The Barbed-Wire College
The Barbed-Wire College

Author: Ron Theodore Robin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1995-04-03

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1400821622

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From Stalag 17 to The Manchurian Candidate, the American media have long been fascinated with stories of American prisoners of war. But few Americans are aware that enemy prisoners of war were incarcerated on our own soil during World War II. In The Barbed-Wire College Ron Robin tells the extraordinary story of the 380,000 German prisoners who filled camps from Rhode Island to Wisconsin, Missouri to New Jersey. Using personal narratives, camp newspapers, and military records, Robin re-creates in arresting detail the attempts of prison officials to mold the daily lives and minds of their prisoners. From 1943 onward, and in spite of the Geneva Convention, prisoners were subjected to an ambitious reeducation program 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 behavioral scientists, these instructors pushed through a program 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. Red-baiting Pentagon officials added their contribution to the program, as well; 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 reeducation officials 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 reeducation program. By telling the story of the program's rocky existence, however, Ron Robin shows how this intriguing chapter of military history was tied to two crucial episodes of twentieth- century American history: the battle over the future of American education and the McCarthy-era hysterics that awaited postwar America.

Barbed Wire University
Barbed Wire University

Author: Dave Hannigan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1493063529

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Barbed Wire University tells the extraordinary tale of Winston Churchill’s internment of some of the most gifted Jewish refugee writers, professors, artists, and painters of their generation in a camp on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. These were men who had fled Hitler’s Germany, found refuge in Britain, and then, in the hysteria of 1940, were held in captivity as a perceived security threat. They turned the camp—Hutchinson Camp—into a school, concert hall, and artistic community. Using memoirs and diaries, some of which have only recently become available in archives, Dave Hannigan pieces together a richly detailed account of what these remarkable men did during their time in captivity. This is a forgotten corner of World War II, and the way these men constructed a Bohemian idyll in the middle of the Irish Sea, their freedom taken from them, is an extraordinary tale of grit and creativity.

The Perfect Fence
The Perfect Fence

Author: Lyn Ellen Bennett

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1623495822

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Barbed wire is made of two strands of galvanized steel wire twisted together for strength and to hold sharp barbs in place. As creative advertisers sought ways to make an inherently dangerous product attractive to customers concerned about the welfare of their livestock, and as barbed wire became commonplace on battlefields and in concentration camps, the fence accrued a fascinating and troubling range of meanings beyond the material facts of its construction. In The Perfect Fence, Lyn Ellen Bennett and Scott Abbott explore the multiple uses and meanings of barbed wire, a technological innovation that contributes to America’s shift from a pastoral ideal to an industrial one. They survey the vigorous public debate over the benign or “infernal” fence, investigate legislative attempts to ban or regulate wire fences as a result of public outcry, and demonstrate how the industry responded to ameliorate the image of its barbed product. Because of the rich metaphorical possibilities suggested by a fence that controls through pain, barbed wire developed into an important motif in works of literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Early advertisements proclaimed that barbed wire was “the perfect fence,” keeping “the ins from being outs, and the outs from being ins.” Bennett and Abbott conclude that while barbed wire is not the perfect fence touted by manufacturers, it is indeed a meaningful thing that continues to influence American identities.

Barbed Wire
Barbed Wire

Author: Olivier Razac

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9781861974556

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Barbed wire is the quintessentially modern creation. Its hidden history is here uncovered for the first time, illustrated with rare archive photographs. Few technologies did more to usher in the hallmarks of the modern era: the harnessing of nature, brutal mass warfare, political conquest and repression, and genocide. Developed in the USA as a handy way of keeping cattle _in_ and native Americans _out_, it realized its destiny in the trench warfare of 1914-18 and in the camp archipelagos of the world, from the Boer War to Auschwitz, from Gulag to Guantanamo.

Behind the Barbed Wire
Behind the Barbed Wire

Author: Chester M. Biggs, Jr.

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2011-07-28

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780786467228

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On December 8, 1941, Japanese troops methodically took over the U.S. Marine guard posts at Peiping and Tientsin, causing both to surrender. Imprisoned first at Woosung and then at Kiangwan in China, the men were forced to laboriously construct a replica of Mount Fujiyama. It soon became apparent that their mountain was to be used as a rifle range. In 1945 the author was among those transferred to the coal mining camp at Uteshinai in Japan. Recounted here are descriptions of the living and working conditions at the prison camps in China, the treatment of American prisoners by their Japanese captors, and how the POWs were able to hold themselves together.

Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War
Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War

Author: Gilly Carr

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2012-04-27

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1136322361

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This book focuses on the numerous examples of creativity produced by POWs and civilian internees during their captivity, including: paintings, cartoons, craftwork, needlework, acting, musical compositions, magazine and newspaper articles, wood carving, and recycled Red Cross tins turned into plates, mugs and makeshift stoves, all which have previously received little attention. The authors of this volume show the wide potential of such items to inform us about the daily life and struggle for survival behind barbed wire. Previously dismissed as items which could only serve to illustrate POW memoirs and diaries, this book argues for a central role of all items of creativity in helping us to understand the true experience of life in captivity. The international authors draw upon a rich seam of material from their own case studies of POW and civilian internment camps across the world, to offer a range of interpretations of this diverse and extraordinary material.

Nazi Prisoners of War in America
Nazi Prisoners of War in America

Author: Arnold Krammer

Publisher: Lyons Press

Published: 2020-10

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9781493049523

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This is the only book available that tells the full story of how the U.S. government, between 1942 and 1945, detained nearly half a million Nazi prisoners of war in 511 camps across the country. With a new introduction and illustrated with more than 70 rare photos, Krammer describes how, with no precedents upon which to form policy, America's handling of these foreign prisoners led to the hasty conversation of CCC camps, high school gyms, local fairgrounds, and race tracks to serve as holding areas. The Seattle Times calls Nazi Prisoners of War in America "the definitive history of one of the least known segments of America's involvement in World War II. Fascinating. A notable addition to the history of that war."

Barbed Wire Baseball
Barbed Wire Baseball

Author: Marissa Moss

Publisher: ABRAMS

Published: 2016-03-08

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 1613124937

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As a boy, Kenichi “Zeni” Zenimura dreams of playing professional baseball, but everyone tells him he is too small. Yet he grows up to be a successful player, playing with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig! When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, Zeni and his family are sent to one of ten internment camps where more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry are imprisoned without trials. Zeni brings the game of baseball to the camp, along with a sense of hope. This true story, set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, introduces children to a little-discussed part of American history through Marissa Moss’s rich text and Yuko Shimizu’s beautiful illustrations. The book includes author and illustrator notes, archival photographs, and a bibliography.