Late autumn 1944, the officers compound of Camp Papago Park, Arizona. Captain Jurgen Wattenberg, former commander of submarine U-162, and the highest ranking German prisoner of war in the American Southwest, spread a stolen American road map across a rough wooden table. Around him, two of the most experienced U-boat captains in captivity studied the blue lines snaking south across the Arizona desert.
Friedrich Guggenberger, who had commanded U-513 until his capture off South America. Jurgen Wattenberg former captain of U-595, taken off North Africa. These were not ordinary prisoners. They were Kriegsmarine officers trained in navigation, engineering, and the precise calculation of distances and currents. The map told them everything they needed to know.
The Crosscut Canal ran directly past the eastern perimeter of their compound. It fed into the Salt River. The Salt joined the Hila. The Hila emptied into the Colorado. The Colorado flowed straight into the Gulf of California and Mexico. The mathematics of escape, as Wattenberg saw it, were irrefutable. What Wattenberg and his officers had not calculated, what no amount of German naval training could have prepared them for, was that the American road maps they were studying told a beautiful and catastrophic lie.
In Arizona, a blue line on a map did not mean water. It meant a memory of water. A path where water had once flowed and might flow again someday, but where? In December 1944, a man could walk for miles across dry sand and cracked mud without wetting the sole of his boot. The rivers that Wattenberg planned to ride to freedom did not exist, and the desert that surrounded Camp Papago Park was not the mild sandy landscape these German sailors imagined.
It was the Sonoran Desert, one of the most unforgiving environments in North America, where December nights dropped below freezing, and the terrain stretched flat and featureless for miles in every direction. This is the story of the largest prisoner of war escape from an American facility during the Second World War.
25 German officers and enlisted men who tunneled their way to freedom only to discover that escaping the Americans was the easy part. Surviving what came after was something else entirely. To understand how 25 German prisoners came to be digging through Arizona desert soil in the first place, you have to understand the peculiar world of prisoner of war camps in the wartime United States.
By 1944, nearly 175,000 Axis prisoners were held across roughly 500 camps scattered from coast to coast. The sheer number overwhelmed the system. Able-bodied American men were overseas fighting. The guards who remained stateside were often older, under-trained, or recovering from wounds that made them unfit for combat duty.
Camp Papago Park, built in 1943 on 3,000 acres of public parkland in eastern Phoenix, was a product of this system. Originally designed for Italian prisoners, it was converted to a German-only facility by January of that year. At its peak, the camp held more than 3,000 prisoners behind its barbed wire, watched over by roughly 400 guards.
The camp itself would have struck any visitor as remarkably relaxed. The facility consisted of five separate compounds, one designated for officers and the rest for enlisted men. Prisoners were not required to work, though many volunteered simply to combat the boredom of captivity. Those who did work were assigned to nearby cotton fields and fruit orchards, traveling out each morning and returning each evening like commuters.
They earned 80 cents an hour in script, which they spent on beer and snack foods at the camp canteen. Movies were screened regularly. One longtime local resident later recalled attending film screenings alongside the prisoners, where one man would shout out the dialogue in German and another in Italian as the reels played.
Laurel and Hardy were everyone’s favorites. Educational classes were offered. Sports leagues kept the men occupied. There were even whispered stories of prisoners who had cultivated relationships with local women during their work details outside the wire. The majority of the prisoners at Papago Park were former Kriegsmarine sailors.
Most of them pulled from submarines sunk in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and off the coast of Africa. These were not conscripts or reluctant soldiers. They were volunteers, trained specialists, and many of them decorated veterans of the most dangerous branch of the German military. A U-boat crew that survived a sinking and capture had already beaten odds that killed roughly 70% of all German submariners during the war.
These men understood risk, endurance, and discipline in ways that their American guards, many of them older men or those fit for overseas combat, could not easily appreciate. The contrast between their captivity and what was happening to Allied prisoners in German and Japanese hands was staggering. While the men of Camp Papago Park played volleyball and drank beer, American and British prisoners in stalag camps across occupied Europe endured starvation rations, forced marches in winter, and the constant threat of execution for the
slightest infraction. In the Pacific, conditions were immeasurably worse. American prisoners of the Japanese suffered mortality rates that defied comprehension. The men at Papago Park did not know the full extent of these horrors, but they knew enough to understand that their situation was, by the brutal standards of wartime captivity, almost absurdly comfortable.
