Hidden History: Mississippi’s Nazi Prisoners of War

PEARL RIVER COUNTY, Miss. (WLOX) – View the second, digital-exclusive half of our two-part special below.

“When I found this thing, I didn’t have any idea what it was. I dug that thing out and I just- it was all corroded and covered in mud, so I just stuck it in my pocket. I got home and I put it under the sink and kind of scrubbed it a little bit and I was like… The first thing I saw was a swastika. And you don’t expect to see that, you know.”

Retired history teacher Jeremy Weir spends his free time searching for treasure, taking his metal detector out to forests and abandoned grounds across South Mississippi.

But one January day in the woods of Pearl River County, he found something he’d never expect- a Nazi war medal from World War II.

Weir researched the medal, as he loves to do with all his artifacts, and found it was issued during the early months of Germany and Italy’s invasion of North Africa.

“I’ve done a lot of research on it, of course,” Weir said. “And these were given to General Rommel’s forces in North Africa. Rommel was ‘the man’; he was the general for Hitler. But it was actually made by the Italians and given to the Germans.”

Featured on the medal is a swastika- the unmistakable symbol of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany. On the other side, two gladiators fighting a crocodile, symbolizing Germany and Italy’s fight against England.

“They say that the significance of it was the gladiators were Germany and Italy and the crocodile was England, being the symbolic nature of it was… England being an island.. that’s where the crocodile came in,” Weir said.

But how did the medal, issued in North Africa so long ago, end up in South Mississippi?

Adding to the fascination of this find is where it was unearthed: just miles away from the World War II prisoner of war camp in Carriere, Mississippi: Hillcrest Farm.

This site was originally a dairy farm, until Nazi prisoners of war came to Mississippi in 1943. Silohs and remnants of buildings still stand, all these years later, a mark of what the property once was.

“I’ve taught Mississippi history many times, and just, we leave out the local history usually,” Weir said. “But having grown up locally, I knew about the history of the old POW camp here.”

But the little piece of Mississippi history isn’t common knowledge to most.

We spoke with a couple gentleman from Pearl River County, asking if it was surprising to learn, years ago, there were Germans in their own backyard.

“Yeah, very surprising,” said Peter Tims from Poplarville. “I had no idea they were anywhere around.”

Tims recalls his first and only run-in with the prisoners, who were wearing striped clothes and shopping in a local store, when he was just 15 years old.

“I encountered them in a store and I saw six or eight of them,” Tims said. “They were buying merchandise with whatever money they had. They were very congenial, talked, and there’s really about all I know about them.”

Jerry Mitchel, from Carriere, lived about a mile from Hillcrest Farm and would watch the prisoners ride on a school bus back and forth from Picayune to the camp.

“My father was friends with the bus driver. I begged him to let me ride the school bus. So, I got to ride it out to the prison camp where they were keeping them,” Mitchel said. “Of course, there were no problems. One guard on there is all. They were happy as they could be. Most of them wouldn’t want to go back to Germany or Italy. They liked it over here.”

But the Carriere camp wasn’t the only one in Mississippi. In fact, it was one of many across the state where German and Italian officers and soldiers remained under guard and worked for just pennies a day.

It all began 80 years ago, 7,000 miles away, in the desert sands of North Africa. In May 1943, 267,000 German and Italian soldiers were captured by Allied forces in the North African Campaign.

Three months later, 150,000 Axis prisoners of war were shipped to the United States. Camps began popping up all over the U.S., including in Mississippi, where four primary camps were established.

Among those camps is Camp Shelby, just south of Hattiesburg. Our curiosity peaked by the medal’s discovery, we decided to dig deeper into the history of Nazi prisoners in our state, taking a trip up to the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum at Camp Shelby to speak with a man who knows their history better than most.

“You would have several thousand POWs here at any given time,” said Tommy Lofton, Mississippi Armed Forces Museum Director, pointing toward the museum’s elaborate prisoners of war exhibit. “They would actually take Germans out in work parties and build sub-camps. In [Pearl River County], they had a bunch working in the timer industry.”

