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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
Local internment camps dotted
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
By May 1943, over 36,000 Germans were staying in the
From
Minnie Champ remembers farmers driving to the
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
Not much else is known.
Champ, a researcher and publisher of
Sixty years later, the numbers of those who know what happened in the small internment camps in
"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.