An affecting wide-angle overview of the POW experience during WW
II. Drawing on interviews with more than 150 US and German soldiers
who were interned, Carlson (History/Western Michigan Univ.) offers
a judiciously organized survey that lets a host of ex-prisoners of
war speak for themselves. He first addresses the severe mental
shock sustained by combatants who were taken captive on the
battlefield or (in the case of downed airmen and D-day
paratroopers) behind the lines. The author next focuses on the
physical hardships, short rations, and other privations endured by
Americans confined in the Third Reich's typically primitive camps;
by contrast, their German counterparts who sat out the fighting in
Stateside lockups had a far easier time of it. In some instances,
moreover, American POWs identified as Jewish, or incorrigible, or
suspected of being spies were sent to concentration camps; over 50
years later, their matter-of-fact recollections of the ghastly
events they experienced bear eloquent witness to humankind's
infinite capacity for inhumanity. Carlson goes on to debunk the
Hollywood myth that escape was a preoccupation of either Allied or
German POWs; precious few ever made it beyond the wire, or even
tried. Covered as well is the grisly fate of informers as well as
undercover agents who tried and failed to infiltrate inmate
populations on either side of the Atlantic and, the Geneva
Convention notwithstanding, the dilatory pace of repatriation from
the US. While almost all American interns were freed by their own
or Soviet troops before V-E Day, fewer than 75,000 of the
380,000-odd Germans held in the US were sent home in 1945; in
addition, many of those who made it back to Europe in 1946 spent
another three years as POWs in England or France. A scholar's
illuminating rundown, complete with telling anecdotal detail, on a
great war's largely forgotten men. (Kirkus Reviews)
During the Second World War, Germany captured nearly 94,000
American soldiers, while the Allies shipped almost 380,000 Germans
to the United States. We Were Each Other's Prisoners compares, for
the first time ever, stories of POWs from both sides of the
conflict: From the anti-Nazi German soldier who tried desperately
to turn himself in rather than fight for Hitler, to the U.S.
prisoner who thrice escaped his German captors,the last time to
join Russian troops in the Battle of Berlin, to the Jewish-American
prisoner who was sent to a slave labour camp.Culled from more than
150 interviews with 35 American and German surviving POWs, the book
addresses larger political and psychological issues: What does it
mean to be a prisoner, especially for men whose cultures prize
individual heroism? Why did conditions differ so dramatically in
American and German camps? How were these men received upon their
return to their homeland? How have they coped with the long-term
effects of incarceration?
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