In The Barbed-Wire College Ron
Robin tells the extraordinary story of the 380,000 German prisoners who were
brought to the USA during WWII and kept in camps throughout the country. Using
personal narratives, camp newspapers, and military records, Robin re-creates in
arresting detail the attempts of prison officials to mold the minds of their
prisoners. From 1943 onward, despite the Geneva Convention, prisoners were
subjected to an ambitious re-education program designed to turn them into
American-style democrats. Under the direction of the Pentagon, liberal arts
professors pushed through a program of arts and humanities that stressed only
the positive aspects of American society. The American educators censored
popular books and films in order to promote democratic humanism and downplay
class and race issues, materialism, and wartime heroics. However, by the war's
end, the curriculum was more concerned with combating the appeals of communism
than with eradicating the evils of National Socialism.
The re-education program, overall, failed to
make these POWs shed their Nazi beliefs and become supporters of a liberal-
democratic ethos. It succeeded less than the policies of other nations in
indoctrinating prisoners of war or internees. In The Barbed-Wire College
Ron Robin shows how this intriguing chapter of military history was also tied
to two crucial episodes of twentieth- century American history: the battle over
the future of American education and the McCarthy-era hysterics that awaited
postwar America.