During WWII, Long Island POW camps taught American values to Nazi soldiers

Melanie Cardone-Leathers, a librarian at Longwood Public Library in Middle Island, was conducting an inventory of historical documents in 2010 when a discolored file box containing photographs and documents caught her off guard.

The papers outlined the day-to-day operations involving Nazi and Italian Fascist prisoners of war held during World War II at nearby Camp Upton, the present-day home of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Cardone-Leathers said she had not known this piece of history happened so close to home.

“I grew up reading ‘Summer of My German Soldier,’ by Bette Greene.” She said the 1973 book about a friendship between a Jewish American girl and an escaped German POW “made me believe that they [POWs] were only out West somewhere.”

By examining the collection and recently discovered documents donated to the library’s collection, Cardone-Leathers and other local historians have begun piecing together a detailed narrative highlighting the treatment of the POWs in the aftermath of the war. POWs incarcerated in local facilities were provided a dental clinic, a music program, a library, a theater, sports teams, English language classes, a camp newspaper and a re-education program in hopes of instilling American values.

Archives, old Newsdays

Documents from the originally discovered file included letters from Camp Upton’s Intellectual Division, which certified that the POWs had completed a reorientation program in the “American Way” or were “favorably disposed to the American Ideology” before their discharge. Additional papers from the National Archives were donated to the collection by local historian Paul Infranco, who obtained them through Freedom of Information Act requests. Infranco’s documents included POW rosters of Camp Upton and memos related to the creation of Upton’s re-education program.

Once in possession of these documents, Cardone-Leathers ran searches for similar historical document collections and found the memos of Army Maj. Edward Davison, director of the Morale Services Division, in Yale University archives. She also came across multiple old newspaper stories related to Upton’s POWs, which include a December 1946 edition of Newsday with a story about job seekers headlined, “Vets Turned Down While POWs Work at Upton,” and a February 1945 Newsday column that highlighted a woman from Bay Shore who was trying to marry an Italian prisoner of war.

Together these papers detail how Upton operated as one of the Army’s many “reorientation” programs for the estimated 425,000 Nazi and Italian POWs held in the United States.

The men were becoming increasingly violent with each other in late 1943, according to multiple documents. There was fear among camp leaders that, should the Allies win the war, the most fervent among the Nazi detainees would eventually go back to Germany and resurrect a defeated Nazi Reich.

The solution was to have prisoners assigned to work details and participate in an Americanization program that taught the core values of democracy.

Maj. Maxwell McKnight, administrator of the Army’s Prisoner of War Camps, and Davison created a list of movies that showed “true American life” and included “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Why We Fight.” Davison forged partnerships with various universities to develop courses that focused on American democracy, according to the documents uncovered in his papers at Yale’s archives.

Guards and Army personnel assigned to the camps were mandated to have experience in the education system, the movie industry and American literature, according to the Davison papers.

Declassified documents Cardone-Leathers found in Yale University archives reveal two uncompromising directives given by McKnight and Davison: “Do not hinder the natural intellectual development process of the POWs” and “No publicity of the program is to be disclosed.”

Davison, in a separate memo to assigned camp leaders, specifically stated: “Any approach which leads the prisoner to suspect an attempt to propagandize them will render impossible the achievement of the program.”

Within these camps, education programs were tailored based on age, maturity and the years individuals spent under the Nazi and Italian Fascist systems, according to the National Archive documents.

3 POW CAMPS ON LI

Once the detainees were shipped to the United States, the directors of the special reorientation program sorted out the high-ranking and most influential individuals for incarceration in more restrictive camps.

On Long Island, the reorientation camps were at Camp Upton and Mitchel Field in Uniondale. Mason General Hospital in Deer Park, the present-day Edgewood Preserve, was reserved for high-ranking and influential prisoners.

Before being selected to become a POW camp, Upton operated a detention facility as early as 1942, housing 218 “enemy aliens” who were sent to Maryland before the POWs arrived.

Upton’s reassignment to a large-scale reorientation camp raised concerns among military commanders, according to Infranco’s examination of the National Archive documents.

