Son of Crowder POW visits Neosho

Dietmar Felber’s father doesn’t talk much these days about his military service as a teenager in the Austrian Army during World War II.

One thing he doesn’t clam up about, however, is his time as a prisoner of war at Camp Crowder in Neosho.

Last week, Dietmar, who was born in Austria but came to live in America in his 20s, visited us here at the Newton County Historical Museum with a very simple wish: He wanted to see the town where his father was once held captive. We did him one better: We took him out to what’s left of old Camp Crowder and to the building we think may have once been part of the POW processing center.

“My father, like most of the war generation in Germany and Austria, doesn’t talk about the war,” Dietmar told us. “It’s something they are ashamed of.”

In fact, Dietmar doesn’t even know how his dad came to be captured, or anything else for that matter, about his military service to the Axis Powers except that he was held as a prisoner of war at Camp Crowder until just about the end of the war. His father was then transferred to England and then on home to Austria, where he yet lives today.

When it comes to Camp Crowder, though, Dietmar said his father apparently doesn’t mind opening up a little. According to Dietmar, his father told him he worked in the bakery there and was treated very well. He even said the prisoners were allowed to occasionally come into Neosho under close supervision.

Dietmar’s father was a scared 17-year-old kid deep inside the enemy’s homeland when he arrived by rail into the camp.

What has been historically labeled the former army quartermaster warehouse – a very long building along a side-track near Neosho Airport and presently being occupied by a local charity – likely had an additional use.

According to some unconfirmed sources, the long building – or an identical one belonging to a series of buildings along that track and that are no longer standing – also functioned as a place to process the incoming German, Austrian and Italian prisoners of war.

While I’m not totally convinced, it does make practical sense for a couple of reasons. First, the two POW camps were very close by. Second, prisoners did arrive by rail and these long buildings, including the one that still exists, were conveniently right beside the tracks.

Then there are the stories of German names being scrawled on some of the pillars in the yet-standing building.

And that’s where we brought Dietmar.

Well, we didn’t find any names. We did discover a Nazi swastika and German Iron Cross on one of the wooden support columns but it’s impossible to tell if the icons were scrawled by an unrepentant German soldier or by some bored young punk in modern times (the building has had a few commercial uses in the past 60-plus years.)

We also drove Dietmar through what used to be the hospital area (off Nelson Avenue) and showed him a few of the original barracks on the back side of the Crowder College campus.
When he left us, Dietmar said he would share with his father about visiting the place he once was held as prisoner and hoped that it would inspire him to talk a little more about his wartime experiences, though he wasn’t too hopeful.

The next day, we received an e-mail from Dietmar that is addressed as much to this community as to anyone here at the historical society. It reads in part:

“It is worth recalling that historical events have very personal consequences and that individual lives are tied to history in innumerable ways, not always readily visible. I for one find it impossible to think about WWII and the internment of German prisoners of war in the United States…without relating those events to my very existence, since, as I mentioned, I might never have been born if the Allies had followed a different policy or if the POW camps had been less humane. So naturally I feel grateful and want to say thank you to those responsible for the larger policies that made such humaneness possible as well as to those nameless members of the local community who, in the mid-1940s, engaged in personal acts of kindness towards people like my father, ‘the enemy.’” 

Enough said.

Wes Franklin is director of the Newton County Historical Park and Museum, at 121 N. Washington St., in Neosho. The site is open seven days a week, 12:30-4:30 p.m. (1:30-4:30 p.m. on Sundays). To contact, please call 451-4940.