[metallic, eerie noise] Narrator: July 8, 1945, Private First Class, Clarence V. Bertucci was due for guard duty at midnight.

♪[drums, eerie music] His job: guard 250 German prisoners of war asleep in their tents, weary from a long week of work.

♪[drums, eerie music] Bertucci was a troubled soldier with prior convictions in military court.

He had never seen combat, never had a chance to fire on German soldiers.

But that morning, all of that would change.

[gun shots, men yelling] Arlen Madsen: It was really early in the morning, and all of a sudden, we heard a lot of popping sound.

We didn't exactly know what it was, but it woke us up.

Rex Torgenson: We didn't know what happened.

And here come my Uncle Sharp running across the road and he had a gun with him.

Anna Chappell: My dad come down, made us get up, and he stripped the beds and got the tarps off the mattresses to wrap the bodies in.

So they put them out on the lawn and that's where they put all the bodies.

♪[suspenseful music] [bombs dropping, fighter plane noise] Narrator: More than 5,000 miles away from the frontlines of WWII, the small rural town of Salina, Utah was experiencing the kind of bloodshed that was only seen in newsreels.

By the end of the night, six were dead, three mortally wounded, and 19 injured.

It was an unprecedented tragedy and the biggest blemish on an otherwise successful program that saw the United States house more than 370,000 German prisoners of war in more than 500 camps across the nation.

8,000 of these prisoners found themselves in Utah - a place they never would have expected, working side-by-side with civilians in fields and factories across the state.

From this collision of cultures, both sides discovered the humanity in one another, and for brief moments, forgot they were at war.

Major funding for Splinters of a Nation was provided by: Additional support was provided by: ♪[suspenseful music] Narrator: During WWII Allied forces captured over 8 million German prisoners of war.

It was a problem on a scale no one had dealt with before.

Arnold Krammer: We had to determine what are we going to do with them?

Here, we have thousands upon thousands of German prisoners.

What are we going to do with them?

We can't kill them, of course, because then, they'll start to kill ours, and we can't have that.

We can't leave them in camps because then, they will overrun those camps, take their prisoners back, put them back in uniform, and we'll fight them again.

Kent Powell: Well there were really three options.

One was to take care of them where they had them.

The second possibility would be to ship them off to England, which they did.

But England found that they were running out of the space and resources to take care of them.

And so the third option was of course, to send them to the United States.

Arnold Krammer: We put them on liberty ships, where the ships brought equipment and replacements and ammunition to the front lines.

And instead of going back empty, they now carried German prisoners.

Universal Newsreel: These prisoners were captured by Americans, perhaps by soldiers the Wakefield had taken overseas a few months before.

Yet to the officers and men of the ship they are just troops, to be checked in, ordered, and cared for.

The agreement protecting... Ruediger Overmans: This for many, you have mentioned, that, at that times a German average soldier did not have the chance to be on vacations in any foreign country.

Therefore, it was for the inmate, was very impressive to have such long journey over the sea and see the Statue of Liberty and, and enter a totally different country.

♪[inquisitive music] Narrator: Between 1942 and 1945 more than 370,000 German prisoners entered the United States.

Now on American soil, they boarded Pullman trains, and to their wonder, were treated to comfortable seats, good food, and vistas of American cities and farmland, none of which had been destroyed by the war.

Prisoners arrived in more than 500 locations, across nearly every one of the 48 states.

Utah was a perfect candidate for POW camps, and eventually more than 8,000 prisoners would spend some or all of their incarceration in 12 camps across the state.

A flagship camp sprung up in Ogden, housing nearly 4,000 German prisoners, which at times also held thousands of Italian prisoners.

Following standardized blueprints, its construction mirrored that of other camps across the country.

Double barbed wire fences, watchtowers, and searchlights surrounded the compound.

Prisoners slept in heated barracks, with unlimited hot water nearby, and plenty of comfort compared to the Spartan conditions of the battlefield.

Universal Newsreel: War prisoners receive the same rations as American soldiers or an equivalent in their own type of food if they prefer.