By any honest measure, life inside Camp Papago Park was safer, more comfortable, and better fed than anything these men would have experienced on the front lines of a losing war. From time to time, individual prisoners slipped away from outside work details and remained on the loose for several days before either being recaptured or simply returning voluntarily to the camp.
These small-scale escapes were treated as minor annoyances rather than serious security breaches. The guards became accustomed to a certain level of casual non-compliance. Local children in the surrounding neighborhoods reportedly admired the German prisoners so much that some began wearing the letters POW on their jackets, prompting camp officials to issue orders prohibiting the practice to avoid confusing the guards.
This was the security environment that Jürgen Wattenberg intended to exploit, but comfort did not equal compliance, not for every prisoner and certainly not for Jürgen Wattenberg. Wattenberg arrived at Camp Papago Park carrying a reputation that preceded him like a storm warning. American camp administrators had labeled him a super Nazi, a designation earned not through ideology alone, but through relentless troublemaking at every facility that had tried to hold him.
He had been shuffled from camp to camp across the country because no one wanted to keep him. According to one account, he had attempted escape before. He was 43 years old, a veteran of the Battle of the River Plate, and a man who viewed captivity not as a condition to endure, but as a problem to solve.
The American commander of Camp Papago Park, Colonel William Holden, made a decision that would later be called catastrophic. He concentrated his most troublesome and escape-prone prisoners together in Compound One, the officers’ compound at the northern end of the camp, conveniently located near the outer perimeter.
The logic, presumably, was to keep the difficult cases contained. The reality was that Holden had assembled the most experienced, most motivated, and most resourceful men in a single location and given them nothing but time and proximity to plan. One man saw the danger clearly. Captain Cecil Partial, the camp’s provost marshal, pointed out that there was a spot in the officers compound that could not be seen from any of the guard towers.
A blind spot. Right next to the bathhouse, directly adjacent to the camp’s eastern fence. Partial warned his superiors. The German prisoners, he said, were a fine bunch of men, smart as hell. Putting the smartest of them in compound one made no sense. He knew they would find that blind spot. His warnings were ignored.
Wattenburg found it almost immediately. The blind spot sat between the bathhouse and a large coal storage box, out of direct line of sight from every guard tower in the compound. Wattenburg chose it as the entrance to his tunnel. The plan was elegant in its simplicity. When prisoners went to the bathhouse to shower, they could slip through a section of removable wall panel and drop into the tunnel entrance instead.
The coal box, heavy and unremarkable, concealed the opening from any guard who might wander past. To dig the tunnel itself, the Germans needed tools. Wattenburg requested shovels and rakes from the Americans, explaining that his men wished to tend gardens and construct a volleyball court for exercise. Colonel Holden approved the request without hesitation.
He even provided a load of dirt for the court’s construction. He assigned the prisoners two shovels and two rakes to be returned at the end of each day. The Americans assumed the rocky Arizona soil was too hard and compact for tunnel digging. They were wrong. Dry desert soil is indeed rock hard, but wet desert soil can be cut.
The Germans simply added water. Digging began in late summer of 1944. Three groups of three men worked in 90-minute shifts through the night. One man dug with a pick and coal shovel. The second gathered the loosened earth into buckets. The third pulled the dirt out of the shaft and kept watch. A fourth group handled disposal.
This was the critical challenge. The tunnel would ultimately require the removal of tons of earth. And every pound of it had to go somewhere the guards would not notice. The volleyball court sold everything. At first, the Germans flushed small quantities of dirt down the toilets, hid it in the attics of their barracks, or carried it out in bags beneath their trouser legs to scatter in the compound gardens.
But as the tunnel lengthened and the volume of excavated soil grew, these methods became insufficient. The volleyball court, the Faustball court, as the Germans called it, absorbed it all. Prisoners carried the dirt out in bags and spread it carefully across the playing surface, raising its level gradually over weeks.
The guards, accustomed to seeing construction activity around the court, noticed nothing unusual. They watched German officers playing volleyball on a field built from their own escape tunnel’s refuse and thought nothing of it. The Germans called their project the Faustball tunnel. For illumination underground, the prisoners stole electrical wire and light bulbs from the camp and simply plugged into a socket in the bathhouse.
