German WWII POWs in the U.S. remembered - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

German WWII POWs in the U.S. remembered

ROANOKE, Va. — Helen Crumpacker and her mother-in-law cooked dinner for the German prisoners of war who had labored that day in the Crumpacker Bros. orchards near Bonsack.

In POW camps in Salem, Catawba and across the nation, many Germans lingered for a time in the United States even after Allied forces in World War II declared victory in Europe in May 1945.

As they had throughout their imprisonment, the Germans interned in Southwest Virginia worked for farmers and orchardists, cut pulpwood and performed other jobs left vacant when men from Southwest Virginia left to fight the Germans or Japanese or landed defense-related jobs.

Employers typically paid the U.S. government 50 cents to 60 cents an hour for the POWs’ work, of which 10 cents was paid to prisoners in special scrip to buy personal items at camp.

“That there were German POWs here in the U.S. is one of the great untold stories of World War II,” said John Long, director of the Salem Museum. “They were probably the best-treated POWs in all of history, and how we treated the enemy among us influenced how our boys were treated in German POW camps. Our kindness paid off in tangible ways.”

Crumpacker, now 92 and living in Roanoke, said the quality of the POWs’ daily rations declined after the war.

“The government had provided hot lunches to them every day, but as soon as the war ended, they started sending them margarine sandwiches,” she said.

Crumpacker said she and Daisy Crumpacker, the mother of Helen’s husband, Morris, decided to fix the men a home-cooked meal.

About 10 or 12 POWs sat around the dining room table that night at Daisy’s home, Helen said.

“We fixed them a chicken dinner,” she said. “One of them played the piano.”

In 1943, German POWs by the thousands began arriving in the U.S. for internment after the defeat of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa. They kept coming as the war stretched on.

The positive experiences of German POWs in Southwest Virginia reflect the national handling of prisoners of war. They were generally treated quite well.

At least two of the men still correspond with families in the Roanoke Valley. At least two have returned to visit the former Civilian Conservation Corps camp off Bradshaw Road in Roanoke County that became the Catawba camp.

Several factors influenced the U.S. decision to embrace the humane treatment of German, Italian and Japanese prisoners of war.

National ideals and a desire to adhere to Geneva Conventions standards were among the motivations. The U.S. hoped its policies would be reciprocated by enemies holding Allied prisoners. And the Allies felt shipping prisoners to the U.S. eliminated the threat of escapes from camps near the front lines.

Among the men who worked seasonally for the Crumpackers was Erwin Koudela, an Austrian who spoke English and was a gifted artist. Koudela worked, too, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Salem under the supervision of landscaper John Wharton.

Koudela still corresponds with Helen Crumpacker and, separately, with Flora “Billie” Wharton Roth, 82, one of John Wharton’s daughters.

While interned at the Salem camp, Koudela completed charcoal sketches of Wharton’s three daughters to express appreciation for his kindness. The small camps in Catawba and Salem could hold about 200 men and were branches of the much larger base camp at what is now Fort Pickett.

After the war, Koudela and at least six other former POWs wrote to Wharton.

In a letter dated Feb. 12, 1946, Peter Schuller wrote, “If you would be able to send me some cigarettes I should be very grateful to you, because here one cannot have very much of them in a month.”

Willy Grueber wrote: “I don’t want forget all what you have done for me.”

A letter from Koudela dated July 26, 1946, described the devastation he found after returning to his home in Austria: “Irresponsible though tough SS troops were defending these last positions with the aim less on the interest of their own country than on the last minute destruction of Austrian soil.”

Koudela’s letter also referenced counsel from John Wharton.

“Yes, you were right when you gave me the advice to look at things from a less gloomy angle since in life one gets what one deserves anyway,” Koudela wrote.

POW Harry Seeger and other prisoners from the Catawba camp, now the Roanoke Valley Baptist Association’s Ward Haven retreat, sometimes worked in the orchards owned by the family of Harry Weeks in Botetourt County off Laymantown Road.

Seeger has stayed in touch with the Weekses and with Gerald Calvert, 76, a neighbor who picked apples as a boy for the Weekses’ sprawling orchards — now subdivisions. Both Calvert and Virginia Weeks Hicks, 86, one of Harry Weeks’ daughters, still exchange letters with Seeger.

In 1987, the former POW, his wife and daughter, returned to the U.S. and visited Hicks and Calvert and what was left of the Catawba POW camp.

Hicks said her father’s friendship with Seeger was no surprise.

“I’m just like my daddy,” she said. “I enjoy everybody on earth.”

She said her brother, John Weeks, felt differently about the amicable relationship.

