In the summer of 1945, inside prisoner-of-war camps across the United States, German soldiers were led into camp theaters and mess halls and ordered to sit. There would be no Hollywood feature that evening. The U. S.
Army had directed every German prisoner in the country to watch a single twenty-minute film. At Camp Blanding in Florida, one company of prisoners emerged from the screening and began collecting donations. At Camp Butner in North Carolina, a historian later wrote that a thousand men burned their German uniforms. The question was what the army had put on that screen, and why it wanted every one of them to see it.
By the spring of 1945, the United States was holding more than 370,000 German prisoners of war in camps spread across nearly every state. Many had been captured in North Africa and Italy, and a larger number in France. The army gave them food, shelter, and paid wages for their labor because the United States had signed the Geneva Convention and was determined to honor it. Many of the prisoners still believed in Hitler.
Behind the barbed wire, hardline Nazis enforced their own order, and a man who spoke against Hitler risked being beaten in his barracks at night. In April 1945, as American troops were opening the gates of German camps, the Under Secretary of War and the army’s personnel division made a decision. Every German prisoner of war held in the United States would be required to watch a film about what had been found there. The orders for that film went to the Army Signal Corps written point by point.
Two reels, about twenty minutes total. The worst footage the cameramen had recorded. A German-language narration would state the location, the camp name, and the date of each scene, plus one additional line. The purpose of the narration was to remind the prisoners that they had been treated in America according to the Geneva Convention.
A film made to those specifications would have taken months. The army did not wait. On May 8, the day the war in Europe ended, a telegram went out to every service command in the country. German prisoners of war were to be shown films about German atrocities, and army newsreels of the camps could be shown in camp theaters free of charge.
Special screenings for the prisoners were authorized. Camp commanders would arrange them, and one rule was stated explicitly. No entertainment films were to be shown in the same program as the atrocity footage. So that summer, camp by camp, the lights went down.
The film most of them saw was called KZ, the German abbreviation for concentration camp. It was short and had no actors. It was cut from footage shot by Allied cameramen that spring as the camps were liberated. American guards stood at the back of the room.
When the film ended, prisoners were asked to write down their opinions, or their own German camp leaders interrogated them and sent summaries to the American commander. At Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the film had a strong effect. A prisoner identified only as Joseph Kay remembered it years later. He said, “We were forced to watch films about concentration camps.
This was our first knowledge that these things happened. It was hard for Americans to believe, but we truly did not know. ”
Not every man in those rooms was ready to hear that. At Fort Robinson in the far northwestern corner of Nebraska, every prisoner was required to watch the film, and the anti-Nazis in the camp had been waiting for it.
They wanted evidence to put before the others. The hardliners had an answer ready. Some said the bodies were not Jews at all, but natives slaughtered by the British in India. In other camps, men said the dead were German civilians killed in Allied bombing raids.
One reporter was told that some men believed the bodies in the film were Germans tortured by the Russians. Some laughed out loud when the narrator said there had been 300 camps. Many did not laugh. At Camp Blanding in northern Florida, an entire company of prisoners watched the film on June 10, 1945.
Afterward, their German spokesman wrote a memorandum and sent it to the American command. He wrote that the company had seen through a motion picture how the German government had mistreated and tortured to death citizens, foreigners, and prisoners of war. Then he wrote what they had decided to do voluntarily. The company resolved to send 411 dollars to the German Red Cross to be used for women, children, and men, regardless of their religion, who had suffered the most.
The final lines of the memorandum demanded that all those criminals, whatever their party or military unit, receive just punishment. Blanding was not the only camp that collected donations. In other camps, prisoners took up collections for the survivors of the German camps. 411 dollars was real money in a prisoner-of-war camp.
The army paid a working prisoner 80 cents a day, mostly in canteen vouchers. At Eagle Field airfield in Florida, prisoners who watched the atrocity films donated 2,371 dollars to American war charities, and the New York Times printed the story in all the camps. By November 1945, German prisoners had donated about a million dollars of their camp wages to the International Red Cross for the Europeans who had suffered from the war. Then there was Camp Butner.
It lay in the pine woods north of Durham, North Carolina, built to hold about 5,000 men. In 1977, historian Judith Gansberg summed it up in one sentence. A thousand men at Camp Butner voluntarily burned their German uniforms. A prisoner’s uniform was often the only clothing he had brought with him from the war.
Camp Butner also held another group of prisoners in their own compound. By June 1945, it contained 792 men who had been forced into the German army against their will. 332 Czechs, 150 Poles, 147 Dutch, 117 French, and a few dozen others. Some men at Butner had never chosen that uniform at all.
No one recorded the names of the men who took part in that fire. A German historian who read the written prisoner responses from every camp found that burning uniforms was rare. She wrote that it may have been the only unambiguous sign that a man had broken his connection with the regime. The army wanted to know how far the film had reached the prisoners.
So it asked. Before sending prisoners home, it surveyed more than 20,000 of them. Only 36 percent of the men questioned accepted what they had been shown about the camps as fact. The army did not press the question further.
It presented the evidence and reminded them of how they themselves had been treated. When the office of the Provost Marshal General wrote the history of the program in 1946, it stated that the prisoners were impressed by the truth, not by propaganda, to the point that they felt it was they themselves who were making the new decisions. By the summer of 1946, the last German prisoners had left the American camps. Many of them would not see Germany for another year or two, and at home the Germans would soon be shown the same kind of images.
Some of them had already seen those images once, in a dark room in Mississippi, Nebraska, Florida, or North Carolina, with an American guard standing at the door.