The evening of Sept. 29, 1945, 2,500 Nazi soldiers settled into their wooden bunks tucked behind barbed wire fences for a muggy, mottled Camp Swift sunset in Bastrop, Texas. These German prisoners of the recently-victorious Allied Forces pulled taut their sheets and massaged sweat from the backs of their necks as they heard the prison camp’s PA system crackle to life. The voice of Baylor University professor Walter Howard Juniper overpowered the nesting doves cooing from the pines.
Speaking in German, Juniper greeted the inmates and proceeded to respond to a letter he’d received from a prisoner in camp, who asked him questions about the place they called Texas. After singing Home on the Range in German, Juniper shared his thoughts on being a Texan and an American, describing the merits of living in a free land as opposed to Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
“Adolf Hitler told you, ‘I want to see again in the eyes of the youth the team of the beast of prey,’” Juniper said. “But you understand now that he was thinking of the advantages this would bring to him and his party; he was not thinking of your future happiness or the happiness of your loved ones.”
A transcript of Juniper’s words — available in both German and English in The Texas Collection’s archive — offers a flickering glimpse of academics from Baylor and across the United States in World War II, who sought to better the experiences of prisoners of war held in American internment camps.
AXIS PRISONER CAMPS IN THE UNITED STATES
In World War II, Axis prisoners were incarcerated in POW camps across the globe, a number of which were located in small rural communities dotting the United States. According to Michael Waters’ book Lone Star Stalag: German Prisoners of War at Camp Hearne, Texas boasted 120 branch camps, housing 79,000 prisoners of German, Italian, and Japanese allegiance. The American camps were built to follow the Geneva Convention’s rules regarding POWs, which required that prisoners be kept a safe distance from combat and given quality living conditions.
“The agreement also stipulated that each camp provide facilities that encouraged physical activity, libraries that encouraged intellectual curiosity, and a setting that enabled prisoners to pursue religious worship,” noted Jeffrey Littlejohn and Charles Ford in their book The Enemy Within Never Did Without.
According to Littlejohn and Ford, American officials hoped that if the U.S. military strictly followed the outline provided in the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of prisoners, Germany and Japan would do the same with American POWs.
Many Nazi prisoners in Texas had been captured in North Africa as members of Hitler’s Afrika Korps. Once shipped to the Lone Star State, they were kept near small rural towns such as to be available as paid day laborers on farms, workshops, and lumber yards.
German POWs were also offered chances for entertainment and academic education. Littlejohn and Ford noted that prisoners were allowed to play basketball, baseball, and football and form choirs and orchestras, as well as theater troupes.
COLLEGE EDUCATION IN THE CAMPS
Today, displayed in the museum located on the site of Camp Hearne, just 60 miles south of Baylor’s campus, is the black composition notebook of a prisoner named Wilhelm Nellessen, containing detailed notes and drawings from an art history course he took while incarcerated –– possibly taught by faculty from Baylor or another Texas school. The bank employee-turned-Nazi soldier had only received an eighth-grade education, according to museum notes, because his father was out of work and could not afford to pay for him to enter high school. But at Camp Hearne, Nellessen had a second chance to learn.
“The thing in Germany was, Hitler had gotten jobs for everybody,” explained Melissa Freeman, museum program director for the Camp Hearne WWII Historic Site and Exhibit. “… But they only got an eighth-grade education in Germany. Well, you had to pay for high school. And Hitler got jobs for everybody, but they were low-paying, typically, and then he expected families to be huge … So most families could only send one kid, maybe two, to high school.”
Baylor University and 102 other American universities offered higher education to German soldiers, according to Arnold Krammer, as described in his book Nazi Prisoners of War in America. The college courses offered by the 102 institutions were unbelievably popular with the Camp Hearne POWs, Michael Waters wrote.
NAZISM REIGNS BEHIND BARBED WIRE
The United States government didn’t work to separate German prisoners of differing political ideologies, according to Littlejohn and Ford’s Enemy Within. This became troublesome for those German soldiers who didn’t believe in or agree with the Nazi cause they were fighting for, as there were violent clashes amongst pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi prisoners.
“And a lot of the people who got captured in North Africa did not want to fight for Germany, the German Nazi party, but they were forced into it,” Littlejohn recently told The Baylor Line. “So then when they got captured and sent to camps, the Nazis basically ran the POW camps and the American soldiers kind of let them keep their structure — their military structure — in place because that meant you had to do less to keep people in line. But the anti-Nazis hated that.”
There was, ironically, some hostility between the American soldiers and the anti-Nazi prisoners, because the anti-Nazi prisoners were seen as traitors or rats against their own people, Littlejohn noted in his book. Assaults and even murders of German defectors by pro-Nazi prisoners were repeatedly documented in Texas camps at the time.
AMERICAN PROPAGANDA: RE-EDUCATION EFFORTS
The lessons POWs learned in American internment camps were not all academic or recreational. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor hoped to teach POWs to embrace American values. To this end, propaganda materials were assembled with the help of college professors in order to “re-educate” Axis prisoners about the appeals of freedom and democracy.
Approximately 150 American military officers with higher education backgrounds were assigned to oversee the re-education process –– including Baylor’s Dr. Juniper, who had taken a leave of absence as Latin department chair to serve as a U.S. military officer in a series of Army and POW camps across the country, as reported in The Lariat. Many other American academics were glad to seek similar service.
“It was just part of your wartime duty,” Littlejohn told The Baylor Line. “I mean, I don’t think any of the professors got paid … I don’t think they were ashamed of it at all. They were very proud that they were teaching American democracy, you know, and trying … to convert Nazis to return to democracy, and they thought it was a patriotic endeavor.”
POW camp inmates were given books on democracy that Hitler had banned, and the former German soldiers were even shown films depicting the war’s atrocities, including the Holocaust.
While many Germans in American POW camps denounced Hitler and expressed a desire to establish democracy back home, according to Enemy Within, some historians have said the education POWs received about American democracy also taught them how segregated and racist the U.S. South was, which to them modeled another kind of white supremacy.
“Obviously, McLennan County and Walker County, these were not democratic societies,” Littlejohn said. “They were highly stratified by race, class, and gender. And so teaching democracy — I mean, the poll tax was in place in Texas throughout the war.”
A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH DR. JUNIPER
The Lariat articles from the 1940s describe the accolades and hobbies of Dr. Juniper –– a soldier, a Latin linguist, a music-lover and weekly disc jockey on campus radio station KIXS, and eventually an assistant dean at Baylor after the war. He gained some statewide renown for his DJ skills, which he said he had applied to his military work.
“During the war I did a ten-month stretch in a prisoner of war camp in charge of the German PW’s there,” Juniper told The Lariat in 1949. “As part of that program we had an elaborate public address system for the camp, and I delivered a weekly ‘fireside chat’ to the prisoners in German. The PW’s referred to the PA system as ‘Juniper’s Schrecken aus dem Luft,’ ‘Juniper’s Terror from the Air.’”
Only one transcript of Juniper’s re-education speeches survives for public consumption. It details the professor’s love not only for Texas history, but for the sentiments and values held by most Texans.
“We try not to be selfish,” Juniper had told the Camp Swift prisoners that September night in 1945, contrasting the Texan mindset to that of Adolf Hitler. “And our own happiness in our free land is clouded when we hear of the sufferings of others. Not that we all feel that way because we are not a perfect people, but I believe that most of us do. We teach our children that the greatest satisfaction in life comes from helping, not hurting one who is less fortunate than we are.”
