POWERGRAMS

As America prepared to enter World War II, preparations also were begun to house enemy soldiers captured by U.S. troops. The prison camps would need to be far inland, away from any coast, in sparsely populated areas with good transportation routes and a climate that wouldn't necessitate high energy costs. Aliceville fit the bill and in 1942 construction began on one of the biggest of more than 500 prisoner of war camps nationwide that would collectively house about 450,000 foreigners. Based on wartime propaganda about German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, some Aliceville residents feared "devil soldiers" would be brought into their midst. Despite those initial concerns, the prison would create an economic windfall for most of Pickens County. Three trains filled with the first prisoners of war rolled into town on June 2, 1942 as nearly everyone in Aliceville watched from sidewalks, porches and lumber piles alongside the Frisco depot. More than 6,000 POWs would soon reside within the tar-paper walls of the rows of barracks in the 838-acre, $2 million military prison built on a former dairy farm. Many of the POWs were stunned to see no destruction during their 1,050-mile journey from New York City to Alabama, having believed Hitler's propaganda that most major U.S. cities were in ruins from heavy Axis bombing. More surprising for the sick, wounded and ragged prisoners arriving in the rural South was eating the first good food they'd had since well before their capture. They marveled at the white bread they compared to cake back home. They ate peanut butter for the first time. "It tasted wonderful," a POW recalled years later. The Germans made the most of their stay in Camp Aliceville. They published their own newspaper "Der Zaungast." They put on plays like Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night." They played sports, had a jazz band, an orchestra, a choir. They watched hundreds of movies. They painted portraits and landscapes, made pottery, built marionettes and wrote books. "We had it better than anyone at home (during the war)," one POW said in a documentary about Camp Aliceville. The POW camp had a 250-bed hospital in a county that previously did not have a hospital. It had a baseball field, tennis courts, boxing arena, running track, officer and noncommissioned officer clubs, theaters and amphitheaters. Prisoners were fed three square meals each day, in line with the Geneva Convention rules routinely ignored by Germans and Japanese holding U.S. soldiers abroad. Some German prisoners worked on local farms and were paid 80 cents a day for their efforts. Seven Camp Aliceville prisoners died in two years: Two were killed trying to escape, four died from illness and one committed suicide before the prison closed in 1945. They are buried in an Anniston Cemetery where a memorial service is held each November. For decades after the war, former POWs returned to Aliceville to celebrate friendships with townsfolk, farmers and guards that developed under the most unusual circumstances. Some of the prisoners came back to live in the U.S. Ruth Beaumont Cook's 2006 book "Guests Behind the Barbed Wire; German POWs in America: A True Story of Hope and Friendship" provides details in a critically acclaimed 600-page account. Seventy-one years later, few of the 1,000 former U.S. Army guards or the POWs from Camp Aliceville survive. POWs Walter Felhoelter, 94, and Wilhelm Schlegel, 96, still talk occasionally with Aliceville Museum Executive Director John Gillum. Former guard Thomas Sweet lives in Massachusetts and calls sometimes to share his recollections to make sure Gillum's tour talks are historically accurate. Items taken from the prison are often sent by people who were there or by their surviving relatives, and Gillum makes room for them in the museum. "I'm one of those lucky people who loves what he does every single day," Gillum said. Camp Aliceville was World War II home to many captured Afrika Korps soldiers First POWs marched through town under close guard. PHOTO COURTESY ALICEVILLE MUSEUM German uniform donated by POW. German helmets in museum. 20

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