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POW Profiles and Stories
Gerhard Kleindt was an 18-year-old draftee in the German Army when his military vehicle overturned during a gunfight on a Normandy beach in 1944. The Canadian Services captured him after the Germans were overrun.
Kleindt was a prisoner of war at Camp Houlton from July 1944 to March 1946 where he worked first as a cook for the guards, and later on a potato farm. He took advantage of educational programs offered at the camp, which he said prepared him for life after the war. Looking back, Kleindt reflected,
The best years of my life were spent in a prison camp behind barbed wire. It was the consequence of a senseless war that Germany had started, for which we were shamelessly misused.
Kleindt was released in 1946 and returned to a divided country. His home in Dresden was part of Eastern Germany, and Kleindt was unable to travel outside of East Germany until 1989. In 2003, Gerhard Kleindt returned to visit Houlton along with other former POWs, when Houlton declared all former POWs honorary citizens.
Painting by German Prisoner of War, Houlton, 1945
Item Contributed by
Aroostook County Historical and Art Museum
Most of the surviving paintings made by POWs from Camp Houlton are nostalgic, and feature German subjects. This piece might feature an Aroostook County subject, since the sled includes snowshoes—a Indigenous invention from what is now called North America. Helmut Klusson, who painted this scene, was among the first prisoners of war to arrive at the Houlton POW camp in 1944 when he was 22-years-old. During the winter, prisoners worked in the woods cutting pulpwood for mills.
Prisoners in other camps around the world also created artwork during their captivity—but often these images were painful, showing the horrors of war, and were not shared as readily as the paintings at Camp Houlton. Some Americans thought the POWs were being treated too well. Their housing, diet, wages, and educational resources were above those of neighboring communities and Wabanaki Nations, and in some cases, POW conditions exceeded those of US Army soldiers—the so-called "Black Guards"—guarding the railroads and bridges in Maine. But US military leaders felt that letters sent by POWs to Germany detailing their good treatment might lead to Germans surrendering, and leaving the war.
Painting of Mont Saint Michel, ca. 1945
Item Contributed by
Aroostook County Historical and Art Museum
Franz Bacher painted this scene of Mont-Saint-Michel, a tidal island town in Normandy, France for the commander of Camp Houlton during Bacher's internment there.
Of the thousands of German soldiers who came to the United States as prisoners of war, there were very few who tried to escape. With uniforms marked "PW" and heavy German accents, they were easily spotted. This did not deter Franz Bacher, who had been a political prisoner in Nazi Germany before being sent to North Africa to fight. With some American money and a civilian coat, on which he painted "PW" in watercolor—which easily washed off—he escaped from the Camp Starks, New Hampshire POW camp on August 1, 1944. Prison officials found a note on his bed saying,
I am going to escape today. The reason I am doing this is I live for my art. If I continue to cut wood, my hands will become so mutilated that I will be unable to paint. If I can’t paint, I can do nothing.
In New York City, Bacher lived and slept in Central Park until he earned enough money from selling artwork to rent an apartment in the East Village. Bacher's subjects included scenes of New York, or vistas of Europe and his home in Austria.
After about a month, a US Army corporal from Starks recognized Bacher in Pennsylvania Station. Because Bacher was known as a painter, the authorities notified art stores. A clerk in Union Square spotted Bacher, who was captured by the FBI and turned over to the Army. Though the records are spotty, Bacher likely was interned at camp Houlton just prior to being repatriated to Germany.
Following his return to Europe after WWII, Franz Bacher went on to have a long and successful career as an artist.
German POW artwork from World War II American internment camps has not been studied or well documented, largely because most of the creators were self-taught, artists were often unidentified, and the art was created on perishable materials. While the work varies in execution, the artworks are important historical records of POW experiences in Maine. They mark the prisoners' experiences as soldiers, and their loss of human dignity as they were captured and placed in internment camps.
Franz Bacher was an Austrian political prisoner in Germany before the Nazis sent him to fight in North Africa. He was a leftist who spoke four languages and worked as an artist in Vienna prior to World War II. The New York Times detailed his escape from POW Camp Starks in New Hampshire in the October 15, 1944 edition.
Watch a video about the 2003 return of four World War II German soldiers to Houlton, where they were held as POWs at Camp Houlton.
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