German POWs in Colorado Thought They Were Escaping When Given This Mountain Assignment

The Unlikely Allies: Captain William Das and the German POWs

On the morning of July 7th, 1944, a convoy of canvas-covered trucks wound its way up the narrow mountain roads of Colorado’s San Isabel National Forest, climbing to an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet above sea level. Inside the vehicles, 42 German prisoners of war sat in silence, watching the pine forests give way to rocky slopes and thin air. They had been told only that they were being assigned to a special work detail in the mountains. Many exchanged knowing glances, believing this isolation was exactly what they had been waiting for.

The American guards seemed relaxed, almost casual, as if they had no idea what a group of determined men could accomplish in such remote wilderness. What these men were about to discover would shatter every assumption they held about their captivity, their captors, and the very nature of the conflict that had brought them thousands of miles from home. Their mountain assignment would become not an escape route but a revelation that would transform enemies into something far more complicated.

Oberleutnant Klaus Richtor pressed his face against the truck’s canvas opening, studying the terrain with a practiced eye. At 26 years old, he had served in the mountain divisions in Norway before his capture in Tunisia. He knew mountains, knew how quickly a man could disappear into wilderness like this. Beside him, Unaritzia Hanssburgman, a former forester from Bavaria, was equally attentive. The Americans had made a critical mistake. Both men thought they were being handed opportunity on a silver platter.

The camp they arrived at was unlike any prisoner facility they had seen. Camp Hale, as it was called, sat in a broad valley surrounded by peaks that scraped the sky. But the prisoners were not taken to the main facility. Instead, they were led to a smaller outpost, a collection of wooden barracks that looked hastily constructed, surrounded by equipment they recognized immediately: logging saws, axes, skidding chains, and measuring tools. An American captain named Robert Chen stood waiting for them, a clipboard in his hands and an interpreter at his side.

Captain Chen was 31 years old, a forestry engineer from Oregon who had spent most of his life in timber country. He regarded the assembled prisoners with neither hostility nor excessive friendliness, just the practical assessment of a man sizing up a work crew. Through the interpreter, a German-American sergeant named Friedrich Weber, he explained their assignment. The United States Forest Service needed timber. Not just any timber, but specific high-quality lumber from high-altitude trees. The prisoners would be logging these forests under American supervision, cutting and processing timber that would be used for various wartime needs.

Richtor translated quietly for those whose English was limited, but his mind was already elsewhere. The nearest town was miles away down treacherous roads. The forest stretched for hundreds of square miles. Guards would be minimal in such terrain. He caught Bergman’s eye and saw the same calculation reflected there. What they could not know was that Captain Chen had grown up hearing stories from his grandfather, who had worked in logging camps across the Pacific Northwest. He knew what men thought when they saw wilderness. He also knew that the mountains kept their own counsel about who survived in them and who did not.

The first week unfolded exactly as the Germans expected in terms of work. They were roused at 6 each morning, fed a breakfast of oatmeal, bread, and coffee that was plain but adequate. Then they were divided into crews and led into the forest. The work was hard—physical labor at an altitude that left even fit men gasping. The thin air made every task twice as difficult as it would have been at sea level. But for men who had survived the African desert and Atlantic crossings in cramped ships, it was manageable.

What surprised them was the quality of their equipment. The saws were sharp, recently manufactured, with replacement blades available when needed. The safety equipment was comprehensive: goggles, gloves, boots with proper tread for mountain terrain. At first, the prisoners thought this was simply American carelessness, an excess of resources that did not account for the realities of conflict. But as days passed, other details began accumulating. The food improved. By the third day, their meals included fresh vegetables, potatoes, and occasionally meat. Not the thin stew they had grown accustomed to in previous camps, but portions that actually sustained men doing heavy labor.

Gayorg Fischer, who had worked in a supply depot before his conscription, remarked that they were eating better than he had eaten in the last two years of service. The guards, too, were unusual. There were only eight of them for 42 prisoners, a ratio that seemed almost laughable. But these guards were not young, nervous conscripts. They were older men, veterans of the First World War mostly, who carried their rifles with casual competence but showed no particular interest in intimidation. One of them, a sergeant named Tom Morrison, had worked as a hunting guide in Montana before the current conflict. He watched the prisoners the way he might watch clients on a hunting trip—attentive but not oppressive, ready to help if someone got into trouble.

