Part I: James Robert Ruchti World War II German POW Repatriotization Project Memoirs

 Part 1: Prisoner Selection and Treatment

This is James R. Ruchti speaking.  It is April 21, 1992. I'm making this recording as an extension of remarks that I made in a tape for my granddaughter, Thomasin Clare Ruchti, on April 7, 1992. Tommi would like to have an elaboration of my experiences with German prisoners of war during World War 2.These remarks are in addition to those that I made on the tape that I mentioned earlier. Tommi is particularly interested in the way the German prisoners reacted and how they were treated to the circumstances in which they found themselves in this country. 

A bit of background about that. Many of the Germans who were captured during World War 2 were taken in North Africa. There were also some that were captured in the early days of the Allied invasion of France in 1944. The project at Fort Getty and the project at Fort Eustis, Virginia included prisoners from both groups. But those at Fort Getty, the senior and most significant program, tended to be from the German 999th division, which was introduced into the combat in the days of the battle for North Africa in Tunisia in 1943. That division was made up of Nazi officers, but the enlisted men in the division were primarily petty criminals or petty political criminals as defined by the Hitler regime. That meant that they were given the choice of serving in the military forces under Nazi officers or of being incarcerated or kept under surveillance and close control back in Germany. Many of them decided that they would enter the armed forces. Their objective, of course, was to surrender to the Allies as soon as they had an opportunity. The Germans used the 999th division as a last resort reinforcement of their forces in the famous “Afrika Corps”, the German troops that fought across North Africa. The 999th division was a very lucky division in that the convoy that carried the German forces from the southern part of France from the port of Toulon to North Africa was intercepted by a British Naval force, primarily submarines. There were 5 vessels, as I remember, in the convoy and 4 of those vessels were sunk by the British. The one vessel that was not sunk was the vessel that carried primarily the 999th division. So from the German point of view, the least reliable forces were those that escaped, successfully in this instance, the British naval efforts and landed safely in North Africa.  The reliable German forces in the other 4 divisions were lost to the Germans. The 999th division was in combat for a very short period of time. Most of the Germans that were captured were taken by American forces, and they had been in combat some of them less than a week, most of them for 5 days. 

They were brought to the United States and put in prisoner of war camps under the rules of the Geneva Convention for prisoners of war. This is an international treaty to which the United States and Germany and many other countries adhere. Those rules provided that the German or any other prisoner of war would be treated in specified ways. One of the things was they were to be segregated according to their rank so that officers were in one camp and enlisted men in another. A second provision was that they would receive adequate protection, adequate food, medical care, and that they would have the right to correspond on a prescribed basis with their relatives in their home country through the auspices of the International Red Cross. All of those provisions were strictly followed by the US for the prisoners that were captured. But after a period of time it became clear that those German prisoners of war who were either non-Nazis or anti-Nazis were being subject to harassment, some of them very severe harassment, by the Nazi Germans who were interred in the same camps. The United States went a step further than the Geneva Convention, and the officers in the prisoner of war camps throughout the United States were directed to separate their prisoners into a second category which included those who were Nazis and those who were either non-Nazis or anti-Nazis. This separation greatly facilitated the work of the program that I was with, the office of the special Provost Marshal General project at Fort Getty.  

It facilitated it because we already had a pre-screening of the men from which we wanted to draw a substantial number for our program to be introduced into Germany after the war. They were, as I mentioned in the first tape, to be assistants to our military government in Germany and to provide a nucleus for the political and economic reconstruction of Germany after the war. Our screening teams were sent from Rhode Island and went around to the various camps. From that screening, which was largely a paper screening-  that is the prisoners records were looked at and reviewed by the American officers- resulted in the selection of approximately 10,000 prisoners who were sent to Fort Devens, Massachusetts. From Fort Devens, Massachusetts the project that I was with at Fort Getty selected about 2,000. Actually a little over around 1,400 were used or brought into our project. 

So we had a pre screening and then we had our own screening for our own project which was the final selection of those for the project. Every one of the prisoners in the project at Fort Getty had to agree to certain things before we would accept them. The first thing was that they would give up all privileges that were associated with rank. That was because of the Geneva Convention .We treated every prisoner in our group the same whether he was an officer, an enlisted man, or a non-commissioned officer. They all receive the same exact treatment at the Fort Getty project.  The second thing was that they had to agree that they would volunteer their services to the Allied military government after they were repatriated to Germany. We had very little difficulty with this because as it turned out a large number of the approximately 2,000 that we selected came from the original 999th division. My recollection is that the division had around 12,000 men in it, and of course we had therefore quite a number to choose from. And while many of them were petty criminals and therefore not of particular interest to us to say the least, the petty political criminals in the 999th division formed a large part of the 2,000 that we eventually selected as being eligible for our project. 

