Roger Naylor

Special for The Republic

When it comes to rivers, Arizonans are extremely open-minded. Water isn’t an essential ingredient of a river here. Sometimes it's just the memory of water, or the potential for it. That proved to be a painful lesson for a group of German prisoners of war near the end of World War II.

On Dec. 23, 1944, under cover of darkness, 25 prisoners squeezed through a slender tunnel beneath the barbed wire of Camp Papago Park and scattered across the desert. It was the largest escape by Axis prisoners of war from a U.S. compound.

Camp Papago Park was built to house U.S. soldiers undergoing desert combat training. But an influx of POWs led to a repurposing of the facility in 1943. Italian prisoners were held there before being transferred to camps in California. The first German POWs arrived at Papago in January 1944.

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The "Great Papago Escape" caught the American military by surprise, coming as it did via tunnel. Officials believed it was impossible to dig through the decomposed granite under the camp. Yet the industrious Germans carved a tunnel that started behind a bathhouse and stretched for 178 feet.

It went under two fences and a road before emerging on the banks of the Crosscut Canal. Excavated dirt was hidden in attics, flushed down toilets, spread in gardens and eventually used to build a faustball court, for a game similar to volleyball.

The escapees were naval personnel led by U-boat commander Capt. Jürgen Wattenberg. Three men built a kayak and carried it through the tunnel in pieces. From a stolen filling-station map they could see the tantalizing blue line of the Gila River leading to the Colorado River. Their plan was to ride the rapids all the way to Mexico. But they arrived at the Gila to find only a few languid puddles.

Historian Steve Hoza interviewed Wilhelm Günther, one of the boatmen, years later. “He told me, ‘I can laugh about it now but at the time it was very disheartening.’ ”

Wilhelm and the others ditched the boat and continued on foot but were captured shortly afterward. All the fugitives were rounded up. Several turned themselves in just hours after their escape. Heinrich Palmer and Reinhard Mark made it to within 10 miles of the Mexican border before they were recaptured near Sells.

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Wattenberg was the last to be caught. He and two others hid out in a shallow cave near Piestewa Peak. When his comrades failed to return after a search for food, Wattenberg decided to get clear of Phoenix but didn’t make it far. On Jan. 28, 1945, the police picked him up on his way to the railroad station in Phoenix.

“One thing all of the Germans told me was that it was more of a prank on their part,” Hoza said. “They had no real hopes of escaping. Most couldn’t speak English. You needed ration coupons to buy anything and they didn’t have them. They just felt like they had to cause trouble for the Americans and they wanted to be free for a bit.”

Hoza wrote the book "PW: First Person Accounts of German Prisoners of War in Arizona." It’s a collection of stories he gathered from the prisoners, their American guards, farmers who used the POWs as laborers and others who had contact with the camps. Hoza traveled to Germany in 1994 to conduct interviews and hosted many of the former POWs who returned to Arizona.

"They were grateful they were treated so well here,” Hoza said. “German POWs in Russia had a death rate of 53 percent. In America, it was less than 1 percent.”

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Heinrich Palmer was one of the men Hoza interviewed. He spoke of his time at Papago with fondness.

"The food at Papago Park was very good. We received the same food as the U.S. soldiers who guarded us. The food was brought in raw on trucks to the different compounds. In each compound was a kitchen barrack where a fellow POW who was a cook prepared the food. There was, for example, fresh milk that came in bottles. The cook would collect the cream from theses bottles and each prisoner on his birthday would have a cream cake baked for him with a few friends to help him eat it. Cream cakes as a prisoner of war! We sometimes thought we were in Schlaraffenland ("the land of milk and honey").

Still, many POWs consider it their duty to try to escape. The Americans made it easier at Papago by confining high-security-risk prisoners — the troublemakers, as they were known — into one compound. Leisure activities were encouraged, so when the Germans asked for gardens and a volleyball court, the guards happily handed over shovels.

“Even the guards told me security was very lax,” Hoza said. “There were no patrols on foot around the compound, it was all done from the towers. On work details, guards would often sit in the shade of the truck and take a nap.”

For Hoza, the most remarkable aspect of his research had nothing to do with the escape from Papago but from the broader services performed by the prisoners. More than 400,000 Axis POWs were held in the United States during the war. Most of the 500 camps were in the rural South and Southwest.

During the war, America suffered an acute shortage of workers and the enemy soldiers became our de facto labor force. The prisoners were put to work in mills, canneries, farms and laundries, and were paid for the work in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

“I can’t emphasize enough how important they were to the economy,” Hoza said. “They picked 90 percent of Arizona’s cotton. They were sent around the country to harvest crops. Farmers were grateful to have them. And for the POWs, it kept their minds off what was happening back home.”

Nearly 50 years after the war ended, Hoza placed a letter in a newspaper for German veterans. He was looking for men who had been POWs in Arizona.

“The floodgates opened,” he said. “They were happy to talk and many were anxious to return to Arizona. They would tell me the stories of serving in the Afrika Korps, or surviving depth charges aboard a U-boat before they were captured. And then they would say you’re the first person I’ve told this to since the war. They entrusted me with their family correspondence, their mementos, one man even gave me his Iron Cross. Their children had no interest in anything pertaining to the Third Reich.”

Camp Papago Park was located between the present boundaries of McDowell and Thomas roads, between the Crosscut Canal and Barnes Butte, with 64th Street running through the middle. It closed in March 1946.

Not much of the camp remains. Buildings were torn down. Huts from the officers’ compound were hauled away to become part of a Scottsdale apartment complex. The American Officers’ Club is now an Elks Club near the intersection of 64th Street and Oak. Housing developments, auto dealerships and baseball diamonds cover much of the camp. But if you know where to look, you can still see foundations of guard towers within Papago Park, a 1,200-acre park managed by Phoenix.

Of course, the distinctive sandstone buttes that fascinated the Germans still rise above the landscape, including Hole-in-the-Rock and Barnes Butte, which the POWs called Sleeping Indian.

Find the reporter at www.rogernaylor.com. Or follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/RogerNaylorinAZ or Twitter @AZRogerNaylor.

Find out more

• Steve Hoza’s book, "PW: First Person Accounts of German Prisoners of War in Arizona," is out of print. He will give a talk on a different topic, the Battle of Pima Butte, at 2 p.m. Jan. 9 at Cave Creek Museum, 6140 E. Skyline Drive. The talk is included with museum admission of $5. 480-488-2764, www.cavecreekmuseum.org.

• Papago Park has trails, fishing lagoons, sports fields and an archery range. 625 N. Galvin Parkway, Phoenix. 602-495-5458, www.phoenix.gov/parks.

Arizona's Military History

Conflict has shaped the Southwest since colonizers arrived in the late 1600s. From the earliest presidios to a modern-day Army base, fighting near and far has caused communities to thrive and fall.

Each month in Explore Arizona in 2015, Roger Naylor has featured a destination or episode in which military events shaped the state. This is the final story in this series.