I live in Michigan in the US and we had a lot of German POW camps. They converted old CCC Civilian Conservation Corp camps into the POW camps and later after the war were converted into minimum security prisons. My understanding is the POW's worked on local farms as the farmhands that would have worked the farms were fighting in the war.
I had a German professor in college who was a native German who had served in the German army in North Africa under Rommel. He was captured by the Americans and he was sent to a POW camp in Georgia. He said the cruelest thing the Americans did to the POWs was to send them home to Germany after the war. Germany was pretty much bombed into rubble. The POWs had apparently enjoyed their time in captivity.
I had a German professor in college who was a native German who had served in the German army in North Africa under Rommel. He was captured by the Americans and he was sent to a POW camp in Georgia. He said the cruelest thing the Americans did to the POWs was to send them home to Germany after the war. Germany was pretty much bombed into rubble. The POWs had apparently enjoyed their time in captivity.
That's one of the most enthralling and inspirational stories I've ever heard. Whatever the meaning of your life, Henry, you've contributed some to mine. Thank you so much! God bless you, buddy!
My grandmother's sister was fluent in German. She was in the Woman's Army Coprs (WACs). She was a POW camp Comandant's secretary at a POW camp in Florida. She had a few stories to tell, that's for sure!
This reminds me so much of a German friend of mine, Hans Phirshke, dead now poor old Hans. He was in the Hitler Youth as all German boys were, not been was not an option or so Hans told me. Just before the end of the war when he was fourteen he was transferred to the Luftwaffe to defend Berlin from the allie’s in an anti aircraft unit. He was apart of Hitlers last inspection of troops, a poor bloody kid, inspected by that mad mongrel with his limp and drooling. I asked did he respect Hitler, he said no, none of his friends did, but none were ever mad enough to let it be known that they didn’t, it was all nazi salutes in public. He was very lucky he said, he and four of his mates were captured and because they were only kids it was arranged for them to go to the British as POWs not the Russians which is where they should have gone, he reckoned if he had gone to the Russians he would have died there. Anyway like this bloke he was a prisoner for a few years after the war, he ended up coming to Australia rather than returning to Germany as all his family were dead. In hind sight, now many years later I realise Hans was a broken man, he never recovered from that war and what Hitler did to him. He never trusted officialdom, he never married, probably because he could never trust or get to close to anyone. He died in the late nineties, living out the last two decades of his life on the out skirts of a small out back country town. He seemed contented and happy living in his small camp amongst the Coolabah and Box tree eucalypts, with his animals. I asked him did he never want to visit Germany again, with a wave of contempt he would say no, there is nothing there for me and he was nothing to Germany. Whether he felt he failed because of Germany losing, or was just glad to survive, maybe guilty he survived when so many of his mates were killed, I don't know, but there was something there that you could not cross. He would not take part in ANZAC day ceremonies, though I encouraged him to do so, he refused point blank, hoo hoo he would say derisively, me a German going to a ANZAC day, never, no matter how much I argued with him it wasn’t like that anymore. Poor Hans, he was a good bloke, a decent human being destroyed by life and circumstance I guess, the Nazis have a lot to answer for not just Jews and Russians either, as i read some where, the Germans were Hitlers first victims.
Wonderful story with a happy ending. I remember reading about a murder of of a prisoner by six other prisoners for anti Nazi comments. The men were sentenced to hanging. President Truman refused to commute their sentences. For their last meal they all requested fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Sad.
After my mom gave birth to my brother in USSR in '89 she was talking to a nurse in the hospital, who was just a little girl during the war. Her father was at the front/dead and it was just her and her mom. When the Germans came in, it was bad. They thought they'd be better than the communists who would rob you of all your food and livestock and anywhere between 10-50% people would starve in some regions, but they would do the same. Her mother struggled to keep them both fed, but there was a very kind officer who would share his food with them and kept them safe. When the partisans blew up a nearby bridge with a German train going over it, the reprisal was coming. I don't remember if they massacred all of the villages in the area, but when the soldiers came in to execute the villagers, the officer took both her mom and herself to some forest, and told them to run. Thanks to his kindness, they both survived. The Eastern Front was very, very brutal, but I hope he made it to the end of the war.
