Friend or Enemy?

Army officers at the prisoner of war camp at Houlton, Me., were wondering last week what was going to happen to 67 Russians who recently arrived with a batch of Nazis.

The Russians, wearing regular German uniforms, had been captured in the first days of fighting in Normandy. Their story was that they had been seized by the Nazis back in 1941, forced into labor battalions in the Reich and later sent to man a position on the coast of France. When U.S. soldiers stormed their beachhead, they said, they promptly surrendered. Their ages ranged from 17 to 35.

Houlton was no isolated case. All German POW camps in the U.S. have collected Russians. The only thing camp officials could do was what they were doing: hang onto the Russians and leave it to the State Department to unravel the tangle of international relations.

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