♪[old newsreel music] These Signal Corp pictures show a fully equipped recreation room provided for the captives, who even have their own band.

America scrupulously observes the principles of humanity in her treatment of war prisoners.

Ruediger Overmans: It was the interest of the custodian power to give them not too much time to think about the situation.

Because there could only become quarrels of that.

Therefore they should be occupied.

They should be doing something, eh?

Arnold Krammer: The program was: keep them tired, because if you keep the prisoners of war tired, however you keep them tired, they'll be less likely to escape.

So we encouraged them to get involved in sports.

You could drive by a camp, for instance, and stop your car at the barbed wire fence, and you could make bets with the guards.

Which team was going to win, which one would lose, and so on.

♪[ukulele music] Narrator: In addition, the Ogden camp was furnished with a canteen, hospital, chapel, classes, theatre, and a recreation field.

And the longer the prisoners remained at the camp the more they made it their own, with original plays, a 24-piece orchestra, choir, tennis and badminton courts, boxing rings, billiards, ping pong, and a camp garden, even food that mirrored homegrown tastes.

Kent Powell: Yeah I suppose if I had been a soldier in World War II, I would have just as soon been sent to Utah as a prisoner of war as any other place.

Ruediger Overmans: There were two things that were missing, this was first freedom, and second, women.

Narrator: Some prisoners regarded their stay in Utah as a brush with paradise.

Local residents on the other hand, strapped with war-time rations, were outraged, and led many to label their camps, the Fritz Ritz.

Conditions in America starkly contrasted that of the larger prisoner of war experience, including those in Russia who drank melted snow and ate rodents to survive.

American authorities were careful to abide by the Geneva Convention, but were more concerned about the care of their own soldiers in German hands.

Arnold Krammer: We had 371,000 German prisoners in the United States, and they had 90,000 of our prisoners.

So we felt as well as we take care of their prisoners, hopefully, they will take care of ours.

[camera capture sounds] Narrator: Prisoners were generally well behaved at the Ogden camp, but some entertained themselves with hi-jinks that kept the guards on their toes.

Josef Berghoff, captured at Normandy at age 18, quickly bored of the repetitive work in the uniform repair shop and began tossing fabric around the room.

Though sentenced to two weeks of solitary confinement on bread and water, Berghoff wasn't through making trouble.

♪[jazz music] Narrator: Jakob Goergen, a 20-year-old prisoner found that sometimes it was the guards who had the last laugh.

Universal Newsreel: These are the last German captives that will be brought to this country; they range in age from 13 to 60.

♪[newsreel music] They all assured Army authorities that they were anti-Nazi and had never harmed a soul, a tale we will hear many times before the last war criminal is liquidated.

Ruediger Overmans: The main difference was when those from North Africa were captured, Germany was on its height of power.

These soldiers still believed in the superiority of the German Wehrmacht, and the ones who were captured in Normandy, they learned that, at least materially seen, the allies were much more powerful.

It doesn't make sense to fight anymore, and these two opinions, you can say clashed in the camps.

♪[suspenseful music] Arnold Krammer: Our mistake was we didn't separate them in the beginning, and could you as a prisoner of war speak out against Hitler?

It would have been a dangerous thing to do.

Groups of Nazis had already made themselves known in most of the prison camps.

Ruediger Overmans: Ardent Nazis, these were not so many.

But there were many who believed in the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, who admired the successes he had had, who were willing to serve their country, without being Nazis explicitly.

And there were lots who did not want to have much to do with the Nazis.

They only served their country.

They didn't have alternative, and things like that.

Narrator: Although relatively small in number, fanatical Nazis had the potential to hold other prisoners hostage to their ideas.

American commanders realized that if future German leaders were to come from the ranks of those incarcerated, something needed to be done.

Newsreel: American style is not an organized system of loot.

That distinguishes it from the efforts in military government of the Axis powers.

Arnold Krammer: The Geneva Convention says that you cannot re-educate prisoners.

Nonetheless we did it.

Kent Powell: Here's an opportunity to show that democracy works.

That the United States really can be looked to as an example of what Germany might become after the war is over.

