Lone Star and the Swastika

Prisoners of War in Texas

By: Richard P. Walker

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, prisoner of war camps were being planned and developed in the United States. The U.S. Army was faced with the difficult assignment of finding locations for such camps, constructing the buildings, staffing the sites, and establishing military policies that followed the strictures of the Geneva Convention. Many of the POW camps were located in Texas, some the result of active campaigning by citizens to have camps built nearby for economic reasons. This analysis of the Texas camps not only describes the logistics of holding thousands of captured German (and some Japanese and Italian) soldiers until World War II's end, but also offers an evaluation of the army's role in carrying out their assignment. The author has extensively considered all facets of the POW program in Texas: how camps were selected and constructed, how prisoners were treated, what routine camp life was like, what problems arose with pro-Nazi prisoners, and how civilians reacted to having 50,000 enemy prisoners in their state.