In North Africa during WW2, the Allies captured about 250,000 enemy combatants. A documentary shows some/all of them corralled in a barbed-wire enclosed field.
How were they housed and fed? In general - the Allies treated their POWs better than the Axis. Were they all distributed throughout Allied countries? (my father’s UK AFB had a bunch of Italian POWs taking care of the grounds, and cleaning the barracks. Some decided to stay in the UK). Were some simply set free in north Africa and told to find your own way home?
Many were shipped to the US and Canada, there were many empty supply ships returning after dropping off war supplies so the cost was minimal. They enjoyed a much better life than Allied prisoners did in Europe, much better.
I was once told by a British man that his father was a German prisoner of war who was kept in a camp in the U.K. There he met his mother, a British woman. They eventually got married. At first the British government tried to discourage any friendship between the German prisoners of war and British women. It gradually became harder and harder to enforce this. Eventually some of the German prisoners of was decided to stay in the U.K. and marry a British women they had fallen in love with. In some cases, the German man and the British woman got sexually involved before marriage. The German man went back to Germany and the British woman had a baby which she put up for adoption in the U.K.
A lot were put to work in the UK. The granary in my home town (a small village in the south of England) was built by them, it was a little worse for wear but still going strong when my brother worked there in the late 90s (the boards at the top my brother had to walk on had a habit of falling through)
Nearly 80,000 German POWs were housed in camps in Texas during WWII. When the war ended, they were required to be repatriated back to Germany. Many of them subsequently emigrated to the U.S.
There was a lot of guilt among many POWs for being warm and fed while their families at home were likely suffering, especially Japanese prisoners. They’d been convinced the Americans would starve, torture, and kill them, because that’s what their officers had told them. That first meal was looked upon with suspicion. Some even thought the heaping plate of food they’d been handed was supposed to last them a week or be shared by a group.
I find this amazing having grown up as an American: You go to war, get captured and put in a POW camp in the enemy nation. War ends, you get repatriated and then you emigrate to the (former) enemy nation.
No matter how bad things get here under Trump, I have tremendous difficulty imagining that scenario playing out for me.
There was a German POW camp about 10 miles from my grandfather’s farm. He and other local farmers hired the prisoners as farm workers. (I have no idea how much he paid them, or how the money was given to them.) I was told that the prisoners enjoyed the work, and they were well-fed, as were their guards.
One thing they wouldn’t eat was sweet corn from Grandma’s garden. They called it ‘pig food’.
Towards the end of World War II, the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese were in bad financial shape, Many people were near starvation. Thus many of them were happy not to return to their country or to return and later come back to where they were prisoners.
I recently came across a video on YouTube about a German in a POW camp near Medford Oregon. He worked for a pear farmer who couldn’t get enough locals to harvest his crops because those guys were all off to war. The camp was adjacent to an Army base and the prisoners got the exact same food as the US soldiers. The prisoners only got a fraction of the pay an American worker would get, but they could spend it at the camp store for cigarets, candy, newspapers, etc. They could even take evening classes in English and other subjects.
This particular prisoner came back to the US after the war, sponsored by the farmer he’d worked for, and started his own fruit farm.
Well, there were a lot of German-ish culture areas within the US where Germans had already settled a century or so prior, so maybe it wasn’t quite as foreign as you might think for the German post-war immigrants.
Plus, the US still had a lot of economic mobility, they were the right caste (white), and probably bought into the idea that it was the Land of Opportunity.
The German and Italian POWs that were held in American prison camps were largely better off than American citizens held in American prison camps simply for the crime of looking like the enemy.
I was just googling that, and was surprised to learn that POWs were held in Camp Robinson, near my residence in North Little Rock. I can hear gunfire when the AR National Guard practices.
My story is that Italian POWs in Arkansas rioted when given lard to cook with instead of olive oil. Sorry, I can’t find it in a google search.
In Phoenix, there was the largest prisoner escape on American soil. The craft Germans dug a tunnel and were going to float down the Salt River to the Colorado and Mexico and FREEDOM!
Trouble is, as anyone that lived here knows, just because a map labels something a river, that doesn’t mean it actually has water in it! oops.
In the video about the prisoner in the Medford POW camp I discussed upthread, he was surprised that they only had a single guard when they went out to the orchard to pick pears. Then someone pointed out how far Medford was to somewhere not the US: 800 miles to Canada, but Canada is also at war with Germany, and 1300 miles to Mexico. So there was no point in escaping. The guard was just a pro forma requirement and mostly sat around under a tree and read.
It seems unlikely they were held at the low security camps in the US. It would be dangerous having hard-core Nazis in the same housing as regular German soldiers.