Camp Clark highlighted in new book on Missouri's POW camps

By Steve Moyer

Nevada Daily Mail

Most Nevada residents know Camp Clark is a National Guard training facility on the east side of Nevada on Highway K.

Many Nevada residents also know Italian and German prisoners of war were kept at the camp during World War II.

What some Nevada residents probably don't know is that captured Nazis were transferred to Camp Clark to get them away from German prisoners in other camps who didn't share their support for Adolf Hitler.

St. Louis writer David Fiedler brings this and many other facts to light in his new book "The Enemy Among Us: German and Italian POWs in Missouri during World War II."

It is the detailed story of the 15,000 POWs held in 30 Missouri camps, including Camp Clark, one of the four main camps in the state. Fiedler will be in Nevada Oct. 10 at 2 p.m. to give a slide presentation on Missouri POW camps at Bushwhacker Museum.

Fiedler became interested in the camps after seeing a cistern with the words "built by the German prisoners of war" on it.

"I wanted to learn more about them, but in trying to find more I realized there wasn't anything out there," Fiedler said. "World War II had a lot of really traumatic events, big-news battles that captured a lot of attention. In the whole scheme of things, this was very much humdrum, backwater activity."

Fielder visited Camp Clark and did some of his research here, interviewing several Nevada residents and local historians.

Although Fiedler notes that physical traces of the prisoners have disappeared at many of the camps, Camp Clark still retains some of the barracks that prisoners were kept in.

"It's one of the few places in Missouri where you can still see evidence of the prisoners' stay," Fiedler said. "In other camps, there isn't much left."

The first prisoners of war at Camp Clark were Italians, who came in 1942, but their stay was short. By the middle of 1943 the Italian prisoners were out and German prisoners were in. Missouri housed nearly 15,000 German prisoners at four main camps and many smaller ones.

Camp Clark was one of the four main camps with nearly 4,000 prisoners.

Fiedler first pitched the idea for writing a story to the magazine "Missouri Life," worked a year on the magazine project, and then eventually decided to write a book on the subject.

Fiedler spent more than two years gathering information and photographs, talking with people who remembered the camps and writing the book, which became available last October.

Camps holding German prisoners were spread around the country and in some cases the prisoners were used to replace farm workers who were drafted.

Some people were concerned about the danger of having POWs close to their homes. Leonard Ernsbarger, a long-time Nevada resident, was 9 when Pearl Harbor was attacked and remembers that German POWs were close by.

"It was scary, really scary to know those guys were around," Ernsbarger said. "You heard all kinds of stories about them."

But Fiedler said most of the time they turned out to be "18- or 20-year-old boys who weren't nearly as fierce or frightening as the locals thought they'd be."

Security around the camps was tight but internal security, at least at first, was sometimes provided by the prisoners themselves. The Nazis would keep order in the camps, but they also tried to force prisoners to continue supporting the Third Reich.

"The government was slow to catch on to what Nazis were up to," Fiedler said. "When they did find out, they separated the Nazis from the rest of the Germans and put them in camps by themselves."

Fielder's book can be found, or ordered, at most bookstores. For more information you can visit his Web site at http://mopows.tripod.com.