After two weeks, Richtor gathered his small group in the barracks after the evening count. Besides Bergman, there were four others he trusted: Verer Ko, a former university student from Heidelberg; Paul Schmidt, a farm boy from Saxony who could navigate by stars; and two brothers, Yseph and Martin Kelner, who had grown up hiking the Alps. They spoke in whispers, though the barracks were theirs alone after dark. Richtor laid out the plan he had been formulating. They would leave on a night when the moon was dark, taking advantage of Morrison’s rotation when he took the midnight guard shift. Morrison was the oldest guard, nearly 50, and by midnight he was always fighting sleep.

They would head northeast into the deepest wilderness, moving fast for the first night to put distance between themselves and any pursuit. Bergman knew how to find water, which plants were edible. Schmidt could guide them by the stars toward the Canadian border, still hundreds of miles away but theoretically reachable. They would become ghosts in the forest. Ko, the university student, asked the question that had been bothering him. “Why are they feeding us so well? Why give us good equipment?”

Richtor had thought about this. “Probably,” he suggested, “the Americans were simply wasteful, a nation that did not understand scarcity. They had so much that they did not bother to calculate what prisoners actually needed versus what was convenient to provide.” But Ko was not convinced. He had studied economics before the conflict and had read about American industrial capacity. “What if,” he proposed quietly, “they were not being wasteful? What if this was deliberate? What if the Americans wanted us to be healthy and capable?”

The question hung in the air, troubling and strange. Martin Kelner, the younger brother, dismissed it. “Wanted us capable for what? To escape? That makes no sense.”

“No,” Richtor said firmly. “Ko is overthinking. The Americans are simply soft, made careless by abundance. It would be their advantage.” They set the date for the night of August 3rd, 1944—three weeks away, enough time to gather what they could, to memorize the terrain, to prepare.

During those three weeks, other things happened that none of them quite knew how to interpret. Captain Chen began joining them in the forest occasionally, not to supervise, but to work. He would take a saw and cut alongside them, his technique efficient and practiced. Through Sergeant Weber, he would offer suggestions—a better angle for the cut, a safer way to direct a falling tree. He treated their questions about forestry techniques with respect, explaining the why behind each method.

One afternoon, a widow maker—a dead branch lodged high in a tree—came loose during a cutting operation. It fell directly toward Joseph Kelner, who was working the other end of a two-man saw. Chen, who was 30 feet away, shouted a warning and sprinted forward, shoving Kelner aside. The branch, easily 200 lbs of dead wood, crashed down where Kelner had been standing moments before. Chen helped him up, checked him for injuries, and then simply returned to his own workstation as if nothing unusual had occurred.

That evening, Joseph told his brother that an American officer had probably saved his life. Martin struggled with how to think about this. They were enemies. They were going to escape. And yet the moment had been real, the danger genuine, the response instant and unhesitating. The food continued to improve. By late July, they were receiving meat three times a week, fresh bread daily, and on Sundays, there was dessert—apple pie made by the cook staff at the main camp.

Gayorg Fischer, the former supply clerk, did calculations and realized they were consuming approximately 3,000 calories daily, the recommended intake for men doing heavy physical labor at altitude. This was not carelessness. This was precision. The work itself began to reveal patterns. They were not clear-cutting the forest, which would have been faster. Instead, Chen taught them selective logging, taking mature trees while leaving younger growth intact, creating gaps in the canopy that allowed sunlight to reach saplings below.

This was forest management, not just resource extraction. It required knowledge, planning, care. Ver Ko found himself almost against his will becoming interested in the process. He asked Sergeant Weber questions, which were relayed to Chen, who answered them in detail. The American captain explained that these forests would be here long after the conflict ended. The trees they were cutting today would be replaced by the saplings they were protecting. Logging camps in America, Chen said, had learned hard lessons about sustainability. Take too much too fast, and the forest dies. Work with the forest’s natural cycle, and it provides forever.

This was a strange philosophy to men who had spent years in a system built on total conflict, on maximum extraction of every resource toward victory. The idea of planning for after the conflict seemed almost decadent. And yet the evidence was everywhere around them. The careful marking of which trees to take and which to leave, the replanting operations they occasionally observed, the genuine concern in Chen’s voice when he spoke about forest health.

Morrison, the older guard, began teaching some of them English during the evening hours. It was not mandatory, just an offer extended to anyone interested. A dozen men, including Ko, took him up on it. Morrison was patient, good-humored, telling stories about Montana while teaching vocabulary. He spoke about his son, who was serving in the Pacific, and his hope that the boy would come home safely. The prisoners found themselves sharing their own stories—families in Germany, homes they missed, fears they carried.

