Enemies in Love

by Alexis Clark

  Like the other prisoners, upon arrival Frederick was processed and received special clothing: a loose-fitting cotton button-down jacket and matching pair of pants with the letters “PW” written in large white block letters across the back of each garment. The uniform was baggy and shapeless, akin to a pair of pajamas but in sturdier fabric, a far cry from the military uniforms the German soldiers had worn before getting caught by the Allies.

  The POWs then walked in single file to the prison barracks. The rooms had bunk beds, and a chair and dresser for each prisoner. The accommodations, though sparse, were a surprising relief after the cramped ocean journey and the long train ride. With the exception of the double rows of barbed-wire fences, the conditions in the POW camp looked decent and sanitary, and the POWs were treated with respect. No one had anticipated being greeted with “Good morning” or “Good afternoon,” but those pleasantries were commonplace—a fact that surprised the POWs, who knew how inhospitable the Germans could be toward their prisoners.

  Perhaps inevitably, there were prisoners who tried to escape from camp. If that ever happened, American guards were trained to shout “Halt” three times before shooting. And if a shooting did occur, assuming it was justified, the guard was to receive a carton of cigarettes and a transfer to another unit.34 The chances of successfully fleeing Camp Florence were slim, given its location. A former POW there, Paul Zürn, described the futility of trying: “Escape from Camp Florence was impossible. We were behind three rows of barbed wire with guards and guard dogs. We wore distinct POW clothes, U.S. Army clothes dyed black with ‘PW’ all over them. The heels of our shoes were notched in such a way that our footprints would be very distinct if we ever did get out. There was a large sign in our compound that said, ‘Where will you flee to?’ Mexico was over 100 miles away across the hot desert. Escape would have been suicide.”35 Camp Florence’s hopeless location notwithstanding, there were numerous reported attempts of prisoner escapes at camps throughout the United States, but they were overwhelmingly unsuccessful. By the end of the war, a total of fifty-six German POWs who tried to escape were shot and killed. A final report by the War Department in November 1947 revealed that out of the 371,000 Germans detained in the United States, 2,222 attempted to escape, and only 17 remained at large.36

  It was no secret that Germany was losing the war. And the demeanor of the prisoners was constantly observed to see how many of them still maintained allegiance to Hitler. Most of the prisoners at Camp Florence signed a document that had been prepared by POWs at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, in which the German people were advised “to cease hostilities and oust the Nazis.” If they signed the honor statement denouncing fascism, they were rewarded with more freedom. The military interrogated POWs to determine which ones weren’t a threat to civilians or capable of escaping. Frederick was deemed nonthreatening, as were most POWs at Camp Florence, which was known to have the less fanatical German soldiers in its population. The uncooperative and unrepentant Nazis at Florence were housed in a separate compound, and many were transferred to Camp Rupert in Paul, Idaho, which had a population of approximately three thousand people.37 Camp Rupert received the German and Italian POWs with disciplinary problems. The prisoners who attempted sit-down strikes or tried to escape landed there, along with true Nazis who threatened any German POWs who denounced Hitler. Those who were part of the Waffen SS, the brutal security forces associated with the most heinous war crimes, were usually housed at Camp Rupert.38

  At Florence, in the last year of the war, there were only thirty-eight SS men, who could be identified by the characteristic symbol tattooed under their left arm. In the last year of the war a report to the Office of the Provost Marshal General, the arm of the military that oversaw POWs, indicated that most of the SS officers were so morally beaten down that Nazi fanaticism was largely nonexistent at Camp Florence. “The Nazi influence has been sufficiently diluted to make this camp fertile field for the reorientation program,” the report stated, indicating that the Germans were ready to turn on their leader and embrace the teachings of democracy.39 The POWs who had renounced Hitler would begin to have direct contact with American civilians as a result of their amenable demeanor, working as much as possible.