They rigged the tunnel with working electric lights. Progress was slow. Only a few feet per day through the narrow passage, which measured barely two and a half to three feet in diameter. A man could not turn around inside it. He could only crawl forward or backward. But the work continued night after night for approximately four months.
By December 20th, 1944, the tunnel was complete. It measured 178 feet in length, running from the bathhouse east beneath two fences and a patrol road, terminating at the bank of the crosscut canal. The vertical entrance shaft dropped 6 ft down from the bathhouse floor. At the canal end, the prisoners had constructed a concealed exit covered by a shallow box filled with dirt, grass, and weeds fitted snugly over the opening.
It was nearly invisible. Wattenberg’s preparations extended far beyond the tunnel itself. He had secured civilian clothing and forged identity documents for his men. He had rationed food for weeks, stockpiling chocolate bars, canned milk and meat, cigarettes, coffee, and highway maps. He had obtained contact information for sympathizers in Mexico who might help the escapees return to Germany.
He had arranged for prisoners staying behind to stage a massive, noisy celebration on the night of the escape to cover any sounds from the tunnel and distract the guards. He had even solved the problem of the head count. Four U-boat captains informed the Americans that they and the other officers would no longer appear for roll call unless it was conducted by a commissioned officer, not an enlisted guard.
Colonel Holden refused this demand and placed the entire compound on restricted rations for each day the officers refused to appear. The standoff lasted 16 days and ended in a compromise that gave the Germans exactly what they needed. All men would appear for roll call every morning except Sunday at 900 hours and every afternoon at 16:15.
Officers above the rank of Lieutenant Captain could stand in their barracks doorways to be counted rather than assembling in the yard. The escape was set for Saturday, December 23rd, a Saturday evening followed by a Sunday with no morning roll call. Wattenberg calculated that the escapees would have at least 20 hours before anyone realized they were gone.
The escape began at 2100 hours on December 23rd, 1944. One by one, 25 men dropped into the tunnel entrance beneath the bathhouse floor and crawled 178 ft through the narrow wet passage dragging their survival packs behind them. Outside in the compound above, German prisoners who had chosen to stay behind launched into a raucous celebration. They sang “Deutschland über alles” at the top of their lungs.
They raised a German navy flag on a weather balloon and defied guards’ orders to bring it down. News of the massive German offensive in the Ardennes forest, what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge, had given the prisoners genuine cause for celebration. And this made the staged distraction all the more convincing.
By 02:30 on December 24th, all 25 men had emerged from the tunnel exit on the bank of the Crosscut Canal without alerting a single guard. 12 officers and 13 enlisted men scattered into the Arizona night. Three of the escapees, Captain Wilhelm Günter and Lieutenants Wolfgang Clarus and Friedrich Utzolino, had spent weeks constructing a collapsible watercraft.
It was a canvas-covered frame that could be disassembled into three portable sections, pulled through the tunnel, and reassembled on the canal bank. Their plan was the most ambitious of any group. They intended to float down the Crosscut Canal to the Salt River, then follow the Salt to the Gila River, ride the Gila to the Colorado River, and take the Colorado south into the Gulf of California and Mexico.
They had studied American road maps obsessively. The rivers were drawn in bold blue lines. The route appeared straightforward, almost inevitable. They assembled their craft, lowered it into the Crosscut Canal, and paddled south toward the Salt River. They found mud. The Salt River, that bold blue line on the map, was a wide expanse of dry sand, cracked earth, and scattered puddles that would not have floated a paper boat.
The three German sailors, men who had navigated submarines through the North Atlantic stood on the bank of a river that did not exist and stared at nothing. They dragged their canoe sections approximately 20 more miles overland searching desperately for water deep enough to float their vessel. They never found it.
The raft was abandoned in the desert. As every Arizonan knows, a blue line on a map does not mean water. It means a suggestion. Back at Camp Papago Park, the deception held through the night and into Christmas Eve morning. Sunday. No roll call. A cold steady rain fell over the camp. No work details were scheduled. The compound was quiet.
Colonel Holden’s staff did not conduct a head count until the afternoon. When the numbers came up short, worried guards began searching the compound. They checked barracks. They counted again. The numbers did not add up. Hours passed in confusion. Holden still did not know how the men had gotten out. There were no holes in the fence, no cut wire, no evidence of anyone climbing over the 8-ft barbed wire barrier.
