Fort Stanton, some 35 miles north of Ruidoso, was the first internment camp for Germans in World War II -- and some historians say it was the toughest.

And a German film crew from that country's Vidicon network was in Fort Stanton was in Fort Stanton and Lincoln recently to chronicle a remarkable and all-but-unknown story of the first German internees, the Ruidoso News reported. 

But even before the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, more than 400 German sailors from the luxury liner "Columbus" -- at the time, the 13th largest steamship in the world --  that scuttled off the coast of Cuba in 1939 rather than be captured by British warships arrived at an old CCC camp across from Fort Stanton in the spring of 1941, according to an online history of the site.

Capt. Wilhelm Daehne and 410 members of his crew were noncombatants and considered "distressed seamen" as they turned their camp into a "quality resort" for POWs, complete with a basketball court, a music room and a flourishing vegetable garden for the duration of the war.

When war was finally declared, a barbed wire fence went up and Border Patrol agents were brought in to serve as guards, according to the German American Internee Coalition's Web site.

In 1942, a small contingent of Japanese farmers from California were brought in and interned at a separate camp, and German workers were taken by truck to the gardens every morning, according to a Fort Stanton history.

Some of the German POWs managed to escape, but the Border Patrol used Apache trackers from the nearby Mescalero Reservation to run them down, according to the Web site.

The Germans, many of whom grew up watching wild west movies and devoured the books of Karl May, allegedly pleaded when recaptured that they not be scalped!

The internee Web site said that some historians believe that at some point during the war, those POWs elsewhere branded as troublemakers were sent to Fort Stanton to be segregated from other internees, and security there was said to be the most stringent of all U.S. internment camps.

According to the Ruidoso News, the German crew, led by interviewer Annette Sanders, talked to several local residents who either remembered the Germans or had been told of them by their parents.

Also interviewed was James McBride, author of the book Interned: Internment of the SS Columbus Crew at Fort Stanton, New Mexico, the News reported. 

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