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Nazis in East Texasby
Bob Bowman | |
In
the 1940s East Texas sawmills and
paper mills lost many of their loggers to the armed forces fighting during World
War II.
The problem was solved with a unique exchange.
German
soldiers who had been captured in Europe were brought to the U.S. and conscripted
as loggers.
Today, the unusual trade is remembered by seven Texas historical
markers placed near German POW camps at Alto,
Center, Chireno,
Huntsville, Lufkin,
San Augustine and
Tyler. |
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Texas State Historical marks the site of Camp Alto, one of seven German prisoner-of-war
camps in East Texas during World
War II |
The Germans came to
East Texas through the efforts of companies like Southern Pine Lumber Company
of Diboll, Frost Lumber Company of Nacogdoches,
and Angelina County Lumber Company of Keltys, near Lufkin.
History, regrettably, doesn’t record many of the names of the German soldiers
who came to East Texas, but most of
them worked hard in the woods, felling trees, cutting them into pulpwood or lumber
logs and shipping them on railcars bound for the sawmills.
Some Germans,
however, deliberately slowed down their work, believing that shortages of lumber
would hurt the American war effort.
While East Texans struggled with the
notion that the German POWs would escape and commit all kinds of atrocities to
their families, there were few such events. The Germans simply did their jobs
and most were returned to Germany after the war. Some remained in East
Texas; one even became the president of the chamber of commerce at San
Augustine.
A few of the Germans escaped, but became lost and eventually
wandered back to their logging camps.
When a prisoner escaped at the Chireno
camp, guards found him in a cow pasture holding a little girl, and the mother
was deeply upset. The guards discovered, however, that the girl had wandered into
the pasture, where there were some bulls.
The escapee scooped up the child
and when the guards raced toward the POW, he and the little girl were talking
to nearby cows. The little girl told the guards. “He nice man. He show me cows.”
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Author
Mark Choate chronicled the story of the Germans in his excellent 1989 book, “Nazis
in the Pineywoods.”
Except for the historical markers, little remains
of the old POW camps. In Lufkin,
a stone gate bears an inscription scratched into the stone: “Rothhammer, 1944,”
a reminder of a German POW who lived there. |
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