German POWs Arrived in Alabama. Towels and Shaving Kits Were Waiting on Their Bunks.

Thumbnail: illustration. All footage and photographs inside the video are archival; sources are captioned on screen and listed below. On the evening of Wednesday, June 2, 1943, the authorities in Aliceville, Alabama told everyone to stay off the streets. The town of 1,475 people did not stay home. They climbed the lumber pile beside the Frisco tracks to see the men who stepped off the train: prisoners from Rommel's Afrika Korps, captured in Tunisia three weeks earlier, shipped across the Atlantic in the holds of empty cargo ships and brought south in Pullman coaches. The camp built for them over the winter held ten guard towers, a double wire fence and around four hundred frame buildings, room for six thousand prisoners in a town of fifteen hundred. Inside the barracks, on every bunk, a towel and a shaving kit had been laid out before the enemy walked in. Why the US Army did that is written into Articles 10 and 11 of the 1929 Geneva Convention, which the guards at Aliceville had drilled into them before the first train arrived, and into a colder calculation about American prisoners in German hands. The episode follows the day of arrival through the voices of the townspeople, guards and prisoners recorded in a 1994 oral history project, the white bread and peanut butter of the first meal, the ham and corn the prisoners buried in the sand, the orchestras, the school, the Signal Corps photographs of September 1943, and the reunion of October 1989 when former prisoners came back to Aliceville. Sources: Aliceville oral history project (1994, Sam Love / Aliceville Museum) as broadcast in Radiolab, "Nazi Summer Camp" (2015); Alabama Historical Association marker, Camp Aliceville (1989); Encyclopedia of Alabama; Alabama News Center (2019); Ruth Beaumont Cook, Guests Behind the Barbed Wire (2007); Bulletin of the US Army Medical Department (March 1944); UPI, 7 October 1989; US Statutes at Large, vol. 47, pp. 2021–2034 (Geneva Convention of 27 July 1929, Treaty Series 846); US Army Signal Corps caption cards, National Archives RG 111. Footage and photographs: US Army Signal Corps (NARA 111-ADC-164, 111-ADC-1168, 111-ADC-1803; 111-SC Camp Polk, Louisiana, 1943; 111-SC Camp Wallace, Texas, 1943; Tunisia, May 1943), United News newsreels (NARA 208-UN), Office of War Information Troop Train (1943), US Coast Guard and Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation photographs, Sanborn map of Aliceville 1933 (Library of Congress), War Department FM 21-15 — all public domain. Where a scene is illustrated with footage from another camp or place, the caption on screen says so. How this episode was made: original research and script by WW2 Memo. Archival film, photographs and documents are re-edited to match the narration and combined with our own maps, document reconstructions and graphics. Books on German POWs in America (affiliate links, we may earn a small commission): Lone Star Stalag (Camp Hearne, Texas), Michael R. Waters: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1585445452?... Nazi Prisoners of War in America, Arnold Krammer: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1493049526?... Men in German Uniform, Antonio Thompson: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572337281?... The Barbed-Wire College, Ron Robin: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691037000?... Listen to history audiobooks with an Audible free trial: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NB86OYE?...