Windfall Indiana World War II POW Camp was a World War II German prisoner-of-war camp from 1944 to 1945 in Windfall, Indiana, United States. [1] The camp was located near the site of the Windfall High School. [2] The location, on the northeast side of town, is now home to a mobile home community. At its peak the camp housed 1,500 German prisoners and their prison officers. The prisoners were put to work laboring on local farms. [3]
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Windfall is a town in Wildcat Township, Tipton County, in the U.S. state of Indiana. It is part of the Kokomo, Indiana, Metropolitan Statistical Area. Windfall's population was 697 as of the 2021 census.
Hiwi, the German abbreviation of the word Hilfswilliger or, in English, auxiliary volunteer, designated, during World War II, a member of different kinds of voluntary auxiliary forces made up of recruits indigenous to the territories of Eastern Europe occupied by Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler reluctantly agreed to allow recruitment of Soviet citizens in the Rear Areas during Operation Barbarossa. In a short period of time, many of them were moved to combat units.
A prisoner-of-war camp is a site for the containment of enemy fighters captured by a belligerent power in time of war.
Stalag Luft IV was a German World War II prisoner-of-war camp in Gross Tychow, Pomerania. It housed mostly American POWs, but also Britons, Canadians, Poles, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Czechs, Frenchmen and a Norwegian.
The Utah prisoner of war massacre took place after the end of World War II in Europe at midnight on July 8, 1945, at a German and Italian prisoner-of-war camp in Salina, Utah. Nine German prisoners of war were murdered and nineteen prisoners were wounded by American private Clarence V. Bertucci, who was on active duty in the camp. After a night out, Bertucci returned to camp around midnight to assume his night duty at the guard tower. Bertucci subsequently loaded the .30-caliber M1917 Browning machine gun on the tower and fired at the tents of the sleeping prisoners. After the massacre, he revealed his motivation was that, "he had hated Germans, so he had killed Germans." Six Germans were immediately killed, two died in Salina's hospital, one died in an army hospital, and nineteen were wounded.
In April 1941, inmates at the Angler POW Camp near Neys Provincial Park on the north shore of Lake Superior planned the largest escape from a Canadian POW camp during World War II. The escape was the largest of its kind in Ontario, Canada.
Stalag IV-A Elsterhorst was a World War II German Army prisoner-of-war camp located south of the village of Elsterhorst, near Hoyerswerda in Saxony, 44 kilometres (27 mi) north-east of Dresden.
Camp Ashby in the Thalia community of Princess Anne County, Virginia was the largest Prisoner of War camp in South Hampton Roads during World War II. It housed 6,000 German troops, many of Adolf Hitler's Afrika Corps who had been captured in North Africa during the closing years of World War II.
Camp Atlanta was a World War II camp for German prisoners of war (POWs) located next to Atlanta, Nebraska. Over three years, it housed nearly 3,000 prisoners. After the war, a number of soldiers and prisoners from the camp returned to live in the area.
Stalag Luft I was a German World War II prisoner-of-war (POW) camp near Barth, Western Pomerania, Germany, for captured Allied airmen. The presence of the prison camp is said to have shielded the town of Barth from Allied bombing. About 9,000 airmen – 7,588 American and 1,351 British and Canadian – were imprisoned there when it was liberated on the night of 30 April 1945 by Soviet troops.
Members of the German military were interned as prisoners of war in the United States during World War I and World War II. In all, 425,000 German prisoners lived in 700 camps throughout the United States during World War II.
Camp Michaux was a secret World War II camp for interrogating prisoners of war. The camp northwest of the Pine Grove Iron Works was previously used as a CCC camp that provided labor for state-owned lands and was used as a summer camp. The POW camp commander was Captain Lawrence C. Thomas, who also commanded the World War II Prisoner of War Camp, Gettysburg Battlefield, Pennsylvania.
Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp was an internment and transit camp for foreign-born Jews, located in Beaune-la-Rolande in occupied France, it was operational between May 1941 and July 1943, during World War II.
Members of the United States armed forces were held as prisoners of war (POWs) in significant numbers during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973. Unlike U.S. service members captured in World War II and the Korean War, who were mostly enlisted troops, the overwhelming majority of Vietnam-era POWs were officers, most of them Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps airmen; a relatively small number of Army enlisted personnel were also captured, as well as one enlisted Navy seaman, Petty Officer Doug Hegdahl, who fell overboard from a naval vessel. Most U.S. prisoners were captured and held in North Vietnam by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN); a much smaller number were captured in the south and held by the Việt Cộng (VC). A handful of U.S. civilians were also held captive during the war.
Camp Hearne, located in Hearne, Texas was a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. Commissioned in 1942, Camp Hearne was one of the few camps that housed prisoners from all three Axis powers during the conflict. After its decommissioning and piecemeal sell-off by the United States government, the site remained abandoned for 70 years. Today there stands a single replica of a barracks on the site of the former camp, which contains a museum.
Large numbers of German prisoners of war were held in Britain between the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and late 1948. Their numbers reached a peak of around 400,000 in 1946, and then began to fall when repatriation began. The experiences of these prisoners differed in certain important respects from those of captured German servicemen held by other nations. The treatment of the captives, though strict, was generally humane, and fewer prisoners died in British captivity than in other countries. The British government also introduced a programme of re-education, which was intended to demonstrate to the POWs the evils of the Nazi regime, while promoting the advantages of democracy. Some 25,000 German prisoners remained in the United Kingdom voluntarily after being released from prisoner of war status.
Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War: An Oral History of Korean War POWs is a 2002 military history book by Lewis H. Carlson. Using first-hand testimonies by repatriated prisoners of war of their experiences in captivity in Korea, the book demystifies the general perception in the United States that Korean War POWs had been "brainwashed" by their captors, and had betrayed their country.