchell, who sort of made this his cause.

They call him the Rush Limbaugh of World War II. Was he that well known? Walter Winchell was one of the most famous reporters in America. He spoke like he was on the telegram. In Washington. I wrote, water. Who way outside? And he spoke in this funny nasal voice.

Oh, my God, that's exactly what it sounds like. So in any case, when he finds out about the Nazi POW program, Walter Winchell just starts to rant about it. The United States Army caters to the Nazis as though they were kings. They get more food than our soldiers get. Polies, radios, luxuries, and not. all sorts of leniency beyond imagination. And he would do this week after week. Wee cuddlers over here won't have any Nazis to capture

and fatten up on states butter, ham and bacon, or chopped chicken liver. People start writing articles in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe. Citizens start flooding the War Department with letters. I know, sir, that your YMCA war prisoners aid does all it can to make Nazi war prisoners over here comfortable. And in the meantime, according to Thomas Sweet, inside the camp, some of these prisoners are,

starting to get kind of bold. For a couple of nights, they cut out swast stickers and took a kite and was flying the kite and had these swast stickers in a box underneath the kite with a string down to the ground. And they handed the string to one of the guards and said, pull this string,

and when they pulled a string. The trap door opened on the gadget they had made and all these swastick started falling all over the camp. And then Allisville, too, and the townspeople started calling the base mad about that. Add to that, we don't have enough men to guard a lot of these camps. So the prisoners are starting to get more and more control of the camp. The prisoners had the run of the camp. And in some cases, the Nazi hardliners would start to torment the non-Nazis.

They would threaten them. They might beat them up. there were even a couple of murders. Who was not a Nazi inside of these camps? If you had been drafted, but you weren't ideologically. So the perception that's coming out of these camps is that we've created these hotels on American soil where Nazis could start radicalizing.

And people get so mad that there's actually a congressional investigation into the coddling of prisoners of war. So I spent a lot of time at the National Archives trying to get to like, all right, What are the arguments? And here's kind of how it went. You have this congressman on one side, Richard Harless, and he's saying, you're coddling them.

Congressman Harlis of Arizona, called the Nazi prisoners in the United States, tampered and privilege. And on the other side, you have the guy who's now running the Prisoner of War program, Archer Lurch. And he's basically saying, no. We do not coddle them. He says, we're just following the Geneva Conventions.

And the reason that he gave was the same reason that Joe Biden would give almost 60 years later. And there's a reason why we sign these treaties. to protect my son in the military. We torture them, they'll torture us. Reciprocity. That's why we have these treaties. So when Americans are captured, they are not tortured.

That's the reason. In case anybody forgets it, that's the reason. One problem, though. Just one month after that hearing in 1944... Unarmed and defenseless American prisoners. Fell to the machine guns of our enemies. News breaks that 84 American soldiers, prisoners of war now in Germany, are gunned down after they surrendered. Four weeks later, their frozen bodies, hands and ankles found, or found where they fell.

We then go on to liberate American soldiers from POW camps in Germany, and we find misery. Nothing like Aliceville. American prisoners of war report inhuman hospital conditions. Walter Winchell gets back on the airwaves. attention, Mr. and Mr. United States. He says, look, reciprocity, it hasn't worked. Our generosity has not been reciprocated, and our boys were not treated the same. Prisoners of war have been protected as much by our red tape as by the one-sided Geneva Convention rules.

And a few months later, things get even worse. It was impossible to fully realize the horror of the Nazi concentration camps. We start going into concentration camps. The incredible truth that man had indeed sunk below the level of animal business. And we start seeing what the Germans have done, what the Nazis have done. Thousands of dead bodies were piled everywhere. Most never having received the dignity of burial. But what was even more frightening were the living dead left behind.

So Congress decides to hold a second investigation into the treatment of prisoners. But this time, it's real soul-searching. I mean, we had just seen the full horrors of the Holocaust. So we're thinking, you know, anything we do to these guys at this point, they deserve. And we've also realized we're not really getting reciprocity, so we don't really have a practical reason to treat them well anymore. So at this point, the question has really become, do we continue to be good, even when we're not getting anything in return?

And the kind of amazing thing to me is that we decide, yeah, we're going to stick to the Geneva Conventions. Archer Alerch, who runs the POW program at this point, He gets up and he says, we are not going to lower ourselves to Nazi standards. We are not going to let the enemy decide who we are as a country. And that argument stuck? Yeah. I think that most people associated with the prison camp experience.

That's historian Arnold Kramer again. Felt that we treated them well, not because they treated ours well, but that we are decent people, and we probably would have done this anyway. For what makes an American is not any special precious sort of blood. but the tradition we have inherited. It's tradition, not blood, that patterns the way we think and act and feel. There's a great belief that we have a special mission and we have a special history.

This is David Goldfield. He's a historian at UNC Charlotte. Now that's the ideal. But no. I mean, you only have to look at the treatment of Japanese. Japanese Americans during World War II. He says, don't forget, right as we're giving the Nazis massive amounts of ham, we're also rounding up tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens, citizens.

