One of the largest WWII POW camps in the US was in Atlanta, Nebraska. Even before the US had any forces in the field, we agreed to take prisoners from England – since they were running out of room. The US Army set up a whole new branch, the Service Command, responsible for prisoner of war camps (the book notes that although the usual civilian abbreviation is “POW”, the official US Army abbreviation is “PW”). Nebraska was part of the Seventh Service Command, and the Army quickly condemned some farmland and set up a camp. The locals had mixed feelings; there were fears of fanatical Nazis in their midst, but there was simultaneously a great need for farm labor; around 1400 Phelps County residents had enlisted or been drafted and the county population wasn’t much more than 5000.

Prisoners on the Plains is by a local resident, and is mostly anecdotes strung together more or less chronologically; it would have benefited from some aggressive editing. Still, the stories are pretty interesting. The fears of Nazis were mostly unfounded; the Army weeded out hard core Nazis and sent them to high security camps. The prisoners were quite willing to work as farm laborers (the Geneva Convention allowed POWs to volunteer for work as long as it was not directly related to the war effort); working prisoners were paid eighty cents a day (in special script that could only be spent at the camp PX). Prisoners got along quite well with their hosts, many of whom were of German descent; fraternization was supposedly prohibited but farm wives often invited the POWs into their houses and made them home-cooked meals. In some cases this went a little further; one farmer forgot to pick up the POWs box lunches at the camp and loaned a POW his car to drive back and get them. Another gave a couple of POWs shotguns and sent them hunting when they saw pheasants and wondered what they were. (Encounters with local wildlife didn’t always end well; a group of POWs working in a cornfield saw a small black animal with a white stripe down its back and tried to catch it. Unfortunately they succeeded, and their clothes had to be burned).

There were a few escape attempts; the POWs usually didn’t have any idea how big the US was and thought Nebraska was 150 miles from New York City and 200 miles from Los Angeles. It wasn’t that hard to get out of the camp, but prisoners who did so usually turned around and checked themselves back into camp after walking for a day. A few said they weren’t trying to escape as much as just wander around a little.

The prisoners had a soccer field and a volleyball court; they put together an orchestra and a choir. There were English language and American history classes, and various crafts were available. The POWs said they were better fed in a US POW camp then they had been as German soldiers; however they complained about American bread and were allowed to set up their own bakery. There were a couple of clandestine endeavors, including a shortwave radio and a schnapps still (they were making it from grapefruit).

Author Glenn Thompson had a hard time getting official information about the camp; most of the records had been sent back to Germany or lost in a fire at a Federal records center in St. Louis. Thus many of the anecdotes were rumors that couldn’t be verified: that the prisoners had lynched a Nazi; that various prisoners had died by “suicide” but were actually murdered by fellow inmates; that one of the prisoners conducted a love affair with a Nebraska farm girl who met him at the wire every night. It took a long time to repatriate all the POWs after the war ended; some didn’t get back to Germany until 1948 (they continued to work but now were paid in dollars rather than script). Conditions in early postwar Germany were pretty awful and Thompson cites a couple of heartfelt letters from ex-POWs to acquaintances they had made in Nebraska, begging for things like soap, cooking oil and clothing.

Well illustrated, with numerous photographs, maps, and plans. Footnotes mostly refer to newspaper articles. A guard tower from the camp is preserved at the Phelps County museum in Holdrege (which is where I picked up this book). ( )