Enemies in Love

by Alexis Clark

  In Europe, where cities were constantly being bombed or occupied militarily, there wasn’t adequate space for Allied forces to imprison all of the German and Italian POWs. Britain had been capturing and housing German soldiers without any relief before the United States declared war after Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the situation was approaching crisis mode.

  Initially, the United States was reluctant to make an agreement with Britain to take in prisoners of war. Despite outside appearances of congeniality, the two countries had different philosophies and strategies about the direction of the war. The rocky relationship made the United States hesitant to partner with Britain on the POW situation, and the United States resisted absorbing POWs for as long as possible in spite of persistent pressure from Britain.5 Security problems were another concern raised by the prospect of having Nazi prisoners on U.S. soil. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, paranoid about the possibility of German POWs escaping and wreaking havoc on American society, reportedly said of the typical Wehrmacht soldier, “Trained as he is in the technique of destruction, he is a danger to our internal security, our war production, and the lives and safety of our citizens.”6

  But the United States acquiesced, agreeing in August 1942 to take in fifty thousand prisoners of war, even though there wasn’t a precise plan in place for what to do with them initially.7

  The POWs would be working in camps, a provision approved under the terms of the Geneva Convention of 1929. The treaty essentially protected captured soldiers from inhumane treatment, but, depending on their rank, prisoners could still be forced to work for their captors. In the United States, the majority of enlisted German POWs worked for the U.S. Army on its military installations, but many were also contracted out to work for civilian employers. Non-commissioned officers were given supervisory work, while commissioned officers weren’t required to work at all, although they could volunteer to do so.8

  Prisoners of war were a boost to the wartime economy. If some were willing to assist in American intelligence gathering by divulging Nazi military information, then the arrangement was even more beneficial. But the United States had never before detained tens of thousands of enemy combatants at one time, and the experience proved immensely challenging. Some German prisoners of war had been detained in the United States during the Great War, but the number was much smaller, and that experience was not remotely reflective of what the country faced in the 1940s.9

  From the start, prisoner of war camps were primarily located in the rural South. Eventually camps were erected all over the United States, but building costs in the South were particularly low, and southern farmers had an ongoing need for dependable and cheap unskilled labor.10

  Some of the labor needs were specific to the region. In the Appalachian areas and northern Minnesota and Michigan, thousands of POWs were used for logging and lumbering. In Arkansas, they picked grapes; and in New York State and Northern Illinois they worked in canning plants for the food services industry.11 In Arizona, the need, of course, was for cotton picking—a task German and Italian POWs would quickly come to loathe.

  Cotton picking had traditionally been the hardest work, reserved for the poorest people. During the Great Depression, 400,000 Mexican cotton pickers were deported after a nativist movement among white residents forced them out. The cotton still needed to be harvested, though, and cotton farmers recruited migrants from what were referred to as dust bowl states—the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas, where farmland had been destroyed by overuse that left it susceptible to erosion by devastating winds, producing dust storms that forced families to flee and become migrant workers. But after a few years of harvesting cotton in Arizona, the migrant workers had moved on, finding less strenuous and better-paying employment opportunities in the defense industries, and the cotton farmers needed help again. They appealed to the U.S. government, and the POWs became the solution.12

  Many German POWs were captured in Italy, and Frederick seems to have been one of them, although even his family has a complicated relationship to his wartime story. “My father didn’t talk about his experience,” said his son Chris Albert. The only story the Albert children received was the brief one Frederick shared with them—he had been a paratrooper and was caught in an Italian village while trying to escape from the Allies on a bike with flat tires.

  His military papers, which Chris found decades after the war, included a prisoner of war registration card with Frederick’s POW number: 81G-244-649. The United States assigned serial numbers to each captured soldier that indicated the soldier’s nationality and place of capture. Interestingly, and unbeknownst to his family, Frederick’s serial number indicated that he had been captured in North Africa.13

  On the same card, Frederick’s position in the German military was listed as “SAN. SOLD” and his division as “LW SAN.G. 1/1,” which seems to indicate that he was a low-ranking medical soldier in the Luftwaffe. Of course, errors were made in paperwork all the time, but it’s unlikely that a paratrooper would be listed incorrectly as a medic. The most reasonable explanation was that in an attempt to impress his children, Frederick told them that he was an elite paratrooper. Perhaps he still longed to be the hard-core military hero he had wanted to be in his father’s eyes.14

  In all likelihood, Frederick’s unit was en route to Africa, but he just never made it there. In 1942, the United States began a lengthy surge in northern Africa against the Axis powers. More than 100,000 soldiers under the leadership of Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley joined forces with British troops led by General Bernard Montgomery to wage intense battles against German troops under General Erwin Rommel along the Mediterranean coast of Africa, comprising Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia. The casualties were extensive, thousands of men died, and several thousand German soldiers were taken prisoner.15

