World War II Honoree

James Lawrence Peigler, Jr.

Branch of Service

U.S. Army

Hometown

Concord, North Carolina

Honored By

Debra Kay Roy

Relationship

neice

He served as a prison guard at Camp Aliceville. Camp Aliceville was a World War II era prisoner of war (POW) camp in Aliceville, Alabama. Its construction began in August 1942, it received its first prisoners in June 1943, and it shut down in September 1945. It was the largest World War II POW camp in the Southeastern United States, holding between 2,000 and 12,000 German prisoners at any one time. The camp began receiving German POWs, at first mostly from Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps, in June 1943. It comprised 400 wood-frame barracks. According to Randy Wall, "fewer than 10 percent of all German POWs were devoted Nazis." In many American POW camps, including Aliceville, these prisoners harassed, injured, or killed prisoners who they thought had become too comfortable with their American captors. Camp Aliceville doctor Stephen Fleck said that "Most of [the murders] were accomplished with bare hands or some cooking utensil...they cold-bloodedly killed either with knives or strangling during the night. We probably had two or three such deaths a month...anybody whom they suspected of wavering in his Nazi enthusiasm. Nobody would squeal, because the squealer would likely meet a similar fate." To protect prisoners from such violence, American military authorities established a number of so-called "segregation camps," to which "ardent Nazis" could be sent. Although it began as an ordinary POW camp, by 1944 Aliceville had become a segregation camp itself. There were over 2000 escape attempts made by German POWs held in American camps during the war, and Aliceville was no exception. One group of six prisoners at Aliceville made it as far as Memphis, Tennessee, where they were captured by the FBI after stealing a car. Prisoners at Camp Aliceville were treated humanely, partly because the United States government hoped that the German government would reciprocate in its treatment of American prisoners of war.