A former SS man who was held at a camp near the small village of Comrie, in Perthshire in Scotland, plans to leave his estate to help the elderly of the village. His reason: the kindness shown to him. Here’s an interview with him, it’s an interesting tale.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/interview-heinrich-steinmeyer-former-pow-1-476058
This.
Also, German POWs (especially in the South) were treated far better than American civilians who were Black.
According to wiki, between 19,000 and 50,000 Japanese were taken prisioner by the Allies - a shockingly low number.
Most Allied POWs of the Japanese were taken when the Japanese empire was on the rise. When it was starting to lose, the typical island-fighting and jungle-warfare campaigns were typically fought harshly, with few prisioners taken on either side, for a number of reasons:
(1) Racial hatred - on both sides. No doubt this did as you say lead to prisoners genuinely taken being simply shot “while trying to escape”. However, for the reasons below, few even made it that far.
(2) The Japanese in the island campaigns in particular typically had no realistic way of dealing with prisioners - so they would not take any. If surrender is not an option for one side, it tends not to be extended as a courtesy on the other.
(3) Related to this, when the Japanese did take prisioners, they were maltreated. Needless to say, such knowledge on the part of Allied soldiers would lead to Japanese prisoners being harshly treated, or murdered, in turn.
(4) Japanese military culture at the time inculcated the notion that surrender was dishonourable and suicide was preferable.
(5) This lead to a certain amount of ‘false surrenders’, in which hopelessly wounded or surrounded Japanese would pretend to surrender, only to attack anyone approaching to take their surrender. The result: it became much more likely for Allied soldiers to simply shoot them, so as to not take the risk.
(6) These factors are self-reinforcing. The Japanese soldiers legitimately feared being killed if they attempted to surrender, leading to less genuine attempts to surrender; Japanese reluctance to genuinely surrender meant Allied soldiers were more likely to simply shoot any Japanese that moved.
According to my grandfather who fought in Italy during WWII, if Germans surrendered in numbers larger than could easily be killed, they weren’t taken prisoner. If a single German soldier popped up with a white flag and his unit was advancing or retreating, they were shot. If a large group surrendered, they were taken prisoner.
So killing potential POWs wasn’t limited to the Pacific Theater of the war.
I am a member of a Facebook group that is populated mainly by very old people from my tiny hometown right on the Texas/Louisiana border. They mention a lot of weird stuff that I never knew but the most shocking was that there was a German POW camp nearby in rural Texas during WWII. I never heard of such a thing growing up but they know all about it. ‘Camp’ is a much more appropriate term than ‘prison’ because that is what it was. It wasn’t even fully fenced or secure. They also had a movie theater, recreational activities and got to take field trips into the small towns nearby including my family’s store. People treated them very well. I guess I can understand it. They were genuine white people who just happened to be on the other side.
Back then, there were a lot of POW camps spread along the rural South because of the climate. Once they were in a camp, there was little conceivable way for them to escape anywhere even if they were given lots of freedom. The land and oceans were too vast and the transportation options just weren’t there unlike Europe where you could hike or take trains between countries if you had enough time. There was no good way for them to make it back to Germany and rejoin the war so they weren’t considered a threat and people were generally kind enough not to mistreat them for being born in the wrong country.
Umm…not certain what your point is.
German POWs were probably responsible for the deaths of American servicemen and they would have probably returned to the battlefield if they had been released thus perhaps killing more American servicemen.
They were the enemy.
To treat them better than American citizens, some of whose family members were fighting and dying to protect this nation’s freedom simply because they were “White” is yet another “black eye” on the reputation of the American South.
It was contemptible behavior then.
It remains that, in my opinion.
Your opinion is just that. I did have a point (and it should have been obvious) but I am not sure what yours is. My point is that German POW’s in the South were not considered the equivalent of terrorists today because they weren’t. They were mainly just kids who were forced into an evil war. People realized that and treated them accordingly. Everyone knew that they weren’t going to escape and start terrorizing the the U.S. domestically and that turned out to be the case. That is not a “black eye” on the South because treating POW’s as people never can be. The German POW’s weren’t going anywhere because there was no were to escape to and there never was a significant domestic threat to the U.S. during WWII. They were held until the end of the war and then released. What else would you expect?
In contrast, my 6’3" grandfather was sent home from a German POW camp weighing 90 pounds, blind in one eye and died at 55 from long-lasting complications from the ordeal. He was the lucky one because most of the crew of his plane that was shot down were executed shortly after they bailed out in a German field.
I think his point was pretty obvious. It was shameful that people who claimed to be patriotic Americans treated enemy soldiers who had white skin better than they treated their fellow Americans who had brown skin.
I guess if I have to explain why treating American citizens worse than you treat your enemy is shameful behavior then we clearly see the world in a completely different manner. It’s pointless to explain to Southern Whites in my experience why their behavior and the behavior of their ancestors was reprehensible because they simply don’t believe that they did (or do) anything wrong.
