As World War II raged, the US became the reluctant home for hundreds of thousands of Nazi soldiers – many still rabidly loyal to Hitler and determined to keep fighting for him at any cost. Even if it meant murdering their own comrades in cold blood.
Living in more than 600 hastily set-up POW camps, scattered in small farm towns across rural America, nearly 400,000 German soldiers settled into their new routine – enjoying a set up so comfortable, many dubbed the camps the Fritz Ritz.
And while some of those POWs turned their backs on Hitler and assimilated into US life, becoming friends with farming families – a few even married American women – the most dangerous Nazis carried on the war from inside the barbed wire, establishing small but devoted enclaves of Nazi Germany on American soil.
The flood of German POWs into America began in 1943, with 120,000 veterans of the Afrika Korps, Hitler’s elite desert expeditionary force, which had surrendered en masse in Tunisia.
They were treated in strict accordance with the Geneva Convention, which entitled prisoners to the same living conditions as American soldiers on the home front. That translated into plenty of food, and entertainment including soccer fields and arts and crafts facilities.
At first, everything seemed to be running smoothly. Authorities had feared there would be mass escapes – leading to terrifying acts of violence and sabotage – but that turned out not to be a serious problem.
In fact, the Germans became a precious source of labor for thousands of farms, factories and businesses that had lost workers to the military or the defense plants.
German POWs wrote movingly of the unexpected kindness of everyday Americans they came to know while on work details. Men who had been force-fed lies and Nazi propaganda from childhood felt their entire world view shifting.
German soldiers still loyal to Hitler were determined to continue his dark mission at any cost
The flood began in 1943 , with 120,000 veterans of the Afrika Korps, Hitler’s elite desert expeditionary force, which had surrendered en masse in Tunisia
US fighter pilot Col. Henry Spicer was sentenced to die for giving a passionate speech to POWs under his command
But giving voice to such feelings was dangerous in camps with a strong Nazi presence. Behind the scenes in many camps, the ardent Nazis established control over the rest of the prisoners. They watched each man for signs of flagging loyalty, and kept them in line with threats and violence.
Some camps became tiny outposts of Nazi Germany in the heart of the United States. And their leaders kept growing bolder.
On October 19, 1943, Nazis at Camp Concordia in the remote Kansas wheatfields forced a German officer to hang himself – with threats that, if he failed, they would get word back to the Gestapo in Germany to kill his wife.
His crime? He had written in his diary that Nazism would ruin Germany.
A second prisoner was later driven to suicide at the same camp.
At POW Camp Tonkawa in rural Oklahoma, a mob of prisoners beat a fellow German to death for allegedly trying to pass a note to the Americans suggesting bombing targets in Germany.
Then at Camp Hearne in East Texas, a prisoner was beaten to death for working harder than required.
Next, at Camp Papago Park outside Phoenix, seven U-boat men beat and strangled to death a fellow submariner who had turned informant. His killers insisted they had not committed murder but had done their duty to stop a traitor.
The POWs were treated in strict accordance with the Geneva Convention, which meant they never went hungry
German prisoners also had entertainment on hand, including soccer fields and arts and crafts facilities
The Germans became a precious source of labor for thousands of farms that had lost workers to the military or the defense plants
Nearly 400,000 German soldiers were set up in hastily established POW camps in rural America, including at Camp Beckinridge, Kentucky
Read More
EXCLUSIVE
Hollywood siren's secret role in spy ring revealed – and how she used songs to terrorize the Nazis
At Camp Chaffee in Arkansas, a Nazi gang fatally beat a POW because they thought he was too friendly to the Americans.
At Camp Aiken in South Carolina – where POW workers had saved the local peanut crop – Nazi true believers strangled a prisoner over rumors he favored the Americans.
Fast action by guards prevented murders in other camps. And some of the 72 POW deaths the Army classified as suicides almost certainly were murders that the guards were not trained to recognize.
Nazi POWs also committed so-called ‘political’ murders in Britain and Canada. The British hanged ten German prisoners for two murders, at camps in Yorkshire and in Comrie, Scotland. Canada executed five Germans for two murders at the same camp in Medicine Hat, Alberta.