I gotta say, i think he was the most likeable german author i've heard yet. Probably because his parents were anti-nazi from the get go, especially his father. My grandfather was a holocaust survivor from what was at first eastern poland then became western ukraine after the Molotov-Ribentrop pact. 9 of his 11 siblings, both his parents, maybe 30-40 nieces and nephews were all murdered on the same day and lie in that pit to this day. he was the baby of the family and was drafted to the ukrainan army (why he wasn't shot that day) and his 2 oldest brothers had moved to palestine while it was still under ottoman control, before the end of WW1. One nephew survived the massacre at 9 years old (my dad's first cousin). he and 2 other children were the only survivors from a town of about 6000 as far as i know. they joined partisans in the forest eventually. actually a crazy story in itself. he (dad's cousin) made one of the spielberg interviews and i've thought of posting it but sadly it was shot on VHS and by the time they digitized it much was already corrupted the last 45 min of a 2 hour interview.. my grandfather was actually somewhat lucky. he had somewhere and someone to go to after the war. so many of the older people i knew as a kid had to start over being the only survivors of their entire extended family.
Yea, well, we didn’t forget how we ourselves had felt during the hunger years of 1917/18, how the public were pratically begging for it to end to the extent that one could in the Kaiser’s Reich, there just was no public support or momentum to keep the war going. The money was spent, the resources were running out, the food was gone, the oil was running out, and millions of men were dead, there wasn’t even really a war effort left, there was the guys at the front & a couple months of very strict rations, and then it would have ended on it own with military mutiny once the pay & food stopped coming in. It was just over it, it’s not even so much that the government finally surrendered & ended it, it’s more like they just acknowledged that it was over. We didn’t turn on our Jews & use their wealth to build VWs, autobahns, and u-boats before the war even really got under way. Instead we treated our Jews like any other citizens, and while we did intern a shameful number of Japanese Americans, we never wasted tons of money & logistics trying to erase the Japanese people, we put everything into the war instead. Had Germany fought the war as a pay back for Versailles, and left out all the racial genocidal nonsense they absolutely could have captured the oil fields in the Caucasus & held them, and with that oil, and the mineral & metal resources of the USSR they could have kept the war going indefinitely if they had taken an ancient Persian approach to conquered territory, basically letting them do their own thing as long as they paid their tax, provided troops, and kissed the ring. America was rich, but 1) it’s not invincible, it can be convinced to give up when it is not fighting for its own survival. 2) it would not have died for Britain & France. If the Nazis had taken out the Soviet Union & been more successful in the Battle of Britain to the point that the US would basically have been the only effective fighting force against the Nazis, and would have to mount an amphibious assault, they absolutely would have taken out Japan & sought a peace with Germany, no doubt. You did stand a chance, but generals are good at tactics, not logistics, and dictators don’t seem to be good at either. Hitler lost the war because of the insane amount of resources wasted on genocide. As it happens, it takes quite a kill to kill 13 million people, even when you have neat little death factories where you don’t even have to shoot them & there’s no blood. All those trains wasted moving people, all those troops wasted behind the lines on einsatzgruppen duty, those trains should have been moving gear & men to the front, and the main push should have been army group south, not army group center bound for Moscow. That could have turned the tide & given them the small boost they needed to knock the Soviets out in 41 & secure their natural resources & man power. If they just had to have their stupid little genocide, they could have done it with impunity after winning the war & effectively taking over the world. However, to say they didn’t stand a chance isn’t true. Had the generals planning been bound by logistics, and focused on securing the resources to fight a protracted war before trying to win it quickly just in case, they absolutely had more than a good chance of winning, it was only hopeless because of the human waste in charge.