“He was fighting the Germans at Saint-Lo (France) when daddy was becoming friends with Harry Seeger,” Hicks said.

Calvert said Seeger “was a loyal German but he did not belong to the Nazi Party. He didn’t care for Hitler at all.”

As a teenager, Lois Dezelich, then Lois Sink, lived with her family along Kessler Mill Road in Roanoke County. Now 83, Dezelich recently recalled German POWs being trucked back to the Salem camp on Indiana Street after they’d been picking apples, working at farms or cutting pulpwood.

The family home stood about 75 to 100 feet from the road, she said.

“They used to go by our house in the evening,” Dezelich said. “I didn’t see them go out in the morning because I was in school.”

She described the vehicles as “big Army trucks” fitted with a flatbed ringed by wooden rails and crowded with POWs.

“They were all standing up,” Dezelich said. “They would pass by, and if I was out in the yard, they’d yell out in German. The only word I caught up with was ‘fraulein.’ “

The word is variously translated to mean “girl” or “unmarried young woman.” Dezelich said she was about 14 to 15 years old at the time.

The prisoners did not frighten her, she said.

“The only thing was sometimes there was a siren going off in Salem, and when that happened, the first thing on my mind was that one of them had gotten loose,” Dezelich said.

Based on regional news coverage, the few POWs who escaped from local camps rarely got far.

On April 17, 1945, The Roanoke Times reported about two POWs from the Catawba camp who had escaped April 14. On April 18, the prisoners were captured near New Castle “as they strolled along the Chesapeake and Ohio branch tracks.”

The headline read, “Nazis captured at New Castle.”

Walter Schuetze, 23, and Gerd Schliestedt, 20, had served in the German navy, the newspaper reported. “They worked their way through the mountains, traveling principally at night.”

The men had hoped to hide in a boxcar, travel to Ohio and somehow arrange passage to South America, according to the article. “The men, when captured, were wearing green paratroop camouflage suits, and on the breast of one was a swastika.”

The article reported that the men “will be confined to quarters for 30 days, and for 14 days they will be on a diet of bread and water.”

Herman Neumann did not venture far either.

A brief article in the Nov. 3, 1944, issue of the Salem Times Register reported Neumann’s escape. He was on the lam for about four days.

Neumann had slipped away from an orchard where he was working near Coyner Springs in late October. The story reported that he turned himself in “to Sam Smelser (Sr.) at his home at Webster about 7:30 Sunday evening.” Neumann explained that “he decided to surrender rather than be shot, which was the main reason for giving himself up,” according to the article.

More than 66 years later, Sam Smelser Jr. said in May that he was overseas fighting with the 94th Infantry Division in Europe when Neumann surrendered to his father. He said Sam Smelser Sr., who worked then at the Roanoke Webster Brickyard, never talked about the incident.

In mid-April, a museum-on-wheels traveled through the region to tell the story of German POWs held in camps across the country during World War II.

Irving Kellman wore two hats. He drove the museum’s bus. He interpreted its exhibits.

During a stop at the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Kellman talked about German prisoners who fled from camps across the U.S.

“There were escape attempts,” he said. “I call them frolics.”

He said most prisoners enjoyed freedom briefly and either turned themselves in or were captured after a few days.

“They wanted to go to a bar and have a beer. They wanted to meet some women. They were bored. They wanted to see the United States,” Kellman said.

Nationally, as of mid-April 1945, there had been a total of 1,583 escapes from a POW population of about 400,000 — a number that included German, Italian and Japanese prisoners — according to a July 1977 article in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography titled “Hitler’s Wehrmacht in Virginia, 1943-1946.”

The article reported, “One of the few recorded instances of assault occurred in Southside Virginia when a German POW allegedly tried to rape a Burkeville woman.”

Kellman said he had found no documented cases of sabotage committed by German POWs in the U.S. Fears of such action guided initial decisions to intern the Germans primarily in the Midwest.

Some prisoners, especially those in larger base camps across the county, faced dangers from within the ranks. Fervent Nazis, SS troops and Gestapo sometimes clashed with POWs who had no use for Hitler or Nazism.

“At times this caused tension between the men, even to the point of fanatical Nazis murdering other POWs in their beds at night,” according to “Held in the Heartland: German POWs in the Midwest, 1943-46.”

Kellman, who is Jewish, said he feels comfortable sharing details about the generally humane treatment of German POWs in America.

“But I have a hell of a time going to the Holocaust museum (in Washington, D.C.),” he said.

He speaks passionately about America’s decision during World War II to treat POWs humanely — an approach the traveling museum celebrates.

“People need to know you can treat prisoners of war with kindness, with courtesy, respect and dignity,” he said. “There are many lessons to be learned from that time.”