Enemies no longer

Just east of Springfield, the soldiers face uphill in two ranks — a small
platoon. They are woefully outnumbered by their enemies, who nearly encircle
them.

But neither side will ever advance.

The soldiers’ positions are grave markers at Camp Butler National Cemetery,
on the edge of Riverton. The outflanked platoon consists of 34 stones that mark
the final resting places of Axis soldiers of World War II. Surrounding them
are the graves of U.S. servicemen who fell in the Civil War and in conflicts
since.

The 34 were prisoners of war. When they died, captives of the United States
during history’s most destructive war, they were our bitter enemies. How is
it that they lie at Camp Butler, in hallowed ground where unknown American veterans
sleep?

A short answer comes from the law. Springfield resident Walter Ade, who was
born in Germany and served as a .30-caliber machine-gunner in the U.S. Army
during the Korean War, says that federal law requires an honorable burial for
prisoners of war whose remains cannot be repatriated. The secretary of veterans
affairs, under federal guidelines, has the authority to decide who is eligible
for burial in national military cemeteries. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 also
require that the enemy dead be “honourably interred” and that records of the
location and markings of their graves be maintained.

These veterans of foreign armies — most of them German — are remembered each
year by Springfield residents such as Ade who never knew them and have no connections
with their families. Born overseas or with strong recent family ties in countries
that were once America’s enemies in war, Ade and the other Springfieldians have
a special perspective on conflict — and forgiveness.

Ade’s father was a soldier in the Wehrmacht and, like many soldiers of the
Third Reich, paid a heavy personal price for Adolf Hitler’s war. “My father
was a prisoner of war for 10-and-a-half years in Siberia,” Ade says.

Hans Jakschik, administrative director of the St. John’s Hospital laboratory,
has a similar perspective on the conflict that ended nearly 60 years ago. As
a little boy in Germany, in 1945, he and his mother fled from the advancing
Red Army. His father, an army corporal, had been killed in the vicinity of Stalingrad
about three years earlier. Jakschik says he has no idea where his father is
buried. The Wehrmacht did send his mother a death certificate and a few of his
father’s personal possessions. “He had a mirror in his pocket that my mother
gave him… a metal mirror, you know, and the bullet went right through that
mirror,” Jakschik says.

Remembering is important: It’s about honor and respect, Jakschik says. “We
need to document that person’s death and have it available somewhere for the
family.”

Camp Butler was a resting place for heroes long before prisoners of war began
arriving in the 1940s.

The first World War II POW held in the U.S. was Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, commander
of one of the midget submarines that had attempted to penetrate Pearl Harbor
just before the air attack on Dec. 7, 1941. He was captured when his sub was
beached. Sakamaki was sent first to Tennessee, then was moved to Camp McCoy
in Wisconsin, which eventually held 20,000 German and Japanese prisoners. One
of the prisoners interred here was held at Camp McCoy during the war.

The surrenders of German and Italian armies in North Africa brought another
150,000 prisoners to U.S. soil, and by war’s end, 425,000 Axis prisoners were
being held here. Texas had the largest number of prison camps; Illinois had
three.

Mabel Workman, a program-support assistant for the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs and a staff member at Camp Butler, says that her mother lived near a
POW camp in Mississippi and later told her daughter about speaking with some
prisoners who were permitted to be out in the community. “In later years,” Workman
recalls, “she thought about that.”

The prisoners buried at Camp Butler retain something vital that many American
soldiers buried there have lost. The cemetery holds 166 American servicemen
whose identities are unknown, but the name of each foreign soldier has been
cut into his tombstone. But the stories behind the names have been lost. It
is as though they sprang directly from a military bureaucracy instead of coming
from the Rhineland, or Tuscany, or Kangwon. Camp Butler was not a World War
II prison camp, and the POWs who rest there now died in prison compounds elsewhere
in the U.S. When old or temporary military cemeteries were closed, they were
reinterred at Camp Butler. No personal information about them is on file in
Springfield.

Springfield businessman Jeff Engel, president of the Springfield chapter of
the Deutsch-Amerikanischer National Kongress, believes many of the prisoners
succumbed to epidemics in the prison camps. Riverton resident Carol Norton,
another member of the German-American cultural group, says it was likely influenza
that claimed these victims. Both Engel and Norton have family ties to Germany.

Thirteen of the POWs died between July and December of 1945. Janette Boedigheimer,
who works for the Sangamon County Coroner, combed her office’s records, but
was unable to find any references to the foreign soldiers of Camp Butler. Inquiries
of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Italian consulate, and the German
government’s Bundesarchiv have yielded no information. Still, a few clues to
the military service of two of the dead, Fritz Richard and Bok Do Lee, remain.

Fritz Richard is listed as “Fritz Richard Feldwebel” on the official list
of Camp Butler POW interments. Feldwebel is a military rank. “That’s
like a field first sergeant,” explains Walter Ade. Richard died in the prison
camp at Fort Robinson, Neb., in December 1945.

