Thus, after all that training of German POWs to fill minor posts in the new American military government–after they were shipped to Europe–the POWs were immediately put into barbed-wire enclosures.

It seems one arm of the military, the Provost Marshall General’s Office which was a part of the War Department, somehow had a disconnect with the Office of Military Government, United States which was the major bureaucracy handling the American sector of Germany. As stated in the book, Nazi Prisoners of War in America by Arnold Krammer, although the PMGO eventually extricated the Germans from their new imprisonment, that experience certainly did little for German-American relations.

Few of those graduates who were so faithfully trained to be administrators and policemen in the new Germany were used.

Next time: A Follow-Up Study on the Repatriated POWs

Copyright, Geraldine Birch. All rights reserved.