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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I thought they wuz Yankees.", 6 Jan 2005
At age 55, I've finally learned something about an American experience that ended two years before I was born. About time, don't you think?NAZI PRISONERS OF WAR IN AMERICA is a concise and (apparently) comprehensive overview, which describes the incarceration of the roughly 375,000 captured members of the German military in 500+ camps and branch camps thoughout the United States from May 1942 to July 1946. The book's eight chapters summarize the process from initial capture and dispatch westward across the Atlantic through repatriation and return to Europe. In between, author Arnold Krammer depicts the general layout of the camps, the life behind barbed wire, the work and re-education programs, the escapes, and the ideological tensions between the ardently Nazi minority and non-Nazi majority that generally resulted in internal control of a camp's inmate population by the former prisoner group. Each chapter has a 4 to 8 page photo section relevant to its topic. The 44 pages of notes, based on a 15-page bibliography, indicate a commendable and thorough level of research. As an informative exercise about an interesting topic, I can't find fault with NAZI PRISONERS OF WAR IN AMERICA. As a work of popular history for one casually interested in the subject, it's completely satisfying in all respects. At times, there's even humor of a sort. In the chapter "Escapes", the author relates the incident wherein three U-boat submariners fled into the hills of Tennessee, where one was subsequently shot dead by an old granny defending her water pump. When told by the local deputy sheriff whom she'd killed, she broke down saying she'd never have fired if she'd known the men were Germans. Asked who she thought the intruders were, she replied: "I thought they wuz Yankees." Bobbie Lee would have been proud.
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