The outbreak of killings in the American camps shocked the Army, but it responded forcefully, ordering investigators and prosecutors to bring the killers to justice. The leading prosecutor was Lt. Col. Leon Jaworski, the future Watergate special prosecutor.
Army prosecutors court-martialed a total of 15 German POWs for murder before secret military tribunals – all 15 were convicted and sentenced to hang. The cases were kept so secret that even the condemned men were not told of the verdicts until they had been installed on death row in the maximum-security military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The Geneva Convention required the US to give Germany three months’ notice before executing the Germans, so formal documents were sent to Berlin, through the Swiss, listing the charges and the verdicts.
The Germans – unsurprisingly – were not going to give up their countrymen without a fight, and demanded more information.
What were the circumstances of the killings? What evidence was presented? What defense was offered?
The War Department brushed off their demands. Some of those details were best hidden: In the U-boat case, the Army had heedlessly transferred the victim out of protective custody into a barracks full of submariners who knew he was a traitor and who immediately killed him. Then one of the killers was tortured into a confession that broke open the case. That case alone had sent seven of the 15 Germans to death row.
As the clock ticked toward the executions, Germany issued subtle threats, then unsubtle ones.
Then, on December 29 and 30 – while the Battle of the Bulge was being fought in snowy Belgium – Germany took matters into its own hands, hauling 15 American POWs before secret military tribunals, and sentencing them to death.
The official charges were vague and ominous sounding, but most of the Americans’ offenses were minor. Army Lt. Col. William ‘King Kong’ Schaefer and Lt. James Schmitz, for example, had momentarily blocked the path of a German sergeant tacking a threatening propaganda poster to the POWs’ bulletin board in the Colditz prison camp.
Lt. James Schmitz (left) and Army Lt. Col. William ‘King Kong’ Schaefer (right) had blocked the path of a German sergeant tacking a propaganda poster to the POWs’ bulletin board
At POW Camp Tonkawa in rural Oklahoma, a mob of prisoners beat a fellow German to death for allegedly trying to pass a note to the Americans suggesting bombing targets in Germany
The cases were so secret, even the condemned Germans were not told of the verdicts until they had been installed on death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Fighter pilot Col. Henry Spicer was sentenced to die for a passionate speech to POWs under his command. He had exhorted them to stay strong, accused the Germans of war crimes, and said he would gladly spend the next ten years ‘in this hole’ – in the camp – if he could ‘see the entire German army wiped off the face of the earth’.
Two of the 15 Americans were spies who might have expected to be executed if captured.
US authorities in Washington knew nothing about the flurry of death sentences for American POWs until the morning of January 9, 1945, when the Swiss forwarded a telegram from Berlin with a startling offer of a trade: the condemned American POWs for the Germans at Fort Leavenworth.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson bristled at the idea of freeing convicted murderers to save Americans who had been condemned on ‘trumped-up charges’ just to be traded. One of the 15 Americans offered in trade by the Germans was even a cypher: no such man could be found in the military’s records.
But the US government agreed to negotiate. The State Department proposed a mass exchange of all 30 prisoners at two separate points along the Swiss German border.
The negotiations played out between Washington and Berlin as Nazi Germany descended into chaos. Allied armies tore into Germany from the west and the Soviet Red Army from the east, overrunning Germany’s POW camps., freeing American POWs who were to have been part of the trade.
The exchange negotiations finally collapsed in early April as Germany’s communication system failed.
Amid the confusion, US authorities kept a running list of the 15 condemned American POWs and checked off each man’s name as he was confirmed safe in Allied hands. All were saved except for the mystery man – the ‘cypher’ – whose true identity was never discovered.
Then the War Department set out to hang the 15 Germans as quickly as possible. One of their death sentences was commuted by President Harry S Truman, but the other 14 Germans were hanged at Fort Leavenworth in July and August 1945 for murdering their comrades in the name of a failed and evil cause.
The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America by William Geroux is published by Crown