Helmut Reese, prisoner at Fort Jackson’s POW Camp. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Basic Combat Museum
During World War II, as many as 3,000 German soldiers lived near Trenholm Road in Northeast Columbia, South Carolina. Deep in a quiet neighborhood is a small white concrete blockhouse, the only remnant of the Germans’ presence, but the Germans did not choose to live in Columbia; they were prisoners of war.
Wyndham Manning ran for governor of South Carolina in 1942, narrowly losing to Olin Johnston. Colonel Manning was appointed commander of the Fort Jackson prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, and after the war, Gov. Strom Thurmond appointed Manning as head of the South Carolina prison system, where he served until he retired in 1962.
Colonel Manning did not speak German, and as very few American guards spoke German either, the prisoners ran the camp inside the prison fence. The highest-ranking officer became the camp spokesman, and he maintained a high degree of discipline. Escape attempts were almost unknown as the POWs settled into a better life than they had known in prewar Germany.
Food preparation and cooking were done by the POWs with menus of cabbage, potatoes, pork, pig’s knuckles, wurst, fish soup, and — a German favorite — white bread. Many of the vegetables were grown on-site. Canteens operated by the POWs carried items such as cigarettes and toiletries.
The prison camp had rows of dormitory buildings covered in tar paper, a kitchen-dining building, a toilet-shower building, a recreation building, an administrative building, and an infirmary. The camp had an athletic field and a vegetable garden. Surrounding the camp was an 8-foot barbed wire fence with guard towers at each corner.
Sports were encouraged, as were education classes in history, languages, and the arts. Fort Jackson offered English, German, algebra, bookkeeping, mechanical drawing, bricklaying, and more. Plays and musicals were performed occasionally using homemade instruments; one violin was made from matchsticks. In another case, a piano was made using scrap wood, wire, and animal bones. Profits from the canteen were used to purchase musical instruments and costumes. Nearby neighbors could sit on their porches at night and listen to the Germans sing folk songs.
Out of concern for our own prisoners in Germany, the War Department followed the rules of the Geneva Convention of 1929 to the letter. The International Red Cross inspected each camp for compliance. Some Americans felt the POWs in this country were treated too well — in fact, better than our own federal prisoners. As the war was ending and news of the horrors of German concentration camps became known, the War Department learned of the harsh treatment of American prisoners. Consequently a reduction of food was imposed on the German prisoners in America, reducing each man to 1,000 calories per day.
Little thought had been given to prisoners of war being brought to America until the fall of Rommel’s German African Corps (Afrika Korps) in the summer of 1943. The Afrika Korps was formed in 1941, and one of Hitler’s favorite generals, Erwin Rommel, was designated as commander. Most prisoners from the Afrika Korps were sent to Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but there were plenty of prisoners to go around. At one point during World War II, more POWs were in North America than soldiers in the United States Army at the beginning of the war.
Initially, the British housed POWs in England but soon realized that they would not be able to cope with huge numbers, so they pleaded with the United States to take POWs to America. During World War I, only 1,346 enemy soldiers had been confined in the United States, so the War Department had neither housing nor guidelines for the care of POWs in this country. By May 1945, the number of POWs in America reached 426,000, of whom 372,000 were German; 50,000 were Italian; and 4,000 were Japanese.
Camps were built in haste, designed by the War Department and located mostly in the South and Southwest of the United States. Major camps housed around 2,000 prisoners, while small camps ranged in size from 200 to 600 men. POW camps were located in more than a dozen South Carolina towns, including Aiken, Greenwood, Hampton, Myrtle Beach, and Walterboro, eventually totaling more than 11,000 prisoners.
The authorities tried to segregate the Nazis, considered to be 10 percent of the POWs, from the other 90 percent, but the flood of POWs made this task impossible. One camp in Alva, Oklahoma, was singled out as the die-hard Nazi and Gestapo camp, but every camp surely had a few pro-Nazi prisoners. The Nazis generally were feared by the other prisoners, and in some cases, the Nazis were responsible for the deaths of POWs they considered traitors to the cause. Usually the killings were done by strangulation or beatings with stone-filled socks.
Early on, the arrival of German soldiers in South Carolina caused a certain amount of fear and apprehension among the general population; however, this soon changed as farmers and others got to know the POWs working on their farms and factories. Farmers were allowed to apply for German POWs to work on their farms. Farmers who were successful in securing this labor were required to pay each man $3.50 per day. Of that amount, the prisoners received 10 cents to be used only in the canteen, 80 cents that was held until the end of the war in an account for each man, and the remainder paid to the government for the cost of housing and feeding the POWs.
Most of the labor in South Carolina prison camps was used on farms and in the timber industries. During harvest, POWs packed peaches on railroad platforms or picked cotton. A cotton farmer in the Pee Dee who had studied cotton production in Europe took advantage of the experience and skill of the German POWs. The POWs reorganized his cotton warehouse and became valuable members of his farming operation. He valued the German prisoners so much that he made them homemade lunches every day of liverwurst sandwiches instead of the prison camp provided fare of baloney sandwiches and cold coffee. When the Pee Dee prison camp closed at the end of the war, he gave each man a silver dollar and a carton of cigarettes and asked him to write when he got home. The South Carolina State Museum contains 27 letters from the prisoners to the cotton farmer asking for his help. He replied to each request with a box of food that included sugar, coffee, and chocolates.
Attempts to escape POW camps were rare considering the number of POWs in the United States, but they did happen. In 1944, four POWs left a work detail near Aiken and stole a car to drive to Columbia with the idea of stealing a plane and flying back to Germany. They were found buried under the sand in a railroad car.
In Maryland, one POW made several practice escapes during which he actually left the camp and later returned so he could perfect his ultimate escape.
In Arizona, 25 submarine officers escaped through a 200-foot tunnel they had dug through rocky soil. All were captured 170 miles away — 40 miles into Mexico — with 100-pound backpacks carrying clothes, maps, medical supplies, and cigarettes.
Two POWs escaped from a camp west of the Ashley River near Charleston to “get away from it for a while.” They dug a cave and equipped it with food, candles, and a wooden floor and stayed there until the prison guards found them three days later.
Three POWs in Tennessee escaped into the hills and stopped to get water from an old woman’s well. The shotgun-toting granny ordered them off her property. When they ignored her, she fired the gun and killed one of the men. The sheriff explained the men were POWs, whereupon the old lady wept, saying, “I thought they was Yankees.”
Punishment for escape attempts generally was light, amounting to solitary confinement on bread and water for several days. Only five men succeeded in avoiding capture. Of those, only one man was never heard from again and is presumed to have stayed in the United States as he had said he never intended to return to Europe.
After the surrender of Japan, the camps in South Carolina began to be dismantled, concluding with Fort Jackson, which closed in June 1946. United States Sen. Burnet Maybank from South Carolina had wanted to have all of the camps dismantled before the troops returned from Europe, but the farmers convinced him to change his position. Most of the farm labor had been drafted into the Army or had gone to work for the defense industry, where men could make $8 per day instead of $4 per day on the farms. Thousands of POWs were sent to France, England, and the Netherlands to work in mining, farming, and construction, helping to rebuild what the war had destroyed. Some POWs worked months, even years, before returning to their homes.
For years after World War II, Germans arrived in Columbia looking for the place they spent the war as POWs. They would find the quiet Trenholm Road neighborhood, knock on the door of a building they recognized, and the current owner would show them around. South Carolina did not ask to house prisoners-of-war in towns throughout the state, but the farmers benefited from the inexpensive labor and the knowledge of the men from Europe.
