A Captive (Enemy) Audience: Music and the Reeducation of German POWs in the United States During WWII

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, they provided an opportunity to “reeducate” the enemy, to “reorient” their hearts and minds toward American democracy and American culture and “offset the common idea of prisoners that America [was] a wasteland of culture”. During the final years of the war, the SPD sought to use literature, music, and film to promote the American way of life through its “Intellectual Diversion Program” (IDP), a reeducation program with a goal summed up adamantly in an internal memo: “Americanism is to be plugged!”

The architects of the IDP considered music to be a potentially powerful tool for reeducation, but its use of music was fettered by uncertainty about American musical identity and by the SPD’s underestimation of the centrality of German music in POW life. The SPD’s attempts to utilize music for POW reeducation were inconsistent and reveal a deep disconnection between the SPD and the POWs in its charge. The POWs themselves forged musical subcultures in many camps, centered primarily on German music, but American music did figure in the lives of German POWs through film and radio, though not always in the ways intended by the SPD.