AZ: The History of Arizona podcast · David Rookhuyzen

Episode 237: Prisoners of War

·32 min·2 clips

David Rickhausen opens with a place in southern Arizona that looks easy to miss now. It was anything but ordinary in the 1940s. That land held Camp Continental, the southernmost of the POW camps in Arizona. Around 250 prisoners lived there and worked in the cotton fields. Nothing of the camp is left today, so a plaque was later placed nearby to mark what the landscape forgot. Rickhausen says he pieced the story together from an old ranch autobiography, interviews with a historian, and his own reporting from 2016. From there, the episode widens into the tangled range of German POW experience in the United States. Some prisoners stayed loyal to the Nazi regime. Some did not. Werner Drossler is the clearest warning sign in the story. He was 23 years old. He had served as a sailor on a U-boat that was sunk in May 1943. While being held for interrogation in Virginia, he began helping the Americans and informing on fellow detainees. That made him useful and suspect at the same time. Other prisoners came to believe he was informing on them. The Army received him in December 1943 with explicit instructions not to house him with German naval officers, but that instruction was not followed. On March 12, 1944, he arrived in Tempe with hundreds of other prisoners headed for Papago Park. The next day, guards sensed tension in Compound 4. A shakedown followed. They found blood on the floorboards. In the bathhouse, they discovered Drossler dead, badly beaten and hanged with a dog collar. Investigators eventually tied seven prisoners to the killing. Those men were closely aligned with the Nazi cause. A military court sentenced them to death in August 1945. The ruling was appealed, and the appeal seems to have reached President Harry Truman. It did not change the outcome. The last of the seven was hanged a little more than a week after the sentence was handed down. Rickhausen treats that murder as the worst-case version of what German POW ideology could become. He then pulls back and reminds listeners that most prisoners were not that way at all. Some were polite. Some worked hard. Some were simply intelligent men stuck in a war far from home. He also recalls how former prisoners were later treated as honored guests and taken on a road trip around Arizona decades after the war. And because this story likes a hard turn at the end, it closes by setting up the famous escape that follows, when 25 German prisoners, including Jurgen Wattenberg, planned a breakout just before Christmas 1944.

As heard by us

Arizona's POW camps come back into focus through one vanished site and the killing of Werner Drossler.

A vacant stretch of southern Arizona opens onto a World War II POW story that feels stranger, and more local, than it first appears. David Rickhausen traces Camp Continental, where German prisoners picked cotton, then follows the effort to recover a place that left almost…

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You want Arizona history that starts with a cotton field and ends in a WWII POW murder case.

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