7 Ways German POWs Tried to Escape American Camps

Christmas Eve, 1944. Three German navy men walk the farm roads outside Phoenix, Arizona, carrying pieces of a folding boat they built in secret. They wish the Americans they pass a merry Christmas. Nobody stops them. They're heading for a river that will float them to Mexico, and the river on their map is mostly dry sand. By the spring of 1945 America was holding more than 371,000 German prisoners of war, many of them behind nothing more than barbed wire and a few towers. Officials recorded 2,222 escape attempts. Not one of those men ever made it back to Germany. So what was actually holding them? It wasn't the wire. To be fair to the guards, the fence wasn't nothing. They were authorized to shoot, and a man crawling under wire at night had no idea how a nervous nineteen-year-old in a tower would react. But over and over, getting out turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was everything after: a thousand miles of farmland, clothing stamped P W, pockets full of camp coupons, and an accent that gave you away the moment you asked for a bus ticket. Historian Arnold Krammer counted 1,073 German escapes between November 1942 and February 1945. In fewer than twenty of them did an American civilian help. An Allied airman shot down over Europe could sometimes find a safe house. A German on the run in Alabama or Kansas found nobody. Without anyone planning it, the country itself became the outer fence. America didn't need a Colditz. It had a continent. What we go through: Walking off a work detail, and why it was a break from routine more than an escape Lifting the wire, and the Illinois sergeant whose story ends where nobody would guess Six prisoners from Camp Aliceville who stole a car and made it to Memphis Escape committees, camp tailors and printers, forged passes and homemade American uniforms U-boat captain Jurgen Wattenberg and the tunnel under Camp Papago Park The bathhouse, the coal box, and the faustball court the Army said yes to The night 25 men went down a 178-foot tunnel and nobody noticed The Gila River, the Mexican border, and the biggest manhunt in Arizona history Reinhold Pabel, who became Phillip Brick and ran a Chicago bookstore for eight years Georg Gaertner, who became Dennis Whiles and stayed hidden for forty years Said plainly on how it ended: every man from the Papago Park tunnel came back. The Army had assumed the ground was too hard to dig, head counts were sloppy, and the shovels were Army issue. The best-planned escape inside the United States got every man past the wire and still failed completely. Distance, weather, and a map that lied did what the guards couldn't. There is a twist in all of this. The men racing for home were the ones America swallowed. The one who got away was the one who never tried to leave. Gaertner came forward in 1985, surrendered on national television, and in 2009 became an American citizen. Tell me in the comments if anyone in your family remembers a POW camp near where they grew up. And tell me this: if you'd been Gaertner in 1945, with home now inside communist Poland, would you have gone back? #WW2 #WorldWar2 #POW #GermanPOW #PrisonerOfWar #PapagoPark #GreatPapagoEscape #WW2History #Arizona #HomeFront #EscapeStory #UBoat #MilitaryHistory #History #AmericanHistory