The German Sailor Who Lasted Six Hours at an Arizona POW Camp

Werner Drechsler survived six hours at an Arizona POW camp before his own countrymen hanged him in the shower house. He was a U-boat sailor turned American informant, and the Navy had warned the Army in writing: do not send him to a camp full of the men he'd been spying on. The Army sent him anyway. What followed was a midnight execution behind American barbed wire — and seventeen months later, a gallows at Fort Leavenworth that the Geneva Convention itself forced the United States to build.