And look at the USA now ! Nearly 80 years later an on the verge of total collapse!! Like the uk a total disastrous mess!! And after Germany followed the Americans footsteps after WW2 are now heading down the toilet! It’s over for the western dominance! The new world order is now China , Russia, India !!
We don't care that you escaped from the POW camp, in fact we find it quite amusing. But stealing wire cutters and damaging government property by cutting the wires…we're going to have to punish you for that. 🤨
That was a very compelling story. It is funny that he mentioned an officer named Hitower. I had a German friend and one time at a car race here in Ohio. befriended an officer at the race track named Hightower.
My mother was in school during WWII. My grandfather was captured by the French in both WWI and WWII. He said the French were incredibly cruel. Food provided was whatever the French threw in the garbage. They sent him home near the end of WWII as he was old and injured. He would visit the farms the French prisoners where working at to verify they were there. After the end was announced and everyone was released they came to his home, my mother was there. They searched the house for his pistol, then found him and took him away. He wasn't seen again for more than a year. He would never talk about this time. There was good and bad on both sides of the war.
There is an anecdote (probably apocryphal) that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was driving around in America during one of his stays there and came across two man fixing pot holes with some machinery. He thought: In Japan, this would be done by a hundred peasant with shovels, here all they need is two men and a machine.
Very interesting. 👍
I live in Michigan in the US and we had a lot of German POW camps. They converted old CCC Civilian Conservation Corp camps into the POW camps and later after the war were converted into minimum security prisons. My understanding is the POW's worked on local farms as the farmhands that would have worked the farms were fighting in the war.
I had a German professor in college who was a native German who had served in the German army in North Africa under Rommel. He was captured by the Americans and he was sent to a POW camp in Georgia. He said the cruelest thing the Americans did to the POWs was to send them home to Germany after the war. Germany was pretty much bombed into rubble. The POWs had apparently enjoyed their time in captivity.
I had a German professor in college who was a native German who had served in the German army in North Africa under Rommel. He was captured by the Americans and he was sent to a POW camp in Georgia. He said the cruelest thing the Americans did to the POWs was to send them home to Germany after the war. Germany was pretty much bombed into rubble. The POWs had apparently enjoyed their time in captivity.
Why do they have an upperclassmen Brit narrating….takes away from presentation
I never even knew this side of history. I am richer now for having learned of it.
Much better than the Germans treated the Jews.
A nice yarn. My bet it is 30% personal experience, 20% other German experience, and 50% fiction.
There "WW2 Stories" are most entertaining and informative. However, they are marred by too many commercials !
That's one of the most enthralling and inspirational stories I've ever heard. Whatever the meaning of your life, Henry, you've contributed some to mine. Thank you so much! God bless you, buddy!
I hate to say it, but apart from the sugar beet harvesting and cotton picking, that sounds like a pretty decent trip to the US.
My grandmother's sister was fluent in German. She was in the Woman's Army Coprs (WACs). She was a POW camp Comandant's secretary at a POW camp in Florida. She had a few stories to tell, that's for sure!