The declassified memos cited two main security concerns following Lt. Hans C. Jespersen’s inspection of Camp Upton:

“The floodlights necessary to properly guard a wire enclosure stand out like a beacon in an otherwise dimmed out and inconspicuous community. It has been established that the lights can be noticed 15 miles at sea,” he wrote. “Many Axis sympathizers in this community conceivably might cause serious trouble. There is a possibility of a breakout of a thousand prisoners engineered from any small landing force.”

Jespersen concluded his memo by recommending that an “alternate site be selected, such as anywhere in the Hudson Valley.”

POWs arrive in 1945

Despite the lieutenant’s concerns, in May 1945, Long Island would receive its first shipment of 500 Italian and German POWs sent to Camp Upton, and in June, Mitchel Field received 250 additional detainees. In total, an estimated 1,200 to 1,500 German and Italian POWs were held in Upton, according to the records, but no full roster has been found.

Kim Guise, a senior curator at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, said many scholars have studied the success rate of these reorientation programs.

“We had hundreds of thousands of Axis POWs shipped to the United States, and the experience varied depending on where you were sent and assigned to work,” she said.

“As a whole, the experience was a positive circumstance for these men,” Guise added. “Axis POWs worked in agriculture, which connected them to the food supply, unlike the soldiers held in Europe, where the food supply was scarce. The rations were meager and were supplemented with aid from the Red Cross. Toward the end of the war, a food shortage [in Europe] affected everyone. While rationed in the United States, the food for the POWs here was abundant.”

80 cents an hour

Camp Upton’s POWs were assigned to harvest potatoes, one of the government-designated staple crops. “The farmers collectively estimated that they saved over a million dollars a year in labor costs from hiring the POWs, who were paid 80 cents a day,” Cardone-Leathers said.

Daniel Tomaszewski, of Ridge, a descendant of one of the farming families that used the POWs, said they had a positive impact on the farms.

He said his grandparents Helen and Walety Marcinowski owned one of the largest potato farms in the Yaphank area and had a contract from the government. There was a labor shortage, and part of the contract required POWs as labor, which saved his grandparents money.

“My family got to know many of the laborers well, especially the ones who spoke Polish, like my grandparents,” Tomaszewski said. “A few prisoners, after learning about our [economic and political] system, expressed a dream of returning to America. When my grandmother asked one of them what their dream was, specifically, one of them said to get a start in the movie industry.”

After the war

By spring 1946, the United States started the gradual process of sending the POWs back to their countries.

According to a March 1946 Newsday article about the first wave of departing POWs, reporter Weley Sheffield wrote, “World news reached them daily via American radios and newspapers. Onlookers yesterday could see little realization of the world’s tragedy wreaked by the Nazi hordes of superman in their stolid faces and open grins.”

In contrast to Sheffield’s observation of the captives’ perceived obliviousness, a letter found in the original Longwood files from former Upton POW Josef Kraft to Frederick Pearsall, a civilian worker at Upton, expressed his gratitude.

“I am often thinking about the good times in the Besches Mess in Camp Upton,” Kraft wrote. “Here in Germany, we have to do without quite a lot, which wasn’t the case in the past. Most often, I am thinking of the good food and the smoking that we had when I was together with you in the dining hall. Should you still be working in the dining hall, please give my best regards to all who knew me, in particular to the German women who worked in the dining hall.”

POWs buried on LI

The only visible remaining relics of the POW camps are in section 2c of Long Island National Cemetery in Pinelawn. These are the 55 gravesites of the 89 POWs who died while detained in one of the three regional camps.

“I never knew there were POWs buried here, but there is so much history in this place that it never ceases to amaze me,” said Michael Fehn, Long Island National Cemetery administrative officer, in a recent interview. “I grew up in the area, and when I first heard about it, I was surprised. They were buried far away from where we were doing the interment at the time.”

In addition, 37 Germans and 54 Italians are buried in the cemetery, with 36 of the Italians in a mass grave. They are the remains from a British ship transporting 1,800 POWs that was torpedoed, Fehn said.

Their countrymen still come to pay respects.

“When members of the German embassy arrive, they come near closing, accompanied by a handful of [German military] servicemen, keeping a low profile,” Fehn said. “Every November, the Italian ambassador to the United Nations and a military unit accompanied by Italian veterans visit the area, conduct a parade, deliver speeches and then depart. However, the crowd seems to dwindle every year.”