The Fifteen
Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown.
“In the pantheon of American history, it’s very hard to find compelling, original stories, and even harder to find authors worthy of them. In The Fifteen, William Geroux delivers the goods.”—John U. Bacon, New York Times bestselling author of The Great Halifax Explosion
The American government was faced with an unprecedented challenge: where to house the nearly 400,000 German prisoners of war plucked from the battlefield and shipped across the Atlantic. On orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Department of War hastily built hundreds of POW camps in the United States. Today, traces of those camps—which once dotted the landscape from Maine to California—have all but vanished. Forgotten, too, is the grisly series of killings that took place within them: Nazi power games playing out in the heart of the United States.
Protected by the Geneva Convention, German POWs were well-fed and housed. Many worked on American farms, and a few would even go on to marry farmers’ daughters. Ardent Nazis in the camps, however, took a dim view of fellow Germans who befriended their captors.
Soon, the killings began. In camp after camp, Nazis attacked fellow Germans they deemed disloyal. Fifteen were sentenced to death by secret U.S. military tribunals for acts of murder. In response, German authorities condemned fifteen American POWs to the same fate, and, in the waning days of the war, Germany proposed an audacious trade: fifteen German lives for fifteen American lives.
Drawing on extensive research, journalist and author William Geroux shines a spotlight on this story of murder and high-stakes diplomacy, and on the fifteen American lives that hung in the balance—from a fearless P-51 Mustang fighter pilot to a hot-tempered lieutenant colonel nicknamed “King Kong.”
Propulsive and vividly rendered, The Fifteen reminds us that what happens to soldiers after they exit the battlefield can be just as harrowing as what they experience on it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After the Allies' defeat of the Afrika Corp in May 1943, "there was nowhere else to put the Germans but in America," writes journalist Geroux (The Ghost Ships of Archangel) in this exhilarating history. Over a hundred thousand Germans were interned in newly built American camps, but camp authorities didn't attempt to separate Nazi from anti-Nazi soldiers, or to de-Nazify true believers (in fact, camp commanders were prone to rewarding the Nazi POWs over the anti-Nazi ones because they appreciated the Nazis' obedience and efficiency). In addition, U.S. military officials underestimated Gestapo infiltration, which was so extensive that POWs' expression of anti-Nazi views would lead to persecution of their families back home. Eventually, a string of murders of anti-Nazi POWs led the U.S. to take the threat seriously (including by instituting a de-Nazification program spearheaded by Eleanor Roosevelt). The murderers were caught, tried, and executed, prompting accusations of Geneva Convention violations from German diplomats (the accused had been taken on "wild, blindfolded rides" and made to wear "onion-filled gas masks," Geroux writes). The State Department refused a prisoner exchange; in retribution, the Nazis sentenced 15 American POWs to death. Reversing course, the U.S. tried to negotiate an exchange after all, and Geroux's already impressively multipronged narrative pivots with alacrity to describing the torture the condemned American POWs endured before their nick-of-time rescue by the Red Army. It's a riveting, whirlwind look at a little-known episode of WWII.