  There was a surprising amount of freedom at Camp Florence once the prisoners had established to the Americans’ satisfaction that they weren’t spies or fascists. There were religious services held at a stone Catholic chapel that had been built by the Italian prisoners when they first occupied the camp. The chapel was in constant use and attendance steadily increased for both Catholic and Protestant services.40

  There was even a POW paper called Der Ruf. Captain Weiskircher, a high-ranking POW at Camp Florence, recommended that a camp newspaper be established, and an Austrian prisoner with previous newspaper experience acted as the editor.41

  The POW environment was designed to create a community for captured men to be contained and somewhat comfortable, which the government hoped would increase the prisoners’ likelihood of allegiance to the United States. In some of the camps, including Florence, the POWs had it better than their loved ones back home in Germany. There was a PW canteen, where prisoners could buy soap, toothpaste, shaving materials, and of course cigarettes with the money they earned from working, in the form of coupons. Some of the prisoners who worked as waiters in the mess hall would receive fifty-cent or one-dollar tips from the wives of the American officers who liked them and thought they were “good boys.”42 And Florence wasn’t the exception. Prisoners at other camps were treated well too. POW Fritz Haus couldn’t believe how plentiful the food was. “We lacked nothing. If anything they pampered us. Food was sufficient, regular, and much better than what our German civilians and military had available back home.”43

  Not all of the prisoners were treated well. Some of the conditions for POWs who had to pick cotton were reported as deplorable. Karl-Heinz Hackbarth, who was at a camp in Michigan, remembered seeing a bunch of German POW transfers arrive looking deathly skinny. They had been detained in Texas and Mississippi, where they picked cotton all day in the blazing sun, supposedly without water and never receiving enough food to eat. “They looked like skeletons. We were able to give them some of our food. Of course a lot of American POWs held in Germany also lost fifty or more pounds. So I never saw this mistreatment as something terribly one-sided.”44

  With POWs and American civilians living in such close proximity on a regular basis, fraternization was inevitable, even though it was forbidden. Many residents had an uncontrollable desire to observe the POWs and to communicate with them. They were impressed by the prisoners’ youthfulness, physical fitness, and adherence to discipline. In some instances, they responded to them as if they were American farm boys. “Whatever poisonous ideologies may still be boiling underneath their sun-bleached hair to all outward appearances they are like any American kids from Tampa to Tacoma,” said one reporter about POWs in Oklahoma.45

  With Frederick’s low rank in the military, he had to take on whatever work the United States Army wanted him to do. With a combination of luck and English fluency, he landed a job mostly working as a cook for the officers’ mess. Most people didn’t want to rise before dawn, but POWs like Frederick worked in the kitchen as much as possible. Being there kept them from hard labor in the fields, and allowed them their sparse wages under the terms of the Geneva Convention.

  Just like in any military setting, routines and schedules were strictly set for the POWs, and their days started early. Cooks gathered in the mess hall at 4:00 a.m. to begin assembling the morning meals. Breakfast was served directly after 6:00 a.m. roll call. Everyone was fed well; breakfasts consisted of cereal and fruit followed by pancakes, sausage, and bacon. There was one unpopular meal that caused a stream of complaints: a mixture of dried beef and cream sauce on toast, which was known at the camp as SOS, short for “shit on a shingle.”46

  No one would ever say anything negative about Frederick’s cooking. He was an excellent baker, sp
ecializing in breads and pastries. His mother, Margarete, was a wonderful cook and he had inherited her skills in the kitchen. While he worked, he wore an apron, white cap, white shirt, and khaki pants. He made brötchen and weizenbrote, some of the German breads he had grown up eating, from scratch. In the kitchen he could forget that he was a prisoner of war. He didn’t have to wear his bulky “PW” ensemble either. The guards loosened the reins considerably and Frederick wore regular clothes purchased on base at the supply store.

