Prisoners of Travel Town

Beneath the footfalls of the laughing children scampering over restored old railway stock in Travel Town, Griffith Park, lies a little known legacy - this location once held German, Japanese, and Italian prisoners of war. At the height of the war in May and June of 1945 the German POW population alone in the United States was over 371,000 with a total Axis prisoner count of over 425,000. The majority of these prisoners were moved to the south and southwest, with a few temporally housed and processed at the then Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) facility located in the park.

The Travel Town museum is located in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Founded in the early 50's, it boasts the largest collection of steam locomotives in the western United States,  featuring both passenger and freight aspects of railroading. Well worth a visit, the park makes for a pleasant and educational diversion for young and old alike.

The Playground Department, in the 1920s, established a Boy's Camp at the site to provide recreation for underprivileged, city youths. During the 1930s, the camp became a CCC facility large enough to house over 500 hundred corpsmen. During the 1940s, this site was used as a Photo Experimentation Laboratory, a military film location, a Camouflage Experimental Laboratory and Yard, a Prisoner of War Enclosure, and a Hydraulic Model Yard to study the flow of the Los Angeles River Flood Control Channel. Although the site was used only on isolated instances as a Prisoner of war enclosure, processing only a handful of prisoners before being abandoned in 1943, few were ever aware of this wartime use of the property. The camp was also used to house over 700 Polish refugees in June of 1943, making a convenient stop for them on their way to Quanajiuato, Mexico.

Life as a POW in America during the war was a far cry from the horrors that came from Asia and the Holocaust. Prisoners were fed well, provided medical care, and although sometimes overcrowded, the prisoners were treated humanly. That this area would turn into a playground for adults and children, allowed to climb on the very trains that transported these prisoners and refugees, is part of the irony we call Los Angeles.