In May of 1943, as American and British forces were wrapping up their operations in North Africa and preparing for an invasion of Sicily, United States military personnel in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, were making their own unique contribution to the Allied war effort. Deep in the heart of the Michaux State Forest, an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp was being renovated for an entirely new purpose: to detain and interrogate German prisoners. This site, referred to in official War Department documents as the "Pine Grove Prisoner of War Camp," was classified as "secret," and its existence and mission (to glean vital strategic intelligence from German prisoners of war) were largely unknown to the local inhabitants. This long-kept secret is perhaps one of Cumberland County's most intriguing historical events of the Twentieth Century.
The Second World War was the first and only war in which the United States found itself holding a massive number of enemy prisoners on American soil. Men and war material were transported to Europe and North Africa in American ships; and the empty ships returned to the continental United States with enemy prisoners, thus alleviating the logistical and security crisis presented by the increasing number of Axis prisoners in Allied hands. This gargantuan and unanticipated task became the responsibility of the Army's Provost Marshall General's Office (PGM0).1
The War Department and the PGMO were wholly unprepared to deal with the overwhelming number of enemy troops that were disembarking in Atlantic seaports in the summer of 1943. The War Department had no experience to guide them in establishing the administrative and logistical system required to transport, process, and house a large number of prisoners. In April of 1943 there were 5,007 Axis prisoners in the United States. This number jumped to 130, 299 by August of that year, and by 1945 the number had risen to 425,871. Eighty-seven percent of these prisoners were German;2 the remainder were Italian and Japanese. POW camps were established in 44 out of 48 states; there were 16 in Pennsylvania alone, including camps at New Cumberland, Gettysburg, Fort Indiantown Gap, and Pine Grove.3
The primary concern of the War Department was to ensure that the standards set by the Geneva Convention of 1929 were met in full lest substandard treatment of Axis prisoners would result in retribution against American prisoners held by the German military.4 To make matters more difficult, all American assets, including food, housing, energy, transportation, and personnel were in limited supply during the war. These pressures forced the PGMO to conduct only basic interrogations of prisoners before sorting them by rank and branch of service and transporting them to the appropriate camp. As a result, the PGMO made a tragic mistake in assuming that all German prisoners held similar political views. The truth was that not all Germans were hardened Nazis; in fact, some of them detested Hider and his National Socialist regime. Many of these anti-Nazi prisoners were subjected to persecution and some were even murdered by the Nazi hierarchy that came to control the internal workings of many POW camps in the United States.5
Despite the fact that the War Department was not prepared for the large number of prisoners that it would receive, the United States used the situation to its advantage. As more and more Americans volunteered or were drafted to fight the war in Europe and in the South Pacific, labor became increasingly scarce and precious. To help alleviate this crisis and to increase the production of materials needed to sustain the war effort, many prisoners were put to work in American agriculture and industry. The Masland Company in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, received a contingent of over one hundred German prisoners and the necessary guards from the Fort Indiantown Gap POW Camp to augment its work force in producing war materials in the late summer and autumn of 1944. The prisoners who worked at the Masland factory were housed in tents on the grounds of the Carlisle Barracks.6 This sort of use of Axis prisoners was common in the United States during World War II.
I have never forgotten my first solitary walk through Camp Michaux. The sun was setting and visitors had gone. I explored in silence, hearing only a gentle breeze create an eerie creaking in the trees that made me strain my ear as if listening for voices of the past.