You may be surprised to know that, in 1944, Greensboro, NC was home to a Nazi POW camp. Let’s explore what infrastructure has survived of that CAMP 80 years after the fact. There’s quite a bit remaining.
With almost 400 Kraut combatants under wraps in Greensboro from 1944 until 1946, ORD’s POW camp was one of 18 small ‘branch camps.’ Compare that with much larger installations statewide, housing thousands of internees, located in Butner, Fort Bragg, Monroe, Southern Pines, and Hoffman.
In 1943, Basic Training Camp-10, later designated Overseas Replacement Depot, was established on the northern edge of Greensboro, the entrance to ORD located near to where Bessemer and Summit intersect, then continuing east down Bessemer.
Situated on 650 acres, ORD’s mission was to train and outfit US Army Air Forces (USAAF) recruits for the European theater of war. Grafted on to the southeastern corner of that base, located south of Bessemer at the corner of Winston and Sullivan Streets, was the gateway into ORD’s German Prisoner of War camp.
The initial influx of what were referred to then as PWs were captured combatants from Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Somewhat coincidentally, that’s where my father was serving in the Army during this period.
In accordance with the Geneva Convention, POWs were required to be housed and fed in the same manner as our recruits. Thinking being, Germans would treat our detainees reciprocally. That was not to be the case but we didn’t know it at the time.
POWs crossed the ocean on ‘Liberty Ships’ returning after delivering supplies overseas, arriving by rail on the way to Greensboro on Pullman cars, the height of luxury, waited on by black porters in transit, served in dining rooms where African-Americans weren’t welcome. Treated so well it created a furor after local airmen of color complained, rightly so, that our enemies were afforded better accommodations than they were.
With every able bodied male recruited for the war effort, the United States was suffering a severe manpower shortage in 1944. While women were being recruited for the manufacturing sector, we couldn’t very well have German nationals building our ships and planes now could we?
Local farmers and business owners would round up prisoners in the mornings to spend the day plowing and harvesting cotton, tobacco, and peanuts, along with other duties around ORD. Limited to 8-hour shifts, they earned 80 cents a day.
If you want to tour what’s left of that enemy internment facility, travel east on Bessemer, turn right at Winston. A few feet past Sullivan traveling down Winston you would be entering the pow camp in 1944, there was a guard stationed there but no serious security. Barbed wire atop fences surrounded the camp.
To the right on Winston were 8 Prisoner of War barracks - the third of which is still standing at 727 Winston with an added on brick facade
Next door at 725 was Mess Hall #11 for German POWs. The 8 Barracks were equipped with four latrine and shower units in the rear. One of those out-buildings can be spotted behind a more modern building at 721 Winston, known as South 13th Street then.
You can still see the tracks and the ORD train depot is still standing at the corner of Bessemer and English, the outer edge of ORD.
To the left of the barracks was an unfenced guard field - an administration office(?) at 704 Winston resolutely sits up on cinderblocks just as almost every other building was in ORD
Meant to be temporary after all, we were going to win the war right? This building was constructed later than the others, perhaps to process Germans back to Germany?
The fencing in front of this structure is precisely where the barbed wire line was in 1944. It stretched almost to Sullivan and surrounded the barracks and out buildings, you can still see where the fence line was and is today, this was the entrance into the camp behind us.
South 13th Street = Winston Street = ended at the edge of camp, but today it curves to the east leading into Utility Street which retains its original Army Air Force base name.
This offers us a look at the camp’s other barbed wired zone reserved for recreation and education including a library, english lessons, movies and newsreels depicting US Army Air Forces, many trained just a couple of blocks from there, raining holy hell on nazis all across Europe.
Again you can see where the fence line was and is today. 2200 Sullivan Street operates out of two refurbished rec halls built for POWs on the eastern edge of the POW Camp.
Luis Felicia, who went on to establish a well-known dance studio in Greensboro, was stationed on the base from 1943-45. In an interview with a UNC-G history project, he recalled supervising Germans servicing the Officer’s Club, said to be one of the most elegant in the nation.
Besides minor problems communicating there were no snags, just the opposite actually. “They were real happy,” Felicia remembers. “I think they were happy to be prisoners. Because they had a lot of good food to eat. One of them said, ‘My goodness,’ he finally got it across to me, he says, ‘Hitler would feed the whole army with what you just threw away.’”
A year after V-E Day, in 1946, all Axis combatants were forcibly deported back to their hometowns. If given a choice a great number would undoubtedly have stayed put, they had it a lot better in the USA than the war ravaged nation they returned to - a large portion of which was occupied by bloodthirsty Russians hellbent on revenge.
Many of the Germans quartered in Greensboro wrote letters back to the families they worked for and dined with in Greensboro, often receiving ‘care packages’ in return. In those missives, former combatants remarked that they never understood the concept of freedom until they were imprisoned here.
So 425,000 Germans incarcerated around the country, including about 10,000 in North Carolina, helped America win World War II? Nazi that coming!
