The Y.M.C.A. inspector was also impressed by Dermott’s commanding officer, Colonel Victor W. B. Wales. Stoltzfus described Wales as “a person of broad sympathies and deep understanding” and claimed that he had rarely seen prisoners of war “express such wholehearted admiration for their camp commander.” Wales, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, had apparently won the respect of the German officers in his custody by attending the funeral of one of their fellow prisoners and greeting the prisoner population of over two thousand men “face to face.” Stoltzfus was so impressed by Wales that he arranged to have the Y.M.C.A. temporarily loan Camp Dermott money for the purchase of some necessary supplies. Wales had cited funding problems as the main reason that he had not done more for the prisoners by December 1944 and Stoltzfus chose to help because of his trust in Wales’s personal character, saying that “it [was] very fortunate indeed that the conduct of this German ‘officers’ camp [was] entrusted to such a person” as Colonel Wales.7
The appointment of a commanding officer of Wales’s caliber was certainly influenced by lessons the PMGO had learned from dealing with Camp Clinton’s commandant, James Mc-Ilhenny. Numerous critics of Mc-Ilhenny had suggested replacing him with an American general officer, preferably a graduate of the military academy, who was cultured, well traveled, and could deal with the German general officer prisoners as an equal. Placing Wales, a high-ranking, academy-educated American officer with sympathetic views of the prisoners, in charge of the operation at Dermott addressed these long-standing concerns about Mc-Ilhenny. Despite Wales’s not being a general officer, in all other respects he epitomized the type of commandant that many in the War Department thought most appropriate for dealing with the German generals.
The camp’s open physical arrangement, on the other hand, reflected the mission of the American “re-education” program at Camp Dermott. One of the stated goals of the War Department’s new relationship with the Wehrmacht general officer prisoners was using these men to influence lower-ranking prisoners in the United States in favor of American democratic ideals. Undoubtedly, allowing the prisoner population of Dermott’s four prisoner compounds to freely mix without barbed-wire restrictions would allow the generals to have direct contact with and presumably a strong influence on their subordinate officers in the camp. This arrangement also promoted American lessons about democracy by removing one of the authoritarian aspects of the camp.
Unfortunately for both American officials and sympathetic German prisoners, this arrangement had unintended consequences. In late February 1945, Captain William F. Raugust evaluated Camp Dermott for the PMGO’s Special Projects Division, which was responsible for the reeducation program. Raugust found the social and intellectual environment at the Arkansas camp somewhat paradoxical. On one hand, since the chief goal of the reeducation program was to instill in the prisoners an appreciation for democratic ideals and western civilization, Camp Dermott was a model for its intellectual diversions. The camp’s library already held an impressive sixty-five hundred volumes at the time of Raugust’s visit and the assistant executive officer in charge of the program had ordered another $25,000 worth of books to add to this collection. Moreover, a large theater had been constructed that showed two motion pictures each week. But the most impressive aspect of the camp and the focal point of the American operation was “Dermott Camp University.” Astoundingly, camp officials dedicated fourteen buildings to an educational program that offered six hundred different courses on two hundred subjects and featured 150 professors. Of the 3,156 prisoners living at Camp Dermott, approximately 2,000, or close to two-thirds of the prisoners, had enrolled in at least one class.8
Yet, in spite of the high level of prisoner participation in the educational program, the open and accessible nature of the camp aggravated an ongoing political divide among the prisoners. Captain Raugust stated that there was “every indication that an underground movement [was] in the process of being formed in both the officers’ and enlisted men’s compound.” Camp officials believed that Nazi sympathizers were using so-called honor courts, in which they tried and punished their political opponents, to establish control of the camp’s population, and violence had broken out among the enlisted prisoners. Indeed, American authorities tried seventeen German enlisted men for assaulting fellow prisoners. In one such incident, the perpetrators brazenly held two American guards in the corner of the barracks so they could not interfere with the beating of another prisoner.9
To make matters worse, the PMGO soon planned to transfer an additional six hundred officer prisoners to Dermott from Camp Alva, Oklahoma. The War Department had designated Alva as an American camp for Nazi agitators, and SS prisoners constituted a sizable portion of the camp’s population. Raugust feared that the transfer of these six hundred potentially troublesome prisoners would only exacerbate the circumstances at Camp Dermott. Two prisoners at Dermott, Colonel Wilhelm Ludwig and Lieutenant Hans-Joachim Wolf, who had previously been interned at Camp Alva, claimed to have been “subjected to considerable political pressure from Gestapo and Schutzstaffel members” there. According to these prisoners, “super-Nazis virtually controlled the actions” of the other men at Camp Alva “by threatening violence to the less fanatical prisoners and to their families in Germany.” Moreover, these Nazi thugs at Alva had organized an underground movement to encourage escapes, conduct sabotage, and carry on active resistance once the German military collapsed.10
The testimony regarding Nazi activity at Camp Alva and the planned transfer of hundreds of prisoners from that camp to Dermott raise questions about American motivations. It seems puzzling that the War Department would introduce large numbers of prisoners from a “Nazi” camp into the population of a reeducation camp specifically established for cooperative officers. Most likely, a shortage of housing for the flood of prisoners coming to the United States in late 1944 and early 1945 compelled Washington to take advantage of Dermott’s potential to house up to ten thousand prisoners and forced U.S. officials to send German officers to Arkansas regardless of their political persuasions.
