Murder and Martial Justice by Meredith Lentz Adams

Author:Meredith Lentz Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Murder and Martial Justice: Spying and Retribution in World War II America
ISBN: 9781606350751
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2013-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Coddling and Confirmation

A number of things made mercy for “Nazi terrorists” unlikely. A third of the prisoners taken in the six months since D-Day had been brought over at the request of labor-hungry government agencies. By December 1944 there were 305,648 Germans in American camps, up from 150,000 in June.1 The Pentagon therefore feared Nazi influence more than ever.

Red Cross reports of the serious mistreatment of GIs in German POW camps also made mercy increasingly dubious. In September, Secretary of War Stimson had ordered JAG Cramer to set up an interagency committee to consider how to prosecute Axis “cruelties, atrocities, and acts of aggression” against American armed forces,2 an effort that led eventually to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Although most reports about mistreated GIs would be kept out of the press until the spring of 1945,3 in December 1944 everyone knew that American prisoners had been machine-gunned at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge, a brief but frightening renaissance of Nazi power.

In addition, public outrage refueled the protracted “coddling crisis.” The War Department considered food to be “the most vexatious prisoner of war problem in the United States.”4 Americans, increasingly pinched by rationing, complained that enemy prisoners were gorging on meat, smoking free cigarettes, and partying over here while GIs died for freedom over there. Some critics also accused the Army of ignoring a fine chance to reeducate Nazis into good freedom-loving democrats. Others railed against the notion that these Nazis were allowed to terrorize their “coddled” fellow prisoners.

The War Department thoroughly investigated every citizen complaint. Every letter received a personal reply. Both the War and State Departments issued public explanations and denials of such charges.5 They did little good. Repeatedly, some newspaper or radio commentator or veterans’ organization6 would make accusations that would be echoed in the French and Russian press.7 Two such attacks particularly displeased the War Department.

Walter Winchell, the Rush Limbaugh of his day, was a constant problem. In early 1944 an officer conducting a seminar for POW personnel in the Eighth Service Command ordered them to straighten up, because Winchell had flooded the commanding general “with complaints from Washington and from prominent citizens [all] over the Service Command.” He added, “the wires from Washington were hot” the day after Winchell’s broadcast skewered incompetent guards. “We have to find a solution and get off the spot.”8

Walter Winchell outdid himself on March 5, 1944, when he revealed a pathetic scandal at Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky. “Attention Mr. and Mrs. United States and General George Marshall” (the Army Chief of Staff): “The following exposé is without qualification one of the most serious and dangerous conditions ever to exist within the United States.” In American camps, the Gestapo was training prisoners “as Nazi battalions . . . to take over Germany when they are returned. General Marshall, I respectfully submit to you, sir, that some of our American officers in charge of these prisoners do not even understand the German language.” At one Kentucky camp, “an American colonel

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