August 3rd arrived. Richtor met with his group as planned. They had gathered supplies carefully—matches, a knife Ko had been allowed to use for carving and had not returned, dried food stolen in small quantities over weeks, a compass Richtor had managed to acquire. Everything was ready. But as they gathered in the darkness, Richtor found himself speaking words he had not planned. He described the escape route, the plan, the theory behind it.

And then he said something that surprised even himself. He told them about Morrison in the cabin, about Chen pushing Joseph Kelner out of the path of the widow maker, about the pie on Sundays, and the English lessons and the selective logging techniques designed to preserve forests for generations not yet born. He asked them a question that had been growing in his mind. What are we actually escaping from? Not from cruelty or starvation or abuse. Those things were not present here. Were they escaping from captivity? Yes, technically they were prisoners. But what did that mean when they were fed better than they had been in service, treated with more respect than many of them had experienced from their own officers, and engaged in work that was genuinely constructive?

Vera spoke up, his voice quiet but firm. He had been thinking about American industrial capacity, about the numbers he had studied before the conflict. He had not wanted to believe them, had thought they must be propaganda or exaggeration, but everything they had experienced in these mountains confirmed those numbers. The equipment that was replaced without hesitation when damaged, the food that flowed in steady supply, the casual abundance that was not carelessness but simply reality.

If America could treat prisoners this way while fighting a conflict on two fronts, what did that say about the relative strength of the nations involved? What did it say about which side was actually winning? These were dangerous thoughts—thoughts that contradicted everything they had been told, everything they had believed about the superiority of their own nation’s system.

The brothers Joseph and Martin Kelner were perhaps the most conflicted. They were young, had known nothing but the military system, had been trained to think of escape as duty. But Joseph could not forget the weight of Chen’s hands pushing him out of danger, the instantaneous decision to risk injury to save an enemy. What did duty mean in the face of that kind of humanity?

Paul Schmidt, the farm boy who could navigate by stars, made the final point. If they escaped, where would they actually go? Canada was hundreds of miles through wilderness that could end them a dozen different ways. Even if they reached it, then what? Try to somehow make their way back to Germany while the conflict still raged? They had no papers, no money, no contacts. The dream of escape had always been more simple than practical—a way of maintaining pride, of feeling that they had not surrendered entirely. But perhaps, Schmidt suggested carefully, there were different ways to maintain dignity. Perhaps refusing to run from people who were treating them fairly was its own kind of strength.

They talked through the night. These six men, who had planned to disappear into the mountains. By dawn, they had made a decision that would have seemed impossible weeks earlier. They would stay, not because they were giving up, but because they were choosing to acknowledge reality over ideology, humanity over hatred.

Richtor gathered the supplies they had accumulated and buried them in the forest, a small cache that would remain undiscovered. They returned to their barracks and slept for a few hours before the morning count. When Captain Chen led them into the forest that day, he noticed something different in their demeanor. They worked with a new kind of focus, asking more questions about technique, taking genuine pride in the quality of their cuts.

Chen said nothing, but he exchanged a glance with Morrison that suggested he understood something had changed. Over the following months, the dynamic in the camp continued to evolve. The prisoners became genuinely skilled loggers, their production rates increasing, not because of pressure, but because of competence. Chen began involving them in planning decisions— which areas to log next, how to handle specific terrain challenges, where to focus replanting efforts.

Ver Ko became a kind of informal translator and liaison, his improving English allowing for more direct communication. He found himself explaining to new prisoners arriving from other camps what made this place different. It was not that the Americans were soft, he would say. It was that they were confident enough to be humane.

Christmas of 1944 arrived with the mountains deep in snow. The logging operation had slowed but not stopped. On Christmas Eve, the camp staff organized a celebration. There was a decorated tree brought down from the forest by Bergman, who had picked it with a forager’s eye for shape and health. There were gifts—small things, practical items mostly, but wrapped and distributed with ceremony. The cook had prepared a feast that included turkey, potatoes, vegetables, and three different kinds of pie. Morrison led the guards and some of the prisoners in Christmas carols, the traditional songs that transcended national boundaries. Men who had been enemies sang together in a wooden barracks at 10,000 feet, their voices carrying across the snow-covered valley.