His initial explanation to reporters was that the prisoners must have somehow scaled the perimeter fence. Even Holden must have known this was unlikely for 25 men carrying supplies. It was not until 3 days after the breakout on December 26th that an informer inside the camp revealed the existence of the tunnel.
The discovery stunned the American command. Under the very noses of 400 guards, over a period of 4 months, German prisoners had excavated a 178-ft tunnel, rigged it with electric lighting stolen from the camp’s own power supply, removed tons of earth, and hidden it in a volleyball court that the Americans themselves had approved, and constructed concealed entrances at both ends sophisticated enough to pass casual inspection.
It was, as one account later described it, a real-life version of the Hogan’s Heroes television show, except in many ways even more audacious. The full scale of the escape hit the public like a shock wave. On Christmas Day, the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette both ran full front-page coverage.
Wily Germans elude chase. Bloodhounds trailing Nazis. The Army High Command in Washington, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, congressional leaders, and national media demanded answers that Holden could not provide. Radio commentator Walter Winchell broadcast the story in his typically breathless style. Several hundred soldiers, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, and Papago Indian scouts were mobilized for what the Phoenix Gazette called the greatest manhunt in Arizona history.
A $25 reward was offered for information leading to the recapture of any escapee. The problem for the Germans was not the manhunt. It was the desert itself. The Sonoran in late December is a brutal environment for men accustomed to the temperate waters of the North Atlantic. Cold rain fell steadily. Nighttime temperatures plunged toward freezing.
The terrain offered no shelter, no landmarks, and no water. Every direction looked the same. Flat, scrubby expanses of creosote bush and palo verde stretched to the horizon, broken only by distant mountain ranges that seemed to grow no closer no matter how far a man walked. The escapees had carried provisions, chocolate bars, canned milk, canned meat, cigarettes, coffee, but not nearly enough for a 130-mi trek to the Mexican border across unfamiliar ground.
Most of them had never set foot in a desert before in their lives. They were sailors. Their entire military experience had been confined to steel vessels on open water. They understood tides and currents and navigation by stars, but they did not understand that the desert, which appeared empty and passive, was actively trying to kill them.
There was another problem the Germans had not anticipated. They were conspicuous. In 1944, the population surrounding Phoenix was sparse, and strangers stood out. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover had issued warnings months earlier, urging citizens to be alert for escaped prisoners among the roughly 175,000 Axis captives held across the country.
Now, those warnings had a face and a location. Every farmer, rancher, and shopkeeper within 100 miles of Camp Papago Park was watching for Germans. The surrenders began almost immediately. Within the first week, eight men were back in custody. The manner of their recapture told a story more humiliating than any failed military operation.
They were not hunted down after pitched pursuits. They were not cornered by bloodhounds or surrounded by armed patrols. They gave up. In ones and twos, cold, wet, hungry, and lost, German prisoners of war who had spent 4 months digging a tunnel to freedom decided they would rather go back to camp. Two exhausted, rain-soaked prisoners walked up to a farmhouse in the desert, knocked on the door, and identified themselves as escaped German prisoners of war.
The family living there did not call the police immediately. They invited the two men inside, sat them down, and shared dinner with them. Then, they called the authorities. The image is almost impossible to reconcile with the fear that had gripped the region. Two enemy combatants, prisoners of a nation at war, sitting at an American family’s dinner table, eating a home-cooked meal, waiting politely for the police to arrive and take them back to their comfortable prison camp.
Herbert Fuchs, a 22-year-old U-boat crewman, made it to a highway. He stuck out his thumb, hitched a ride, and asked the driver to take him to the nearest sheriff’s office. The sheriff called Camp Papago Park and reported, with what must have been considerable bemusement, that he had a German prisoner who wished to return.
Fuchs had not been captured. He had not been tracked. He had voluntarily sought out American law enforcement and asked to go home. These were submariners, men who had endured depth charge attacks in the North Atlantic, who had lived for weeks in steel tubes beneath the ocean surface, who had been trained to withstand the most extreme physical and psychological pressures the Kriegsmarine could devise.
The Arizona desert broke them in days. But not all of the escapees surrendered so quickly. A few were made of more stubborn material, and their stories ranged from the dramatic to the absurd. On New Year’s Day, 1945, two unnamed prisoners were captured by Papago Indian scouts less than 30 miles from the Mexican border. They had covered roughly 100 miles of desert on foot in 8 days, a remarkable feat of endurance for men with limited supplies and no knowledge of the terrain.
