Introduction

In the 1940s, the United States housed over 400,000 German and Italian prisoners of war on American shores. This chapter provides an introduction to the WWII POW system in America and the organizational structure of this text. While source material on German POWs in the United States has been available since the 1950s, it was not until the 1970s that any general texts become readily available. Two books, one by Arnold Krammer and another by Judith Gansberg, were published in that decade and then, no general reference for 50 years. What became available in the 1990s and 2000s were texts on particular camps, autobiographies, and texts about narrow aspects of the subject, like martial law. This author began researching the POWs in the 2000s and has gathered primary source material from Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States. Using these sources and many others, the research in this text incorporates a wide array of material types that lend themselves to a far-reaching understanding of the topic.