A U.S. Army company is escorted into the prisoner-of-war camp at Fort Bliss, Texas. (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
I have been trying to yank sound and interviews off of 17-year-old minidiscs for the past few days. I knew when I recorded all this that it was important, but with the passage of time and the changes in our understanding of extremism, I think it’s probably more critical than ever to share these tapes.
I’d been working at The New York Times in 2003, on 9/11 projects. I remember sitting in the office when I received a call back from “This American Life” about a story I’d pitched them. Ira Glass was on the line. My baby journalist self died a little in that moment — sitting at TheTimes with Ira Glass on the phone. He sounded exactly like he sounds on the radio, but with a little more cursing.
We agreed to pursue my story, and he paired me up with then-“TAL” producer Starlee Kine. (We never did produce it for the show, FYI.)
Starlee and I soon took off to Houlton, Maine, to interview four Nazis who were flying over from Germany. Actual, 80-something-year-old Nazis, who had been held in the town as young prisoners of war.
Houlton was just one of the hundreds of U.S. sites with WWII POW camps that housed an estimated 425,000 Germans, Austrians, Slavs and Italians. I know, I was shocked by that too — POWs held on American soil, in places like New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
Something unexpected happened, however, when we were in Maine that September.
One day, as we toured the wooded area (near the Canadian border) where the POW barracks had been, we met a very old, very squat man who wafted out from the trees like an apparition.
I have wondered all these years about this encounter: Was the man real — an actual memory — or a dream?
Starlee and I had asked each POW whether they’d known what was happening in Germany during the war. Did they know about the concentration camps? Each said no, or that they did not know the extent of the horrors. They all pleaded that they had been made to join the Hitler Youth, and were forced to fight.
But then the man came out of the woods.
We spoke while standing on a dirt road away from the others. He told me proudly that yes, he had been a Nazi. He had been part of the Luftwaffe.
My whole body felt fear.
But, as the years fell away since then, I began to wonder, had the whole thing actually been a dream? A nightmare? Did this happen? Did I really meet this man, this Nazi, in the middle of the Maine woods?
Today, I finally found my answer.
German prisoners at Camp Carson, south of Colorado Springs, Colo. Here, a group of workers sing as they march to the camp laundry. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
I wrote this in 2003, after the trip to Houlton:
Four old German men stand on a decayed wood platform overgrown with trees. One man is round, two are of average height, and one is more elfin than the others. Gnats swirl around their heads. A television cameraman from a local Maine station swings his lens from one to the other, but steadies it on Rudy Richter, the round, sweating one, when he begins to cry.
Richter has been asked what it was like to return to Germany after the Second World War, and he is crying because he is explaining how he could not find his family at first, and how when he did, he could not recognize them because of their gray hair and gauntness. The platform they are standing on is what remains of the shower area where the men had washed themselves when they were prisoners, from 1944-1946.
What has brought them back to Houlton, population 6,500, the last exit before Canada, are what are being called the “WWII Prisoner-of-War Reunion Days.” The reunion is between the Germans and the older residents of Houlton, men and women who remember when the prisoners worked in their potato fields all season round, in the cold winters and the Indian summers.
Today, the reunion is a celebration of an unlikely friendship between POWs and captors, victors and losers.
Downtown Houlton, Maine. (Staff photo by Gregory Rec/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
As a 25-year-old woman with “black hair and a waistline” during the war, Kay Bell, the main organizer of the weekend, ran two potato farms with her husband. She had a new baby girl and too much farming to handle, so she welcomed the POWs’ help.
To Bell, as to many in the community, the prisoners looked just like local teenagers, like “the neighbor’s kids.”
She swears she was never afraid of the “polite, clean, hardworking” Germans on her land. Now, as an 84-year-old flash of white-haired energy, Bell has taken on the role of town historian, and talks about what she remembers of the arrangement she made with the U.S. government to employ the Germans in her fields during the war.
“This is farm country,” she said. “And here we do what we have to do. The harvest comes before everything.”
The prisoners themselves recall the benevolence of the farmers, who fed them extra food when rations were cut by the government. They remember being able to purchase Pall Mall cigarettes and Life magazine at the camp’s PX, and that they were paid 80 cents a day for their labor — nearly the dollar a day made by German officers back home.
The men were really just boys when they arrived, according to former Camp Houlton guard Milton Bailey, now 87. Bailey recalls that the young men were ragged, with ripped clothing and not much meat on their bones. Gerhardt Kleindt, one of those disheveled boys, had been just 17 when he was conscripted by the Wehrmacht. He said he had been told before he was captured at Normandy that the Americans did not take prisoners.
When Kleindt’s convoy was attacked one night, to his surprise, the GIs took him for debriefing, and fed him milk and cornflakes. The Americans “saved my life,” he said.
Hans Krueger, who was 17 when he was captured, calls his internment “the best time of my life.”
German POWs relaxing with books and magazines in one of the prisoners' barracks at Camp Blanding, Fla., in June 1943. The walls are decorated with American pinups such as Joan Fontaine, Deanna Durbin and Hedy Lamarr. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Another former POW, Hans Georg Augustin, talks about what he knew or didn’t know of what was happening during the Holocaust:
“I must admit we knew there were concentration camps,” he said. “But we couldn’t do anything against it.”
“Yes, it’s strange for you, I know,” Augustin said. “But you ask me, and I tell you the truth. May it be good, may it be bad. And then, when I came to America, I learned that that’s not the only way, the way the Germans lived. There’s another way. But it took time before I learned it.”
Then there was the man who emerged, without warning, from the woods.
His name was Herbert Krun, he said with a thick German accent.
He was vague about where he lived, but it was somewhere near Houlton.
Unclear about how long he had lived in the U.S., I asked if he remembered the Houlton POWs.
“When they were here 60 years ago, then I was in Italy,” he said. “I was an SS German soldier.”
Hearing that Krun had been in Hitler’s brutal SS paramilitary unit made me physically sick, and a little dizzy.
I asked if he had been a POW in Italy, or fighting.
“No, no,” Krun said, puffing up his chest. “I was fighting. I was in the Luftwaffe. The divisions gave their commandments over the phone. I was very important in the war.”
The man was real.
I’m not sure how to feel about this. I spoke with Starlee a few days ago and asked her whether she thought he’d been real. She wasn’t sure either. He’d been almost a caricature of evil. But here he exists, in a transcription I did in 2003, just after our trip. A Nazi among the contrite Nazis I met, proud as day of his role in the war.
I remember him saying that he’d known everything about the concentration camps, but I have not found proof of that memory yet.
I’m getting that sick feeling in my stomach again.
While I have a number of interviews from the Houlton trip transcribed, I am struggling to get the audio off my ancient minidiscs (and to find the many photos I took). When I can, I will create a podcast episode so you can hear the men’s voices for yourself, and more about their relationship with the town. I have no idea whether any of the Germans I spoke to are still alive now, but I doubt it. They would be in their hundreds, with Krun even older than that.
I hope I can give you the chance to hear their stories in their own words. These tapes are part of the historical record, and they are, if anything, chilling.
Good stuff. Here's hoping for success in recovering the audio.
I vaguely remember you speaking of this at the time. Fascinating. Hoping to hear a follow up podcast.