Volume 8 , Issue 7

WII Stories of Guards...

Some guards experienced unpleasant duties while guarding the POW's. Non-commissioned officers and enlisted men could be pleasant at times, but the German Officers seemed to show the hatred in their eyes and were the threatening ones. A doctor (Dr. Clifford Traverse) was quoted as saying, "The glaring eyes of some German officers were permitted to watch me operate on one of their own. I was warned not to wear a necktie in the camp." It seems that the POW's often stretched trip wires across the nightly path of the guards who made bed checks. Pow's went on hunger strikes that were broken only by throwing tear gas grenades into the barracks. Cries of help could be heard at night by tower guards from the POW's who strayed from the Nazi line. The Wiebener's farm house was turned into a "safe house" to hold POW's who were removed from camp for their own safety and transferred to the other POW's camps. There was no evidence that any POW's were killed by other POW's in the camp, but it did occur at Camp Tonkawa and two unexplained suicides at the Alva camp were suspect.

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