Narrator: Kurt Schnepper was captured at age 17, having fired only a single shot in the war.

For him, Democracy was an easy sell.

Kent Powell: I can't say that all German prisoners, or even many German prisoners, really embraced the United States.

But I think the seeds of goodwill were planted and grew to fruition after many of these prisoners returned home.

♪[suspenseful music] Arnold Krammer: It is part of the military code that if you get captured by the enemy, it is your responsibility to escape.

Ruediger Overmans: The main reason in America was the wish to get out of camp, to get out of the fences.

Yes, this was the main reason.

Only very few believed that they really could succeed in getting home to Germany.

Kent Powell: Those that were ardent supporters of Hitler, rather than escape, felt that keeping the prisoners in line here was their mission.

Narrator: Though American authorities continually worried about escaping POWs, in reality very few prisoners attempted it.

Of the 371,000 German prisoners, 2,222 got out, less than 0.6%.

Arnold Krammer: Within three days, almost every one of the prisoners who escaped was apprehended.

Sometimes by accident by Boy Scout groups that were out on overnight hike, and they would bump into a German prisoner.

Sometimes, the German prisoners were, would come to the gate and try to get back into the camp.

Narrator: For some, escaping meant much more than simply getting out for a few moments of freedom.

For them the stakes were much higher.

♪[ominous music] On a cloudy night in March 1944, POWs in camp Warner near Tooele, just west of Salt Lake City, lit several smoky fires in their barracks stoves to take visibility down to a minimum.

Three German prisoners made their way to the fences and cut through.

Free of their compound, they plunged into the Utah desert and headed south for Mexico.

Franz Englert, a veteran of the Afrika Korps who was captured in Tunisia, led the trio on foot as they followed the railroad south.

Their absence remained undetected through the night, but by dawn, camp leaders had discovered the escape.

The hunt was on.

Herb White: So an all-points bulletin was put out, and the civilian community and of course all the military knew about it, and everybody went looking for them.

And nobody in the area had seen hide nor hair of these three.

My dad is John Noble White, and he was assigned to the Tooele Ordnance Depot in Utah as their safety and security officer.

There was a railroad man some 40 miles from the camp who spotted them, and he figured out what was going on.

He called the military.

Dad got some of his civilian guards in two Jeeps and took off across the desert.

♪[suspenseful music] And when they caught up with the three men, the three men realized the jig was up, and they split into three different directions trying to get away.

[men shouting in German and English] Narrator: Franz Englert, like many Germans, was familiar with American cinema, and his western adventure on the lam ended at the hands of a local lawman -- a John Wayne character right out of the movies.

Herb White: Now, at that time, he also confiscated from each of these POWs, a notebook.

It was a school note tablet.

The notebooks contained quite detailed maps of the terrain in Utah, Arizona, California and, and up to the border of Mexico.

Their goal was to reach Mexico and ask for asylum, and then go on down to South America.

My guess is to try to make contact with the Germans who lived in South America and get back to Germany.

Narrator: Newspapers throughout Utah and several other states recorded their recapture, and while locals breathed a sigh of relief, Englert also found a measure of security.

For him, escaping was about more than tasting freedom, it was about keeping himself safe from something far more threatening than being re-captured.

Narrator: Englert's punishment was 21 days of solitary confinement with only bread and water.

But each day behind bars brought him a grudging respect from the camp's fanatical Nazis.

Kent Powell: The prisoners of war were the closest that most Americans, certainly, most Utahans, came to the actual enemy.

And it's wartime.

This is a life or death situation, it's not a time to embrace people and remember good Christian teachings of loving your enemy and taking care of them.

♪[inquisitive music] Allie Lawler: In my particular job the whole warehouse was full of German prisoners of war.

But I was never allowed to talk to them privately as a person.

It was considered treason.

[shouting in German, cheering from crowds] I was terrified of them because of the war movies and things that I'd seen, you know?

They were really as far as I was concerned, guilty of a lot of atrocities, and I was really, really scared of them.

I used to sing a lot.

I studied music.

I was singing in German in my office one day, not even thinking about those prisoners.

