What was Camp Papago Park?
Fifteen minutes from where Old Town Scottsdale now sells turquoise, the United States once held about 3,100 German prisoners of war behind wire, and twenty-five of them tunneled out on Christmas Eve.
Camp Papago Park sat on the northern edge of Papago Park from 1943 to 1946 — ground running from roughly 62nd Street east to the Crosscut Canal, north of McDowell Road, in Phoenix. The site had been Army land in one form or another since 1909; in the autumn of 1943 the facility was converted into a POW camp, taking Italians first and then Germans, organized into five compounds, four for enlisted men and one for officers.
It was, by the standards of the war, a soft billet. Prisoners nicknamed it Schlaraffenland — the land of milk and honey. They weren’t required to work, they ran a choir and a theater, and they published their own newspaper. What the camp commander did do, disastrously, was house the most escape-minded officers together, including Kapitänleutnant Jürgen Wattenberg, a U-boat commander and the ranking German prisoner.
Wattenberg’s people spent from September to December 1944 digging a 178-foot tunnel, about three feet across, from a bathhouse eastward to the bank of the Crosscut Canal, hiding the entrance behind a coal box. On the night of December 23, 1944, twenty-five men went through it — the largest Axis POW escape ever staged on American soil.
None of them got home. The ground is now the Papago Park Military Reservation, and you can’t walk it. The story is still there on two markers.
How to see what’s left
Set expectations first: the camp is gone and the site is a military base. The ground the compounds stood on is now the Papago Park Military Reservation, headquarters of the Arizona National Guard and the state’s Department of Emergency and Military Affairs. Visitors without a Defense Department ID need a background check to get through the gate, so this is not a place you wander into on a Sunday. Treat the base as off the itinerary unless you’ve arranged access.
Go to the tunnel marker instead, which is free and public. A historical marker stands on the Crosscut Canal bike path, about a tenth of a mile north of Oak Street, near where the tunnel’s far end broke the surface. This is the payoff. Stand there, read the text, and then look at the watercourse in front of you — because the escape plan hinged on rivers being navigable, and the whole thing collapsed within a day of the men discovering they weren’t.
Fold it into a Papago morning. The marker is a short walk or ride from the buttes, so the natural version of this trip is a sunrise loop at Papago Park — Hole-in-the-Rock, Hunt’s Tomb, the lagoons — and then the canal path to the marker. Forty-five minutes of walking, about a thousand years of history, ten minutes from south Scottsdale.
The museum, if the hours line up. The Arizona Military Museum on the reservation holds material on the camp and the escape. Its opening hours are narrow and change, so call before you plan a day around it.
Seasonal reality. The canal path is flat, unshaded and brutal after about 9 a.m. from May through September. Winter mornings are perfect. The monsoon field manual applies in storm season, when the canal path can be closed or slick.
For more of Scottsdale’s war years, the local counterpart is Thunderbird Field II, the primary flight school that opened in June 1942 and trained roughly 5,500 cadets on the land that became Scottsdale Airport. One camp made pilots; the other kept U-boat crews. They were running at the same time, twelve miles apart, and the 1940s history page ties both into what the war did to this corner of the Valley.
The night twenty-five Germans went looking for a river
The plan was good. That’s what makes it worth telling.
By 1944 Camp Papago Park held roughly 3,100 German prisoners and a few hundred American guards, and the Americans had made an organizational error they would spend the rest of the war regretting: concentrating the hardest cases in one compound — submarine officers, repeat escapers, the men with the most training and the least to do. The ranking prisoner was Kapitänleutnant Jürgen Wattenberg, a U-boat commander whose boat had been sunk in the Caribbean, and who treated captivity as an assignment rather than an ending.
Digging began in September 1944. The entrance was a six-foot vertical shaft inside a bathhouse near the camp’s eastern perimeter; prisoners removed a section of wooden wall and hid the opening behind a coal box, which let men disappear into the ground while ostensibly showering. The cover story was a volleyball court: prisoners carried the spoil out in their pockets and scattered it on the court, which is why the Germans called it the Faustball tunnel. They worked in shifts, in the dark, in a hole three feet across, for three months. On December 20, 1944, the tunnel broke through: 178 feet from bathhouse to the bank of the Crosscut Canal.
On the night of December 23 — chosen because holiday routine meant slack attention and the men had saved up rations — twenty-five prisoners went out. They carried food, fabricated civilian clothing, and the components for collapsible rafts, because the plan was to reach the Salt River, follow it to the Gila, and float to Mexico.
The Salt River, in December 1944, downstream of a century of Valley irrigation diversion, was a dry arroyo. So was the Gila. The most sophisticated escape of the American home front had been built on a map that told the truth about where rivers were and nothing about whether water was in them.
What followed was almost comic and also completely predictable. Some escapees, who had treated the whole thing as a prank, walked back in within days. Others pushed south on foot toward the border, roughly 130 miles away, and were picked up cold and starving. O’odham scouts assisted the search, reading tracks across ground the Germans couldn’t interpret at all. Recaptured men were reportedly fed by local officials and received visitors — including, in one widely retold detail, a boy looking for someone to play chess with. Nobody was killed, on either side.
Wattenberg was the exception and the whole point. He sheltered in caves in the mountains north of Phoenix for weeks, supplied by prisoners still inside the wire, and eventually walked into the city itself. He was arrested on January 28, 1945, thirty-six days after going into the tunnel — the last of the twenty-five.
The camp closed in 1946. The land kept serving: an Army Reserve Center arrived in 1952, and Arizona’s Department of Emergency and Military Affairs established its headquarters here in 1975. The old footprint is now split between the military reservation, city parkland, houses and commercial lots. In April 2006, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a marker on the base recording Papago Park’s military history back to 1909. A second marker, on the public canal path, marks where the tunnel came up.
Why it matters
Every city has a war story it half-forgot. Ours is that the largest Axis prison break in American history happened in a Phoenix park a quarter hour from Scottsdale’s shopping district, and failed because the escapees trusted a map about a desert river. It belongs on this site for the same reason CrackerJax and Rawhide do: the place is gone, the ground has been repurposed, and without a page like this the only trace left is a plaque on a canal path that cyclists ride past without slowing down. Slow down. Twenty-five men came up out of the dirt right there.