German prisoners in this country all had the same and very good treatment, that is good treatment considering that they were not permitted to wander off or do what they pleased. They had to wear uniforms which were marked with PW on the legs. They were American Army uniforms. So they wore the same clothes as our own soldiers except they had a big PW painted on the uniform so that they couldn't escape, so to speak.

PW Graduation Ceremony at Fort Getty, 1946; One can see the Army uniforms worn by the prisoners with the PW identifier stencil present.  

Of course they had to live in camps. But many of them went out from those camps and worked around in the communities where they were held. Some of them were farmworkers. Many of them did projects in the local communities. They were paid for these projects on the basis of about a dollar a day. That is in addition to their food, room and board, maintenance and all of that, their clothing and so forth which was of course provided by the US Army, they received by dollar credit for their work in fields or factories or wherever they happen to be. That credit was available to them in the form of canteen chits. Canteen chits could be used for specified things at little stores at each camp. They could buy cigarettes. They could buy soft drinks. They could buy newspapers. They could buy Kleenex, a deck of cards, candy, small things like shaving cream, things like that that they might find useful, personal items. They were of course not permitted to use those chits to purchase anything outside the camp. They couldn't buy a train ticket for example. They couldn't buy clothing or other items because the chits were available to them only in the canteen in their prisoner of war camps.  This same situation prevailed at Fort Getty. There of course we had a small canteen where they could buy personal comfort items. They had their chits which were in the form of a little coupon book. 

PW Canteen Chit representative of that used at Fort Getty and Fort Eustis, 1946

The prisoners themselves at Fort Getty were treated especially well because we had a very minimum security. The Provost Marshal General required that each prisoner of war camp be surrounded by barbed wire. That usually meant a double barbed wire enclosure which was protected and guarded by American soldiers.  At Fort Getty we had a pro-forma wire fence. It consisted of 3 or 4 strands of barbed wire strung around the post in a way that you could have walked through it or 2 or 3 times abreast without touching any of the wire. In other words we met the “requirement” of the Provost Marshal General's office but de facto the wire was symbolic only. No prisoner ever tried to escape from our project at Fort Getty because they were not only treated better, but they knew that at the end of their study there they would be repatriated to their home country and that this would therefore be a tremendous advantage for them. 

The project at Fort Getty consisted of two months of study and training in the subjects that I mentioned in my previous tape. My personal role was to instruct the prisoners in German and American History. I was also responsible for all of the reading materials that the prisoners had; books, magazines, and so forth. My authority allowed them to buy things that other prisoners in other camps in the United States could not obtain. If one of them wanted to buy Time magazine or a New York Times or one of those, I would make sure that they had enough canteen chits to pay for it and then I would place the order for them. They were sent to me. That is the magazines and newspapers were sent to me. Some of them we subscribed to were German language newspapers. Then I would pass them to the men who had ordered them and collect the chits to pay for the subscriptions.  They could also order books. We had a number of books from the modern library, Random House and so forth, that they were interested in.  They could buy those. Some books had been forbidden in Germany for many years and they were able to read them in a prisoner of war camp in the United States, although most of those were in English. Many of the prisoners that we had were able, by the time they had finished our 2 month course, to speak fairly good English and certainly to read it. Others had been able to do that before they were in our project because we had a very high quality prisoner. They were usually very well educated. We took no one unless he was at least the equivalent of a high school education. Most of them had finished what the Germans call "Gymnasium", which is high school in the US plus two years of junior college in the US.  Quite a lot of them, I don't remember the figures, had university degrees. We even had a few who had PhDs. 

Note from Tommi Miller: Pictures taken from The Prisoner of War Camps at Forts Getty and Wetherill in Jamestown: Reeducating World War II German POWs with the Best of Intentions

The above link is an a great article about the POW program at Fort Getty and mentions/quotes my Grandfather.  Interestingly the article, showing my Grandfather was mistaken, mentions that in fact one prisoner at Fort Getty actually escaped in January 1946.  The PW was a former private of in the German 999th Division. The FBI, state police, and other authorities in the area joined efforts to recapture the man.  The escapee was recaptured in a hotel room in New York City with his American girlfriend.  He was due to be returned to Germany in a few days prior to his escape. He chose to escape and try to start a new life in America with his girlfriend rather than return to an uncertain, war-torn Germany.  The article does not disclose the final fate of the recaptured PW.