I live in Dal­las, and as far as I can tell, other than the first 7–11 and, of course, the JFK assas­si­na­tion, Dal­las doesn’t have a lot of tales, but by gum we did have our very own Nazi POW camp towards the end of WWII.

The 3 and a half acre camp, which was a branch of the Camp Mexia Pris­oner of War camp, started out its life in 1933 as a Civil­ian Con­ser­va­tion Corps camp on the shores of White Rock Lake, roughly 1/2 a mile from my home. The camp was made up of roughly 200 unem­ployed men from the sur­round­ing areas who lived there as well as made improve­ments to White Rock Lake Park. How­ever, after the start of WWII the CCC camp was given over to the Army Air Corps’ Fifth Fer­ry­ing Com­mand, which used the camp as an induc­tion cen­ter and boot camp for nearly two years.

Then in 1944, some of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corp sol­diers cap­tured by Amer­i­can G.I.’s were shipped off to the White Rock Lake branch of Camp Mexia. The camp even­tu­ally held 403 men who were bussed to work every­day at the Regional Quar­ter­mas­ter Repair Shop at the con­verted Cen­ten­nial Gen­eral Exhibits Build­ing at Fair Park.

There was never an escape attempt from the camp, even though civil­ians would often call about escaped pris­on­ers wan­der­ing the area but when ques­tioned by MP’s they would reply that they’d just got­ten lost or wanted to go for a walk. The area, I can attest, is very pretty.

At the end of the war a large per­cent­age of Hitler’s sol­diers wanted to stay in the States, but the gov­ern­ment quashed the idea, forc­ing all to return home to their native lands.