The barbed-wire college : reeducating German POWs in the United States during World War II
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Bibliographic Information
The barbed-wire college : reeducating German POWs in the United States during World War II
Princeton University Press, c1995
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [189]-211) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This is the extraordinary story of the 380,000 German prisoners who filled camps throughout the USA during World War II. Using personal narratives, camp newspapers, and military records, the author re-creates in detail the attempts of prison officials to mould the daily lives and minds of their prisoners. From 1943 onward, and in spite of the Geneva Convention, prisoners were subjected to an ambitious re-education programme designed to turn them into American-style democrats. Under the direction of the Pentagon, liberal arts professors entered over 500 camps nationwide. Deaf to the advice of their professional rivals, the behavioural scientists, these instructors pushed through a programme of arts and humanities that stressed only the positive aspects of American society. Aided by German POW collaborators, American educators censored popular books and films in order to promote democratic humanism and downplay class and race issues, materialism, and wartime heroics. By the war's end, the curriculum was more concerned with combating the appeals of communism than with eradicating the evils of National Socialism.
The re-education officials, however, neglected to account for one factor: an entrenched German military subculture in the camps, complete with a rigid chain of command and a propensity for murdering "traitors". The result of their neglect was utter failure for the re-education programme. By telling the story of the programme's rocky existence, however, Ron Robin shows how this intriguing chapter of military history was tied to two crucial episodes of 20th-century American history: the battle over the future of American education and the McCarthy-era hysterics that awaited postwar America.
by "Nielsen BookData"
