Editor’s note: This is the final story of a five-part series on the history of World War II POW camps in Michigan. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 are available to read on woodtv.com.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Overall, then-U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall’s plan for European prisoners of war during World War II was a success.
More than 400,000 enemy soldiers were brought stateside, humanely helped solve a manpower problem for farms and businesses and possibly even sped up the end of the grueling fight with the Germans.
But it wasn’t perfect. Supervisors had to adjust some rules to keep prisoners safe from the “hardcore Nazis” who admonished the “traitors” who intentionally laid down their weapons. And some prisoners took the lax conditions around the camps too far.
Historian Greg Sumner, who literally wrote the book on the history of the World War II POW camps in Michigan, said it caused some headaches.
There are a handful of escape attempts, most of them utterly fruitless — like the pair of POWs who walked off the job while their guard was sleeping and jumped into Lake Allegan, thinking it was Lake Michigan. They crossed the lake only to find Michigan State Police waiting for them.
“(The state police) said ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’ And they said, ‘Well, we just swam (across) Lake Michigan. We were trying to get to Chicago. Somebody told us there would be some Germans there who would help us.’ They didn’t understand how big the country was,” Sumner told News 8. “If somebody walked off or escaped for a few hours, they didn’t usually get more than a couple of miles away.”
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One escape attempt did cause a big problem — one that had prosecutors mulling treason charges and ultimately sent two young women to prison.
FRATERNIZING WITH THE ENEMY
Most jobs didn’t offer much opportunity to chat with people of the opposite sex, but some did and many POWs used their limited opportunities to flirt and befriend the locals. Two prisoners and two young women quickly found the boundary for their fraternization — then rolled right past it.
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In the summer of 1944, Kitty Case, 20, and Shirley Druce, 19, had worked at the W.W. Roach Cannery in Owosso in Mid-Michigan. Like many other businesses, the cannery brought in more women to help fill the staffing gap with so many able-bodied men off fighting the war. Then they brought in the POWs.
A tent camp was set up at the Owosso Speedway, so prisoners could volunteer for jobs at farms, factories and other nearby businesses. Two German POWs, Gottfried Hobel and Erik Classen, took temporary jobs at the cannery; the rest is history.
One July day, Case and Druce, with Case’s 17-year-old sister Phyllis behind the wheel, drove behind the cannery building and helped Hobel and Classen play hooky from work for a night out.
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Nothing too serious happened. Phyllis Case, who claimed she was threatened by her sister, drove the foursome around for several hours before they ended up at Colby Lake, just outside the neighboring town of Corunna, splitting a couple of bottles of wine.
Phyllis Case, who lied and told the foursome that the car was out of gas, was able to make a break for it and speed home to her mother, who alerted the camp to what had happened. It was an embarrassing moment for the camp supervisors, who had not realized two prisoners had been missing for several hours.
It sparked a manhunt. Local police worked with state troopers. The Shiawassee County sheriff and his undersheriff eventually found the group in a patch of woods near the lake around 7 a.m.
The escape plan was seemingly mapped out by Hobel and Kitty Case. One newspaper report claims the women had recently been fired by the cannery and implied the plan may have been to pin the blame on the business for allowing the escape. Regardless, it was clear that the two women didn’t think they were committing a federal crime.
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One report by The Owosso Argus-Press said, “the group was in a jovial, laughing mood at the moment of their capture.”
Said Sumner: “They thought, ‘Can we go home now?’ And they said, ‘No. No, you’re going to jail. We’re putting you on trial.’”
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
The next day, the story was front and center on page 1 of The Argus-Press with a photo of the foursome and a headline that read in stark letters: “War Prisoners Aided by Girls, Flee, Caught.”
In a separate newspaper report, Kitty Case allegedly told investigators that “it was a last fling before we left Owosso. We thought we could get the prisoners out of the state and then they could look out for themselves.” The real plan was to go visit Druce’s “sweetheart,” a sailor stationed in Virginia.
They weren’t prepared for the storm heading their way — the prosecutors looking to make an example out of violators, the national media coverage of their case and of course the small-town gossip that immediately reached a fever pitch.