This reminds me so much of a German friend of mine, Hans Phirshke, dead now poor old Hans. He was in the Hitler Youth as all German boys were, not been was not an option or so Hans told me. Just before the end of the war when he was fourteen he was transferred to the Luftwaffe to defend Berlin from the allie’s in an anti aircraft unit. He was apart of Hitlers last inspection of troops, a poor bloody kid, inspected by that mad mongrel with his limp and drooling. I asked did he respect Hitler, he said no, none of his friends did, but none were ever mad enough to let it be known that they didn’t, it was all nazi salutes in public. He was very lucky he said, he and four of his mates were captured and because they were only kids it was arranged for them to go to the British as POWs not the Russians which is where they should have gone, he reckoned if he had gone to the Russians he would have died there. Anyway like this bloke he was a prisoner for a few years after the war, he ended up coming to Australia rather than returning to Germany as all his family were dead. In hind sight, now many years later I realise Hans was a broken man, he never recovered from that war and what Hitler did to him. He never trusted officialdom, he never married, probably because he could never trust or get to close to anyone. He died in the late nineties, living out the last two decades of his life on the out skirts of a small out back country town. He seemed contented and happy living in his small camp amongst the Coolabah and Box tree eucalypts, with his animals. I asked him did he never want to visit Germany again, with a wave of contempt he would say no, there is nothing there for me and he was nothing to Germany. Whether he felt he failed because of Germany losing, or was just glad to survive, maybe guilty he survived when so many of his mates were killed, I don't know, but there was something there that you could not cross. He would not take part in ANZAC day ceremonies, though I encouraged him to do so, he refused point blank, hoo hoo he would say derisively, me a German going to a ANZAC day, never, no matter how much I argued with him it wasn’t like that anymore. Poor Hans, he was a good bloke, a decent human being destroyed by life and circumstance I guess, the Nazis have a lot to answer for not just Jews and Russians either, as i read some where, the Germans were Hitlers first victims.
why hitler declared war on america l will never understand, but america probably would have declared war on germany sooner or later
This guy was living it up for a POW
Wonderful story with a happy ending. I remember reading about a murder of of a prisoner by six other prisoners for anti Nazi comments. The men were sentenced to hanging. President Truman refused to commute their sentences. For their last meal they all requested fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Sad.
Well they are not rich anymore.
Plot Twist. The good news: Yes, you're right; it is a scheiss haus. The bad news: You are the scheiss. 🤣 Jetzt! Job machen! "Arbeit Macht Frei"
The arrogance and simultaneous whininess of these Nazis is disgusting.
After my mom gave birth to my brother in USSR in '89 she was talking to a nurse in the hospital, who was just a little girl during the war. Her father was at the front/dead and it was just her and her mom. When the Germans came in, it was bad. They thought they'd be better than the communists who would rob you of all your food and livestock and anywhere between 10-50% people would starve in some regions, but they would do the same. Her mother struggled to keep them both fed, but there was a very kind officer who would share his food with them and kept them safe. When the partisans blew up a nearby bridge with a German train going over it, the reprisal was coming. I don't remember if they massacred all of the villages in the area, but when the soldiers came in to execute the villagers, the officer took both her mom and herself to some forest, and told them to run. Thanks to his kindness, they both survived. The Eastern Front was very, very brutal, but I hope he made it to the end of the war.
I gotta say, i think he was the most likeable german author i've heard yet. Probably because his parents were anti-nazi from the get go, especially his father. My grandfather was a holocaust survivor from what was at first eastern poland then became western ukraine after the Molotov-Ribentrop pact. 9 of his 11 siblings, both his parents, maybe 30-40 nieces and nephews were all murdered on the same day and lie in that pit to this day. he was the baby of the family and was drafted to the ukrainan army (why he wasn't shot that day) and his 2 oldest brothers had moved to palestine while it was still under ottoman control, before the end of WW1. One nephew survived the massacre at 9 years old (my dad's first cousin). he and 2 other children were the only survivors from a town of about 6000 as far as i know. they joined partisans in the forest eventually. actually a crazy story in itself. he (dad's cousin) made one of the spielberg interviews and i've thought of posting it but sadly it was shot on VHS and by the time they digitized it much was already corrupted the last 45 min of a 2 hour interview.. my grandfather was actually somewhat lucky. he had somewhere and someone to go to after the war. so many of the older people i knew as a kid had to start over being the only survivors of their entire extended family.