I went to lunch, and when I got back, I had a note on my typewriter.

Boy, my knees shook.

My arms shook.

I shook all over.

I was scared to death, and it said, "Would you teach me about this country and God?

If you want to meet me, meet me at Bay 5 [or something] on Pallet 6," and I was sure I didn't go that way, anywhere near that way.

Narrator: Strict rules prohibited the interaction of civilians with German prisoners.

But inevitably the rules were broken.

Marilyn Mayfield: He was working out there as the guard, and he took two of the prisoners home with him.

I guess it's not a good thing to say, but he would sneak 'em out of the base.

And then after a certain time at night, he would sneak 'em back in.

It was only the same two always, and they tried to come, and if they knew my mother was baking pie they'd always come.

And they'd eat, and then afterwards they would stay and play music.

And at seven years old, we thought that was great.

It was just a happy, happy time for all of us.

I guess it just didn't matter that they were at the camp out there with, with Chuck as prisoners of war.

And when they left out there, they presented my mother with the picture, and the painting has been in our family for 70 years.

Just to thank her, I think for pie more than anything else -- for accepting them and having them in our home.

Narrator: The policy restricting interaction between civilians and prisoners held up for some time, but with so many able-bodied men overseas fighting, Utah was in the midst of a labor shortage.

Soon, the industrial and agricultural sectors realized that prisoner labor could help solve the problem.

It was cheap, mobile, and plentiful.

For the first time, prisoners were taken out of their camps and put to work side by side with thousands of civilians in factories and fields across the state.

Vaunda Russell: There was one time, that my dad drove up with the truck and he had some German prisoners of war, and that's the first time I'd really seen them.

I remember they were just laughing and jumping up and down, and I thought, "Boy, they don't look like monsters."

They were having a good time to think that they were out in the open.

Narrator: Prisoners found themselves in places like warehouses, orchards, fields, and factories.

They built or repaired buildings, dug embankments, cleaned ditches, cut timber and even constructed a ski run and lift at Snow Basin in Ogden Canyon.

♪[newsreel music] [treefalling, saw cutting tree] Narrator: Described as "apt and willing workers," thousands of prisoners bolstered Utah's economy.

Temporary camps were created across northern Utah and even as far south as Salina, so prisoners could be closer to the work.

For the people in those communities, the face of the war effort became a lot more personal.

The enemy had come to their backyard.

Arnold Krammer: An army truck would pull up with ten or fifteen or however many you asked for, dump them out, usually an American guard with them.

The American guard would hand his rifle to one of the German prisoners.

The rifle was empty, and the American guard went under the truck and went to sleep in the hot sun, and the prisoners helped bring in the crops.

Rex Torgenson: We made friends with them when we worked out in the fields.

We worked right with them.

We didn't work over here in the other part of the fields.

We worked with these guys.

Gene Taylor: One day out come a little weasel.

And I just remember all of 'em screaming, "Weasel, weasel, weasel!"

And they run around there as hard as they can run.

They had a great time.

I don't think they ever caught it, but they sure had fun chasing it.

Kent Powell: The experiences were for the most part positive, and so it didn't take long for these relationships to be established.

They were certainly tentative at first.

There was suspicion on both sides.

♪[jazz music] Narrator: Paul Bartsch was a 19-year-old prisoner who found himself working the sugar beet fields in Logan.

It was hot, backbreaking work, with very little interaction with the farm families he served, but one day, that all changed when a farmer pulled up in his pick-up truck.

Gene Taylor: He just took a liking to me.

He's the enemy, and normally you'd, be wanting to shoot him, kill him!

You know, he's the enemy!

Every day he'd talk to me, and he tried to teach me to speak German.

To this day, I speak German [counting in German], so they could have been the neighbors next door instead of German Prisoners of War.

They were just that nice of people.

Arnold Krammer: I don't think anybody else had that close contact, but farm families did.

Farm families often brought them into the house to have lunch.

The German prisoners often made little handicrafts, which they gave to the farm family.

They got along quite well.

Narrator: Of all the things POWs and Utahans found they had in common, perhaps none was more potent in bridging the divide than children.

