German Pows Recall Captivity In U.S. Camps

NEBRASKA CITY, Neb. - Two months after being captured in Africa in 1943, William Oberdieck was on a train with hundreds of other German prisoners, slowly chugging across the United States to a place called Kansas.

He was just 21, a German sergeant, and scared. At every stop, curious Americans gathered to look at them - "to see if we had horns or something," he says.

When the soldiers reached their destination and were taken to a dining hall, Oberdieck and the other Germans, used to the rigors of the battlefield, were worried. The tables were set with real dinnerware.

"Are they going to shoot us," he remembers thinking, "is it our last meal?"

Actually, it was the beginning of captivity, U.S.-style.

For two years during World War II, Oberdieck and 371,600 other German soldiers were held prisoner in Nebraska, Kansas, Louisiana and other rural U.S. states.

They worked on local farms, plucking chickens and picking apples. They formed orchestras and soccer clubs. They became stand-ins for American farm laborers who had become GIs.

In the case of Oberdieck and a handful of others, life was so good they returned to the United States after being shipped home after the war. Oberdieck, now a U.S. citizen, lives 26 miles from where he was held as a prisoner of war (POW). He even owns the orchard in which he was once ordered to work.

CAMPS WEREN'T PUBLICIZED

It's easy to forget that the United States had POW camps for

German soldiers during World War II. They weren't publicized much and were in rural areas, where the Germans were deemed less of a threat. They were dismantled when the war ended.

Fifty years later, some former POWs and Americans are reviving interest in the camps.

Just as U.S. veterans are trekking to Europe for 50th anniversaries of battles, local historians are planning exhibits, marking old foundations that now lie in cornfields, even planning reunions.

Among those organizing a get-together is the Phelps County historical society in Holdredge, Neb., the site of Camp Atlanta, where Oberdieck was sent after being processed in Kansas. The historical society, which claims that roughly 300,000 Germans passed through Camp Atlanta, is trying to find former POWs for a reunion next year.

To find them, the group is sending brochures to Germany, says Glenn Thompson, the event's director. "We've almost waited too long. So many people have already died."

OOMPAH BANDS, TOO

The volunteers are planning a three-day celebration in October, complete with oompah bands, crafts, a German beer garden and speeches celebrating German-American friendship. Germans will be able to visit a nearby military cemetery, where 61 Germans who died in captivity in the Midwest are buried. And there will be self-guided tours of what's left of the old camp, which has been razed except for a few foundations and a water tower.

Already, 67 Germans have said they will come, Thompson said.

But not everyone wants to dredge up the memories. One man, who settled in Nebraska, says he doesn't want anyone to know he once fought for the Nazis.

"I just think it's better. There might be some retaliation" from Jews, says the former POW, who asked not to be named.

Oberdieck, now 70, was among the youngest of Atlanta's prisoners when he was taken there in January 1944. A huge man with a gray crewcut and a tanned, creased face, he looks at home on a farm, although he grew up in the industrialized German city of Muelheim an der Ruhr.

He was not a Nazi, he says, and was drafted into a conflict he wishes never happened.

"People don't want to be in a war," he says in a thick German accent.

The prison camps seemed forbidding, with barbed wire, barracks, canteens and mess halls, but they were run mostly by the Germans themselves. There were German cooks, German doctors, even German veterinarians tending U.S. canine and cavalry corps. There were German newspapers amd singing societies.

"It was a comfortable life," says Oberdieck. "We got 10 cents a day, and if you worked, you got another 30 cents a day, for working. And beer at that time was not very expensive. We had PXs where you could buy candy and beer. Beer was 10 cents."

Sometimes curious Americans would come out from the town, sitting on the grass on one side of the fence while the Germans sat on the other.

"One evening there was a woman, I will never forget, who began screaming, `Here they sit, and over there they shoot up our boys!"' Oberdieck recalled. "She got so upset, they called the captain, and they accompanied her home."

That kind of anger was rare, though, say Oberdieck and others, especially after Germans were sent to work in the fields.

Richard Kimmel, 95, was one of the farmers who needed help in 1944, and signed up a crew of four to work in his 90-acre orchard in Nebraska City.

"We didn't know (if they were Nazi supporters), we just took 'em in," says Kimmel. "We needed the help so desperately, we didn't care anyhow."

The Germans proved good workers, Kimmel says, and became friends. Eventually, they ate with the families, and their guards began trusting them, until by 1945, "quite a few times my wife would go to pick them up in the truck by herself," Kimmel says.

Oberdieck traveled the state, plucking chickens in Alma, harvesting potatoes in Grand Island and picking tomatoes and apples in Weeping Water.

His last stop was at Kimmel's orchard, where the two men became friends. Kimmel offered him a job when the war ended, and Oberdieck accepted. After four years, much of the time spent trying to prove he had not been a Nazi, Oberdieck returned to work in Kimmel's apple and cherry orchard. When Kimmel retired in 1965, Oberdieck took it over.

Oberdieck says he hasn't decided whether he will attend the reunion of Camp Atlanta. Maybe, he thinks, it's better just to forget.

"We're always harping on what they did to us, what we did to them," he says. "We should just wipe the slate clean."