The United States Program For WWII German POWs That No One Talks About

Amidst all of war's justified self-defense and unjustified mass slaughter, certain stories tend to fall through the cracks. Take soldiers themselves. Not every soldier either shoots and kills someone, gets shot and dies, or trots home safely. Some get caught and taken as prisoners of war (POWs). Sometimes lots and lots get taken. And during World War II, the U.S. held over 400,000 German POWs in numerous camps across the U.S.

Many German POW camps were located in rural areas or near army bases. Estimates range from 511 total camps to almost 1,200, with some small enough to fit into a gymnasium. Conditions of POW camps of course vary wildly from country to country, and conflict to conflict. And while life at German POW camps in the U.S. wasn't exactly a stay at the Marriott, the U.S. abided by the 1929 Geneva Convention to provide POWs with shelter, food, and the chance to work. But there was another reason why German POWs were treated well, one related to the main point of the camps: interrogation. 

The U.S. intelligence-gathering program was detailed, complex, and well-structured. Using one well-documented, main camp as an example, P.O. Box 1142, the National Park Service outlines the strategy of the Army's Strategic Interrogation Center (MIS-Y). There were different divisions like the Enemy Intelligence Subsection, which focused on things like espionage, and the Air Subsection that focused on learning about German air power. While there are questions about the ultimate effectiveness of the camps, they certainly played a hand in turning the tide against the Axis powers.

It's not clear if every single German POW camp in the United States conducted an interrogation program, or if program specifics changed between camps. But, we can at least look at P.O. Box 1142, the secret name (and mailing address) of Fort Hunt, Virginia. Per the National Parks Service, P.O. Box 1142 was one of the more important camps that contained "high value POWs" as well as developed the U.S. military's critical "escape and evade" program, which helped extract operatives abroad. As the 2022 book, "Nazis on the Potomac" says, more than 3,400 German POWs (including 15 generals) passed through Fort Hunt. This information, plus all related interrogation program data, was declassified only in the early 1990s, about fifty years after World War II ended in 1945. 

Overall, the interrogation program was a joint intelligence-gathering venture overseen by the Army but conducted by the Army's Military Information Support (MIS) and the Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Topics of interrogation cover the full gamut. We mentioned the Enemy Intelligence Subsection (German espionage, counterintelligence) and Air Subsection (aircraft weaponry, the German rocket program, discussions of fallout based on Allied attacks). Then there's the Army Subsection (the ground version of the Air Subsection), the Industrial Economics Subsection (the ins and outs of the German war machine from a manufacturing perspective), the Scientific Research Subsection (scientific ventures related to the military), and the Navy-led interrogation of German U-boat crew (the water version of the Air and Army Subsections). All in all, these subsections generated over 5,000 reports between 1942 and 1945 for use by various military branches.

The public will be wondering how closely the treatment of German POWs during World War II mirrors the torture techniques employed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Thankfully, there was no physical torture of German POWs, although psychological measures like threats were not off-limits. As German-speaking POW Army interrogator, Rudolph Pins told CBS, "You don't get people to talk by beating them or waterboarding or anything of that nature." Pins admitted that while he didn't use physical coercion, he did use "psychological" methods. 

This American Life contains a treasure trove of documents, like a bound "Interrogation Course" describing to interrogators how to conduct an interrogation. Advice includes, "Asking direct questions is ordinarily the best and quickest way to get answers," "Starting with easy routine chatter, we must stimulate this urge to answer our questions," and, "The job of the intelligence officer at the front comes closest to that of a newspaper reporter." It's all very level-headed, common sense, and psychologically focused. Each session generated a multi-page report, resulting in hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.

While the entire program focused on face-to-face conversations, it supplemented its findings through other methods. Camps contained listening devices, for instance, and wielded willing informants who supplied the military with information. To help things along, camps separated the "staunch Nazis," per Veterans Breakfast Club, from run-of-the-mill soldiers who held no or minimal ideological leanings. Camps also introduced "re-education programs" late in the war to try and pave the way for a cooperative, post-war period. 

