Theses and Dissertations Collection

This dissertation examines wartime experiences of German and Italian prisoners of war (POWs) on the American home front through case studies. After Axis soldiers were captured by the Allies on the war front, the United States took over 420,000 prisoners of war from Europe to stateside between 1942 and 1946. Even though the United States had never incarcerated foreign enemy prisoners of war on that scale, the nation abided by the provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1929 as much as possible and offered humane and fair treatment to the Axis POWs. This is not to say, however, that the United States, American society, and hosting communities accepted America’s captives based on purely humanistic ideals. At federal level, on one hand, America employed various top-down approaches to soften their enemies’ pro-Nazi or pro-fascist ideologies and make them malleable to the U.S. democratic principles. Almost everything POWs encountered was meant to convince them of America’s political, economic, and military greatness incomparable to POWs’ home countries while trivializing socioeconomic and political inequalities experienced by racial minorities. At the local level, on the other hand, many hosting communities expended their effort to employ POWs as agricultural laborers. Daily encounters between locals and prisoners helped them conclude that they were not each other’s enemies but rather friends. In dominantly white rural communities, what helped them understand each other was their cultural closeness and European POWs’ white, Christian, and male identity that offered them a ticket to temporary membership in localities.