In May 1945, German prisoners at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, made an offer through the spokesman for their camp. They would join the American army to fight Japan. When that war ended, they would return to being prisoners for five more years. What they hoped to gain was American citizenship.
These men had fought in Hitler’s army. Three months before their request, a captain in the army’s prisoner of war office had already written a secret plan to recruit German prisoners for the war against Japan. The prisoners wanted to join. The army had a plan to let them.
So why did a top-secret memo close that door? The offer reached newspapers on May 12, four days after Germany’s surrender. A short Associated Press story appeared on the front page of the Evening Star in Washington. A number of German prisoners of war at the base camp had asked to join the American army in the war against Japan, then return to their prisoner status for five years, all in an attempt to earn American citizenship.
The request came through the camp’s prisoner spokesman. No number of men was given. The camp commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Schalk, confirmed receiving the request. He did not say what the army might do about it, though he told the reporter it was unlikely the offer would be accepted.
Five more years behind the wire, volunteered by men who had fought for Hitler. Were they truly serious? Five weeks earlier, in a Massachusetts camp, the army had already seen what some German prisoners were willing to put their names to. In early April, the War Department released a document written by German prisoners at Camp Devens, northwest of Boston.
It was addressed to their countrymen still fighting at home. It told them to stop believing the Nazi government, then said plainly: throw down your arms immediately, stop the war, surrender. The army said the prisoners had begun the appeal themselves. Of the 3,102 German prisoners held at Devens, 1,391 signed it voluntarily.
Not every man in the camp, not even half. The War Department broadcast it to the Reich. Other camps moved as well. At Florence, Arizona, a camp previously known as pro-Nazi, prisoners sent the army a sincere message of condolence when President Roosevelt died in April.
Then, on May 8, Germany surrendered. For prisoners in America, the war was over. At Devens, the anti-Nazis wrote again that month. This time, 367 prisoners signed a memorandum asking for speedy repatriation to help build a new democratic Germany.
Many prisoners wanted to go home and rebuild. But at Fort Sheridan, near Chicago, one group asked for something entirely different. Their war was over. America’s was not.
Across the Pacific, the battle of Okinawa still raged. Kamikaze aircraft struck American ships, and the army was moving men from Europe to the other side of the world. In June, President Truman told Congress that millions of American soldiers were being redeployed across the hemisphere for the war against Japan. Historian Arnold Krammer, in his 1979 history of these camps, wrote that some prisoners went further than any appeal.
Thousands of prisoners, by his count, volunteered to join the American army, unbelievable as it seemed, to fight against the Japanese. Fort Sheridan was not the only camp. In June, an intelligence officer at Camp Crowder, Missouri, sent a secret report to his command. Its subject was enlisting foreigners in the American army.
It seemed like something new. But for one army office, it was not. That office was the Special Projects Division for prisoners of war. This division ran the army’s quiet program to re-educate German prisoners away from Nazism.
Its own people called it the Factory. Inside the Factory, a captain named Walter Schirnstedt ran a branch of the program. Back in October 1943, Italian prisoners at an Arizona camp had volunteered to fight the Nazis. By then, Italy had surrendered to the Allies and, that same month, declared war on Germany.
The Factory had also seen a more successful effort: prisoners holding Allied citizenship had been returned to their own armies. The idea took root. If Italians would fight their former ally, could Germans be turned against theirs? On February 2, 1945, three months before Germany’s surrender, Schirnstedt sent a memo to his division director.
It was titled “The War Against Japan and German Prisoners of War. ” Krammer described it as a startling four-page proposal. Its goal was to create anti-Japanese feeling among the prisoners. The arguments were designed for men raised on Nazi ideas.
The memo claimed their own Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had coined the phrase “the Yellow Peril. ” It reminded them that Japan had fought against Germany in World War I. Then it used Nazi racial doctrine against them. The memo argued that Hitler’s alliance with Japan stood in clear contradiction to every racial principle the Nazi party promoted.
The memo also listed what America would gain. It would make use of German officers and soldiers the United States did not want returning to Germany, it said, as long as the Nazi guerrilla war continued. It would also prevent a complete moral collapse among the prisoners by giving them a positive mission in a just cause. The prisoners were promised something as well.
Parts of Alaska, western Canada, or islands in the southwest Pacific might one day be opened to new settlers. In exchange for their service against Japan, German prisoners could be promised a place there. The memo even gave the unit a name: the German Volunteer Corps. The generals who read it were not interested in the Kaiser so much as in something else.
In Krammer’s words, it was not those arguments that drew them, but the clear goal of saving American lives. One German volunteer in the Pacific might mean one fewer American sent into combat. So a top-secret committee at the highest military level gave the plan serious consideration. It included planning and operations offices, the Judge Advocate General’s office, military intelligence, and the office of the chief of military police, which ran the prisoner of war camps.
After lengthy discussions, the judgment came down on May 23. It was signed by Brigadier General S. L. Scott, deputy director of planning and operations.
Its title: “Use of German Prisoners of War on a Voluntary Basis as Combat Troops in the War Against Japan. ” The committee concluded that German prisoners could fight for the United States in only two ways: as regular soldiers in the United States Army or as mercenaries. Neither was acceptable. The first problem was the soldier.
A German soldier would be entitled to all the rights and privileges of an American soldier: pensions, benefits for his family, the GI Bill, and, the memo noted, possibly the right to American citizenship. The second problem was the mercenary. A paid foreign legion would require a decision by Congress. It would also establish, for the first time, a precedent that was unsound from a democratic point of view.
On the same day, General Brehon Somervell, who commanded Army Service Forces, concurred and sent his own memo to the chief of staff. A popular history published by Time-Life in 1981 summarized it in a single sentence: some prisoners volunteered to fight Japan, an idea that received serious attention from American military authorities. The subject was closed. But the letter writers did not stop.
Krammer wrote that newly “democratized” German prisoners continued, in vain, to offer their combat services on behalf of the United States. In late June, 125 German noncommissioned officers at a subcamp in Brush, Colorado, sent a lengthy petition to the chief of military police, Major General Archer Lerch. They pledged themselves to the Four Freedoms of the Atlantic Charter. The petition was recorded in the name of an ordinary soldier named Heinrich Carstens.
In August, after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered. The German Volunteer Corps never existed on the ground. Yet the letters kept arriving. Historian Judith Gansberg found that by autumn 1945, there was a wave of letters from prisoners volunteering to join the American army.
One came from a prisoner the archives identified only by his first name: Erich F. He wrote that he wished to serve for a list of goals: the elimination of Nazism, the end of the war, and eventually the rebuilding of a way of life in some country, in case the United States refused immigrants. He was not only offering to fight. He was asking for a future somewhere, in case America would not take him.
Why did the army refuse requests from men who were offering to fight for it? The reasons stated in the memo, as Krammer reported them, came down to what approval would mean. An enlisted German soldier would receive all the rights of an American soldier, even if he had worn a German uniform a year earlier. Employing a force of foreigners would require an act of Congress, and the committee had called that precedent unsound for a democracy.
And the men at Fort Sheridan? They had offered five years behind the wire for one thing: a chance at citizenship. In Washington, the committee had studied the same idea from a different angle. The committee noted that enlisting a German prisoner in the American army would most likely give him the right to become an American.
The prisoners saw that as the great prize. The committee saw it as one of the costs of saying yes. None of these men ever fought for America. But something had changed in many of them by 1945.
At Camp Butner, North Carolina, the army showed its prisoners a 25-minute film. Afterward, about a thousand of them burned their German uniforms. What those prisoners saw on that screen led them to burn the uniform they had once fought in.