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- New Hampshire residents kept the economy moving on the homefront and provided crucial weapons of war to the American Navy during World War II. The small state of New Hampshire played an outsized role in America's fight to win World War II.
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Learn about New Hampshire's outsized role in America's fight to win World War II, including the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard's construction of 70 submarines and the arrival of four Nazi U-boats.
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Scope and Content: Photographic prints taken between approximately 1942 and 1944 of the effects of World War II in New Hampshire. Includes images of posters encouraging the planting of victory gardens, a victory booth of war stamps and bonds, military parades, the production of wooden bomb pails, and aluminum drives.
- Franz Bacher, German Pow
- Camp Stark
- Town and Prison
- Cutting Wood
- Escape
- Chance Encounter
- Return
German POW Franz Bacher went to northern New Hampshire to cut down trees in the tiny logging town of Stark, named after Revolutionary War hero John Stark. It was Stark, ironically, who gave the state its motto, “Live Free or Die.” Many prisoners escaped from Camp Stark, only to return after finding that living free meant subsisting on berries in th...
When the Germans surrendered in North Africa in 1942, the number of German POWs threatened to overwhelm Britain. America agreed to take 50,000 and transported them in empty ships to New York City, Boston and Norfolk. That number rose to 60,000, then 100,000, and 160,000 by September 1943. By then a Berlin, N.H., paper firm called the Brown Companyh...
The prison camp and the town coexisted peacefully. Some of the soldiers sent to Stark as guards married local women and settled down in the North Country. They came to church suppers, or to people’s homes for Sunday dinner or a holiday meal. A Groveton woman contributed new furniture to the camp so the soldiers could have a lounge. One U.S. service...
Like most of the Camp Stark prisoners, Bacher had been a political prisoner in Nazi Germany before being sent to North Africa to fight. He was a 27-year-old Austrian, a leftist who spoke four languages, an artist who had won some acclaim. He hated military life and he hated cutting wood. Fortunately for Bacher, Camp Stark was one of the least secur...
While in the camp, Bacher had obtained U.S. currency and a civilian jacket. He painted ‘PW’ with watercolor on the back of the jacket. He wore the jacket to work on August 1, hid in the brush and then washed the paint off in a stream before hiking 20 miles to Jefferson, N.H. Prison officials found a note on his bed. In front of one of the big resor...
One day in October, Bacher was walking through Penn Station when he encountered Sgt. Ted Tausig, the U.S. Army interpreter at Camp Stark. Tausig, an Austrian Jew who had escaped the Nazis, came to America and joined the Army. Bacher and Tausig had lived a few blocks away from each other in Vienna. In Camp Stark, they became friends. Tausig was on t...
The military sent Bacher to Fort Devens, and then to Fort Eustis in Virginia for a six-day course in democracy before he returned to Germany. The Nazis had imprisoned Bacher for his support of democracy, and the U.S. military government in Germany offered him a job. He declined. When the German POW camp finally closed in 1946, some of the prisoners...
July 25, 1951 was the cut-off enrollment date for those who served in World War II, whose benefits expired 4 years after the end of the war which was officially set at July 25, 1947. At the same time, a new conflict in Korea was drawing away college-age males from the pool of potential students.
The post-World War II decades have seen New Hampshire increase its economic and cultural links with the greater Boston, Massachusetts, region. This reflects a national trend, in which improved highway networks have helped metropolitan areas expand into formerly rural areas or small nearby cities.
Located in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, the Wright Museum of World War II is a nonprofit educational institution dedicated to recognizing and honoring the contributions and enduring legacy of WWII-era Americans.