Yesterday, I toured Delaware's Fort Dupont, built by the federal government during the Civil War to protect Philadelphia, and decommissioned at the end of Word War II. During the latter conflict, the fort, besides protecting Philly from U-boats, housed over 3,000 German POWs.
Delaware's acute manpower shortage in 1944 prompted the Army to put the POWs to work. Under light guard, captured Germans soldiers and sailors worked inside Fort Dupont as dishwashers, waiters, grocers, butchers and groundskeepers; and in nearby communities, as farmhands, canners, chicken processors, and garbagemen. German POWs even rebuilt the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach. The Germans were treated with dignity, well fed and clothed, and paid for their labor—40 cents a day.
While the Army was roundly criticized by The Philadelphia Inquirer for "coddling" the Germans—columnists called Fort Dupont the "Fritz Ritz"—few civilians knew the Army, under pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt, had undertaken a massive "reeducation" effort designed to denazify the POWs.
The effort, led by Eleanor and a committee of Ivy League educators, comprised a kind of "barbed-wire college" where critical-thinking courses were taught, using subjects like civics, history, geography, art, film, music, and literature.
At least half of the German POWs—draftees in Hitler's armed forces—required little in the way of coursework to become denazified; but just as many—avid, vicious and fanatical fascists—required intensive instruction. The educators found these Nazis, regardless of age, to be "intellectually and ideologically adolescent," lacking all self-awareness and prone to accepting propaganda as fact (they believed, for example, Hitler's claim that the Luftwaffe had leveled New York, and were shocked to learn the city still stood).
By the end of the war, over 370,000 German POWs in America graduated barb-wire college. Student assessments were positive. "Most now know that there is only one superman and that he is an American reporter on the Daily Planet," one educator wrote.
As coincidence would have it, as I was touring Fort Dupont, home-grown Hitlerites were massing in downtown Washington. The coincidence led me to wonder: Do we need another reeducation effort? And how timely Dr. Jill is an educator!
