Guard's kindness remembered by POW
By SHANNON CRABTREE scrabtree@leader-news.com

BOGART

A simple Christmas card took on a whole new meaning for one Missouri soldier who spent a fair portion of the war guarding El Campo soil.

It was sent by a German soldier.

The recipient was an American soldier - one of his guards - PFC George Robert Bogart of Kansas City, Mo.

Bogart, who died Jan. 29, 2007, had been stationed here toward the end of the war.

His wife Dorothy wanted to share her husband's special connection with the pearl of the prairie - a card from Walter Hoffman, Nazi soldier - a thank you for the art supplies.

The Bogarts didn't meet until after the war was over, but her husband's memories of rice farmers and POWs were strong, she said.

The couple had been married 56 years.

The son of a Christian Science family, he went into the service partially disabled. Two dislocated shoulders at birth had never healed. He typically drove a truck during the war when he wasn't on guard duty, she said.

An art enthusiast, Bogart found a common ground with Hoffman, the enemy.

A Letter To A Friend A Christmas card from former POW Walter Hoffman to his El Campo guard reads: "Dear Georg, Do you still think of me? certain you have forgotten the german painter who did so many portrait . whilst being in the states. In January 1948 I got home. Our home was slightly damaged by everything is restored now. How do you do in the states? If you get time, please write to me." Contributed Photo

At at least one point, he bought art supplies for the German who may have gone on to an art career after the war.

There's a post World War II German artist by the name Walter Hoffman.

The art on the hand-drawn card is similar to the later work. But no local records still exist of who the man behind El Campo barbed wire really was or what happened to him later.

Even the exact dates of when the German Prisoner of War camp was located in El Campo have been lost to time and military abilities to reshuffle paperwork as much as personnel.

The camp, located off Second Street, was in existence most likely from October 1943 until late 1945.

The POWs stationed there helped bring in the rice harvests in lieu of the our own boys overseas and in the fight.

By day the captured worked and by night they were housed in the three barrack camp not far from what are now two city parks.

Two of those barracks housed 200 prisoners each. The other was used as a commons area in El Campo.

Similar POW camps were located at the Wharton County Fairgrounds and near the junior college in Wharton, according to information supplied by the Wharton County Historical Association.

Most of the POWs were members of Erwin Rommels Afrika Corps - more than 400,000 were captured and transported to the states, according to a paper on POW Camps in Texas written by the late Art Keinarth, a colonel and former city councilman, in 1994.

Of those more than 80,000 were placed in Texas camps, according to the colonel's research.

"The El Campo camp, enclosed by a 7 ft. high fence, was 600 by 390 in size and had 10 strands of barbed wire and an elevated sentry post in each corner," Keinarth said. "Flood lights illuminated the entire enclosure."

The El Campo camp closed sometime in the middle of September 1945.

After its closure, it was used as housing for migrant workers.

Bogart attended the Kansas City Art Institute after the war and then spent 32 years with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a visual information specialist.

Hoffman returned to German soil in 1948, according to the card he sent Bogart.

But it was an El Campo memory, that linked the two for years.