We’ll just have to disagree about how the situation was and leave it at that.
I’ve never really understood why people are surprised, or shocked or whatever by this, though. If the law says “White people are treated better than black people”, then why does the fact that the white people are your captured enemy and the black people are your citizens make a difference? You’re not treating people based on how well you like them, but based on your belief in their inherent racial superiority or inferiority. It’s not about liking. It’s about racism.
Canadian historian James Bacque claims, in his book Other Losses, that Eisenhower intentionally starved German POWs to death, but the book has been severely criticized.
When I was stationed with the US Air Force in Germany, a friend and I went out to dinner at a small restaurant in a small German town near our base. There was a table of older locals sitting together talking, and one of them came over and sat down at our table. When he asked if we were Americans, and we said that we were, he said, “I love America. America is my second home. I was a prisoner of war in Texas.”
It wasn’t just the law…and it wasn’t a set of just laws.
It was people showing contempt for their fellow human beings by virtue of the fact that they could do so without sanction.That bothers people even now, 70 years later, when it occurs. Imagine if say Iraqi POWs had been brought to the US and then treated better than American citizen are/were. That wouldn’t fly.
It shouldn’t have “flown” then and people who did it shouldn’t get a pass because they thought it was the “right thing to do” when they did it.
Of course it was wrong – Shagnasty’s point (I believe) is how ingrained racial prejudice was at the time. That black people were seen as lesser than Nazi prisoners. Don’t you know anything about the history of how blacks were treated in the U.S. prior to the Civil Rights Movement?
Great, once again we go from an interesting question to a devolution of commentary about race relations between blacks and white in the American South during the 1940’s. Here is a hint. The topic is complicated and the two issues have little to do with one another. German POW camps in the South treated their prisoners (campers) quite well because no one saw any reason to do otherwise. That positive fact should stand on its own but somehow we get unrelated comments that try to turn it into a negative.
That phenomenon wasn’t unilateral either. The Germans also had some POW camps that were relatively nice for American POW’s. The sitcom Hogan’s Heros was based on that theme. Don’t laugh. That was well within living memory of many people that were quarantined in them and it wasn’t generally considered offensive. However, there were other groups that were treated horrifically (obviously) and it was a crap-shoot even for American or British servicemen which situation they would find themselves in if they were captured.
I, too, have heard that German POWs were treated decently in Texas. I took a lot of German classes in uni in Texas, and the instructors, even the actual German ones, all said Texas had a special place in Germans’ hearts due to the kind treatment. (Suckers!)
Hate Southern whites all you want. I am one even though I have lived in the Northeast for 19 years. I can promise you that I have more true black friends than you do as well as many black family members. That is just the way it worked out but it has little to do with this topic.
I fail to see how treating German prisoners well in the South during the 1940’s can be considered a negative by anyone. Please explain.
I fail to see how treating German prisoners well in the South during the 1940’s can be considered a negative by anyone. Please explain. You accused me racism but also engaged in ethnic prejudice of your own by calling them ‘enemies’. I cannot even begin to comprehend why you think there is a difference. Young German soldiers didn’t volunteer, they were drafted and they eventually lost. Why would anyone hold that against them? The average German soldier wasn’t ‘the enemy’. That is crazy. They were forced into service for a brutal cause and almost all of the ones that were captured were happy to be stateside rather than fighting on the front lines in Russia or anywhere in Europe. There was no reason to hate them and they were treated well.
Malthus covered this rather well*, but you are simply wrong that many Japanese did surrender, or that it was simply at a lower rate than Germans. Surrender rates were below 1%, those taken prisoner were often those rendered hors de combat and incapable of committing suicide, and often times those taken prisoner were not even Japanese at all but Korean laborers. To give some concrete examples, Japanese casualty figures from some battles:
Tarawa: 4,690 killed
17 soldiers captured
129 laborers captured
Peleliu: 10,695 - 10900 killed,
202 (301) captured
Iwo Jima: 18,844 killed[1]
216 taken prisoner
Okinawa: More than 110,000 killed[3]
More than 7,000 captured
Note that at Okinawa it was taken as a sign that Japan’s will to fight might be breaking due to the number of prisoners taken, and that number was less than 6% of total casualties and more importantly included local Okinawans impressed into service.
*With the exception of “in the island campaigns in particular typically had no realistic way of dealing with prisioners - so they would not take any.”, which I’d have to disagree with; dealing with prisoners in the island campaigns would have been easy to handle if any were taken in appreciable numbers.
Thoroughly discredited is a better description than severely criticized.
I don’t think anyone has said they are surprised or shocked. The terms used have been contemptible, shameful, and reprehensible.
Why it’s important is because we shouldn’t look back at history and only look at the good parts. We should acknowledge the bad parts existed as well.