An Introduction: Music, German POWs, and Indoctrination in America

During WWII, over 375,000 German POWs were interned in the United States in camps in nearly every state. For most American civilians these camps provided the closest encounter with “the enemy” they would have, but for those in the Special Projects Division (SPD) of the Office of the Provost Marshall General’s Office, they provided an opportunity to “reeducate” the enemy. During the final years of the war, the SPD sought to use the POWs’ recreational activities to promote American culture and the American way of life. To facilitate the reorientation of German POWs, the SPD designed the “Intellectual Diversion Program” (IDP), a program whose goal was summed up adamantly in an internal memo: “Americanism is to be plugged!”  

            The IDP was designed to “offset the common idea of prisoners that America [was] a wasteland of culture” and to use American art and media to sway the Nazi mind toward democracy. Among the media used was music, whether it was that played by the POWs’ own choirs and orchestras or the records made available in camp libraries or broadcast over camp public address systems. The architects of the IDP considered music to be a potentially powerful tool for reeducation, but the files of the SPD and documentation of the organic musical activities of German POWs show that the IDP’s musical curriculum was inconsistently implemented, and in some camps, completely ignored.

           The SPD’s musical directives reveal that the effort to promote democracy and pro-American sentiment through music was complicated by the struggle to define a musical “curriculum” or repertory. The staff of the SPD included no music specialists, and the division devoted considerably more time to the careful vetting of films and books than to music, and there was no agreement about what music best represented America. Examination of SPD’s musical directives alongside the extant concert programs and other archival documents from individual POW camps reveals a narrative in which music was a vehicle for patriotic ideology, an outlet for nationalistic expression in captivity, a means of community-building, and a cultural bridge between Americans and Germans living in close proximity.