“Military prosecutors brought murder charges against 15 German POWs and court-martialled them before secret military tribunals.”
By William Geroux
BY 1943, the western Allies had a problem: Where to keep the hundreds of thousands of German prisoners the alliance was capturing?
Britain already was holding a half-million German POWs. Canada agreed to take 36,000. America was reluctant to accept any large numbers of Germans but agreed to hold 50,000. Washington was initially fearful that allowing any more German POWs on American soil would invite mass escapes and sabotage. But those concerns soon gave way to the reality that there was simply nowhere else to put the prisoners. The United States ended up accepting nearly 400,000 German POWs.
The U.S. Army’s Provost Marshal General’s Office quickly built a network of POW camps in rural America. The facilities were little more than clusters of hurriedly built wooden barracks and offices surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard towers.
The first great wave of German prisoners were veterans of the Afrika Korps, which had been an elite desert fighting force under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” but finally had been starved of supplies and forced to surrender en masse in May 1943 at Tunis, Tunisia. Many Afrika Korps soldiers, and almost all of their leaders, were dedicated Nazis who still believed Germany would win.
After surrendering at Tunis, the Afrika Korps men were carried by train to the ports of Oran or Casablanca and then crammed into the holds of American cargo ships, which were returning home after delivering war supplies to North Africa. The ships dropped off the Germans at ports in New York, New Jersey and Virginia, where the prisoners boarded trains for the final leg of the journey to their assigned camps.
Most of the camps were at least 1,000 miles away; many twice as distant. The Germans were amazed at America’s sheer size. Some insisted the trains were being driven in circles to make the United States look bigger than it was. The prisoners also were surprised at the accommodations. These were not cattle cars. The prisoners rode in comfortable surplus Pullman passenger cars with upholstered seats. They enjoyed regular meals. Soldiers of the German army were used to travelling in boxcars.
The Germans were surprised at how well they were treated. The U.S. Army strictly followed Geneva Convention’s rules that entitled POWs to the same food, lodging, and recreational opportunities as American troops on the home front. The Germans ate heartily, played soccer, watched movies, painted landscapes, and even produced plays. In fact, some Americans complained the camps were too comfortable, a “Fritz Ritz.” But the United States wanted to set an example for the world through its treatment of prisoners, and hoped its enemies would treat captured Americans just as well in return. Germany had been following the Geneva Convention in its treatment of American, British and other Western prisoners. On the war’s Eastern Front, however, things were different. Both the Germans and Soviets executed and enslaved each other’s prisoners. Some wondered if GIs and airmen in German captivity would face similarly savage treatment once Germany and Hitler were on the ropes.
Ironically, the German POWs pouring into the United States became a vital part of the home front workforce effort. They were organized into a vast army of laborers for thousands of farms, factories and businesses that had lost millions of their American workers to the military or to the booming (and higher paying) defense factories. A German POW camp was an economic plum to a small community — a gift from the government. Politicians and chambers of commerce lobbied for new camps as they lobbied for new bridges and highways. The camps seemed to be running smoothly until a conflict under the surface erupted.
On October 19, 1943, at a POW camp in the remote Kansas cornfields, a secret Nazi hierarchy forced a fellow prisoner to hang himself for writing in his (stolen) diary that he feared Nazism would ruin Germany. A second prisoner was also driven to suicide. A few weeks later, a German prisoner at a camp in Oklahoma was beaten to death for allegedly writing a note to the Americans suggesting bombing targets in Germany. In Texas, a second prisoner was fatally beaten. In Arizona, seven U-boat men hanged a fellow submariner who had become an informant. In Arkansas, a prisoner was fatally beaten for working harder than required. In South Carolina, a prisoner was strangled over rumors he favored the Americans. In other camps, Catholic priests were severely beaten for not embracing Nazism, and gangs of Nazis and anti-Nazis fought with boards spiked with nails and razor blades.
The killings caught the army off guard. Military authorities had neglected to screen out the hardcore Nazis from the rest of the prisoners. As a result, the zealots quickly took control of their fellow prisoners behind the scenes, through intimidation, threats and even violence. The army responded forcefully. Military prosecutors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Leon Jaworski (the future Watergate special prosecutor), brought murder charges against 15 German POWs and court-martialled them before secret military tribunals. The tribunals – handpicked panels of U.S. military officers — convicted all fifteen Germans of murder and sentenced them to hang at the maximum-security military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The Geneva Convention required the United States to give Germany three months’ notice before executing the German POWs. The U.S. War and State Departments sent documents to Berlin through the Swiss listing the formal charges and the verdicts. The Germans immediately demanded more: What were the circumstances of the killings? What evidence was presented? What defense was offered?
The War Department, led by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, brushed off the German demands. The U.S. government had good reason to withhold details in some of the murder cases. In the U-boat case, investigators had tortured some of the Germans into confessing to killing a known traitor, who the army had carelessly transferred from protective custody into a camp of his former comrades, who had wasted no time in strangling him. The U-boat case alone had sent seven of the 15 Germans to Leavenworth’s death row.
