World War Two - POWs

A fascinating article reporting on "the Baby Cage", the Allied prisoner of war camp that held some 7,000 boy soldiers of the German army, ages 12 through 17.

In light of the fact that so manyGerman youths had been indoctrinated from their earliest days in Nazi dogma and then dumbfounded to a far greater degree within the Hitler Jugend system, the Allied leadership post-war government believed that this group needed to be instructed in the ways of tolerance before being let loose into the general population.

Click here to read about the Nazi indoctrination of German youth.

An American POW On Radio Tokyo (American Magazine, 1942)

When the bright boys at Radio Tokyo decided to allow one of their half-starved American prisoners to flatter them on air, they couldn't imagine that he would take the opportunity to broadcast vital information needed by the U.S. Navy, but that's just what he did.

 

Nazi Justice On American Soil (Newsweek Magazine, 1944)

Here was the first report on the kangaroo courts that were held "at frequent intervals" in the American POW camps that housed captured German soldiers and sailors. It seems that it was a common practice to level the charge of "treason" on one of the inmates, put him in the docket where, just like the courts at home, he would fail to present an adequate defense and soon find himself condemned to death by his fellows. Beaten to death by his former compatriots, the corpse would then be presented to the American camp authorities who would see to the burial.

 

Nightmare At Stalag IXB (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

On April 2, 1945, elements of the American First Army liberated a German prison camp adjacent to the little town of Orb, Germany:

"What they found there appalled even the toughest GI and seemed to demonstrate that in some cases at least the Germans had treated British and American prisoners of war as badly as any of the pitiful slave laborers."