But 30 miles from freedom, their luck ran out. The scouts found them exhausted, dehydrated, and unable to continue. Shortly afterward, U-boat captains Friedrich Guggenberger and Jürgen Quaet-Faslem were apprehended within 10 miles of Mexico. 10 miles. These were two of the most experienced naval officers in the escape party, men who had commanded submarines in combat, who had planned and executed the escape alongside Wattenberg himself.
They had navigated 120 miles of hostile desert terrain. They could practically see the border. A border patrolman spotted them sleeping in the brush. They offered no resistance. Then came the capture that entered local legend for its sheer comic absurdity. Günther Clarus and Utzolino, the raft builders whose grand nautical escape plan had been defeated by the absence of actual water, had been wandering the desert for over 2 weeks.
By January 8th, they had made it to the vicinity of Gila Bend, roughly 70 miles southwest of the camp. They were filthy, exhausted, and desperate. When they came upon a canal near the town, Utzolino decided that the canal offered something he had not had in weeks, a chance to wash his underwear.
He stripped and began doing his laundry in the irrigation canal. A group of local cowboys spotted three disheveled men at the canal, one of them scrubbing his undergarments in the water, and alerted the military. The last of the raft builders were taken into custody because one of them could not endure dirty underwear any longer.
By January 8th, only three men remained at large, and they were the most resourceful of the entire group. Captain Wattenberg had not followed the others south toward Mexico. Instead, he and two of his original crew members, Walter Kozur and Johann Kremer, had headed north into the mountains above Phoenix. This was the decision that separated Wattenberg from every other man in the escape.
While the rest scattered toward the border, the obvious destination, the one the Americans would expect, Wattenberg went in the opposite direction. He found a high overhang next to a desert gully that provided a cave-like shelter. And there they established a base camp that would sustain them for nearly a month.
The location offered concealment from aerial observation, protection from the cold rain, and a vantage point over the surrounding terrain. For a submarine commander accustomed to hiding from enemy patrols, it was familiar logic applied to unfamiliar ground. Wattenberg’s genius was not the cave, it was the supply line. Before escaping, Wattenberg had identified an abandoned vehicle somewhere outside the camp perimeter.
He communicated its location to trusted prisoners who had remained behind. German prisoners assigned to outside work, details the same cotton field laborers and farm workers who left the camp each morning and returned each evening, would hide provisions in the vehicle. Food, water, information about the progress of the manhunt.
Every few days, Kremer would leave the cave, trek to the vehicle, and retrieve the supplies. It was a logistics chain worthy of the naval officer who had conceived it. Then Kremer did something audacious beyond reason. He began infiltrating prisoner work crews outside the camp, walking in among them as if he had never left, and returning through the gates with the group at the end of the day.
Inside the camp, surrounded by the very guards who were supposed to be hunting him, Kremer gathered food, collected intelligence about the manhunt’s progress, and communicated with allies still inside the wire. He slept in the barracks. He ate in the mess hall. He walked the compound grounds. Then, when the time came, he would join another outbound work detail the following morning, and simply walk away again, returning to the cave with fresh supplies and news for his captain.
He did this multiple times over the course of several weeks. A man who had escaped from a prisoner of war camp was walking back into the camp voluntarily, spending the night, and walking out again the next morning. The guards never noticed. The system that was supposed to count every prisoner twice daily could not distinguish between a man who belonged inside the wire and one who most emphatically did not.
If anything demonstrated the state of security at Camp Papago Park, the security that Colonel Holden had assured Washington was adequate, it was the spectacle of an escaped prisoner repeatedly entering and leaving the facility at will. Like a commuter with a particularly unusual schedule, the scheme lasted until January 22nd, when a surprise inspection caught Kremer inside the compound.
He was identified as one of the 25 escapees and and detained. Whatever information Kramer provided, and the records suggest he provided something, it led directly to the next capture. The following night, Coslow left the cave to retrieve provisions from the abandoned vehicle. Armed soldiers were waiting for him.
Now, only Wattenberg remained free. For five more days, the former U-boat commander survived alone in the mountains north of Phoenix. He had almost no food, no support network, no plan beyond endurance. But something in Wattenberg was different from the men who had knocked on farmhouse doors and hitched rides to the sheriff’s office.