Secretary of War Stimson finally agreed to share with Germany the court records of the first POW camp murder case, in which five Germans at Camp Tonkawa in Oklahoma had been sentenced to die for taking part in a mob that fatally beat a fellow prisoner. German lawyers quickly reviewed the case and issued a furious rebuttal, along with a demand that the executions be halted. The Camp Tonkawa executions were only weeks away. The Germans did not wait for Stimson to respond. They had decided on a new approach.
On December 29 and 30, 1944 (while the Battle of the Bulge raged in the snowy Ardennes Forest), the German army and SS hauled 15 American POWs before secret military tribunals that sentenced them to death. The official charges were often “interfering with the operations of the Reich,” but most of the Americans’ offenses were minor. Two had momentarily blocked the path of a German sergeant tacking a propaganda poster to the POWs’ bulletin board. Several other Americans had punched guards but not injured them. An American pilot was sentenced to die for declaring in a passionate speech that he hoped to “see the entire German army wiped off the face of the earth.” Two of the 15 Americans were actually secret agents who were taught to expect the worst if captured.
U.S. authorities in Washington knew nothing about the flurry of death sentences against the Americans until the morning of Jan. 9, 1945, when a jarring telegram arrived from Berlin, through the Swiss. The Germans were proposing a trade: the lives of five condemned Americans — listed by name, rank and hometown — for the lives of the five German POWs from Camp Tonkawa. Two of the names on the list of Americans puzzled the War Department. One was misspelled and the other – one Lieutenant James Greyfield of Massachusetts — appeared nowhere in the military’s records. The State Department asked the Swiss to try to determine who Greyfield was.
Secretary of War Stimson burned with indignation at the Nazis’ unequal offer: Five Americans who had not harmed anyone for five Germans who had taken part in a mob that brutally beat a man to death. State Department officials urged Stimson to set aside his anger and consider the offer. What if the Americans were executed and the public found out that the government had passed up a chance to save them? Stimson agreed to halt the executions and allow negotiations. The Germans added more Americans to the exchange list.
The negotiations were marked by bartering and confusion. Berlin declared that one of the 15 condemned Americans, Louis Biagioni, who had parachuted into Nazi-occupied Italy to spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was worth two of the condemned Germans. But the Germans did not press the point. Finally, the United States offered to send all 15 prisoners at Leavenworth back home to Germany. In exchange, the U.S. wanted the 11 Americans it knew had been sentenced to death, plus any it did not yet know about. Berlin agreed. Both sides pledged to halt all executions during the negotiations. The United States tried to hurry the exchange along. The State Department proposed a mass exchange at two separate points along the border of Switzerland and Germany. At one point the German POWs would be released into Germany while simultaneously at the other point the 15 Americans would be handed over to the Allies.
But even as the deal was taking shape, Allied and Soviet armies were overrunning German territory and POW camps, liberating some of the 15 Americans from captivity into the chaos of Nazi Germany’s collapse. The exchange negotiations effectively ended on April 3, 1945, when Swiss diplomats reported that due to problems with the communications system in Germany, they had lost contact with the “responsible authorities” in Berlin and no longer knew where all of the 15 Americans were.
Germany surrendered on May 8. Army Provost Marshal General Archer Lerch immediately set out to confirm that all of the condemned Americans were back in Allied hands and out of danger. Lerch kept a list of the names and checked them off (although the mysterious Greyfield never was identified or found). Then, in a rapidly changing world at war’s end, U.S. authorities faced the question of what to do with the Germans ex-POWs on Leavenworth’s death row.
My new book details their fates. The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America, is a tale of murder, wartime justice and “hostage diplomacy” out of the vast network of German POW camps that spanned the United States during World War II. I was drawn to the story partly because no one has ever fully told it before.
The question of whether to hang the Germans was just one aspect of this story that I found thought-provoking. I also was fascinated by the way the German POWs held up a cracked mirror to the virtues and flaws of 1940s America. I was intrigued by the Germans’ claims that killing a traitor was an act of duty, not murder. Overall, I believe America tried to do the right thing for its masses of German prisoners and largely succeeded. The United States treated its prisoners of war better than any other major power in World War II. But we set aside our principles when we felt threatened by the camp murders. And I’m sorry to write that “hostage diplomacy” as practiced by the Nazis in The Fifteen — detaining foreign citizens with excessive charges or sentences so that they could be used in trade — is a growth industry today. The American WNBA basketball star Britney Griner for a Russian arms dealer nicknamed the “Merchant of Death”; Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in a large exchange that freed a Russian assassin. The State Department says dozens of other Americans are still being “wrongfully detained” in foreign countries.
William Geroux is the author of The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America. He has spent 25 years as a journalist, writing often about the military and winning awards for breaking news coverage, investigative journalism, and feature writing. A native of Washington, DC, and graduate of the College of William and Mary, Geroux lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