The U.S. military was still feeling its way through the whole interrogation thing when World War II broke out, and trying to figure out how to go about conducting such a program. The first step was quality interrogators, without whom nothing else worked. The National Parks Service tells the tale of one such Jewish interrogator, the aforementioned Rudy Pins, whose parents shipped him to the U.S. from Germany to save him from Nazis when he was 12. He not only spoke German, but he understood German culture. NPS Ranger Sarah Gamble told Military.com of the German Jew interrogators, "These were incredibly smart individuals who were recruited here and very passionate about winning the war." Pins died in 2016 at the age of 95.

Then there was interrogator training. We already mentioned handbooks written to steer interrogators in the right direction. These handbooks focused on soft skills like conversational abilities, approachability, trustability, and such. And if this all sounds rather mild for POWs, the American public thought so, too. The House Military Affairs Committee sent investigators into POW camps to investigate their "golden cage[s]," as Smithsonian Magazine quotes one POW. The committee even drafted a "POW Coddling Report," which found no such coddling.

One final piece of information regarding interrogator training comes from a 1943 Army Air Forces training video on The Best Films Archives. The video shows some impressive example interrogations of not only German, but Italian and Japanese prisoners (in their own languages). The example interrogations focus on adjusting the conversation for nationality and culture.

No matter how beneficial the U.S. interrogation program was to thwarting enemy operations during World War II, it helped produce the immensely strategically valuable Operation Paperclip after the war ended. For those who don't know, Operation Paperclip constituted one of the cleverest — and most morally uncomfortable — moves by U.S. military intelligence, ever. 

Headed by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), Operation Paperclip involved filching prominent German scientists from Germany as World War II wound down. The reason was simple: Keep them from working for the U.S.S.R. and make them work for the U.S., instead. The U.S. imported over 1,600 such scientists and their families following the war, in the process stowing concerns about war crimes or criminal prosecution. Amongst these people was Wernher von Braun, who developed Germany's deadly V-2 rocket fired on London during the war. It's with von Braun's expertise that the U.S. modified the V-2 rocket into the Saturn V rocket that took the U.S. to the moon in 1969 before the U.S.S.R.

But before all of this, von Braun arrived in the U.S. at Fort Strong in Boston in the fall of 1945. There, he and some fellow scientists met some of the same P.O. Box 1142 interrogators who'd gotten intelligence back at Fort Hunt during the height of the war. Presumably, von Braun was interrogated by members of the Scientific Research Subsection mentioned earlier. Thus the U.S. interrogation program, and the skills that the interrogators learned, segued directly into Operation Paperclip and U.S. geopolitical power during the Cold War.

When looking at the ultimate effectiveness of the U.S. World War II interrogation program, it clearly helped stop plenty of Axis operations. At the same time, interrogator Rudy Pins felt less sure when asked if the program worked. As he told CBS, "I would hope so, but, you know, it's like a jigsaw puzzle. You need all the pieces to get the picture, and we got some of the pieces."

However, according to military.com, interrogators discovered the location of Germany's V-1 and V-2 rocket-making plant in Peenemünd, Germany, which was bombed by Allied forces. The interrogators also gained intelligence that helped stop a German U-boat from reaching Japan — a U-boat carrying eight atomic bomb's worth of nuclear material. The submarine also contained tons of instructions regarding advanced German aircraft, subs, radar, and more. These are two very prominent examples besides general German military maneuvers, weaponry, and more.

Also of value was the face-to-face exposure that each side — American and German — had to each other. It was through the U.S. interrogation program that a distinction emerged between German people, in general, and members of the Nazi party, specifically. Curator of the Fort Robinson Museum, Tom Buecker, says of the POW camps in Smithsonian Magazine, "Half of the prisoners had no inclination to sympathize with the Nazi Party," and less than 10% were "hardcore ideologues."