hometown POWS German and Italian prisoners supported the N.C. economy in a crucial time by JOEL HASS
I
n the 1940s, more than 5,000 men—each trained to kill Americans—came to the Triangle and central North Carolina. May of 1943: Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps and the Italian Tenth Army surrendered to Allied forces. Suddenly, the Allies had over 200,000 men to feed, clothe and care for. Churchill asked Roosevelt to take on the POWs. At the time, the U.S. housed only a few dozen German U-boat crews; this would be well over a hundred times as many prisoners had been here in
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POW uniform
WWI. Roosevelt feared the American public’s reaction. But Southern politicians, desperately short of manpower for farms, urged Roosevelt to take the prisoners. More than 500 main camps and over a thousand satellite camps were set up throughout the United States, the majority in the Southwest and the South. Our state hosted two large POW camps, one at Camp Butner, north of Durham, and a second at Fort Bragg, south of Raleigh, for both German and Italian prisoners of war. Scores of satellite camps were set up around the state
Courtesy the N.C. Archives.
HISTORY
