Wars have essentially been the backbone of history. A war can make or break a country. As the result of war, a country can lose or gain territory and a war directly impacts a countries’ economy. When we learn about wars in schools we usually are taught about when they start, major events/ battles, and when they end. It would take a year or two to cover one war if we were to learn about everything. One thing that is commonly overlooked and we take for granted, is prisoners of war. Most people think of concentration camps and the millions of Jews that suffered when prisoners and war are mentioned in the same sentence. Yes it is terrible what happened during WWII, but what about our troops that were captured and potentially tortured trying to save the Jews? How did they suffer? Being captured as a prisoner of war is just an on the job hazard. In this paper I will explain what POWs went through and how it has changes between countries, and I will only scratch the surface.
Taking prisoners of war have been a battle tactic for ages. Capturing an enemy troop could be done for many reasons. Mainly enemy soldiers are captured to be interrogated for unknown information on the enemy. There were usually common rules and procedures for taking a prisoner of war, weather they were followed or not was really up to the country. Come 1929, there was a document in the works that set rules regarding prisoners of war. More than 40 countries got together to sign and agree on these new set of rules (“Life” 11). The signing of the Geneva Convention was held in Geneva, Switzerland.
This document of ninety-seven articles defined a prisoner of war as a member of a regular military unit, wearing a uniform (thus spies were excluded). The Convention decl...
... middle of paper ...
... Red Cross and learning the facts about the brutality, General Eisenhower stopped sending POWs to the French. (Tarczal)
Works Cited
Bowman, Michael. "World War II Prisoner of War Camps - Encyclopedia of Arkansas." The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. 29 Oct. 2009. Web. 23 Mar. 2015.
.
Hutchinson, Daniel. We . . . Are the Most Fortunate of Prisoners": The Axis POW Experience at Camp Opelika during World War II. Publication. Alabama Review, 2011. Print.
Tarczal, Bela. Hungarian POW in French Captivity. Publication. Trans. Eva B. Bessenyey. Print.
"World War Two - Japanese Prisoner of War Camps." World War Two. Web. 23 Mar. 2015. .
Wukovits, John F. Life as a POW. San Diego, CA: Lucent, 2000. Print.
...Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Print.
As common knowledge, people normally recognize the term “concentration camp” and immediately refer to the prison camps the Jews were sent to during the Holocaust. In Corrie Tenboom’s famous collective story of her imprisonment, The Hiding Place, she writes in visual description of exactly how the Jews were treated in these camps. Women were forced to stand naked in front of Nazi guards for not much reason at all and made them feel less than human and animalistic. The people were beaten and killed on a regular day basis. One of the worst parts of these camps were the barbaric gas chambers. Men, women, and children would be fooled and dragged into chambers in groups to stand and be slaughtered by the dozen. Concentration camps are what can be known as the cruelest and most barbaric part of World War II history.
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
The atrocities that swept through Europe during World War II brought with them the cultivation of a horrific contagion: dehumanization. The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel exemplifies the spread of this disease by following Wiesel’s journey through the concentration camps of the 1940s. At the time, the stories may have seemed unimaginable, but today, historians cannot deny what happened during that dark time before liberation. Wiesel’s memoir can be used as evidence. Through their inevitable acceptance and continuation of the dehumanization displayed by the Nazis, prisoners of the WWII concentration camps were doomed to slow and painful deaths.
How would you feel if you were forced out of your home to go to a camp where you shall be incarcerated for an unknown amount of time in an unknown location. You have no idea what will happen to you and your family. Why were you forced into the camps? Because of your ethnicity or beliefs. Japanese internment camps and Holocaust concentration camps both left their hateful marks in the fabric of history. During World War II, the Holocaust concentration camps were located around Central or Eastern Europe while the Japanese internment camps were located in the Western United States. Both types of camps have interesting similarities. However, one must realize that despite this similarities, these camps were very different in many ways. Yet, one thing is certain. We must learn more about this dark time in history in order to prevent such acts of hatred and paranoia from ever happening again.
Bruce Elleman, Japanese-American Civilian Prisoner Exchanges and Detention Camps, 1941-1945 (New York City: Routledge, 2006), 55.
World War II is an area of history researched by many scholars and amateurs in a variety ways and perspectives. Unfortunately, some aspects of this international event have been widely ignored. Thus, many books on unknown aspects of history have a harder time balancing both informing about the event and creating an argument within its history. The correct balance between these two tasks is something not all history books can accomplish, however, Nebraska POW Camps accomplished this task with only a small error. Using personal accounts, Melissa Amateis Marsh’s book, Nebraska POW Camps: A History of World War II Prisoners in the Heartland, was a refreshing read on a forgotten event close to home for Nebraskans, with a strong argument that only faltered in the organization of her defense of why POWs had positive experiences in the camps.
The internment camps were permanent detention camps that held internees from March, 1942 until their closing in 1945 and 1946. Although the camps held captive people of many different origins, the majority of the prisoners were Japanese-Americans. There were ten different relocation centers located across the United States during the war. These Japanese Americans, half of whom were children, were incarcerated for up to 4 years, without due process of law or any factual basis, in bleak, remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.
Imagine living in such a time period, where thousands of children are confused and families are scared. That is what life was like during World War II. In the story, “Keeping Memory Alive”, the author, Elie Wiesel, discussed why remembering the concentration camps is important. “The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family” by Yoshiko Uchida describes daily life in the internment camps. Both stories are connected by sharing their feelings about the unfair treatment received during World War II in the 1940s.
The Virtual Museum Of The City Of San Francisco has established a great source for those interested in studying the internment of Japanese during World War II. This topic is reflected very accurately and fairly in the archives of the museum because the archives consist of primary documents. Their archives of original newspaper articles are the basis of this research document. The content listed on the museum’s web site is very relevant to the topic of Japanese internment because it provides a wealth of primary documents including opinions of ordinary people writing to their newspaper to express a wide variety of viewpoints on the subject of Japanese internment during the Second World War. One question stands above all others and the virtual museum gives a good first-hand account of events to answer it - what happened to the Japanese and why were they forced to move? To answer this question, the archives of the Virtual Museum Of The City Of San Francisco should be consulted.
"Teaching With Documents:Documents and Photographs Related to Japanese Relocation During World War II." Japanese Relocation During World War II. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2013. .
Robson, David. "Life in Camps." The Internment of Japanese Americans. San Diego, CA: Reference Point, 2014. N. pag. Print.
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as a result of pressure, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which relocated more than 100,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans from their homes in the West Coast and were placed in numerous camps around the country. Leaders in California, Oregon, and Washington, believed that by moving the Japanese American citizens inland would prevent another attack and keep their West Coast homes safe. According to the article “Did the United States put its own citizens in concentration camps during WWII?” by Jane McGrath, FDR and the US government referred to these camps as “concentration camps”, that t...
Thousands of people were sent to concentration camps during World War Two, including Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Many who were sent to the concentration camps did not survive but those who did tried to either forgot the horrific events that took place or went on to tell their personal experiences to the rest of the world. Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi wrote memoirs on their time spent in the camps of Auschwitz; these memoirs are called ‘Night’ and ‘Survival in Auschwitz’. These memoirs contain similarities of what it was like for a Jew to be in a concentration camp but also portray differences in how each endured the daily atrocities of that around them. Similarities between Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s memoirs can be seen in the proceedings that
Even when US troops liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, the stories still never made it to the front page of the paper and people still did not believe in the reliability of the stories (Leff 52). In 1943, a survey w...