A World War II feature-length documentary about German prisoners of war in the United States featuring a camp in Mexia will be released this fall, according to producer James Willis of Corsicana.
The documentary, “Hitler’s Reluctant Emissaries: German POWs in the United States,” will be distributed on Blu-ray and streaming platforms. Willis is a veteran film, television and video producer and writer, and the founder of Texas Archival Entertainment.
Willis said the documentary, three years in the making, originally started as a project focusing on the Mexia camp, but it evolved to one about all U.S. camps. The documentary uses old photos and historical records from the period about the estimated 1,000 camps, including 70 in Texas, in the U.S.
“The problem was there just wasn’t enough physical photos, footage and so forth (about Mexia),” said Willis, who also is the director and co-writer. “So I just expanded it out because there’s a lot of stuff out there, but it’s from all over the place.”
The Mexia camp, which housed up to 2,800 prisoners, was established in 1943 to hold captives from Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s North African Army who numbered 379,000 in the U.S. The camp later became the Mexia State School, then the Mexia State Supported Living Center.
Derek R. Mallett, an associate professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the author of multiple military books focusing on World War II, collaborated as executive consultant on the documentary. Willis noted he provided invaluable information about the prisoners and the society they established at the camp in Mexia. Several authors and historians from Texas, Arizona and Utah also were interviewed.
“The way the Geneva Convention was written is that they were under their own command structure in the camps,” Willis said. “Unless it was something just too far out like murder where they killed their own guys – which did happen in some camps – and got out of hand, they basically kind of ran the operation. And they were pretty efficient at it.”
Willis said one interesting development at the Mexia camp involved fliers turning up at camps throughout Texas promoting the Nazi Party. An FBI investigation traced the source of the propaganda to the Mexia camp where German soldiers were using the camp commander’s mimeograph machine in his office to churn out the propaganda, he said.
Willis said the prisoners at the U.S. camps were used for labor in the areas where they were located.
“They would take 100 guys out and dredge a river or something,” he said.
One of the people featured in the documentary will be the former editor of The Mexia News, Bob Wright. Wright will be talking about his recollections of the camp in Mexia when he was a child.
Willis said the documentary will shed light on a troubling period in American history.
“There are just so many stories, and some of them are tragic,” he said. “Some of them are like, how could we let this happen?”
The guards hired at the prisoner camps were not qualified for the work, Willis said. Most able men were overseas at war during the time. “Not all of the guards were bad, but you had some issues where they would do some crazy things. And you had some commanders doing the same things. You had all kinds of crazy things.”
Willis said both of his grandfathers served in World War II, and that he has always had an interest in that period in U.S. history. In 2019, he directed “Field of Valor: Air Activities of Texas” about the U.S. Army Air Corps’ training of pilots to take on the Axis alliance.
Willis said he thinks Mexia residents will find the new documentary interesting. It will be long at about two and one-half hours. It includes 1,500 vintage photographs and footage from 46 film reels.
“I think they will find out a lot of stuff,” he said.
For information visit hredocumentary.com.
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