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German POWs Camp Shelby, Mississippi |
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Japanese Fire Balloons Launched in the Jet Steam to land in America |
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German Football Team Camp Shelby, Mississippi |
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Mess hall at the Hellwig Brothers Farm Gumbo Flats, the Missouri River |
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German POW in a Missouri Camp |
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"Colored" Military Police Columbus Georgia |
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German captives, boarding a train to POW camps |
Infantry Sergeant Reinhold Pabel left a camp in Illinois. He read a magazine article by J. Edgar Hoover on FBI procedure for escaped POWs and avoided recapture until 1953. He was deported back to Germany but was allowed to return a year later to rejoin his American wife and two kids. (I am so happy that Hoover's efforts actually assisted someone.)
Georg Gärtner was even more successful. The FBI stopped looking for him in 1963. Coordinating with the release of his biography, he surrendered to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1985.
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Handmade Christmas Card from German POW |
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POW Canteen coupons for Papago Park POW Camp |
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Camp layout and tunnel entrance |
The prisoners escaped the camp at 2:30 in the morning on Christmas Eve.
The Captain of the camp was a WWI veteran, an ex-police detective and had once robbed a bank while serving as a general in the Mexican army. He called the FBI that evening and was interrupted with a call from a Phoenix sheriff. Two of the POWs had hitchhiked to the police station to surrender. During the evening, four other escapees surrendered to private homes in Tempe.
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German U-Boat |
On New Year's Day, two escaped prisoners walked to an isolated farm house and found a teenage boy watching his younger siblings. While they waited for the kids' parents to return, the Germans shared chocolate and told the kids about living on a U-boat.
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Gila River, Arizona |
The three Germans who headed to the Gila River discovered that it was not as navigational as it looked on the map. Their raft kept sinking and they were eventually captured.
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Wonder Bread, Military Promotional cutouts |
Within a month of the escape, all of the POWs were back in the camp. They were put on bread and water for every day they had been absent from camp.
http://www.historynet.com/the-not-so-great-escape-german-pows-in-the-us-during-wwii.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/german-pows-on-the-american-homefront-141009996/
http://www.historynet.com/german-pows-coming-soon-to-a-town-near-you.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/11/us/ex-pow-ends-40-years-of-hiding.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Gärtner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/german-pows-on-the-american-homefront-141009996/
http://www.historynet.com/german-pows-coming-soon-to-a-town-near-you.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/11/us/ex-pow-ends-40-years-of-hiding.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Gärtner
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