And we're throwing them into these cramped camps that are way worse than Aliceville. And if you ask David, why are we treating the Germans so much better? They look like us. These people look all right. The mailman? The farmer? they all look pretty much like the folks back home. The major reason, race.

The Germans were white. They seemed familiar. There was a connection between the German POWs and the folks in the American South, not only because of the ethnicity of the Germans, not only because of their economic benefit to the region. David told us that he's looked at the historical documents and he thinks the German laws against the Jews were essentially copied from the Mississippi black codes.

We couldn't confirm that they were literally copied, but there are similarities. And a bunch of official Nazi documents from that time praised Southern race laws. So there was already a connection between the American South and Nazi Germany. This is the most horrifying thing I've heard in a long time. I mean, is it really true that like all the niceness was just a perverse form of racism? Well, I would say racism plays an enormous role in why Japanese citizens were interned in the first place. I don't think there's any question about that. That's Paul Springer. He's a military historian.

Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He's not quite sure that race explains all of this. He says, you know what, you've got to be careful because you're comparing treatment of citizens to treatment of prisoners of war. And that's different. It's not a fair comparison. For the case of why you treat the German POWs better, well, because they're prisoners of war. The Japanese POWs were also exceedingly well treated. They were treated much better than the Japanese citizens of the United States.

And I think that's the comparison that's probably more interesting, is why did you treat enemy soldiers from Japan better than you treated citizens of the United States of Japanese heritage? And he says very simply that with prisoners of war, it's because, we had a rule. Governing international law. Like the Geneva Conventions. There's no similar law at that time that says what you can and can't do towards your civilian populations. That's interesting. So it's like maybe we're not racist or noble, but both, and it's the rules that allow us to be our better selves. I mean, here's what I take from this. I think that in a time of war, it's incredibly difficult to be good to your enemy. It's not just

about aspiring to be good, this American ideal. It's about having 97 really nitpicky, tiny, tedious rules to tell you exactly what you can do and what you can't do, because it would just be so easy to not be the person that you want to be in that moment. Does kind of make you think back to February of 2002. Good afternoon. I have an announcement to make. President Bush today has decided that the Geneva Convention

will apply to the Taliban detainees, but not to the al-Qaeda international terrorists. The President has maintained the United States' commitment to the principles of the Geneva Convention while recognizing that the Convention simply does not cover every situation in which people may be captured or detained by military forces, as we see in Afghanistan today.

So, Ari, what you're telling us is that the Taliban prisoners detainees at Guantanamo will not get any more protections than they already are given under the Geneva Convention. What you seem to be telling us is that the Al-Qaeda detainees will get fewer. No, there's no change in the protections they will be provided. They have always been treated consistent with the principles of the Geneva Convention, which means they will be treated well. If you're looking for anything that will not happen as a result of this announcement, is that they will not receive stipends from the American taxpayers. They will not receive musical instruments, courtesy of the United States military. They would have received those had they been

declared POWs. They will continue to be treated well because they're in the custody of America. The concern the debate here was about, if you don't do it here, then U.S. soldiers could be mistreated abroad. Isn't that correct? And so isn't that a big motivation here to make sure that U.S. soldiers get the same kind of treatment? It's important for all nations throughout the world to treat any prisoners well. And that is something the United States always expects, and the United States always does. We have time for one more question, and then there's a pool of that. Hold it. David, we'll get one more, and then we'll come around. Go ahead. Civic point. Wasn't this an important concern? I understand what the expectations are,

but it was important for this administration to be able to say, look, we want to be able to protect our soldiers in similar situations down the line. And if we don't accord, if we don't afford under the Geneva Convention that our sentence could be in peril. David, I was not in the NSC deliberations where various issues were raised, and so really there's no way I can accurately answer that question. Go ahead. David? Forces, they often do not wear uniforms.

They often do not carry their weapons outwardly. If they are captured, they wouldn't be preserved. In terms of the Geneva Convention apply to all, and those terms speak for themselves. Okay, thank you, everybody. Thank you to reporter Karen Duffin and also producer Kelsey Paget. This is such a long and involved reporting process, big props to them. Special thanks to Sam Love, the filmmaker who collected all those Aliceville oral histories. And to John Gillum and Mary Best Pallucci, current and former Aliceville Museum directors.

Ruth Beaumont Cook, who wrote a great book about the Aliceville Camp. And Nancy Waymack for research help. I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening. Message 11. This is Kathy Kirkpatrick. Hello, this is Grand Duffin.

Hey, it's Karen Duffin. I'm calling in to read the credits. Radio Lab is produced by Chad Appamod. Our staff includes Brenna Farrell. Ellen Horn, Dylan Keith, Matt Kielty, Louie, Andy Mills, Lateef Nusset, Melissa O'Donnell, Kelsey Gadgett, Ariane Wack, Molly Woodster, Sean Wheeler, and Jamie York. With help from Danny Lewis, Kelly Prime, and Damiano Marquetti. Our fact checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris.

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