He had spent his entire career at war. He had survived the sinking of his submarine. He had been labeled a super Nazi and shuffled across a continent because no camp could contain his defiance. He was not going to surrender to the desert. On January 27th, 1945, 32 days after crawling through the tunnel, Wattenberg cleaned himself up as best he could and hiked into downtown Phoenix.
He had 75 cents in his pocket. He found a restaurant that was still open and spent most of his remaining money on a bowl of soup and a beer. Then he walked to the Adams Hotel, one of the finest establishments in the city, and asked the night clerk for a room. The clerk told him everything was full, but suggested something might open in the morning.
Wattenberg settled into a comfortable lobby chair and fell asleep. A German U-boat captain, the most wanted fugitive in Arizona, sleeping in the lobby of one of Phoenix’s best hotels, 32 days on the run, and he spent his last night of freedom in an upholstered chair. He woke a few hours later to find the night clerk watching him with suspicion.
Wattenberg left quickly. Outside, on the dark streets of early morning Phoenix, he approached a city street cleaner and asked for directions to the railroad station. The cleaner noticed the accent, something foreign, something that did not belong on a Phoenix street at that hour. He flagged a nearby policeman.
Sergeant Gilbert Brady of the Phoenix Police Department caught up with Wattenberg. After a brief and confused conversation about who the man was, where he came from, and where he was going, Brady asked to see his selective service registration card. Wattenberg had nothing to show. It was over.
Brady offered the German captain a cigarette. Wattenberg took it, drew deeply, and exhaled. “Okay,” he said, “the game is up, and I have lost.” With those words, the great Papago escape was over. All 25 men accounted for. Not a single shot fired. Not a single person harmed on either side. The aftermath was, in many ways, as revealing as the escape itself.
The German prisoners expected severe punishment. They had reason to. Earlier that year, 50 Allied prisoners of war had been executed by the Germans after escaping from Stalag Luft III in occupied Europe. The escapees from Camp Papago Park knew this history. Some of them waited for retribution that seemed, by the logic of their own nation’s conduct, inevitable.
It never came. The punishment handed down to the 25 escapees was bread and water rations for as many days as each man had been absent from camp. A man who was gone for 3 days received 3 days of bread and water. Wattenberg, gone for 32 days, received 32 days. That was the full extent of it. No beatings, no solitary confinement in brutal conditions, no executions.
Bread and water, then back to the volleyball court, and the movie screenings, and the 80-cent work details. The contrast between how America treated its prisoners and how Germany treated Allied captives was was lost on the men of Camp Papago Park. The American personnel did not escape consequences entirely.
The army initially moved to court-martial Colonel Holden and his senior staff for the litany of security failures that had made the escape possible. The failure to conduct compound searches, the failure to notice the tunnel dirt, the failure to recognize the vulnerability of the blind spot that Partial had warned about.
The failure to conduct a headcount for 24 hours after the breakout, but the court-martial was quietly dropped. Army leadership worried that a public trial would prove too embarrassing and might jeopardize the vital prisoner work programs operating across the country. Programs that depended on the cooperation of tens of thousands of German and Italian prisoners.
Holden received a verdict of dereliction of duty and a letter of reprimand. He was allowed to retire early for medical reasons. His career was over, but he kept his freedom and his pension. The public reaction was less forgiving. Arizona residents, already dealing with wartime rationing, were furious to learn about the quality of food the escapees had carried with them.
One letter to the editor of a local newspaper captured the mood. Now, isn’t it a hell of a state of affairs when tax-paying citizens can’t get a single slice of bacon for weeks on end, then read in the paper that prisoners of war can get away with slabs of it? The Tucson Citizen declared, “It’s high time to stop playing sucker to our uninvited guests.
” But the anger, genuine as it was, obscured a larger truth. The comfortable conditions at Camp Papago Park, the conditions that so outraged rationing-weary Americans, and an elaborate journey to Mexico in hopes of returning to a Germany that was being systematically destroyed by the very industrial power that had built their comfortable prison camp.
The irony was not lost on them, even if it took years for some to fully appreciate it. The war ended in 1945. By 1946, the last prisoners at Camp Papago Park had been returned to Germany. The camp was gradually dismantled. Buildings were sold for almost nothing to anyone willing to haul them away. Private citizens bought barracks and converted them into garages and guest houses.