  He would have lived in the kitchen if he could have—anything to avoid picking cotton. Many POWs made sure to prove themselves essential to the goings-on during meal prep and milked it for all they could, particularly during the holidays. They volunteered to prepare Christmas dinner, to help celebrate the occasion and create a sense of community among themselves and the guards. They prepared heaping servings of turkey, potatoes, creamed peas, pumpkin pie, and coffee. And at Christmas the head prisoner on kitchen duty handed each guard a pack of cigarettes as a gift.47

  Yet the holiday cheer didn’t extend to everyone at Camp Florence. For black nurses, there was little to celebrate. For them, and for all African Americans in uniform, the cordial treatment of German POWs from the U.S. military stirred up profound resentment. Or, as was the case with Elinor, feelings of deep disgust.

  Gladys Farrow Powell

  William Lawrence Powell

  Margarete Albert

  Karl Albert

  The parents, circa the Great War, 1918

  Little Elinor holding a doll in Milton, Massachusetts, circa 1924

  Charlotte and baby Frederick in Oppeln, Germany, circa 1925

  Charlotte and Frederick, circa 1930

  Outside in the garden in Oppeln: Karl, Charlotte, baby Frederick and Margarete, circa 1925–1926

  Karl, Margarete, little Frederick, and Charlotte at home, circa 1927

  Elinor in Milton, Massachusetts, circa 1932

  Elinor’s childhood house on Emerson Road in Milton, Massachusetts

  William and Ella Powell’s house on Granite Place in Milton

  Charlotte, Margarete, and Frederick at home in Vienna for Christmas, circa 1939

  Frederick with his father, Karl Albert

  Frederick, circa 1942

  Elinor, circa 1942

  Elinor with her fellow classmates at the Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx, New York, circa 1941–1943

  Frederick and fellow Wehrmacht soldiers, circa 1943–1944

  Elinor enlists in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, July 1944

  Elinor with a fellow army nurse at POW Camp Florence, circa 1944–1945

  Elinor outside the barracks

  Frederick wearing his chef’s hat along with other POWs assigned to the mess hall

  German prisoners of war at Camp Florence, Arizona, circa 1944–1946

  Elinor, a few months after Stephen’s birth in Milton, Massachusetts, spring 1947

  Frederick after the war in Vienna, circa 1947

  Elinor and Frederick together again, Milton, summer 1947

  Frederick, Elinor, and Stephen set sail for a new life in Germany, July 1952

  Frederick, Chris, Elinor, and Stephen in Media, Pennsylvania, circa 1955

  Frederick and Chris, circa 1957 Frederick in the woods outside the family home in Fairfield County, Connecticut, circa 1957

  Frederick and Chris, circa 1957

  Frederick and Elinor in Village Creek, South Norwalk, Connecticut, circa 1960s

  5.

  Prisoners and Nurses

  FEELING LONELY AND ISOLATED WAS SOMETHING that black nurses and prisoners of war had in common in Florence. The POWs were confined to certain areas for security reasons, but the nurses’ restrictions were imposed because of the color of their skin.

  Florence, like Fort Huachuca, wasn’t located near any major cities in Arizona. Both Phoenix and Tucson were more than an hour’s drive away. The same isolation that the black nurses felt in basic training was now magnified with the presence of Nazi soldiers and the absence of black men. To make matters worse, there was not an officers’ club for blacks at Camp Florence, as there had been at Fort Huachuca. For black nurses, enduring POW Camp Florence meant accepting complete segregation, socially and institutionally.

  Depending on the location, both American GIs and POWs could be treated in the same hospital wards. Of course, that didn’t always work out so well. German POWs were attacked occasionally, as was the case at Fort Custer in Michigan. “There were wounded American soldiers in the camp hospital, and one of them hit a prisoner with his crutch and another drove his wheelchair into several of the POWs. It was a reaction and I could understand it. We were healthy looking, and these American boys were all shot up,” said Karl-Heinz Hackbarth.”1

  Elinor was miserable. There were rarely any emergency surgeries at the Florence hospital, and the nurses had a great deal of free time on their hands, but Jim Crow limited their options.