  Germans captured in Africa were first detained in makeshift processing camps hastily erected by Allied forces in places such as Marrakesh, Casablanca, and other North African cities and towns. Soldiers captured in Europe, as Frederick said he was, were detained primarily in France and England. The seriously wounded were transported to hospitals. Other prisoners were held there just long enough to receive a medical examination, get inoculated and deloused, be stripped of their possessions, and then be processed and assigned a serial number before being put on a ship for the transatlantic journey to the United States. Prisoners also had to complete a form that required fingerprints and a medical history; the form was sent to the International Red Cross and Swiss authorities so that their families could be informed about the status of their loved ones.16

  Frederick must have been detained for a few weeks in one of the transitional camps. Karl and Margarete Albert didn’t know where he was, nor did his sister, Charlotte. When he joined the Luftwaffe, Frederick lost contact with his family. At some point, when the bombings in Austria intensified, the Alberts temporarily left Vienna, so for a time Frederick didn’t know how to reach them either.

  Although Frederick had no way to know how long he would be in the transitional camp or where he would be headed for the duration of his captivity, his proficiency in English was an asset. At least he was able to listen to his American captors and pick up clues from time to time.

  Language barriers were one of the biggest hurdles in processing German POWs, not only in North Africa and Europe but in the United States as well. The Americans quickly found out that not only could many of the POWs not speak English, some of them couldn’t speak German either. Wehrmacht POWs included soldiers from Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, and Finland who couldn’t speak any more German than their American captors.17 The situation reflected Hitler’s desperation to recruit as many fighters as possible, even those who weren’t part of his idealized German race.

  To make for an even more confusing and haphazard process, hardly any American translators worked at the makeshift POW camps, because of the high demand for German and Italian translators needed for intelligence gatheri
ng, radio transmission, and interrogation of high-ranking Axis officials. It didn’t take long for German prisoners to figure out that the language barrier could work in their favor. The clerk-typists who were functioning without translators recorded POWs’ personal information as best they could. But some prisoners tricked them by providing false names and inaccurate ranks. In the United States, the problem was even more severe. Some camps had a single interpreter for more than eight thousand prisoners.18

  Margarete, Karl, and Charlotte were eventually notified by the International Red Cross that Frederick had been captured in Italy and taken as a prisoner of war by the Americans, but that was all the information they were given. In the meantime, Frederick had been put aboard a massive destroyer bound for the United States. Ships of this kind were known to have thousands of prisoners on board, confined mostly to spaces belowdecks, sleeping in five-tiered bunks or three-tiered hammocks.19 The amount of time the POWs were allowed to stay on deck varied depending on the temperament of the military police on guard. Some POWs were allowed only thirty minutes a day above deck for fresh air and a cigarette break, while others reported getting a few hours. The prisoners had no idea where they were headed, and none of the guards, armed with shotguns but surprisingly friendly, told them anything, except one, who answered “the desert” when asked, which the prisoners took to be a joke. In the barracks below, the POWs played out every scenario imagined, some actually relieved that the fighting was over for them. But many were uncertain of their fate. Would they be hanged? Imprisoned in inhumane conditions? Interrogated and beaten regularly if they didn’t divulge German military secrets? A great many of the soldiers had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht; they fought because they had to, not because they necessarily agreed with Hitler’s brutality. Soldiers regularly suffered from anxiety attacks, in addition to persistent nausea and the chronic intestinal viruses that plagued large numbers of men in combat. The quality of the food on the transatlantic voyage did mitigate some of their fears, however. They ate T-bone steaks, ice cream, and grapefruit.20 But it seemed too good to be true under the circumstances. Skeptical prisoners were convinced something bad was going to happen soon.

  Finally arriving at shipping docks on the eastern seaboard in Boston and New York—though some destroyers docked in Virginia and Louisiana—Frederick and the other prisoners, as soon as they stepped off the ship, listened to an American interpreter explain their rights as captured military personnel in enemy hands—all the provisions established in the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.21 Before they boarded trains to their final destinations, the prisoners were deloused again, usually by black servicemen.

  For many German POWs, their first interaction with African Americans took place during the war. The drivers of the trucks used to transport captured German soldiers to camps in Northern Africa and Europe were usually African American men, and that task also came with the responsibility of protecting the POWs from any mob attacks by angry civilians who tried to rush the vehicles and throw rocks. In fact, an unlikely bond between black American soldiers and German POWs sometimes developed because blacks knew from their own experiences in the United States what it felt like to be the target of civilian mob violence.

