One of the least-known stories of World War II is the internment of nearly 400,000 enemy soldiers from Germany, Italy, and Japan on American soil.  By the end of the war in 1945 the U.S. government had established 155 base camps and more than 500 branch camps for prisoners of war (POWs). Prisoners were held in all of the 48 continental states except Nevada, North Dakota and Vermont. Most of these facilities went up in the South and southwest, which offered isolation, security, and a warm climate.¹  The War Department eventually set up seventeen base and branch camps across North Carolina.  Two of the camps were in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, and enemy prisoners from the Winston-Salem camp are said to have helped build the barns at Coble Dairy in Davidson County.

 

North Carolina received its first group of POWs when 32 German sailors were rescued May 9, 1942, from U-boat 352.   The U-boat was sunk by the U. S. Coast Guard Cutter Icarus off the coast near Morehead City, NC. 15 Germans were lost, and the survivors were confined at Fort Bragg.  The boat was discovered in 1975 in 110 feet of water.  U-Boat attacks on US ships were frequent off the Outer

Above is Bruce Berrier of Lexington, NC, who served in the US Coast Guard, patrolling NC beaches on horseback.

Banks of NC, and there was fear that the enemy would come ashore. The Geneva Convention provided that the living quarters and rations of prisoners of war equal that of the captor country’s forces. The US generally treated POWs well and hoped that the Axis governments would reciprocate by treating American soldiers fairly. POWs were housed either in tents with wood heaters or in heated barracks. The prisoners were astonished by the amount and quality of the food they received, finding life in an American POW camp to be much more luxurious than life in the German army. During their free time, they formed music bands, worked on art projects, grew flower and vegetable gardens, and played soccer.
   
The Geneva Convention allowed captor nations to employ POWs as long as the men were well cared for and did not work in war-related jobs. Prisoners became an important source of labor in the US, which faced a great manpower shortage due to military enlistments. Most POWs in North Carolina performed agricultural work, such as planting or harvesting crops. Others cut timber or labored on military bases. 

Prisoners hired out to private contractors earned the same pay as regular workers, but eighty cents a day which went into their personal savings accounts or into coupons for use in the base canteen. The remaining money from their labor went back to the United States government, and was used to provide libraries, recreational equipment, and other comforts in camp.
   
On October 18, 1944, Winston-Salem Aldermen approved the use of the Armory at Ninth and Patterson Streets by the United States Government for holding German Prisoners of War.²  The next month, R.J. Reynolds in Winston-Salem, NC, arranged for 200 German POWs to work in its leaf houses. During the war, R.J. Reynolds provided Camels to American soldiers overseas, as well as to President Roosevelt. Closer to home, George Coble’s premier 4,000 acre dairy farm near Lexington maintained a large herd of dairy cattle, and was supplying milk products to the Army overseas. German POWs from the Winston-Salem camp are said to have helped build the barns that are located on the property.³         
  
German POWs are said to have helped build the large barns at Coble Dairy in Davidson County.  However, news of the POWs presence in the US was discouraged, and very little information can be found in newspapers during WWII.

Farmers who contracted with the American military for laborers knew of the German presence, but otherwise the federal government kept the POWs a relative secret. Newspaper coverage and public knowledge were intentionally limited until the end of the war, to uphold the provisions of the Geneva Convention, which said prisoners of war not be subjected to public ridicule. 
   
Occasionally there was an FBI notice of an escape or a story about the recapture of escaped POWs, but not if the military could capture the escapee without public knowledge. Few POWs attempted to escape American prisons. This was largely due to the treatment POWs received in the camps. Another reason was that the camps were so far away from Germany and the war if the men escaped, they could not return home, nor could they rejoin the German army.⁴   

Though there were a total of twenty-nine escape attempts from North Carolina POW camps, only one was “successful.” In 1953 a Camp Butner escapee from the war years turned himself in to the FBI in Cincinnati, Ohio.⁵  But there was often tension in the POW camps. Many of the German soldiers captured early in the war were members of the elite Afrika Korps, and they believed strongly in a Nazi victory. But some of the captured were not actually German citizens, but men of other nationalities who had been captured and forced to fight in the German army.⁶  Once captured, a number of them revealed their anti-Nazi feelings and proclaimed themselves loyal to their respective national governments or the Allies. German soldiers captured later in the war had experienced firsthand the devastation brought on their country by the Allied armies, and they thought German defeat was inevitable. These different factions often clashed over their political views, and violence erupted in some camps.
   
As the Allied victory approached, the War Department began to reeducate German POWs, teaching them about democracy and the American way of life before they returned home. At Camp MacKall in Richmond and Scotland Counties, prisoners organized political parties and voted on issues to understand the democratic process. POWs at Camp Butner north of Durham learned about tolerance when a local Jewish merchant provided them with hard-to-find band equipment. After viewing films of liberated concentration camps, one thousand men at that camp removed their uniforms and burned them in outrage. Yet some prisoners pointed out that widespread discrimination against African Americans and other minorities existed in the United States.
   
With the return of peace, POWs in the United States continued to work until the American army was demobilized and the many thousands of veterans reentered the work force. By 1947 most had returned home. At the end of the war, all of the POW compounds in North Carolina were abandoned, and the land and many of the buildings were sold as surplus property. Today only a small number of people remember when prisoners of war lived, worked, and even played soccer in the Tar Heel State.

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1.  “A Long Way from Home: Prisoners of War in North Carolina during World War II,” Tom Belton, Curator of Military History, North Carolina Museum of History. [Belton’s article is the primary resource for this piece.]
2.  City of Winston-Salem Government Meetings Notes, 1940-1949.
3.  http://www.turninghousemillworks.com/sources_rjrts.
4.  “Enemies and Friends: POWs in the Tar Heel State,” Dr. Robert D. Billinger, Jr. Excerpted from Tar Heel Junior Historian, Spring 2008 issue.
5.  Kurt Rossmeisl walked away from Camp Butner on August 4, 1945, and caught a train to Chicago. He lived under the name Frank Ellis, obtained a social security card, found a job, and even joined a Moose lodge. Tired of being on the run, Rossmeisl finally turned himself in on May 10, 1959, fourteen years after the end of the war. One German POW escapee remains unaccounted for today.
6.  Camp Butner at one point held 332 Czechs, 150 Poles, 147 Dutchmen, 117 Frenchmen, 34 Austrians, 11 Luxembourgers, and 1 Lithuanian.