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White First, Enemy Second: How German POWs Help Us Rethink Race and Belonging in 1940s Memphis

Blaich, Daniel C.
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Blaich, Daniel C.
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Prisoners of war—Germany—United States, World War, 1939–1945—African Americans, Racism—Tennessee—Memphis—History, Segregation—Tennessee—Memphis—History, Memphis (Tenn.)—Race relations—20th century
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Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies
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2025_rirs_blaich.pdf
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https://hdl.handle.net/10267/36863
Abstract
After being overwhelmed by the number of captured Axis soldiers in the middle of the Second World War, the United States government decided to start a prisoner-of-war (POW) program in the continental U.S. Many captured combatants were held in the American South, which was under the thumb of Jim Crow segregation. One of those POW camps was in South Memphis, at the Army Service Forces Depot, which housed roughly 800 prisoners. This paper examines segregation in Memphis through a unique lens, by comparing the daily lives of captured enemy soldiers and the city’s Black citizens. Although the U.S. was fighting fascism abroad, Memphis’s wartime policies reveal how white supremacy at home afforded more rights, care, and dignity to German POWs than to Black American citizens, exposing segregation as not merely a system of separation but of racialized prioritization.
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This document was received from the Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies and uploaded to Dlynx by Rosie Meindl during fall 2025.