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During the Second World War, some 371,000 German prisoners of war (POWs) were interned in the United States. Historians studying this group have so far mainly focused on the country's adherence to the Geneva Convention and on its reeducation program for German POWs. This article argues that the prisoners' bodies are also a central category for understanding their experience of captivity. For many Americans, the German veteran soldiers seemed to embody central masculine virtues. This linked Americans to their own boys in uniform and led to heavy fraternization with the prisoners. Unable to stop this and especially worried about relationships between POWs and American women, the War Department did not follow the example of other powers and refused to parole the Germans into the custody of American employers.
IN their writings about the more than 371,000 German prisoners of war (POWs) in the United States during World War II, German and American historians have focused much attention on the exceptionally good treatment meted out to them. Given the brutality with which most of the approximately 35 million soldiers in enemy hands were treated during this conflict, this is hardly surprising.' The other special feature which attracted the historians' attention was the reeducation program for German prisoners of war. This sometimes creates the impression that American policy towards enemy POWs in World War II was shaped by a combination of high-minded legal obligations spelled out in the Geneva Convention of 1929 and the noble democratic ideals expressed in the reeducation agenda.2
This article aims at restoring the balance by emphasizing the importance of the German prisoners' bodies as a central category for understanding their experience of captivity in the United States during World War II. The Geneva Convention denned the broader limits within which the U.S. War Department worked out its policy towards the German POWs. On the local level, however, appearance counted more. It is argued here that the visual impression largely determined how most American soldiers and civilians regarded and treated the German prisoners in the camps and at the workplace. The first to arrive in great numbers were approximately 135,000 men from Army Group Africa (Heeresgruppe Africa) in 1943, and the stereotype of German POWs in the United States was-and still...