German POWs Thought the Train Was Avoiding the Bomb Damage. There Was No Bomb Damage.

German POWs in America believed their train was being routed around the bomb damage. There was no bomb damage. Between 1943 and 1945 the United States held more than 370,000 German prisoners of war in some 500 camps across 46 states, and almost every one of them reached his camp by rail, watching a country he had been assured was crippled roll past the window for days on end. They had been promised that the Atlantic was closed, that American industry was a bluff, and that the enemy homeland had already been struck from the air. What they saw instead was intact towns, stocked shops, working farms and roads full of private cars, in the third year of a total war. Historian Arnold Krammer recorded that some of them concluded the route itself had been arranged to steer them clear of the ruins. This full length WW2 documentary follows that journey from the surrender in Tunisia to the camps of Texas and Oklahoma, drawing on prisoner memoirs, Swiss complaint files, wartime figures and the records of the American re-education programme, and it says plainly what the evidence supports and what has been embellished in the retelling. SOURCES German POW rail transport, prisoner complaints and the "contrived routes" grumble, drawn from Arnold Krammer's research — uboat.net https://www.uboat.net/men/pow/pow_in_... Joseph Goebbels, "The Tonnage War," Das Reich, 21 June 1942 — German Propaganda Archive, Calvin University https://research.calvin.edu/german-pr... German Prisoners of War (camp numbers, arrival rates, the labour programme, wages, repatriation) — Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/e... Corporal Rupert Trimmingham's letters to Yank, the Army Weekly, 28 April and 28 July 1944 — Teaching American History https://teachingamericanhistory.org/d... Pamela Croley, "American Reeducation of German POWs, 1943-1946," MA thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2006 (camp siting rules, the Fact vs Fantasy pamphlet, the Special Projects Division) https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.c... Allen W. Paschal, "The Enemy in Colorado: German Prisoners of War, 1943-46" — History Colorado https://www.historycolorado.org/story... The secretly recorded conversation of 22 March 1943 — Trent Park House Museum https://trentparkhouse.org.uk/blogs/a... Churchill and the captured German generals — The M Room, London Grid for Learning https://mroom.lgfl.org.uk/trent_park_... Helen Fry, "The Walls Have Ears" — Australian War Memorial https://wm.awm.gov.au/read/walls-have... German prisoners of war under French control, communique of 13 March 1947 — Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, Volume III, Office of the Historian, US Department of State https://history.state.gov/historicald... John Ray Skates, "German Prisoners of War in Mississippi, 1943-1946" — Mississippi History Now, Mississippi Department of Archives and History https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/... Camp Crossville — Volopedia, University of Tennessee Libraries https://volopedia.lib.utk.edu/entries... PRINT SOURCES Arnold Krammer, Nazi Prisoners of War in America (1979) — the standard scholarly history Reinhold Pabel, Enemies Are Human (1955) Helmut Hoerner, A German Odyssey, translated by Allan Kent Powell (1991) Matthias Reiss, German Prisoners of War in American Society, 1942-1946 (2002) Ron Robin, The Barbed-Wire College, Princeton University Press (1995) R. L. DiNardo, Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism? Horses and the German Army of World War II Sidney B. Fay, "German Prisoners of War," Current History, May 1945 United States Army Center of Military History, Tunisia campaign brochure