"Back at the Gap" Major General Frank H. Smoker, Jr. (USAF, Retired) You can’t go home again, but you can go back to prison 35th in a series During World War II, nearly 360,000 German, Italian and Japanese prisoners of war were held in camps in the United States. The government established 15 POW camps in Pennsylvania, the largest of which was at Fort Indiantown Gap - then known at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation - where 1,260 prisoners were held. On at least two occasions, former German POW’s revisited the Gap. It was surprising when Hermann Peters, Erich Gilster, Andreas Neuhauser and Ernst Rinder, former German POW's who were held at IGMR during World War Two, visited the Post on September 16, 1992. This group showed up at the Army Garrison Headquarters looking for someone who could show them the areas where they had been kept in as prisoners in 1945. The four men and their wives, along with two American friends who had arranged the visit for them, visited familiar sites and shared stories of their imprisonment during World War II. "We didn't think we'd ever come back," said Ernst Rinder, who was able to interpret for his friends who spoke varying degrees of English. Rinder who moved to America after the war and now lived in Lancaster had had the opportunity to visit the Gap in the past but said that he had only been here a few times. "It is more active now than then," he said. The former POW's were very excited when they visited the barracks in Area 10 where they had been kept during W.W.II. They had many memories of the time spent there. The field between the barracks was their sports field and they recalled many games played there. The field is now fenced and occupied by Army vehicles. Peters remembered the black soldiers taunting them from the other side of the fence. "They would call 'Hail Hitler' at us from the other side of the fence and raise their arms in the German salute," he said. Peters recalled being sent out to farms to help the farmers. "We would get up at 5:30 in the morning, be counted and marched to work on nearby farms." Although they were allowed visitors from American relatives, association with the locals was discouraged. They also were not allowed to receive any outside news. "We had no access to newspapers, ", said Rinder, ”a few ham radio operators would pass on victorious American news, but we mostly learned what was happening by what the new prisoners could tell us about what had happened since we were captured and where the front line was when they were captured." The Germans had a wide variety of stories to tell about their time as POW's, most of which were good. Gilster who was a 23-year-old parachutist in the German Air Force recalled that it wasn't until he arrived in America that he was fed well and allowed to take a shower. "I was glad when I was captured," said Rinder, “I had been wounded three times already." The hardest part of being captured for Gilster was that his family didn't know what had happened to him. But the guards eventually let them write to their families and prisoners were encouraged to contact American relatives. One POW shared a story about how the prisoners relieved boredom before they were sent to the Gap. "The guards brought bread in paper bags in a big basket. When we had eaten our bread we would, huff, huff, huff, and boom! the bag would pop!" said Gilster who was captured in 1944, with a laugh. They remembered working in the chow halls that were in three big buildings, one of which was building 5-115 which no longer exists. Their memories of the Gap varied from church services in the post chapel to hauling coal in the winter for the furnaces. The Gap was not the only place that they visited while they were in America. They spent most of their time at the former site in Stewartstown where they were sent to work, as Stewartstown was a branch of the base camp at the Gap. Stewartstown was a summer tent city between June and October in 1944 and 1945. The winters were spent in area 10. The Germans were not only happy to see their old quarters here on the Gap, but also got the treat of examining a Harley Davidson motorcycle belonging to Lt. Colonel Michael Nicholson, the acting Post Commander. They had just visited the Harley Davidson factory in York the day before, said their friend and host, Margaret Shaub. Later, in March 1996, a half century after he was released from the POW camp at the Gap, another former prisoner, Helmut Bohle, returned to the site of his World War II captivity expressing warm feelings. “I really don’t feel like a prisoner of war”, the former German soldier said as he wandered the grounds of Fort Indiantown Gap. Bohle, who lived in Dortmund, was 72 years old at the time of his visit. He was captured in France and shipped to the United States. He spent ten months at this Lebanon County base in a barracks with hundreds of other German soldiers. Bohle was a paratrooper in the German Army when Allied troops captured him two months after the June 1944 Normandy invasion. Minutes after his commander surrendered, Bohle said, U. S. medics rushed into the German camp to treat the wounded. His captor gave Bohle his first friendly impression of American soldiers compared to the Nazi descriptions of the enemy. He said he was not afraid of going to a prison camp in the United States. “I was aware it was propaganda,” he said, his words interpreted by his niece, Heinke Klaassen of Kent, Ohio. Bohle’s first POW camp in the United States was at Fort Rucker in Alabama, where he picked cotton. Sometimes, to meet his daily quota, he would place stones in a bag with the cotton before it was weighed. In June 1945, a month after the German surrender, Bohle was sent to Fort Indiantown Gap where his job was bagging fertilizer at a mill in Lancaster County. By night, Bohle studied an English-German language book to help himself advance in his trade as a chimney sweep. He also learned about American democracy and viewed films about Nazi atrocities and concentration camps. He said he was not a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and never saw any concentration camps while in Europe. But he believed what Americans told him. “Soldiers had like a sixth sense,” he said. “Of course, we talked to each other and we heard things.” With the war over for nearly a year, U.S. officials returned Bohle to Europe in French custody. His niece said Bohle was not well treated by the French and Bohle refused to discuss it. “That is a closed chapter”, he said. From conversations that I’ve had with families who lived in the vicinity of the Gap during World War II, many remembered the German soldiers who were considered as “trustees” working on the local farms. They reported that the Germans were treated well by the farmers and in return they put in a good day’s work to help the farms prosper. In fact, with many of the young American men in the military service, the farmers welcomed this additional manpower provided by the Germans. Some of these prisoners were so well impressed with their nice treatment that they returned to this area and settled here after the war. Published in the Lebanon Daily News Wednesday edition, March 9, 2005 © 2005 Frank H. Smoker, Jr. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author. Go "Back at the Gap" Index