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Prosecutors ultimately decided that treason charges, which could result in the death penalty, was a bridge too far. Instead, the girls were charged with “conspiracy to defraud the government by impairing, obstructing and defeating the lawful function of the War Department.”
Case and Druce went to trial the following January — a four-day “media circus” according to newspaper reports. The defense threw out several arguments, accusing federal investigators of coercing testimony out of the girls, blaming the tavern owners who had sold them alcohol and even reviving debate about the Geneva Conventions and whether the POWs should have been allowed to work at the cannery because “food production” could be considered tied to the war effort.
Perhaps the most shocking information to come out of the trial was the details about the security protocols at the POW camp. Guards were accused of being negligent, drinking on the job, and letting prisoners do as they pleased, including chats through the chain-linked fence with local ladies.
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“Then there was the passing of notes, like the one from Hobel to Kitty Case setting up their July 20 rendezvous,” Sumner wrote. “The evidence revealed an elaborate underground communication network through which POWs solicited sexual contact and other forms of mischief with their female co-workers, many of them minors. … Late-night trysts were common outside the gates of the speedway, right under the noses of the guards.”
To make matters worse, the story had made its way to the war zone thanks to a story in Time Magazine. One Marine private fighting in the Pacific wrote a letter to the Owosso Chamber of Commerce that was published in The Argus-Press, lambasting everyone involved and suggesting the guards at the POW camp should swap places with the soldiers fighting on the front lines.
The jury took half a day to deliberate before ruling the two women guilty.
“When the foreman read it, the ‘emotionless’ courtroom demeanor of the defendants suddenly cracked, and they collapsed into the arms of their loved ones ‘sobbing violently,’” Sumner wrote.
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Case was sentenced to 15 months in prison for her role as the “mastermind” of the plan. Druce was sentenced to one year and one day in prison, counting time already served.
RUNNING FROM YOUR PAST
According to Sumner, both Kitty Case and Shirley Druce left Michigan as quickly as they could following their prison sentences. Case moved to Georgia and Druce headed to California where they both got married and raised families.
In 2010, a reporter with The Argus-Press tried to track down the two women to get the last chapter of the story. Unfortunately, both had died decades earlier. Case reportedly took her own life sometime in the 1970s, not long after her husband was killed in a car crash. Druce died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1975. She was 47 years old.
The reporter was, however, able to track down Druce’s daughter-in-law, Melinda Nethaway, who had researched the infamous incident. Even though she was more than 1,000 miles away, it seems Druce never really escaped the shadow of shame from that one night in July.
“I think her life would have been somewhat different if she didn’t have this big cloud over her head,” Nethaway told The Argus-Press. “I think it was very embarrassing for her.”
Nethaway said Druce’s children didn’t even learn about what had happened until after she had died.
“Nobody ever mentioned it, nobody knew about it,” she said. “The oldest daughter knew (Druce) could never vote or get a passport to get out of the country, but she never knew why.”
About a week after Druce’s funeral, her husband told his kids what had happened.
“You could tell he wanted to get it off his chest,” Nethaway said. “To be honest, I don’t think anyone was shocked. I think everyone knew that there was always something in the closet. … This was something she put some place deep inside and moved on. But I wonder if it was something that always tormented her a bit.”
She suspected it was at least one factor in Druce’s descent into alcoholism, finding new levels of sympathy for her late mother-in-law as she advanced through her research.
“In my head, I started thinking about what this must have felt like for her,” Nethaway said. “Owosso is a small town, and it was plastered on the front page. I can’t imagine being a teenager and going to a federal penitentiary.”
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She also told The Argus-Press that Shirley Druce wasn’t just a 19-year-old who got wrapped up in a scandal; she was also a loving mother who was creative and extremely intelligent.
Said Nethaway: “When people Google Shirley Druce’s name, they are seeing the absolute worst moment in her life, and there is so much more to her.”
Editor’s note: This is the final part of a five-part series on the history of World War II POW camps in Michigan.
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