Historians bringing long-forgotten German POW camp back
Updated 10:15 pm, Friday, February 24, 2012
HEARNE - Gazing across these peaceful, wooded flatlands in the Brazos Valley, it's hard to envision the thousands of German prisoners of war who once walked here, so far removed from the war.
Not much remains of Camp Hearne, but in the 1940s nearly 5,000 German prisoners were kept in temporary barracks, their clothes stamped with a bright, white "PW." They were part of some 50,000 prisoners taken in by Texas and among the 275,000 Axis soldiers who surrendered in Tunisia as Adolf Hitler's North African campaign collapsed.
Now, nearly seven decades later, Texas historians are slowly bringing bits of the camp back to life.
The site has a reconstructed barracks and, on Wednesdays through Saturdays, visitors roam the 700-acre property to see foundations, fountains and other remains of the camp.
"Almost everyone I talk to is surprised to learn that Texas housed German POWs," said Michael Waters, a Texas A&M archaeologist who has researched the camp for a couple of decades.
The conditions in which POWs lived also surprise some visitors.
Expecting the familiar images of World War II prison camps - such as Germany's concentration camps and Russia's stalags - visitors would not find them at Camp Hearne.
Some worked on farms
The Germans had it pretty good at what Hearne residents then described as the "Fritz Ritz."
By the middle of World War II, Great Britain no longer had enough space, or enough food, to house and feed prisoners, and American Liberty ships that transported troops and supplies to Europe and Africa had empty holds for the return trips home.
So the Allies decided to fill those holds with Germans.
Heino Erichsen, a German private captured in Tunisia, recalls the trans-Atlantic trip to New York, a nervous affair with his country's U-boats lurking, followed by a train ride from New York to Texas.
"It was a long journey," said Erichsen, 87. "Compared to where we had been, Camp Hearne was good. We had clean bunks, good food and things were finely regulated. But it was still a prison."
The American Red Cross provided them with implements and tools, and the prisoners built fountains and statues, made woodcarvings, played soccer and staged concerts and plays. They could go to classes and learn English.
"If they weren't working, and they weren't beating each other up, they were allowed to do just about anything they wanted," said Cathy Lazarus, president of the Friends of Camp Hearne and a driving force behind the camp's restoration.
Those who did work, like Erichsen, often ended up in local fields as farm hands as a few disinterested guards watched nearby.
Escape attempts at Hearne were rare, but not unknown.
And because of geography, some 1,800 miles of barbed wire wrapped and weaved around the camp's perimeter.
The Army required that prison camps be at least 175 miles from the coast so prisoners couldn't escape to German submarines.
The one serious breakout attempt illustrates the difficulty of escaping.
A handful of German POWs built rafts out of raincoats and big butter tins. They planned to float down the Brazos to the Gulf and eventually to reach Mexico.
Three days, 12 miles
They made their move in August. After less than three days of summer heat and portaging their rafts over gravel bars in the low-water Brazos, the sunburned escapees were caught less than a dozen miles away, Waters said.
The biggest tension was between the true believer Nazis and those who didn't share their faith in Hitler.
These ill feelings came to a head in late 1943, when the Nazi faction beat to death a prisoner sympathetic to the United States.
But overall, life was pretty good in the camp. Workers received compensation for their labor, and all prisoners got coupons to spend at the post exchange. They also got tickets for a beer a day.
"It makes us out to look awfully good, doesn't it?" says Lazarus. And indeed, Americans were following the Geneva Convention in hopes that Germans would do the same.
But she said the U.S. government had other motives.
"What we were actually doing, and this wasn't even known to Congress at the time, is that the U.S. Army had decided to have a secret re-education program to win the hearts and minds of the German people," Lazarus said. "It was pretty obvious we were going to win the war, and we wanted those Germans to go back and be beacons of democracy."
The American attitude toward the prisoners changed, however, as the depths of depravity inside German concentration camps came to be revealed.
Beacon proved bright
Work details at Hearne became harder. Daily food rations were dropped from about 2,000 calories a day to about 1,200 calories, Lazarus said. German prisoners were forced to look at films Americans were making of POW camps in the fatherland.
After the war ended, the German prisoners were kept a few months, through the 1945 harvest. Then they were sent back to New York, then on to Europe, and by the late 1940s, to Germany.
Some, like Erichsen, were eager to return to America as free men. For some captives, the beacon of democracy proved strong indeed.
Erichsen's story, and those of others, are now being retold in this small town in a state where many have forgotten the camp once existed, and most never knew it did.