The Not-So-Great Escape: German POWs in the U.S. during WWII
By Ronald H. Bailey

World War II  | 7 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The general plan was to head south and move only after dark, avoiding trains or buses. Many carried the names and addresses of countrymen or sympathizers in Mexico who might help them get back to Germany. All knew that the odds of actually reaching their homeland were extremely slim. But for now, in the early hours of Christmas Eve, they were free—embarking on an adventure that surely beat life in captivity.

That night one team found a small dry stable and rested among comfortable bales of hay, celebrating Christmas Eve with a meal of roasted bread crumbs and canned milk, and listening as a Mexican family living nearby sang Christmas carols. Another team stumbled across a dilapidated shack and took up temporary residence; one of them had a harmonica, and he quietly played “Stille Nacht.”

Back in Papago Park, the first real opportunity for the American authorities to discover something amiss was Sunday’s four o’clock head count. The German officers remaining in Compound 1A delayed it further by demanding that the count be conducted by an American officer, not a mere sergeant. “It is only proper that as German officers, we have respect and equal treatment,” one insisted imperiously.

It was about seven o’clock before Parshall was certain that a large group of prisoners was missing. He telephoned the FBI to report names and descriptions of the escapees. While he was still on that call, another phone rang. It was the sheriff in Phoenix reporting he had an escaped POW in custody. Herbert Fuchs, a twenty-two-year-old U-boat crewman, had quickly grown tired of being wet, cold, and hungry and hitchhiked a ride to the sheriff’s office. Soon thereafter, a Tempe woman called to say that two escapees had knocked on her door and surrendered; the phone rang again, and a Tempe man reported that two hungry and cold POWs had turned themselves in to him.

One more call came that Christmas Eve from someone at the Tempe railroad station saying yet another escapee had been arrested. This was Helmut Gugger, a Swiss national who had been drafted into the German navy. Almost certainly under physical persuasion from the Americans, Gugger revealed the existence of the still-hidden tunnel the following day.

With a half-dozen escapees already in custody, authorities launched what the Phoenix Gazette trumpeted as “the greatest manhunt in Arizona history.” Soldiers, FBI agents, sheriff’s deputies, police, border patrol, and customs agents all joined the search for the nineteen Germans still at large. Ranchers and Indian scouts, drawn by the $25 reward posted for the capture of each escapee, carried newspaper clippings bearing mug shots of their quarry. “We didn’t think we were that important,” Guggenberger remarked later.

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, had repeatedly warned the American public about the dangers posed by escaped German prisoners. In reality, there was not a single recorded instance of sabotage or assault on an American citizen by an escaped POW. Any crimes committed were typically the theft of an automobile or of clothing needed for the getaway.

In any case, public reaction in Arizona soon focused less on any possible menace to law-abiding citizens than on outrage over all the provisions the newspapers reported found on the recaptured POWs, including rationed or otherwise hard-to-get items like cartons of cigarettes, packages of chocolate, coffee, sugar, and even ten pounds of pork fat. One Phoenix resident wrote the Arizona Republic: “Now isn’t that a hell of a state of affairs when we, the tax-paying citizens, cannot get a single slice of bacon for weeks on end when we come home from working in a defense plant and then read in the papers that prisoners of war can get away with slabs of it?”

After Christmas, most of the remaining nineteen prisoners hiked south each night as far as they could. Capture was a possibility at any moment, and they were also alert to very real physical danger. During the war, no fewer than fifty-six escaped German POWs were shot to death—the great majority by authorities but some at the hands of trigger-happy civilians.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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