POWs

Read Old WW2 Prisoner of War Articles Here. Numerous are the WW II POW Articles in Our Collection. Check Them Out Today!

Inhumanity
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)

Here is a short column that recalls the bestial treatment that was meted out to the American and Filipino prisoners of war by their Japanese masters.

For example, in August of last year, some 300 Japs attacked an unarmed litter train on the Munda Trail. They hacked twenty of the wounded to death…

If You’re Captured…
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

This cautionary article seems like a collaboration between Emily Post, the Twentieth Century’s High-Priestess of manners, and Sigmund Freud. It concerns one-part social instruction and one-part psychology. It offers wise words to the Yank readers as how best to behave when being interrogated by Axis goons; American mothers would have been proud to know that their tax dollars were well-spent advising their progeny to keep in mind manners, manners, manners and always anticipate the direction of the conversation:

It’s best to call your enemy questioner Sir or his rank, if you can figure out what it is. Then when you answer I’m sorry, sir to his questions, there isn’t much he can do about it…


Click here to read an article about the American POW experience during the Korean War.

The SS Prisoner at the U.S. Army Field Hospital
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

This tight little essay, titled The German, serves to illustrate a small piece of life in a very big war. Written with a sense of melancholy by a winsome American medical orderly posted to a hospital not too far behind the front lines, it explains how he slowly got to know one of his German patients, a member of the SS, and how secretive and generally unpleasant he seemed to be.


Click here to read an article about the women of the SS in captivity.

P.O.W. Camp for the S.S. Women
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Among the many dubious legacies of the Second World War is a growing cult of males who have tended to feel that the German women of the SS are worthy of their attention (Kate Winslet’s appearance in the 2008 movie, The Reader didn’t help). This article (and the accompanying photographs) make it quite clear that no one would have found these men more pathetic than the G.I. guards of Prisoner of War Enclosure 334, who were charged with the task of lording over these Teutonic gorgons and who, to the man, found these women to be wildly unattractive.

The girls who served in Adolf’s army are a sorry, slovenly looking lot. In a P.O.W. camp near Florence they spill their gripes to G.I guards.

Click here to read about a member of Hitler’s SS in captivity.

Indian Sikhs Tell of Japanese Prison Camps
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

Captured in the fall of Singapore, 66 soldiers of the 5/11 Sikh Regiment of the Indian Army were freed by our troops. Used as slave laborers since their capture in February 1942, the Indians were building jetties on Los Negros Island when they were rescued.

Asked how they were treated by the Japanese, the Sikhs shake their heads sadly, smile and say, ‘Not very well.’

Wounded POWs Liberated in Germany
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A printable account from a YANK correspondent assigned to General Patton’s Third Army as it swept through Germany and liberated the wounded Air Corps personnel who had been kept at a German military hospital during their recuperation.

Statistical data concerning the U.S. Army casualties in June and July of 1944 can be read in this article.

Drawings of German POWs in America
(Click Magazine, 1943)

This account of life aboard a U.S. train carrying Nazi prisoners of war to prison camps is an authentic bit of after-the battle reporting by an army MP who was a civilian artist. That his eye missed no telling detail is evident from both his first-person story and his on-the-spot pencil sketches.

The Nazis are extremely curious about America, they gaze out of the windows constantly…War plants along our routes are the real eye-openers to the Nazis; those factories blazing away as we travel across America day after day. At first the prisoners look with mere interest and curiosity, then they stare unbelievingly, and before we reach the camps they just sit dumbfounded at the train windows.


Click here to read about Hitler’s slanderous comment regarding the glutinous Hermann Goering.

German Prisoners Resisted Soviet Coercion
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

The article posted above pointed out that the American-held German P.O.W.s who participated in the U.S. Army’s Special Projects Division were all volunteers and willing participants in the program. These Germans had shown some enthusiasm and an interest to learn about democracy and little coaxing was needed. Contrast this with the column linked to the title above that illustrated the crude manner in which the unforgiving Soviet Army chose to propagandize the malnourished German P.O.W.s who fought at Stalingrad:

If communism provides the Utopia that Marx, Lenin and Stalin claim, why does Russia have to rule by the bayonet?


As many of you know, the U.S.S.R. did not release most of their German P.O.W.s until the death of Stalin in 1953.

The Surrender of a Gestapo General
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Within the moldy, dank confines an abandoned brewery located within the walls of Metz, a troupe of exhausted GIs stumbled upon a German general who was earnestly hoping to avoid capture.

He turned out to be Major General Anton Dunckern, police president of Metz and Gestapo commander for Alsace-Lorraine. He’s the first big Gestapo man we’ve taken; he ranks close to Himmler and is one of the prize catches of the war.

The Surrender of a Gestapo General
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Within the moldy, dank confines an abandoned brewery located within the walls of Metz, a troupe of exhausted GIs stumbled upon a German general who was earnestly hoping to avoid capture.

He turned out to be Major General Anton Dunckern, police president of Metz and Gestapo commander for Alsace-Lorraine. He’s the first big Gestapo man we’ve taken; he ranks close to Himmler and is one of the prize catches of the war.

Scroll to Top