Yea, well, we didn’t forget how we ourselves had felt during the hunger years of 1917/18, how the public were pratically begging for it to end to the extent that one could in the Kaiser’s Reich, there just was no public support or momentum to keep the war going. The money was spent, the resources were running out, the food was gone, the oil was running out, and millions of men were dead, there wasn’t even really a war effort left, there was the guys at the front & a couple months of very strict rations, and then it would have ended on it own with military mutiny once the pay & food stopped coming in. It was just over it, it’s not even so much that the government finally surrendered & ended it, it’s more like they just acknowledged that it was over. We didn’t turn on our Jews & use their wealth to build VWs, autobahns, and u-boats before the war even really got under way. Instead we treated our Jews like any other citizens, and while we did intern a shameful number of Japanese Americans, we never wasted tons of money & logistics trying to erase the Japanese people, we put everything into the war instead. Had Germany fought the war as a pay back for Versailles, and left out all the racial genocidal nonsense they absolutely could have captured the oil fields in the Caucasus & held them, and with that oil, and the mineral & metal resources of the USSR they could have kept the war going indefinitely if they had taken an ancient Persian approach to conquered territory, basically letting them do their own thing as long as they paid their tax, provided troops, and kissed the ring. America was rich, but 1) it’s not invincible, it can be convinced to give up when it is not fighting for its own survival. 2) it would not have died for Britain & France. If the Nazis had taken out the Soviet Union & been more successful in the Battle of Britain to the point that the US would basically have been the only effective fighting force against the Nazis, and would have to mount an amphibious assault, they absolutely would have taken out Japan & sought a peace with Germany, no doubt. You did stand a chance, but generals are good at tactics, not logistics, and dictators don’t seem to be good at either. Hitler lost the war because of the insane amount of resources wasted on genocide. As it happens, it takes quite a kill to kill 13 million people, even when you have neat little death factories where you don’t even have to shoot them & there’s no blood. All those trains wasted moving people, all those troops wasted behind the lines on einsatzgruppen duty, those trains should have been moving gear & men to the front, and the main push should have been army group south, not army group center bound for Moscow. That could have turned the tide & given them the small boost they needed to knock the Soviets out in 41 & secure their natural resources & man power. If they just had to have their stupid little genocide, they could have done it with impunity after winning the war & effectively taking over the world. However, to say they didn’t stand a chance isn’t true. Had the generals planning been bound by logistics, and focused on securing the resources to fight a protracted war before trying to win it quickly just in case, they absolutely had more than a good chance of winning, it was only hopeless because of the human waste in charge.
What an amazing story. Very well written and full of information I knew nothing about.
Of course we always had a chance, though it was squandered. A nuke on Washington and New York would have been all that was needed.
Just stumbled in to this amazing piece of history. Thank you for posting this……..
And look at the USA now ! Nearly 80 years later an on the verge of total collapse!! Like the uk a total disastrous mess!! And after Germany followed the Americans footsteps after WW2 are now heading down the toilet! It’s over for the western dominance! The new world order is now China , Russia, India !!
Ah-mees
We don't care that you escaped from the POW camp, in fact we find it quite amusing. But stealing wire cutters and damaging government property by cutting the wires…we're going to have to punish you for that. 🤨
😡 Should've left the Concentration Camps intact and done to the German prisoners what they did to the Jews 💀😠😡!!!!
That was a very compelling story. It is funny that he mentioned an officer named Hitower. I had a German friend and one time at a car race here in Ohio. befriended an officer at the race track named Hightower.
The camp near Wetumtka?
My mother was in school during WWII. My grandfather was captured by the French in both WWI and WWII. He said the French were incredibly cruel. Food provided was whatever the French threw in the garbage. They sent him home near the end of WWII as he was old and injured. He would visit the farms the French prisoners where working at to verify they were there. After the end was announced and everyone was released they came to his home, my mother was there. They searched the house for his pistol, then found him and took him away. He wasn't seen again for more than a year. He would never talk about this time. There was good and bad on both sides of the war.
What an incredible tale.
Anyone know the book that this is from?
There is an anecdote (probably apocryphal) that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was driving around in America during one of his stays there and came across two man fixing pot holes with some machinery. He thought: In Japan, this would be done by a hundred peasant with shovels, here all they need is two men and a machine.
rubbish germany would have won if hitler was not deliberately losing
What an incredible story.