Robert D. Billinger Jr. Nazi POWs in the Tar Heel State. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. 246 pp. $27.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8130-3224-5.
Reviewed by Brian K. Feltman (Department of History, Ohio State University)
Published on H-German (March, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
The German Invasion of North Carolina
In May 1942, thirty-two surviving crew from the German submarine U-352 arrived at a makeshift POW camp in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They were the first of approximately 10,000 German POWs who would spend time in the Tar Heel State's eighteen POW camps during the Second World War. Robert D. Billinger's history of the German POW experience in North Carolina offers the first in-depth study of the state's relationship with its German guests, and stresses the prisoners' diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
Readers familiar with Billinger's Hitler's Soldiers in the Sunshine State: German POWs in Florida (2000) will recognize the recurrence of many of that book's arguments in this, his most recent work. Billinger contends that contrary to the views of many North Carolinians, all German POWs were not Nazis. To show the range of personalities that could be found in a given camp, he begins by providing readers with biographical sketches of several prisoners, among them an SS man, Austrian members of the Luftwaffe and of Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, and a former inmate at Dachau. By summer 1943, the crew of the U-352 and other captured submariners had been transferred out of North Carolina, but a network of "permanent" camps began to take shape in 1944 as a result of the U.S. military's decision to utilize prisoner labor on military bases and in the civilian economy.
After presenting an overview of the first permanent camps in chapter 2, Billinger focuses his attention on the camp at Fort Sutton, which housed many of the early prisoners from the Afrika Korps captured in Tunisia. He contends that despite tension between the camp's Austrian and German populations, and occasional conflicts between some German prisoners and Jewish guards, the prisoners lived well at Camp Sutton and provided a valuable source of much-needed manpower in the civilian and military sectors.
North Carolina's larger base camps at Fort Bragg and Camp Butner are the subjects of chapter 3. Billinger offers readers a detailed description of these facilities, revealing that even with the favorable accommodations offered to the Germans, some prisoners were hesitant to cooperate with reeducation efforts and remained loyal to the fatherland. At Camp Butner, ardent Nazis among the prisoners were held separately from Russians, Belgians, Czechs, Poles, and Frenchmen who had been forced into the Wehrmacht and chose to cooperate with their captors. Late in the war, base camps were supplemented with a series of branch camps where prisoners performed tasks ranging from mosquito control to pulpwood cutting. As the number of branch camps grew, so, too, did opportunities for interaction between POWs and North Carolinians. Although many prisoners complained of work conditions and expectations, Billinger maintains that interaction with civilians often produced lasting friendships.
Prisoners approached their work with differing degrees of enthusiasm, ranging from cheerful willingness to outright defiance. In chapter 6, Billinger skillfully examines the tactics, most commonly insubordination or work stoppages, employed by prisoners to express their dissatisfaction with treatment they found unfair. Interestingly, German prisoners schooled to believe in their own racial superiority often developed relationships with members of another "alienated" group--North Carolina's African Americans (p. 114). Of course, attempting escape was the ultimate expression of defiance in a POW camp. Combining press coverage with official escape reports, the author recreates several notable breakouts and shows that the decision to flee sometimes had more to do with a prisoner's sense of adventure than the desire to restore his honor. In all, a minimum of twenty-nine escape attempts took place in North Carolina, with only one prisoner managing to remain at large for more than three months.
The absence of any successful escape from the Tar Heel State meant that prisoners had to wait for repatriation to regain their freedom. Despite Geneva Convention restrictions that prohibited captors from dispersing propaganda to POWs, American authorities worked to ensure that the Germans they sent back to Europe would be democratically minded allies. In an effort to convince loyal German prisoners to embrace the American way of life, a "Special Projects Division" surreptitiously screened popular Hollywood films and placed cooperative prisoners in editorial positions with camp newspapers. In situations where the "tone of the camp was still set by loyal members of the Wehrmacht, if not outright Nazis" (p. 153), Billinger reveals, the American authorities were not above threatening to delay repatriation of prisoners considered unreliable. Even after the Allied victory in Europe, the war in the Pacific continued, and German prisoners remained in North Carolina after the fall of the Third Reich. News of Nazi concentration camps and the German treatment of American POWs infuriated many North Carolinians, and public accusations of prisoner-coddling forced authorities to reduce temporarily rations in 1945. Billinger explains that the process of repatriating German POWs was rather complicated. The British had captured many of the Germans held in North Carolina, and months or years of captivity in Britain, France, or Belgium awaited prisoners upon their return to Europe.
Notwithstanding the conflicts within the North Carolina camps, Billinger demonstrates that with few exceptions, American treatment of the prisoners held there conformed to the standards of the Geneva Conventions. Accordingly, many Germans who spent time in North Carolina maintained contact with American friends after the war and largely remembered their captivity as a positive experience. In this regard, Billinger's findings support Arnold Krammer's earlier depiction of America's World War II POW program as a successful venture; many prisoners looked back upon it with good will for their captors.[1]
Many of Billinger's themes are not new, and he concedes that the North Carolina POW experience "has just enough unique differences to be worth a special retelling to North Carolinians and those interested in America's German POW experience during World War II" (p. xv). Nonetheless, the author delivers a detailed account of North Carolina's relationship with its foreign guests and establishes that they were not universally Nazis, and many were not even German. The book is well organized and effectively integrates the story of North Carolina's prisoners into the broader context of American POW treatment during the Second World War. A POW's ordeal rarely ends immediately following the conclusion of hostilities, and the author's handling of the repatriation process is particularly noteworthy. Billinger draws on an impressive array of American and German archival materials, correspondence, interviews with civilians and former prisoners, and newspapers. At times, however, his attention to minute details like the names of virtually every camp official, spokesman, doctor, and clergyman makes it seem as if one is reading an official camp report rather than a popular history of POWs in the Tar Heel State.
Although Billinger utilizes a notable collection of primary materials, his bibliography contains less than thirty secondary sources. As a result, this local history fails to engage some of the broader issues relevant to life behind barbed wire. For example, how were Wehrmacht soldiers who surrendered to the enemy viewed in Nazi Germany, where men were expected to fight to the end and military officials punished any actions that might be considered cowardly?[2] Billinger reports that several suicides occurred in the camps of North Carolina, but he scarcely mentions the feelings of uselessness that often plagued POWs and brought on the captivity-induced depression labeled "barbed wire disease" by the Swiss physician, A. L. Vischer, shortly after the First World War.[3]
Still, this volume is a valuable contribution to the study of WWII captivity in the United States. Billinger's affection for his subject is evident in his writing, and this book will appeal to readers with an interest in North Carolina history, the experiences of POWs during WWII, and postwar German-American relations.
Notes
[1]. See Arnold Krammer, Nazi Prisoners of War in America (New York: Stein & Day, 1979).
[2]. On military discipline in the Wehrmacht, see Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
[3]. A. L. Vischer, Barbed Wire Disease: A Psychological Study of the Prisoner of War (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, Ltd., 1919).
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Citation:
Brian K. Feltman. Review of Billinger Jr., Robert D., Nazi POWs in the Tar Heel State.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24124
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