This week on The Historians Podcast, Army veteran and Utica College student David Cooney discusses his research on upstate New York prisoner of war camps where German soldiers were housed during the Second World War. One such camp was near today’s Fort Drum and another was in Utica.
You can listen to the podcast here.
You can find more podcasts and stories at bobcudmore.com.
“The Historians” podcast is heard on RISE, WMHT’s radio information service for the blind and print disabled in New York’s Capital Region and Hudson Valley. The podcast is broadcast Saturdays at 12:05 pm on WCSS 1490 AM and 106.9 FM in Amsterdam and Sundays at 4:30 pm on WBDY-FM-LP (99.5) in Binghamton.
I was told that Fairhaven Beach Park housed refugees, True? Or False?
The camp was originally built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the early 1930s and later by German POWs during its days as the Prison Camp at Fair Haven.[4]
The Safe Haven or refugee camp was in Oswego
I believe that there were Japanese America
n internment camps as well
There was one on Howland Island, just north of Port Byron. They brought in the German POW to work the farms since all the local guys were over there fighting Germans. In the 30’s it was a CCC camp and after the war, it was a Boy Scout camp.
German POWs were also housed at Green Lakes Park outside of Syracuse and were made to farm victory gardens in Syracuse.
My mother remembers them in Binghamton when she was a child under 10. The local neighborhood kids would talk to the prisoners through the fence.
I’m looking for information about Camps and POWs in Orange County, NY. a big agricultural area, needing lots of hand labor
Just Germans? any Japanese? Was the NYC Homeless camp, Camp Laguardia used to house POWs?
Thanks for any help
Dan
My article “On Foreign Soil” about POW camps in New York was published in the New York State Archives magazine in 2018
Would it be possible to get a copy of that article? I am researching my family’s farm, and they used German POW labor in 1944. Thank you!
When I was 4 years old, I mingled with the German POWs that came daily to our farm, The Egg and Apple Farm in Trumansburg, NY. I am 93 years old. Their job at that time was to “fork” beans and I walked the fields with them and sat with them as they had lunch. I’ll always remember the tin lunch pails with sandwiches of dark bread and a 3/4 inch of lard.
My father became friends with a number of them and corresponded for years. These were some of my earliest memories.
My mom is 98, and remembers German POW’s working on her family’s farms outside of Utica, near Clark Mills. She says they were very handsome young men, and the local girls loved flirting with them. After the war, she says they all went back to Germany, but many returned to the US, since Germany was largely destroyed and there was very little work or food or even hope, for them. Many had lost members of their family. She said they appreciated how they were treated by Americans…instead of the Russians.
My sister who is 80 remembers men coming in government trucks to our grandparents farm to work, in ’45 or so ( she remembers things from much earlier in life than most people). The farm was outside of Cortland N.Y. and I wanted to know if there was a POW camp near Cortland or those environs. I told her I would assume that they had used CCC camps to house them, but until that point I was unaware, as I think most people are, that there had been POW camps in the US. I would appreciate any information available on a POW camp near Cortland.N.Y. Thank you.
I’m 84 years old and remember German POW‘s arriving by truck to our farm in upstate New York, near Trumansburg. I would mingle with the workers as they “forked beans.“ They were very friendly with us; in fact, my father continued correspondence with several of the Germans for years.
I was particularly interested in the lunches the workers brought with them. Large metal lunchboxes with sandwiches that intrigued me. There were nearly 1 inch slices of brown bread and in between was a layer of lard! My father milked our cows and gave them milk for their lunch as they relaxed under the trees.
My mom was a teenager in upstate New York when the German POWs were there. She remembered them working at her grandparents farm. She said they were friendly & and always very nice & very polite. She had one particular memory that stood out: it was Christmas Eve & she went on a walk with family members after dinner. It was very quiet out – the kind of quiet that you get where there is snow – & when they were passing their camp they could hear them singing Christmas carols in German. She said it sounded so beautiful & it made her feel kind of bad for these men who were barely older than her & away from their families, so far from home.
Let’s not forget they were part of a regime that killed millions of people, including almost 200,000 Americans.
Yes, I know, but I am sharing my mother’s memory of them. Also keep in mind, a lot of these men were merely soldiers, they were not the SS. In Germany at that time you were required to enlist or suffer the consequences. Boys even had to enlist in the Hitler youth & if parents tried to keep them out the parents were sent to concentration camps. Those are facts. Many of the POWs here did not support Hitler any more than I support ICE taking law abiding immigrants or killing American citizens here right now. The citizens of a country run by a maniacal tyrant or despot need to remember history so it is not repeated.
Well said Jenn. We found the POW’s on our farm to be good humans..
It’s a historical fact that German civilians were widely complicit in the Nazi regime. As a former conscientious objector I prefer to honor those who resisted Nazi terror, especially those in Germany who, at their own peril, tried to stop what their country was doing – rather than those that went along, especially to the point of wearing a uniform and marching off to war.
John: With due respect to your position: I was a USArmyBrat for 20 years; turning 13 in Dachau, where we were living in 1957… during the Cold war and it was still a DisplacedPersonsCamp. I have no illusion of what happened there. Dad had been a US Military Governor of a North German town in 1945/46. HE couldn’t find ANY civilian that had been a Nazi. … Closer to home, El Reno OK 1986, while visiting the Friends of Historic Fort Reno Museum, a curator informed me that I shouldn’t miss the graveyard, situated on a hill, surrounded by a 6FT high wall., containing graves of Italian & German POWs, who had left notes hidden in barracks walls, attesting to the goodness of their American captors AND civilians. They knew their stories would not be believed back home and were only found after they had died or been repatriated. Yes, I am old.
SEE PREVIOUS POST – John: 2006, when I returned to Munich after 40 years, I visited the memorial to the WHITE ROSE, at the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitaet anti-Nazi resistance group (SCHOLL siblings, et al.) … One recollection stimulates another … because I continue to be OLD .. GOTT SEI DANK!