Lufkin Daily News"The Lufkin camp is the first of seven East Texas-based POW camps to be receive a historical marker. In all, prisoners were held at 70 sites in Texas out of 50,000 nationwide. "The story of German POWs in the East Texas timber industry is a significant topic to commemorate," said William A. McWhorter, military history sites coordinator for the Texas Historical Commission. "Because, during the war when the need for Texas lumber was high and the number of available timber workers was low, German prisoners of war were utilized to harvest East Texas trees in support of the U.S. war." It was the forest heritage that brought the POWs to Lufkin, said Angelina County Historical Commission chairman Jonathan Gerland. Gerland thanked those who financed the historical marker, posted at the U.S. Forest Service entrance off North Raguet in Lufkin. Ben Weber, 82, remembers when the U.S. Army brought the first shipment of German prisoners to Lufkin because he was one of 14 military police escort guards to establish the two Lufkin camps. Looking for opportunities beyond a 30-cent post-Depression Era job, the Long Island teenager joined the military at age 17. Completion of his training programs coincided with the Army's capture of thousands of German Nazis in North Africa. Weber sailed to North Africa in a ship marked "POW" on the side and returned to New York City with 2,000 German prisoners in the hold below. "Don't feel bad for them," he said. "I went over with 1,800 guys on top and below." Prisoners were transported by train to Fort Wadsworth, N.Y. "We were getting overwhelmed because we didn't have enough military police companies," he said. That's when the Army began establishing military camps across the country. These facilities used to hold German, Italian and Japanese prisoners were "big" - much bigger than those camps found in East Texas, he said. "We started transporting (the prisoners) on the trains," he said. "And we lived on those trains for months at a time. We transported them all over the U.S." It wasn't long before the Army ran out of labor for camp construction and guards. "After we brought our last group down here we backed up to a place outside Trinity, Texas - Riverside," he said referring to the POW camp known by Walker County residents as "Country Campus." The Riverside POW camp held 5,000 prisoners compared to the 250 prisoners held at each of the camps in Lufkin. "It was tremendous," Weber said of the camp where he stayed from November 1943 until he helped transport prisoners willing to work in the woods harvesting and milling timber to Lufkin. "They were built, with muscles like this - they were powerful boys," Weber said of the men who had belonged to the German general's troops. "They were the best. The best troops they had." Before those willing to work were separated from those who refused, the Germans murdered 37 of their fellow soldiers, Weber said. "They would hold kangaroo court down in their barracks and they'd disconnect the lead pipe from the sink in the latrine and wrap them in a blanket and beat them to death," he said. "They didn't want them to go out and work. They didn't want to help. They thought they were going to win the war. They didn't have any idea they were going to be beaten." Loyal Nazis continued to use violence to sabotage work efforts at the three mills in Lufkin, he said. "They would say, 'You are doing too much work,' and they would hurt them," Weber said. "We'd take them back to Riverside and they'd be locked in confinement." Meanwhile, Weber, a noncommissioned officer, supervised the transformation of the empty warehouse into a prison bunker - completed within a week - at the abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp north of town on Raguet Avenue. "This was just a big building," he said. "We came over and started putting in bunk beds and put the men in here." Pairs of guards accompanied prison workers to the forest. The prison labor was initiated by Ernest Kurth, S.W. Henderson and Arthur Temple, who needed labor to salvage timber after a severe ice storm in January 1944. A second, larger, POW camp opened in February 1944 for five months - making Lufkin the only Texas town with two POW camps. Not long after Weber was sent to the Pacific Rim, the war was over. And the Lufkin POW camps in 1946 were shuttered. Angelina County Historical Commission Chairman Jonathan Gerland unveils the new state historic marker commemorating the German prisoner of war camp located off North Raguet Avenue. Looking on from behind a CCC-built wall are U.S. Forest Service archeologist John Ippolito, left, Bob Bowman, former POW guard Ben Weber, and a state historian."