Farm kids sometimes hung around the working POWs, entertaining them with their antics.

In Logan, Delbert Olsen brought some prisoners to help him with the harvest.

He also brought along his daughter.

Delbert Olsen [Actor's Voice]: "I noticed that one of these men had her in his arms and it gave me a fright.

I walked over to him and took the little girl by the hand but he didn't want to let her go.

I could see the tears running down his face.

The guard came running over.

I don't know what he intended to do, and I said to him don't hurt that man for he's done nothing wrong.

He could not speak to me nor I to him but he didn't have to.

I knew that somewhere in this world he had a little girl that he may not ever see again.

It showed to me that most men throughout the world have love and compassion in their hearts."

♪[heartfelt music] Narrator: When the fragility of life reminded everyone of their own mortality, both sides forgot their differences and lent aid where it was needed.

At Bushnell General Military Hospital in Brigham City, an American soldier named Gordon Reeves volunteered his blood for a prisoner who underwent an operation to remove a brain tumor.

The procedure was unsuccessful, and the prisoner died, but Reeves attended the man's funeral and transported his body to Salt Lake City for burial.

At this same hospital, POWs were used for all kinds of duties, including attending to wounded American personnel.

At times, the prisoners would also volunteer their blood, to the same people who had been their mortal enemies just weeks before.

Such acts of kindness were not unique to the people of Utah, for they were common throughout the country, and although most prisoners and Americans described their experiences with each other in favorable terms, some did not and were simply uninterested and indifferent.

But for many, they came together as enemies but parted as friends.

♪[heartfelt music] ♪[heartfelt music] Narrator: Kurt's letters home allowed him to capture his feelings of homesickness and worry, but they also gave him a way to express hope for a better future.

Newsreel: This is a solemn but glorious hour.

General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.

The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.

Narrator: The war was over, but with it came news and images of Nazi atrocities - more than 11 million men, women, and children dead.

Arnold Krammer: I've interviewed American soldiers who were dumbstruck.

They knew that something had been going on and that the Germans didn't like the Jews and so on -- but to actually walk into a death camp or walk into a concentration camp was just stunning.

♪[apprehensive music] Narrator: American authorities required prisoners in all camps across the United States, to watch atrocity films detailing grotesque scenes of starvation and death.

Ruediger Overmans: Some did not believe it because the first reason was this was a film produced by the custodian power, therefore it was propaganda or not?

They had no possibility to check whether it was true or not.

But you know, this was you can say, a defense strategy.

Everybody I guess knew or had the impression or something like that, that there had been taking place something like that.

And therefore, it's a question of whether you allow yourself to accept the reality.

And many of them did not accept this as reality.

♪[pensive music] Arnold Krammer: The percentage of them who believed it or the percentage that didn't believe it, I don't know.

I've seen photographs of some of the prisoners crying as they were being forced to watch -- or being required to watch, but I think in their hearts, many of them accepted it, that this was being done in their name.

Narrator: It was a bitter pill to take, especially on the heels of sound defeat.

Joachim Oertel (Actor's Voice): "The film we saw has left deep marks in our hearts.

Never should we forget the stain which burns in us like a hot iron, and in the future we must prove to the world that we are worthy to be recognized as members of the society of mankind."

-- Joachim Oertel, Ogden, Utah, 1945.

Narrator: July 1945.

The war with Europe had been over for two months.

POW thoughts and hopes were focused on returning home, and rebuilding.

The worst seemed to be over.

For 250 prisoners held in the small Utah town of Salina however, all that would change at the hands of a single prison guard named Clarence V. Bertucci.

♪[ominous music] Mike Rose: He was a 6th grade-educated guy.

He was only 5' 5" -- weighed 115 pounds -- a little guy from New Orleans.

He had been a bad soldier.

He'd been in Europe.

He'd been court-martialed twice and brought up a third time.

What you would call a bad apple, and apparently the Army figured the safest place to send him was to the end of the earth, and at that time Salina, Utah was about as far away from anything happening as you could get.

