Camp Douglas, Wyoming POW Camp

Just east of Douglas, Wyoming, a World War Two prisoner of war camp operated from nineteen forty-three to nineteen forty-six on a roughly one-square-mile site. Built in the spring of nineteen forty-three, it received its first prisoners in August of that year, about four hundred Italians, with the Italian population growing to nearly two thousand by year's end, followed later by German prisoners whose numbers grew to roughly three thousand by nineteen forty-five. Most prisoners were not confined to camp for long.

Under the Geneva Convention, the Army hired them out to farms, ranches, and logging operations across Wyoming, where wartime labor shortages were acute. Branch work camps fanned out across the state from Basin to Wheatland. By nineteen forty-six the war was over, the Germans repatriated, and the camp demolished.

Little physical evidence remains, but the episode reflects how deeply the global conflict reached into even the most remote corners of the American interior.