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“It is not the lawbreakers we must fear today so much as he who obeys the law. One of the most hopeful auguries for the future is that we Americans have a long and honorable tradition of lawlessness and disrespect for authority.” - Germfask Newsletter, April 1945, volume 1, no. 3

Germfask was a depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps camp that was converted into a concentration camp during WWII from May 1944 to June 1945. The United States government incarcerated 102 conscientious objectors at Camp 135 where they were charged to work without pay. This work included digging ditches and ponds, weed control, and other manual labor on the Seney Wildlife Refuge.

While government reports describe "lenient supervisors, few work requirements, and minimal reinforcement of regulations”, those imprisoned at Camp 135 describe a different system of slave labor. One of the camp managers , Chester C. Osborne, resigned after two weeks citing that the camp was tantamount to “re-establishment of slavery”. Selective Service’s primary focus was not on “work of national importance”, but rather that the men yielded to government authority and obeyed orders. Germfask became the penultimate option (before prison) for the most politically minded and disruptive conscientious objectors.

The prisoners did publish a newsletter. In the April 1945 edition, the paymaster at a Nazi concentration camp is discussed. The paymaster is fearful of his impending execution, and pleads that he had not personally killed any jews. The prisoners write in the newsletter “only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death camp paymaster.”

Germfaskers feared that “slowly, but almost inevitably, the people of this country and the world are being cast into a mold: Authority from the top, and unquestioning obedience to that authority. These are becoming part of our life. The most effective instrument of coercion in the hands of such authority is controlled public opinion. If some one person or group “flaunts “authority, turn loose on him the righteous wrath of his friends and neighbors. If the paymaster attempts to speak out or hesitates to obey orders, authority lets loose the hounds of “national unity“ or “casualty lists” crying “we’re all in this together.” There must be no opposition.”