Dem
47
GOP
53
Up today is D.C. in Hofheim, Germany:
In the summer of 1968, after I had graduated from college and at the height of the Vietnam War, I was drafted into the Army. After my basic and advanced training, though, I was very fortunate and happy to be sent to Germany instead, where I was ultimately stationed with an intelligence unit in Bad Hersfeld near the East German border. While there, I was astonished to get to know any number of older German men who had been prisoners-of-war at various locations in the United States during World War II, inasmuch as I had never been aware that there had been any foreign POWs in the U.S. during the war. And one of these was my eventual father-in-law. He had been stationed with the Wehrmacht along the Atlantic coast of France, where he and his comrades had been trapped by the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy, ultimately taken prisoner, and then sent in troop transport ships to New York, where they were loaded onto a train for their ultimate destination in Missouri. He told two stories about his time as a prisoner of war.
First, during their first day out of New York on the train, two young American soldiers came through their car and told them to put all their personal jewelry, watches, wedding bands, other rings, and the like into a sack that they carried. My father-in-law said that he and the others were not pleased by this treatment, but figured that it was just part of being a prisoner-of-war. But they were both surprised and very impressed when the next day, an American captain came to their car, returned their possessions, and apologized profusely for the behavior of his men.
Then, after reaching their POW camp in Missouri, my father-in-law and another POW were one day ordered to accompany a guard in a flatbed truck up to the train station in Independence to pick up sacks of flour for the camp. They rode on the back of the truck, while the guard drove the truck with a loaded shotgun next to him in the cab. After the 2-hour trip, the guard left them at the station to load the sacks onto the truck and said that he would be back when they were done. They finished loading the sacks of flour, but when the guard finally returned he was drunk as a lord and could barely stand, much less drive, so they loaded him atop the sacks of flour on the back of the truck to sleep it off, while one of them drove and the other held the shotgun on the way back to the camp. When they were almost in sight of the camp, they stopped and woke up the guard so he could drive the rest of the way, and they took his place on the back of the truck.
Having been raised on Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and similar fare, I asked him if they ever tried to escape. He just laughed. They were in the middle of nowhere. Where would they go? How would they get there? And besides, none of them had any particular desire to get back in the war.
Second, after the war, he was brought back on another troop ship to a holding camp in France, from where he was finally released to return to Germany. He began making his way east across Germany toward Silesia, where he was originally from, but Silesia had become a part of Poland, and eastern Germany was under Soviet control, so he stopped when he got as far as Bad Hersfeld, and started a new life there.
A few years later, after I had gotten out of the Army and gone to law school, I went back into the Army as a legal officer in order to be able return to Germany with my wife. I was ultimately stationed at the JAG Office of the VII Corps Headquarters in Stuttgart as a legal liaison officer to the German legal authorities. Not long after I arrived, we hosted a day-long legal conference to discuss mutual legal problems and issues and invited representatives from all the German public prosecutors' offices in our area of responsibility, which included most of southern Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. Although we only regularly dealt with a handful of these, we got a very broad turnout of public prosecutors, and at the luncheon we had, I was seated at a large, round table with a dozen or so of these. At some point, the conversation turned to the fact that several of these had been prisoners of war at different places in the U.S. during the war, and that they had in fact begun their legal training there: Lawyers among the POWs in the camps organized and taught courses in German law there, and after the war, when they continued their legal education at regular German universities, they were given credit for the instruction they received in the camps. It was my turn to be surprised and impressed.
Thanks, D.C. (Z)