I currently work on Fort Meade in Maryland as a civilian, and was assigned there multiple times during my 20 year Army career. Over that time I was slightly aware of the German/Italian POW history on the post and had heard that the building I now work in served as barracks for some of these prisoners. Not too long ago I read an article in the local post newspaper about Werner Henke, a German prisoner of war, who was killed during an escape attempt and is buried on Fort Meade. There is a yearly memorial service at his grave, usually attended by the German Embassy's Naval Attache, and this made me want to dig a little deeper to learn a bit more about the subject. As I was digging, I found sites that provide some of the history behind these POWs in the US.
The Fort Meade Museum website has a POW link and also a list of German and Italian military personnel who are buried in the Post cometary.
This is a very interesting article called Prisoners in Paradise on Italian prisoners of war in the United States during World War 2. This article is based on interviews of surviving prisoners and other sources.
The German American Internee Coalition is a comprehensive site about German prisoners of war. One interesting page shows a map of the internee camp locations. You can click on each location and see a short history of the camp sometimes with photos. While the organization that created this site does have a political agenda, it's jam packed full of information on German prisoners of war in the US.
The GenTracer Genealogical Research page has an incredible amount of resources on both German and Italian prisoners of war. They have many photos of the prisoners and of gravestones, but the most important part is a POW death index linked to the actual National Archive document listing the names, dates of death and place of burial in the US.
There are many other online resources on this subject, but I found these the most interesting of the sites I looked at.
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