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Local WWII POW camps disappear without trace
By Mandy Leonard
Jul 27, 2003

At the height of World War II, Nazis came to Texas, not as enemies but as prisoners and hired help.  Days after almost 100 German Prisoners of War arrived in Bonham, “the whole town drove by to look,” says Fannin County Museum of History Curator Tom Scott.  His grandfather took him for the memorable ride down to the County Fairgrounds, opposite Jones Field, where the Livestock Market now sits.

Local internment camps dotted North Texas like living testaments to the war, but there are very few records of their brief stay. 

 Many folks remember the young men working on nearby farms and taking an occasional trip into town, yet few know why they came or what really happened to them while on Texan soil.  Even Scott, renowned for his thorough knowledge of local history, doesn’t have answers to all his questions, despite 20 years of research.  Calls to federal congressmen leave him covering old ground and there are no archives of the local newspaper, The Bonham Daily Favorite, during that time period.

Because so little is known about the camps, they have dwindled into near oblivion, surfacing only with memories and the occasional search strand on the Internet.  “We have remembrances, but not facts,” says Jane Dodson, who also works at the Museum.

In hindsight, the arrival of German POWs into small Texas towns seemed more of a novelty than a footnote to world history.  In April 1943, General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps surrendered to British troops, who then passed the POWs on to the US War Department.  By the United Nations’ Geneva Convention, prisoners had to be held in camps with similar climates to where they were caught; it was assumed Texas was most relative to North Africa. 

By May 1943, over 36,000 Germans were staying in the United States, according to POW: German U-boat Men in Captivity, complied by Glen A. Sytko.  The height of their total camp population came two years later in May 1945 with 425, 871 German POWs listed.  Throughout Texas, major camps housed anywhere from a few to 15,000 men, though the smaller, forgotten camps of North Texas supposedly housed only a few hundred each. 

From Gainesville to Denison, Bonham and Princeton, the prisoners helped the wartime economy by providing cheap labor for farmers and the Corps of Engineers while most of the local men were overseas fighting.   Supposedly, the Denison camp helped build the Denison Dam on Lake Texoma. 

Minnie Champ remembers farmers driving to the Princeton camp in the morning, picking up truckloads of prisoners to help work their land.  “They were young and blonde, my age, really. I would wave to them, and they’d wave back.”

Most accounts show there was no major animosity between the communities and the prisoners, even though an ocean away, their relatives and friends were trying to best each other.   The prisoners were fed and housed humanely, and paid for their work.  By the war’s end, the POWs were sent home to Germany; a few came back to live in Texas.

Not much else is known.

Champ, a researcher and publisher of Collin County history, has tried to track down records of the Princeton camp as well as men who stayed there.  Locally, no one kept track of where the paperwork was sent and no living German POWs claimed to have stayed in Princeton.  In Germany, the stigma of being a Nazi is overwhelming to many former soldiers.  The shame of admitting their loyalty to a dangerous cause remains stronger than the need to speak. 

Sixty years later, the numbers of those who know what happened in the small internment camps in Texas are dwindling.

"We didn’t think it was that important,” says Dodson.  “There were so many other things going on at the time.”

Even though they have no records or facts to go along with the town's memories, the City of Princeton placed a memorial park upon the old POW camp grounds.

All that remains of the camp is the water tower.

Unlike the water tower in Princeton, the stone gates that introduced the POW camp in Bonham are gone, leaving no exact marker.