Remarkably, American officials do not appear to have anticipated the danger of placing hard-core “Nazis” in the same camp with cooperative prisoners. A special report on the “morale status of war prisoners” in February 1945 estimated that Nazi “super-fanatics” already made up about 10 percent of Camp Dermott’s prisoner population. But the camp’s assistant executive officer dismissed this dangerous minority as “a relatively small number to control effectively the remaining 90 percent to the point where either resistance or information would not be provided by the many other groups present.”11 Washington must have believed that the prisoners soon to arrive from Alva, as well as the Nazi malcontents already housed at Dermott, would be positively influenced by the educational program and the majority population of openly anti-Nazi prisoners.
This disregard for the potential danger of mixing pro- and anti-Nazi prisoner elements is especially remarkable considering the time and attention paid to carefully selecting the right general officer prisoners to be transferred from Clinton to Dermott in March 1945. Walter Rapp devoted over a month at Clinton to evaluating the generals and chose what he believed to be the five most cooperative senior officers. The War Department then took the extra step of sending furniture and accumulated items with the generals in covered trucks to make their new quarters as comfortable for them as possible.12 This significant effort by American officials to carefully choose and transfer general officers would seem to be undermined by placing these men in a camp environment that was considerably more contentious than the one they left.
Given the influx of bad elements coming to Dermott in the spring of 1945, it is not surprising that the camp environment deteriorated further. Captain Raugust returned to Camp Dermott in mid-April 1945, only a few weeks after the five generals arrived, to follow up on the problems he first observed two months earlier. By the time of his second visit, Dermott’s political environment had changed significa
ntly for the worse. During the previous two months, seventeen hundred additional prisoners had been transferred to Camp Dermott. Half of these new arrivals had come from Camp Alva, as originally planned, and the other half from Camp Mexia, Texas. Astonishingly, War Department officials had chosen the worst of the lot from both camps for transfer to Dermott. Raugust described the approximately 850 transfers from Mexia as “Afrika Korps men who would not permit any of their number to either read American newspapers or listen to American news broadcasts.” The American inspector believed these men were hard-core German patriots who were “utterly unaware of the changed conditions in Germany since their capture two years ago.”13
The new arrivals from Alva were even worse. Raugust reported that many in this group were high-ranking officers who were “members of the Gestapo, SS men, and young fanatics. These men and the Mexia prisoners of war formed secret societies such as the Werewolves,” according to Raugust, and “their aim was to maintain discipline and terrorize every prisoner of war in the camp.” The Alva and Mexia prisoners “attempted rigid censorship of all reading material” and plotted to assassinate some of their fellow prisoners at Camp Dermott. One of the men on their hit list was General Elster. Elster had been chastised by some of his fellow generals at Camp Clinton, von Arnim in particular, for having surrendered twenty thousand men to a much-smaller American force in France. His new campmates sought to eliminate him as punishment for this “treason.” Dermott officials had to take special precautions to protect Elster as well as other prisoners who had been threatened, including the camp spokesman and other high-ranking officers.14
The War Department had moved the most cooperative German generals to a far more dangerous environment and undermined the effectiveness of the reorientation program. Part of the Special Projects Division’s overall reeducation plan involved the circulation of a special news magazine, Der Ruf (The Call), in German POW camps throughout the United States. The magazine was prepared entirely by carefully selected anti-Nazi prisoners at a special camp in Rhode Island called “the Idea Factory.” It offered realistic reports on the progress of the war and the state of the German home front and an introduction to American culture and democratic values. Raugust observed that the “terrorists” at Camp Dermott had discouraged the sale of Der Ruf “to the point where it was unsafe for a prisoner of war to be seen buying or reading that magazine.” Furthermore, Raugust stated that “organized plots [had] been made against American personnel, including plans to take over the camp,” and Colonel Wales “did not feel that he could quell the anticipated disturbances by prisoners of war on V-E Day with his present personnel.” He requested that one hundred well-trained soldiers be sent to Camp Dermott immediately and that a battalion of troops at nearby Camp Robinson be prepared to arrive in case of emergency. The existing camp guard personnel had been on alert for several weeks prior to Raugust’s visit.15
Apparently, whereas the Y.M.C.A. inspector had previously lauded the open atmosphere of the camp, Raugust now found at least one enclosure separated by barbed wire. As part of the plan to protect General Elster and others as well as to restore some order to the camp, Wales and his staff segregated almost two hundred “ringleaders” into a separate compound. They hoped that by removing these “Nazi” instigators, the plotting and threats against other prisoners would cease. Indeed, this seemed to ameliorate some of the harshest aspects of Nazi intimidation, but Dermott camp officials stated that a “fanatical Nazi element in this camp” remained “significantly influential” as late as September 1945, five months after Raugust’s report.16
It is unclear why the War Department transferred some of the worst Nazi troublemakers in the United States to what was initially intended to be a reorientation camp for cooperative prisoners. Certainly, American officials could not have believed that the cooperative German officers, including the five generals, at Dermott would be a positive influence on the “terrorists” from Alva and Mexia. Indeed, it seems much more likely that authorities in Washington changed their minds about what to do with Camp Dermott and the general officer prisoners or perhaps had never really made up their minds in the first place.