Bok Do Lee is described as “a Korean soldier” in the Camp Butler records.
Korea, however, was not a sovereign nation during the war; it had been seized
by imperial Japan in 1910 and renamed Chosen. Many Koreans consequently fought
under the flag of the Rising Sun. Bok Do Lee died at Camp McCoy in May 1945.

Workman says the German embassy once requested a list of names, but “my understanding
is, they apparently were unable to locate the families.” Three or four years
ago, she recalls, a tour bus stopped at Camp Butler, and its German passengers
seemed to know about the soldiers of the Wehrmacht who were buried there.

Memorial Day is the only time when flags may be put on the graves at Camp
Butler. The cemetery supplies them. They’ll be placed there this Saturday, and
Boy Scouts earning merit badges are among those who actually place the flags
by the grave markers.

The prisoners of war are honored, too. Springfield’s DANK organization decorates
the German graves with flags of the Federal Republic of Germany. Carol Norton
makes them in the same size as the U. S. flags set out on American soldiers’
graves. For the Italians and Bok Do Lee, there are flowers.

The prisoners, however, are also remembered on other days. Germans remember
their dead on Totensonntag, which is observed in the fall, on the Sunday before
the start of the Advent season. On that day, a memorial service is held in Germany
and “everybody’s grave is decorated, but especially the soldiers,” says Edith
Baumhardt, a DANK member.

In recent years Norton has led the bilingual graveside services, which include
the singing of the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee.” The Totensonntag observance
was established by agreement among German churches just after World War I. A
newer official memorial day for German veterans, Volkstrauertag, is held on
Nov. 14, and DANK may include it in future Springfield observances.

Long before the battles of World War II, Camp Butler was a place for both
captors and captives.

Established in 1861 as an enlistment point and training camp for the Union
Army, Camp Butler was named for William Butler, who was state treasurer at the
time. Butler had picked the site at the request of Gov. Richard Yates, who was
unfamiliar with the countryside around Springfield but had been asked by the
War Department to locate an army camp near the state capital. Eventually nearly
200,000 soldiers passed through Camp Butler.

In February 1862, a portion of the camp became a prison for about 2,000 Confederates
who surrendered after battles at Forts Donelson and Henry, in Tennessee. Between
then and May 1865, there were escape attempts, and many of the Confederate prisoners
died of disease. Some of the Confederate prisoners became “galvanized Yankees,”
released from captivity on that condition that they enter the Union Army for
service on the western frontier, away from Civil War theaters in the East and
South.

The military prison was closed after the South surrendered in April 1865.
That same year, a fire in the hospital and office building destroyed many of
the Camp Butler records. About 1,000 Confederate soldiers are buried at Camp
Butler, according to various sources.

Camp Butler was closed as an army post in 1866. Its military burial grounds
became Camp Butler National Cemetery, and the acreage has been expanded several
times since. There rest the remains of cavalrymen who rode with Grierson through
Mississippi and infantrymen who marched with Sherman through Georgia. Their
neighbors for eternity are men from regiments mustered in such places as Alabama,
Arkansas, and Tennessee.

Once, they were enemies, too.

The names

The remains of 34 prisoners from World War II are buried at Camp Butler National
Cemetery.

Here are their names and when they died.

Paul Baa (Aug. 17, 1945)
Mathias Bachlechner (May 17, 1945)
Heinrich Berghorn (Oct. 28, 1945)
Heinrich Berlinghof (Feb. 28, 1945)
Karl Bruech (Oct. 19, 1944)
Emil Burmeister (Jan. 29, 1945)
Willy Drajewsky (Sept. 17, 1945)
Augustin Faisst (July 13, 1945)
Fritz Richard Feldwebel (Dec. 2, 1945)
Gottfried Fuchs (Nov. 2, 1944)
Heinrich Giere (Feb. 7, 1945)
Fabio Giorgani (Feb. 26, 1945)
Willabald Guetter (Aug. 3, 1945)
Paul Jendryztko (Sept. 27, 1944)
Adolf Kandlbinder (Dec. 2, 1945)
Andreas Kellner (Nov. 27, 1944)
Walter Kraenke (Dec. 29. 1944)
Max Kraus (Dec. 11, 1945)
Bok Do Lee (May 26, 1947)
Adolf Marquard (March 14, 1945)
Umberto Marrollo (May 31, 1944)
Erhard Pfadenhauer (Sept. 1, 1945)
Emil Preuss (March 29, 1945)
Karl Reppert (Sept. 24, 1944)
Wolfgang Robasik (Aug. 19, 1944)
Bernhard Ruhland (Nov. 6, 1945)
Herman Schoene (Nov. 5, 1945)
Rudolf Schramm (Oct. 25, 1944)
Max Stoll (Aug. 28, 1945)
Franz Thallinger (Nov. 15, 1944)
Francesco Tota (Feb. 28, 1944)
Giovanni Trani (April 19, 1944)
Max Wagner (July 27, 1945)
Paul Witt (June 23, 1946)

Source: Camp Butler National Cemetery

This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2004.