In south-central Pennsylvania’s Pine Grove Furnace State Park lie the ruins of one of three secret interrogation camps in the continental United States for prisoners of World War II. You are looking on the first slide at the remains of a large mess hall.
Camp Michaux was originally built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the Great Depression, but from 1943-1945 it was repurposed to interrogate mostly German prisoners, such as engineers. About 7,500 men went through these camps, spending usually a couple of weeks before they were moved to other camps. The strategies that intelligence agents used to get the POWs to talk included allowing the prisoners to gather in the same room and then recording their conversations, letting the German prisoners drink alcohol with secret collaborators, and threatening uncooperative prisoners by telling them they would be turned over to the Russian army — the Germans considered this a death sentence.
Although eventually there were 167 Japanese POWs at Camp Michaux, this was towards the end of the war. After November 1945, the camp’s military purpose ended. For a while, the area was used as a church camp before it was demolished in 1972.
Source(s): See @cumberlink.com/news/local/history/pine-grove-pows-pine-grove-furnace-was-once-a-prisoner/article_780cf746-4d0a-11e4-bddd-d763f93fb84b84b.html, Joseph Cress, _The Sentinel_, Oct 6, 2014; see David L. Smith, “Camp Michaux Self-Guided Walking Tour,” 2013 and revision, @schaeffersite.com/michaux/WalkingTour.pdf .