Captain Chen listened from the doorway, and if there were tears on his face, no one mentioned them. By the spring of 1945, news began filtering in about the conflict’s progress. The German forces were in retreat on all fronts. Cities were being taken, territory lost. The prisoners received this information with complex emotions—grief for their homeland, concern for families, but also a strange kind of relief. The conflict that had seemed eternal was actually ending.

When word came in May that Germany had surrendered, the camp gathered to hear the announcement. Sergeant Weber translated the official statement. The prisoners stood in silence, absorbing the reality that they were now officially and completely defeated. Captain Chen addressed them through Weber. He spoke about the work they would continue doing, the timber that was still needed, the forest that still required care. He told them that arrangements would be made for their eventual return to Germany, but the process would take time—months probably. They would remain here, continuing their labor until transport could be organized.

Then he said something that surprised many of them. He thanked them for their work, not because they were prisoners required to labor, but because they had chosen to do it well. They had learned skills, contributed value, and maintained dignity even in defeat. That meant something, Chen said. It would mean something when they returned home and helped rebuild what had been lost.

The logging continued through that summer and into the fall. By the time the first groups began leaving for repatriation processing in November 1945, they had logged thousands of board feet of timber, replanted acres of forest, and built infrastructure that would serve the Forest Service for decades. More importantly, they had learned something about themselves and about their former enemies.

Klaus Richter was among the last to leave, departing in December 1945. On his final day, Captain Chen gave him a small gift, a book about American forestry practices inscribed with a note suggesting that these techniques might be useful in rebuilding European forests after the conflict. Richtor shook the captain’s hand, thanking him in careful English.

Morrison walked with several of the departing prisoners to the trucks that would take them to the processing center. He shook each hand, wished them well, told them to stay safe. When he reached Ver Ko, the former student who had become a friend through months of English lessons, Morrison embraced him briefly. “Go home,” Morrison said. “Teach what you learned here, not just about trees, but about people.”

The prisoners who had worked at that mountain camp would scatter across a devastated Germany, returning to cities in ruins, and a nation trying to understand how it had fallen so far. Many of them would go into forestry or conservation work, applying techniques learned in Colorado mountains to European forests. Others would become teachers or rebuild family businesses or simply try to live quiet lives in a country finding its way toward peace.

Ver would eventually become a professor of economics in Frankfurt, known for his lectures on American industrial capacity and the importance of sustainable development. He would sometimes tell his students about a mountain camp where he had learned that strength was not always demonstrated through force and that the most powerful nations were those confident enough to be generous.

Hans Bergman would return to his forest in Bavaria and spend 30 years managing it with selective cutting techniques, always thinking about the generations who would walk among those trees long after he was gone. Joseph and Martin Kelner would start a construction company that would help rebuild Munich, their work ethic shaped by lessons learned at altitude under American supervision.

Klaus Richtor would have perhaps the strangest journey. He would spend two years in a British-run agricultural program, then immigrate to Canada in 1952. By 1960, he would be working for the Canadian Forest Service and, in a remarkable coincidence, would meet Robert Chen at an international forestry conference in Vancouver. The two men would recognize each other instantly and would spend an evening sharing stories about what had happened to the others from that mountain camp. Chen would tell Richtor that he had never doubted they would choose to stay, that the mountains had a way of teaching men what truly mattered.

The camp itself would continue operating for several years after the conflict, transitioning from prisoner labor to civilian conservation corps work. The barracks where German prisoners had slept would house American veterans learning forestry trades. The forests they had logged would regrow according to Chen’s plans, sustainable and healthy. By the 1970s, when environmental conservation became a national priority, those techniques pioneered in the mountain camps would be recognized as ahead of their time.

Historians studying the prisoner of war experience in America would note the mountain logging camps as unusual examples of the program. Escape rates were remarkably low despite isolated conditions. Prisoner health and morale were consistently high. Post-conflict surveys would show that men who had worked in these camps had more positive views of America than prisoners from almost any other facility type.

But the real story was not in the statistics or the lumber production numbers. It was in the transformation that occurred when men who expected cruelty encountered humanity, when those who planned escape discovered something worth staying for, and when enemies found common ground in the simple act of caring for a forest that would outlive them all.

The mountains of Colorado had taught them what their military training had not: that strength came in many forms, that abundance could be used for building rather than dominating, and that even in times of conflict, people remained capable of choice, dignity, and unexpected connection.

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