Rex Torgenson: Well one night, my sister worked at Mom's Cafe.

The only thing she knew about him is he came in there and had something to eat.

Well my older sister heard him talking about this, didn't say what he was going to do or anything like that, but he did tell them something big was going to happen that night.

Mike Rose: This pretty much validates that what he was about to do was a premeditated act.

♪[suspenseful music] He left, to walk seven blocks east, on Main Street to the camp.

Kent Powell: Clarence came on duty at midnight.

Prisoners of course had gone to bed, were asleep, were looking forward to the next Sunday morning and their day off.

Mike Rose: A quarter after twelve, he loaded 250 rounds into a .30 caliber air cooled Browning machine gun, and in about fifteen seconds he emptied all 250 rounds into the sleeping Germans below.

[gun fire and men screaming] [gun fire and men screaming] Narrator: Bertucci had finally run out of ammunition and was subdued, but below the tower, 250 prisoners were in pandemonium.

Mike Rose: The Germans had no concept of what was happening.

The immediate reaction was, "They're going to kill us all.

Something has gone terribly wrong in the war, and they're going to kill us all, and they scrambled for cover.

Kent Powell: The town was in a complete uproar over it.

Feeling, some, that the prisoners had fomented an escape, and the guards were responding by shooting at them.

Rex Torgenson: We lived 600 feet from the prison camp.

Scared us so bad, we didn't know what in the heck had happened, that machine gun going off.

The man packed them down, laid them on the grass lawn in front of my grandmother's house.

We walked up there, and boy they told us, "Now go home!

Go home!

Now!"

They had blankets laying on them.

We didn't know what it was.

To be truthful with you it looked like a whole bunch of sheep, laying there on the lawn, covered up.

Mike Rose: The chore now was to care for the wounded, and certainly for the dead.

Dr. Noyes, who was the director of the hospital, like everyone else, was just shaken from his bed that night.

He ran up to the camp.

The commander of the camp was very shaken.

And Dr. Noyes said, "We've got to get these men down to the hospital as fast as we can."

Anna Chappell: Mother was the nurse that was on.

That was a 16-bed hospital and there was only 4 empty beds, so they had a full house.

Arlen Madsen: Dad and I could hear the trucks coming in, and we could hear people talking back and forth, the cries of the soldiers that was hit, so then we walked right over immediately to the hospital and as we got there they put us right to work.

Mike Rose: Witnesses that I talked to said there was blood everywhere.

There was blood in the street.

There was blood on the sidewalk.

It was all throughout the hospital.

Kent Powell: You can imagine it's almost like a bombing taking place in the building.

There was utter chaos there.

♪[suspenseful music] Narrator: The town was unprepared and overwhelmed.

More than 20 wounded prisoners were scattered in the hall, waiting room, and across the front lawn.

As the townspeople gathered around the hospital, they were put to work carrying the prisoners in and out of the building -some were as young as 13 years old.

Arlen Madsen: What I really remember, it's hard to forget, is the cries for help from the prisoners.

Take twenty-eight of them out there that was hurt and some of them had already died, and their moans and their groans and their cries for help.

You just don't forget that.

Rex Torgenson: I would say the townspeople's hearts went out for them.

Kent Powell: I think their response was one of compassion.

"Let us do whatever we can to help" - certainly not a feeling that those men got what they deserved.

They were essentially guests you might say in their community, and needed to be looked after and taken care of.

Arlen Madsen: Well they knew they were the enemy, but by the same token, I don't know of anybody that didn't want to help when they got back to the hospital.

Everybody just dug in, and whatever they could do they helped.

Anna Chappell: Daddy never talked an awful lot about it, and that when I can remember him crying so hard when he says, "That poor boy, and when we were carrying him and his blood was seeping and intestines were falling out."

I mean, what a horrible, horrible thing.

Narrator: Bertucci's motive was never discovered.

Some speculated he was drunk, deranged, or simply filled with hatred for the enemy.

In total, eight prisoners would die that night - a ninth, five days later.

The dead were buried at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, in a cemetery for American heroes.