As late as mid-January 1945, officers in the Special Projects Division still had no clearly defined policy regarding how they might use the German generals. In a memorandum dated January 15, 1945, Captain Rapp recommended to Lieutenant Colonel Davison that “immediate steps be taken to outline clearly the future utilization of German general prisoners of war.” Rapp questioned what the War Department meant when it used the term “psychological warfare” in this context and what its ultimate goals might be in this regard. Furthermore, he recognized that a large number of enlisted POWs in the United States were “seriously concerned about our possible utilization of German generals for immediate or postwar use” and suggested that some of this apprehension might be relieved if American officials could offer a clearer picture of their intentions.17 Curiously, Washington still seemed to be struggling to decide.
The War Department had established Camp Dermott as a reeducation camp for cooperative officer prisoners in the fall of 1944. At the same time, department officials had also planned the careful selection and transfer of the most cooperative general officer prisoners to join this group in Arkansas. Because of the need to renovate Dermott, however, the generals could not be transferred until the spring of 1945. Curiously, during this three-to four-month delay, the Special Projects Division solicited the opinions of the officer and enlisted prisoners interned at the Idea Factory in Rhode Island regarding potential American use of German generals in a variety of roles. The prisoners at the Rhode Island camp had been watched for several months before their selection for transfer to the Idea Factory, and American authorities deemed these men to be the most strongly anti-Nazi as well as some of the most intelligent and educated prisoners in American custody. Washington found their opinions revealing.
The prisoners at the Idea Factory argued against the use of German generals in almost any capacity. Lieutenant Dr. L. F. Mueller reminded his American captors that “only those military personalities were promoted by Hitler who justified the highest claims of political trustworthiness, indeed of energy, in a national-socialistic sense” and that this was particularly true of those appointed general officers. Mueller also argued that the generals would “find neither listeners nor a following in any degree among the German people after the war and defeat.” He claimed that stalwart Nazis would be skeptical of any collaborative general’s motives and likely brand him “a contracted traitor for the enemy.” The German civilian population, on the other hand, would shun them, according to Mueller, because the Germans were likely to blame the generals for the enormous sacrifices that Germany had been forced to make during the war and for those that would continue after its end. He found “no positive or valued ability or practical knowledge among the persons of the German generals that one could not also find among trustworthy and irreproachable circles of the German people.” Mueller concluded by emphatically declaring “the use of German generals by the Allies for any sort of task whatsoever contrary to the aims of this war, furthermore as dangerous, unsuitable and unnecessary.”18
An anonymous group of officers, an individual officer named Lieutenant Birkhauser, and a group of enlisted men, all prisoners at the Idea Factory, also offered separate statements regarding the German generals. All of these statements echoed Mueller’s sentiments opposing American use of German generals for reeducating other prisoners of war or the reconstruction of postwar German society. All three of the statements cited the impossibility of divesting German general officers of their militaristic beliefs. The officers contended that among Americans “the wrong conceptions about German generals [had] been created” and that “the exposition of generals in connection with postwar Germany and re-education of prisoners of war [was] a dangerous undertaking.” They concluded that the previous twelve years under Nazi rule in Germany had “definitely and unequivocally shown how difficult it [wa
s] to direct the steps of high ranking German military personalities towards non-aggressive political tendencies and for international cooperation and democratic ideas.” In a similar refrain, Birkhauser added his belief that a German general would always remain “a man who finds the core of his life in the development and fulfillment of military power.” Citing historical precedent, the enlisted men offered what may have been the most cogent argument against German generals taking a role in any kind of antimilitaristic reconstruction or reeducation plan. They observed that “after the collapse of the Bismarck Reich in 1918, the attempt was made to build a state which would serve the interests of the masses. It is noteworthy that generals did not make any positive contribution to this rebuilding.” In fact, they pointed out, the generals quickly “began to support the organized powers which were aimed against the young republic.”19
These statements also revealed skepticism about the sincerity of any of the generals’ professions of opposition to National Socialism. The officers at the Idea Factory observed that “a German general who declares himself in the U.S.A. as anti-Nazi combines with such a position a definite political aim, and he will from time to time attempt to gain a position similar to that of General von Seydlitz in Russia.” Lieutenant Birkhauser and the enlisted men both insisted that any high-ranking officers opposed to Nazism had already been removed by the Hitler regime prior to the war. They determined that while the general officers “may now loathe Hitler and despise the Nazi Party,” it was “not because [Hitler] wanted to make the Reich a world-dominating power, but because [he] failed to do so.”20
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