  The protectiveness of blacks bewildered the POWs at first. A German prisoner recalled a time when black soldiers protected POWs from an angry mob in France. “Had they not acted so vigorously, we would have fared quite badly. On this occasion we experienced for the first time how much compassion the colored Americans had for us. We were only able to solve this mystery after having our experiences with them in America.”22

  German prisoners immediately remarked on the entrenched racial hierarchy in the United States. Some remembered African American men wearing pristine white jackets serving them during their days-long train journey to the camps. The black attendants brought food and drinks to the POWs at their seats, and stayed on call the entire trip while the Germans slept. They even called the prisoners “sir.”23 It was startling to witness such deference by Americans considering that Germans were technically enemies, not to mention prisoners of war who might well have killed Americans in combat. But it was an authentic picture of how the United States regarded its black citizens and the inherent expectation of subservience to whites, even if they were Nazis. Overall, the prisoners were surprised at how mannered the Americans of both races were toward them upon arrival. POW Karl-Heinz Hackbarth was astounded by the comfortable accommodations en route to his assigned camp, Fort Custer near Battle Creek, Michigan. “We couldn’t believe we were allowed to sit in upright seats on a Pullman car. There were a couple of guards in the front and back of each car. If you had to use the bathroom, you had to raise your hand, and a guard would escort you.”24 There were also stories from German POWs that were less than flattering about the transport. Some prisoners reportedly found the trips “brutalizing,” with packed train cars and harsh orders that barely allowed them to move on the hours-long journeys. More serious allegations surfaced about sick POWs who died en route and were thrown overboard, but these claims were never substantiated.25

  The train journey across the American terrain would be most of the German POWs’ first experience of the United States. The temperature in the Pullman cars that Frederick rode in soared as the train ride grew longer. The 100-degree weather of the Deep South was unlike anything they had ever experienced. As the trains headed to camps on the West Coast, the conversations among the prisoners halted when they passed through Texas and the military bases with rows of B-17 bombers, known as Flying Fortresses, came into full view. These were the planes that the POWs knew were destined to obliterate their cities, homes, and families. There was nothing they could do except hope that the war would end before the bombs touched the ground.26

  The picturesque trips through the United States surprised many of the men, who had been led to believe that America had been bombed by the Luftwaffe—one of the numerous lies Hitler’s propaganda machine had peddled to the German people throughout the war. Some of the POWs weren’t quite ready to accept that Hitler had deceived them; others felt that being captured toward the end of the war was a relief.27

  The dramatic entrance to Camp Florence was set against the desert landscape that backed up to the Superstition Mountains, to the east of Phoenix. As the incoming train began its slow approach, the POWs saw a large sign that said “Florence” made of stones, flanked by a big letter “F” painted white on a nearby hillside.

  Camp Florence was a campus of separate buildings built in 1942. It was dry, desolate, and without any green space until its POW population became large enough to participate in a lawn-building project. Prisoners shoveled, removed dense dirt to build low dikes for irrigation, and planted grass seed in the moist adobe soil. Having grass and a bit of color helped with morale in the otherwise somber, dusty, and remote camp.28

  The residents of Florence had mixed reactions to the camp, but the nation was at war and it was the duty of the city to be accommodating as long as the military was acting reasonably. Housing undesirables wasn’t a completely new idea for those living in Florence, since the town was home to a state prison built in 1908 that is still in operation today.29

  Residents who did oppose the camp made sure their voices were heard. Members of the Superior Rotary Club thought a POW camp would threaten the local copper mines and railways. There was added anxiety that relatives of German and Italian POWs would move nearby to be close to their loved ones, posing a new layer of threats and uncertainties. Edward Dentzer, vice president of the Magma-Arizona Railroad Company, wrote to Arizona senator Carl Hayden about his displeasure: “I feel sure that a lot of these people would be potential saboteurs and, therefore, a menace to any defense industries in this locality.”30 The U.S. military felt the concerns were unfounded, and the construction of the camp went on as planned.

  When Frederick arrived in Florence in 1944, the camp already housed at least 1,500 prisoners of war. Italian
POWs were the first to arrive in 1943, and they were quickly put to work picking cotton in the sun-drenched fields. Cotton was still Arizona’s most important and lucrative agricultural crop. Defense contractors needed massive amounts to produce military uniforms and other products. In the peak month of November 1943, an average of 1,549 prisoners picked fifty-four pounds of cotton apiece most days, which totaled just shy of two million pounds for the month alone.31

  Prison populations shifted regularly and the Italians were eventually relocated to another camp. Once Italy surrendered in September 1943, and changed allegiance to the Allied forces, the treatment of the Italian POWs loosened up considerably. The Italian prisoners who were already in captivity couldn’t be released, but they were given more freedom and jobs that were off-limits to German POWs. The Italian prisoners at Camp Florence were subsequently moved to labor camps in California in the summer of 1944, as trainloads of German prisoners took their place in the cotton fields in Arizona.32

  For security concerns, the Americans sought to separate hard-core Nazis from soldiers like Frederick, who never became indoctrinated into Hitler’s racist system. But it wasn’t an easy task because even in captivity, hard-core Nazis did their best to threaten and maintain control over lower-ranked prisoners, who were more susceptible to American influence. Despite being captured, the German POWs attempted to maintain a hierarchical rule of order within their units. They established a system to settle disputes among themselves and convey issues or requests to their American captors. There was a structure put in place in each camp, where there was one main POW who acted as a liaison between the camp commander and the German POWs. This role typically was given to the highest-ranking prisoner, but on occasion the man who was the most respected and most liked attained the title.33 Frederick spoke English, which meant he could have been the liaison, but given his personality and distaste for the war from the beginning, it’s unlikely that he was a spokesperson in any official capacity.