By Ken Raymond | Staff Writer
When Frances Green was a child, she giggled every time she heard the strangers talking in their odd, guttural tongue.
“I was born and lived in Chickasha,” said Green, 72, “and I remember the concentration camp of Germans we had at the fairgrounds. I remember I was little, and every once in awhile as entertainment we would go there. ... We’d drive out around the camp and see them doing their laundry, laughing and talking their funny language which we couldn’t understand.
“They were so well-treated. What a drastic difference between those men and the ones in Japan, Germany and other places. There wasn’t a fat one among ‘em, but there wasn’t a skinny one, either. They were treated good.”
Between April 1943 and March 1946, Oklahoma housed about 22,000 German and Italian military prisoners at internment work camps. The branch camp Green remembers in Chickasha held about 400 men between November 1944 and November 1945.
Evelyn Robinette’s father was among those in charge of another camp in Tonkawa.
“It was a very interesting place,” said Robinette, 73, of Choctaw. “One of the towers is still there, I believe. It was fenced off with barbed wire.”
Oklahoma had three main camps — permanent camps in McAlester and Stringtown and a temporary camp at Fort Sill — and a variety of branch and base camps, including the ones in Chickasha and Tonkawa. In all, prisoners were held at more than 30 Oklahoma sites.
Most were German. A few were Italian. None were Japanese.
About 75 German and Italian prisoners who died here are buried at Fort Reno.
