Violence & Death
On the evening of October 31, 1945, a group of Fort Custer POWs completed their day’s work on a sugarbeet farm and hopped on the back of their transport truck for the return journey to camp. After stopping at a railroad crossing, the truck rolled forward onto the tracks and collided with a freight train. There were seventeen POWs in the vehicle, and one POW jumped off at the last moment and survived the accident. The other sixteen were either killed on impact or died in a nearby hospital, along with the American guard who was driving the truck.1 In a 1970 interview, former POW Wilhelm Mozin recalled the shock of sixteen caskets lined up for the funerary services.2 The following spring, prisoners purchased potted plants for the graves and led a ceremony for their deceased comrades.3 The ages and surviving family members were listed under the men’s names in the Battle Creek Enquirer article reporting the accident. Four of the men were under the age of twenty-five. Some of the older men left behind their families; Hans Becker and Philipp Allmann were survived by wives and young children.4
One night in 1943, Erich Graf fought a stockade commander and was subsequently stabbed with a bayonet. Witnesses claim that Graf’s motivation for the so-called “Battle of Crossville” was to die fighting for Nazi Germany. A few days later in the camp hospital, Graf died an agonizing death after refusing medical treatment.5
1 “16 PWs, Soldier Killed by Train,” Battle Creek Enquirer, November 1, 1945, Newspapers.com.
2 Dave Carlton, “An Ex-POW Returns: German Brings 24 Years of Memories to Ft. Custer,” Battle Creek Enquirer, October 5, 1970, Newspapers.com.
3 “German PWs Conduct Services at Custer,” Battle Creek Enquirer, May 30, 1946, Newspapers.com.
4 “16 PWs, Soldier Killed by Train.”
5 Antonio Thompson, Men in German Uniform: POWs in American during World War II (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2010), 48-50.