The city of Scottsdale eventually acquired some structures for preservation, but the desert reclaimed the rest. By the 1970s, only scattered concrete foundations and a single surviving building, the officers’ club, converted into an Elks Lodge, marked where 3,000 men had once lived behind barbed wire. The urban sprawl of Phoenix eventually consumed the land.
Homes and apartment buildings rose where guard towers had stood. Streets paved over the patrol roads. The volleyball court that had concealed the greatest prisoner of war escape in American history vanished beneath suburban development. The tunnel itself was filled in and forgotten, but the story was not entirely over. In 1985, 40 years after the escape, a commemorative ceremony was held at the park.
The mayors of Phoenix, Tempe, and Scottsdale attended. Veterans and historians gathered. And the guest of honor, flown in from the German village of Neustadt Holstein on the Baltic Sea, was an 85-year-old man who had once spent 32 days hiding in the mountains above the city, surviving on smuggled food and sheer defiance.
Before spending his last 75 cents on soup and beer and falling asleep in a hotel lobby, Jurgen Wattenberg had come back to Arizona. Not through a tunnel this time, through the front door. The former U-boat captain, who had earned the label “super Nazi”, who had been shuffled from camp to camp because no one could control him, who had masterminded the most elaborate escape attempt in the history of American prisoner detention, returned to the scene of his greatest failure as a guest of honor in a country that had once been
his enemy. He walked the ground where his compound had stood. He saw the canal where his tunnel had emerged. He stood in a city that had grown beyond recognition in a nation that had treated him better than his own country had treated its prisoners, and he was welcomed. The Great Papago Escape was never a story about German ingenuity overcoming American captivity.
It was a story about German ingenuity running were not a failure of policy. They were the policy. The United States treated its prisoners of war well not because American commanders were soft or naive, but because the Geneva Conventions required it. Because humane treatment encouraged enemy soldiers to surrender rather than fight to the death.
And because the prisoner work programs were economically vital to a nation whose labor force was overseas fighting. The Papago Escape was by any military measure a failure of security, but it was also a demonstration of something the Germans themselves were forced to acknowledge. American captivity was so tolerable that most of the men who escaped it voluntarily came back to it rather than face the Arizona desert.
This was not an accident. It was not softness. It was strategy. The United States held nearly 175,000 Axis prisoners across roughly 500 camps during the war. These men were not warehoused. They were put to work. Prisoner labor filled the gap left by millions of American men deployed overseas. German and Italian prisoners picked cotton, harvested fruit, maintained infrastructure, and performed thousands of tasks that kept the American home front economy functioning.
The system worked because the prisoners cooperated, and they cooperated because their conditions were tolerable. Every escaped prisoner, every security incident, every newspaper headline threatened to unravel a labor arrangement that was economically vital to the war effort. The comfortable conditions at Camp Papago Park were not a failure of policy.
They were the policy working exactly as designed. There was a deeper logic as well. Word of how Americans treated their prisoners filtered back to enemy lines through letters, through the Red Cross, and through the simple reality that captured soldiers talked. Every German soldier who heard that surrender meant volleyball courts and beer and 80 cents an hour was a German soldier marginally less likely to fight to the death.
In the Pacific, where Japanese propaganda told soldiers they would be tortured and killed if captured, Americans struggled against an enemy that chose suicide over surrender. In Europe, where the reality of American captivity was known, German soldiers surrendered in increasing numbers as the war turned against them.
Humane treatment of prisoners was not charity. It was a weapon. The men of Camp Papago Park understood this, even if they would not have articulated it that way. They had escaped from a prison that treated them better than their own collapsing nation could feed its civilians. They had carried rations of chocolate and bacon into a desert while American families endured rationing.
They had plunged headlong into American geography and American decency. 25 men dug a tunnel to freedom and discovered that freedom in the Arizona desert looked a lot like death. They built a raft for rivers that had no water. They planned a route to Mexico across terrain they had never imagined. And when the desert defeated them as it defeated every one of them, from the U-boat crewman who hitched a ride to the sheriff’s office to the captain who washed his underwear in an irrigation ditch to the super Nazi who spent his
last night in a hotel lobby, they returned to Apros. Captivity more humane than anything the nation they served would have offered in return. That was the cost of freedom they discovered, not the price of escaping, the price of realizing that the enemy you had been trained to hate treated you better than you ever expected.
