German POWs in S.C. weren’t like American in the Stalags – Lecture Friday, Nov. 6.

Free lecture at noon at the museum on Friday, Nov. 6.

During the Second World War, the main thing Americans held prisoner by the Germans wanted was to get out and go home. Hence all those postwar movies about escape. The Third Reich did all it could to keep them locked up in the Stalags.

It was different for the Germans POWs held in camps in South Carolina. Going home was the last thing many of them wanted – particularly if they were from the parts of the Fatherland in Soviet hands. The only reason they went home at all was because the U.S. government forced them to do so. And thousands of them came back to America as soon as they could.

Fritz Hamer, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum’s former curator of history, will tell all about it in a free lecture at noon at the museum on Friday, Nov. 6. The lecture, “German POWS in South Carolina,” is part of the Relic Room’s regular Noon Debrief program, and the public is invited.

There were many Germans, and a few Italians, held in South Carolina during the war – about 8,000 of them, in a network of 21 camps spread across the state. If you include the Japanese prisoners, there were about 425,000 prisoners of war held across the country.

This helped address the labor shortage that existed during the war, with most fit young men off fighting. Many POWs were put to work harvesting such crops as peanuts, cotton, and peaches. Others cut pulpwood or lumber, planted trees, or worked in a fertilizer factory. They worked 8-10 hours a day, and were paid 80 cents a day in credit at the camp store.

When they weren’t working, recreation was available, with soccer fields, gardens, and reading rooms in the camps. Some of them put on Sunday concerts. They lived in tents with wooden floors, up to five men in each. Their mess hall was a large frame barracks.

Keep in mind that most of these Germans were young men who were drafted or otherwise coerced to enlist in the Wehrmacht, but had little personal allegiance to the Nazi regime. They were seldom motivated to escape, and the few who were did not stay at large for more than a day or two. South Carolina had no escapes like that of Georg Gärtner out in New Mexico after the end of the war.

Terrified of being returned to Germany, he escaped from his prisoner of war camp, took on a new identity as Dennis F. Whiles, and was never recaptured. He revealed his true identity after staying 40 years in the United States.

South Carolina’s prisoners were mostly sent home by some point in 1946. But about 5,000 Germans of those who had been held across the country ended up coming back to live in the United States.

About the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum

Founded in 1896, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is an accredited museum focusing on South Carolina’s distinguished martial tradition through the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and other American conflicts. It serves as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting South Carolina’s military heritage from the colonial era to the present, and by providing superior educational experiences and programming. It recently opened a major new exhibit, “A War With No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973.” The museum is located at 301 Gervais St. in Columbia, sharing the Columbia Mills building with the State Museum. For more information, go to https://crr.sc.gov/.