Lofton says many prisoners were offloaded at New York Harbor and brought directly to Camp Shelby.

“As we started moving into places like Normandy and France, you start seeing in the fall of ‘44, a number of prisoners here that are showing up that are new from the French campaigns in the west. We had prisoners here from all over the place.”

In September 1943, Nazi prisoners arrived by train to Camp Shelby where they were photographed, fingerprinted and assigned barracks.

But life as a prisoner of war in the U.S. was much different than the horrors that captured Allied soldiers experienced in Nazi and Japanese camps.

“They had it pretty good,” Lofton said. “The housing they had here, they could grow gardens in front of their barracks buildings. They had soccer teams, they had their own bands. You could have instruments provided by the camp. [They] built an amphitheater. They had their own canteen or PX where they could buy candy or sodas or beer, cigarrettes… other things.”

Lofton said prisoners would do physical labor in industries like timber and cotton, but they also built the lake at Paul B. Johnson State Park and completed other infrastructure projects around Camp Shelby.

“They were guarded all the time, but again were very instrumental to the success of the state’s economy during the 1940s,” Lofton said. “You know, it was an interesting experience to be able to have your enemy here literally in your own backyard, but also rely on them to help further your state and your economy.”

With many of the state’s rural workers enlisted in the war, farms struggled to find replacements. Nazi prisoners found themselves shipped out to the smaller sub-camps to keep Mississippi agriculture churning.

“It became a vital thing to keep timber, pulp wood and cotton industry- our state’s economy and agriculture economy- to have it thrive as much as possible,” Lofton said. “So we used German prisoners to do that.”

Lofton says not all prisoners in the state were “tried and true, hardcore party members or SS members.”

“In fact, a lot of the heavy political, SS soldiers were usually kind of ostracized by a lot of their fellow prisoners,” Lofton said. “A lot of the Germans and the ones we had here were just simple people. Grew up in farms, grew up in towns. Not everybody was born and raised to be hardcore soldiers. It’s kind of a unique mesh of personalities that you see come through here as prisoners.”

When Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, some 3,000 POWs were at Camp Shelby. By 1946, all were shipped back to Germany. But some of them came back to call Mississippi home.

“A lot of the Germans when they returned home, they found it either wasn’t the Germany they either believed in when they were fighting or the Germany they left behind, between getting bombed out or Russians and other folks coming in and tearing up territory,” Lofton said. “A lot of them realized it wasn’t so bad in places like Hattiesburg, Mississippi at Camp Shelby. So they came back to America to establish citizenship and become an American citizen.”

So what about the Nazi war medal found in Pearl River County? How did it get here? Is it possible the commendation was brought to Mississippi by a prisoner of war?

“Yes, more than likely,” Lofton said.

Lofton described how soldiers would keep regalia or pieces of home with them in a uniform or in a pocket. He says it wasn’t uncommon to find rings or other mementos at the camps, left by soldiers.

“It does make sense because it was people from the Afrika Korps that was here. And it was Germans and Italians,” Weir reflected on the thought of a POW bringing the medal to the camp.

Lofton says it’s very possible the medal was left behind by a prisoner of war who, like so many other captured soldiers, rebuked their Nazi affiliation to start a new life.

For curious explorers and local history experts like Weir and Lofton, how this World War II Nazi medal ended up in Mississippi only adds to the fascination.

“I’m a history buff so this is right up my alley. I love it,” Weir said. “We do a poor job at teaching history, especially local history… And our local history is rich, rich…”

If you yourself are a local history enthusiast and itching to learn more about the history of WWII prisoners of war in our state, stop by the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum at Camp Shelby or the Poplarville Historical Preservation Society, located in downtown Poplarville in Pearl River County.

Click here to subscribe to WLOX News on YouTube: Keep up with South Mississippi news, sports, and local events on our YouTube channel!

Copyright 2023 WLOX. All rights reserved.