Скачать или смотреть Nazi POWs in California Were Shocked by the Landscape Surrounding Their Prison Camp

At 3:22 in the afternoon on September 8th, 1944, Obergefreiter Wilhelm Brenner stood at the fence of Camp Beale near Marysville, California, staring at something he had never seen before. Behind him lay the compound with its orderly barracks and parade ground. Before him stretched an endless expanse of oak woodland, grassland rolling toward distant mountains, and a peculiar quality of light that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The guards told him it was the Central Valley. The maps showed it stretching 450 miles from north to south. Brenner had studied the maps in the camp library. The measurements seemed impossible. A valley that size did not exist in Europe. A valley that size barely existed anywhere. Yet here it was, real and vast, visible from the highest point in the compound on clear days, a landscape so different from anything Brenner had known that it seemed to challenge the fundamental assumptions of geography itself.
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‎Wilhelm Brenner had been a geography teacher in Hamburg before the war. He had taught from globes and atlases, from maps drawn and refined over centuries. He had told his students that the world's great valleys—the Rhine, the Danube, the Po—represented the pinnacle of geographical scale. He had shown them photographs of the Swiss Alps and told them these were among the most impressive mountain ranges on Earth. Then he had been drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939, fought across France, North Africa, and Sicily. He had been captured by American forces near Gela in July 1943, spent four months in a prison camp in North Africa, then been shipped across the Atlantic to California. He had arrived at Camp Beale in May 1944, expecting harsh treatment, limited food, and austere conditions. Instead, he had been given a work assignment in the camp library. His job was organizing books, maps, and geographical documents. He was allowed to read whatever he wanted.
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