  Gwyneth Blessitt Moore and Elinor became friends at Camp Florence in 1944. Moore remembered how frustrated Elinor would become because of segregation. “We’d head to town and would have to turn right back around to base because no one would serve us,” Moore said. “One time some of the white physicians from New York accompanied us and were so horrified that Elinor and I couldn’t get served. They returned right back to base with us but they were embarrassed, and kept apologizing.”2 Elinor and Gwyneth appreciated the solidarity of some of the white doctors who were appalled by the discrimination, but it didn’t erase their feelings of humiliation. Some restaurants offered them the option of ordering their food in the back of the restaurant near the rear door, as if that were a reasonable alternative rather than another racist slight. Of course the ladies declined the offer.

  In some cases when word got back to the commanding officer about restaurants refusing to serve blacks in uniform, all base personnel would be told not to frequent the establishment again. But that type of response largely depended on the beliefs of the commander in charge and whether he was a segregationist or not. At Camp Rupert in Idaho, one particular commanding officer would let the German POWs walk or loll on the grass, but if a black nurse did, he’d get on his P.A. system and order her off. He also called one African American nurse to his office who reportedly overheard him tell his secretary, “That’s one of those smart niggers. When I see these black she-apes in officers’ uniforms it makes me so mad I could puke.”3

  Gwyneth handled Jim Crow better than Elinor. She was originally from New Orleans and lived there for a portion of her childhood before moving to the Northeast, so she knew exactly how the rules of Jim Crow worked. “Whites Only” signs didn’t send Gwyneth into a rage, and when locals in Phoenix or around Camp Florence were nasty to her, she looked the other way because she’d learned how to brush those slights off as a child.

  German POWs were treated better in every aspect of their lives than a great many black Americans, and especially in terms of the freedom and respect they enjoyed when they worked outside of camp and went inside white establishments, including striking up conversations with local residents or attendants at gas stations and train depots. It was also not uncommon for prisoners who were contracted out to work at outside farms to develop friendships with farmers and their children.4 The differential treatment given to German prisoners and black Americans did not go unnoticed by the POWs, despite the U.S. government’s attempt to avoid addressing the glaring hypocrisy. The military wouldn’t dare have reading material in the POW camp library that portrayed America in a negative light, including anything about race relations between blacks and whites under Jim Crow, so German POWs did not see the regular commentary about discrimination toward black soldiers and nurses in the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, Ebony, or newsletters from the NAACP, but they witnessed it. And when POWs did confront white American officers about the conditions for blacks, they were told that discrimination was a result of slavery but tremendous progress was being made.5<
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  The prisoners learned the limitations of such racial “progress” as they worked alongside black civilians in the cotton fields and in service industries. A surprising camaraderie developed as African Americans began to share their experiences of second-class citizenship at the hands of their own government.6

  Some POWs who resented picking cotton and considered it low-level and demeaning work commented on how blacks were treated. Corporal Hein Severloh, a German POW at Camp McCain, in Mississippi, said, “We picked cotton the length of the Mississippi. I’m an agriculturalist and I know how to handle hard work, but there it was truly very, very hard. It was terribly hot, and we had to bend over all day. We had nothing to drink. . . . There were a great number of Blacks on the plantation. They required us to gather 100 pounds of cotton a day; but of the blacks they demanded two or three times more. . . . For them it was worse than for us. And you have to see how they lived. Their farms: very ugly, very primitive. These people were so exploited.”7

  It was impossible for African Americans not to compare their experiences with those of German prisoners of war. One black soldier noted that there was a segregated bathroom for blacks at a POW camp in Texas, but German prisoners used the same bathroom as white Americans. Germans fighting for Hitler could use facilities reserved for whites, but black Americans, including those serving in the military to defeat Hitler and preserve democracy, were relegated to segregated latrines. One black soldier wrote, “Seeing this was honestly disheartening. It made me feel, here, the tyrant is placed over the liberator.”8