Kent Powell: It was a respectful gesture on the part of the American authorities, certainly one that was documented in the newspapers with photographs, and, essentially a sad experience, one that everyone regretted had taken place.

Mike Rose: The bureaucratic tragedy was that the families back home were not immediately notified.

Some of those families were still sending letters and post cards to Salina and other camps that the men had been at previously for more than a year.

Kent Powell: Most of the families only learned of the death of their loved ones by prisoners of war returning from the United States.

Letters that were sent to authorities - all but one case that I can think of were simply -- there was really no response other than that was the responsibility of the Red Cross and of the German government to respond to those kind of queries.

Narrator: Bertucci was unrepentant, and yet never tried for his crimes.

He was declared insane and spent much of his life in hospitals around the country eventually dying of a brain hemorrhage in 1969.

The incident was a national embarrassment, the largest massacre on American soil during the war.

And though the story ran in newspapers and magazines everywhere, exactly a month later, atomic bombs exploded over Japan, and the story of Salina and its fallen prisoners was soon forgotten.

♪[newsreel music] Newsreel: Moving day at Camp Shanks, New York.

1,400 German prisoners of war, the last of the PWs, leave America.

♪[newsreel music] Now, to this remnant of the once powerful Wehrmacht, America says, "Goodbye, and good riddance!"

♪[newsreel music] Narrator: It would take nearly a year to close all of the prison camps across the nation, and some of the prisoners in Utah were among the last to leave.

Arnold Krammer: We had 300 exactly 371,000 German prisoners here.

At the end of the war there were only 12 prisoners outstanding.

Now that's a tight program.

Somehow, God looks out for fools, drunks, and Americans.

♪[soft music] Arnold Krammer: In a sad episode, we turned our German prisoners of war over to the British and the French.

The British and the French treated them badly.

They had been nursing anger through two world wars against the Germans.

Ruediger Overmans: The German situation in France was worse.

France had been devastated to a large degree, and you had to remove bombs and things like that.

It was one of the many dangerous things.

The situations in these camps were very bad.

Narrator: The prospect of ever returning home seemed as far away as ever.

But eventually it did happen.

And when German prisoners finally crossed into the boundaries of their homeland, little could have prepared them for what they saw.

♪[sad, ominous music] ♪[sad, ominous music] Arnold Krammer: The German prisoners came back, and like thousands of people at the time, roaming around Germany trying to find their relatives, had to find their home if they could.

Ruediger Overmans: Everything you had hoped for your future was gone.

For example, those people who were twenty, twenty-five years old, they had never seen anything else but school and military, and they wanted to start - and they had hoped to start- a life after war in a victorious Germany, and now they knew that there was nothing anymore.

There was no future anymore.

Ruediger Overmans: Most returned back home to families who were still existing.

Sure the father or other brothers might have died or still in captivity, things like that, but most of them returned to families who were still existing.

Ruediger Overmans: Nobody in Germany, after defeat, nobody does come home as a hero.

It was, I guess, a problem, to declare that you had been in America because you were better off than everybody else.

And there was some jealous about that.

"You just had a good life while we were still fighting."

Kent Powell: I think that was came out of the prisoner of war experience -the realization that they were just like us, and yet we had our own ways of life and different characteristics, but that basic element of humanity was there - on both sides.

Gene Taylor: These men were just drafted in the army just like our kids were drafted in the army had to go fight the enemy.

Vaunda Russell: Germans were supposed to be monsters.

As a little kid you thought they were monsters, but when I looked at them I thought, "They look just like us."

Narrator: For three years, the people of Utah, and the German prisoners who lived among them, found unexpected empathy as each dealt with the realities of war.

And their friendships would last for years to come.

Though only a handful of prisoners ever returned to Utah, many took a piece of it back to Germany with them, joining ranks with a broken people to make a new life.

♪[uplifting music] ♪[uplifting music] ♪[uplifting music] ♪[uplifting music] ♪[uplifting music] ♪[uplifting music] ♪[uplifting music] ♪[uplifting music] ♪[uplifting music] Major funding for Splinters of a Nation was provided by: Additional support was provided by: