The 64-Pound Ghost of Camp Clinton: The Shocking Medical Discovery and Hidden Trauma of 18-Year-Old POW Greta Mannheim

In the stifling summer heat of June 1945, the war in Europe was a fading echo for most Americans. Victory had been declared, the celebration in Times Square was a memory, and the nation was beginning the long, slow process of looking inward. But at Camp Clinton, a prisoner of war facility nestled in the woods of Mississippi, the war’s darkest remnants were still arriving in the back of olive-drab transport trucks. On June 23, a truck pulled up to the gate carrying eleven prisoners. Among them was a figure so slight and so pale that she seemed more like a specter than a prisoner. Her name was Greta Mannheim, an 18-year-old German girl, and the medical examination that would follow her arrival would shock the camp’s staff to their core.

Greta was listed on the manifest as a Wehrmacht auxiliary, an 18-year-old captured in Bavaria just as the Third Reich collapsed. Most of the prisoners processed at Camp Clinton were battle-hardened men, but Greta was a girl who looked as though she might vanish into the Mississippi humidity. When Captain Raymond Holt, the camp’s medical officer, first saw her, she was leaning against a truck wheel, sweating profusely despite the shade. Her eyes were glassy, her breathing shallow, and she was clutching her side with a desperation that Holt immediately recognized as a sign of critical injury.

The Infirmary Revelation

When Greta was carried into the infirmary, the atmosphere shifted from routine to emergency. Corporal Linda Hayes, the camp nurse, had to use medical shears to cut away Greta’s oversized uniform. What lay beneath was a map of violence. Greta’s torso was covered in a kaleidoscope of bruises—some fading yellow, others a deep, ink-like purple. The most severe trauma was concentrated on her left side, from her lowest rib down to her hip.

As Captain Holt pressed gently on her abdomen, he felt a terrifying rigidity. In medical terms, this is “guarding,” a reflex that occurs when the body is trying to protect internal organs from the agony of a massive hemorrhage. Greta wasn’t just bruised; she was bleeding out internally.

“Who did this to you?” Holt asked in his fractured German.

Greta’s response, whispered so softly that Hayes had to lean in to catch the words, was the first of many shocks: “After. It was after I was captured.”

90 Minutes to Save a Life

Greta was rushed into emergency surgery at 4:30 PM. As Holt made the incision along her left side, blood immediately welled up, spilling over the edges of the cut. Inside, the scene was worse than he had anticipated. Her spleen was ruptured, torn in two places, and had been leaking into her abdominal cavity for what Holt estimated was at least three weeks.

The pattern of the injuries was methodical. Along with the ruptured spleen, her left kidney was severely bruised, and several lower ribs showed hairline fractures that were already beginning to knit back together. This wasn’t the result of a stray shell or a fall; it was the result of blunt force trauma delivered with surgical precision. Someone had beaten her repeatedly in the same spot, likely with a heavy object like a baton or a boot, intending to cause maximum internal damage while leaving minimal external evidence.

Holt successfully removed the ruptured spleen—a procedure that saved her life by hours. Had she arrived at Camp Clinton a day later, she would have died a silent death on the floor of a transport truck, another nameless statistic in the chaos of post-war logistics.

The Ghostly Silence of Lion, France

As Greta recovered, she slowly began to peel back the layers of her nightmare. She hadn’t been a soldier; she was a telephone operator who had been swept up in the American advance. Her trauma didn’t occur on the front lines, but in a holding facility near Lyon, France.

While the facility was managed by Americans, Greta’s specific work detail—sorting through confiscated radio equipment—was supervised by a corporal from the Free French Forces. This man, whose village had been burned by the Wehrmacht in 1940, had made it his personal mission to exact revenge on the prisoners under his watch. Greta recalled him as a man in his 40s with a distinctive scar on his left hand.

The beatings were systematic. Every time a crate was dropped or a task was completed too slowly, the corporal would use his wooden baton. He specifically targeted Greta’s ribs, knowing that the pain would be excruciating but the marks would be hidden by her thick wool uniform. He threatened that if she ever reported him to the American camp administrators, he would make sure she “disappeared.”

A Search for Justice in a World of Ruins

Colonel Thomas Briggs, the camp commander, was so disturbed by Holt’s surgical report and Greta’s testimony that he rewrote his incident report three times. He knew the political sensitivity of the situation; accusing a member of the Free French Forces of war crimes just weeks after the liberation of France was a diplomatic landmine.

Major Frank Ellison, a military lawyer, was dispatched to investigate. He traveled to the facility in Lyon, only to find a world in total flux. The facility was being closed, records were missing, and the guards had been rotated to new assignments. It was as if the “French Corporal” had never existed.

However, a breakthrough came from an unexpected source. A German prisoner in a Belgian camp, Ilse Brener, had been on the same work detail. She corroborated every detail of Greta’s account, even providing the corporal’s first name: Mitchell. This was further backed by an American guard, Private Edwin Nash, who confessed in a letter to the War Department that he had been ordered not to interfere with the French supervisor’s “methods” to avoid friction between the Allies.

Despite the evidence, the wheels of justice ground to a halt. The French government, citing a lack of jurisdiction and insufficient evidence, refused to prosecute the man identified as Mitchell Durac. The case was eventually archived, lost in the millions of files generated during the massive demobilization of 1945.

The Legacy of Greta Mannheim

Greta was repatriated to a destroyed Germany in October 1945. She lived out the rest of her life in a small town near Stuttgart, marrying in 1951 and raising two children. She never spoke of the Mississippi summer or the surgeon who saved her life. She died in 2003, leaving behind only the cold, clinical records in the National Archives.

The case of Greta Mannheim, though largely forgotten, served as a catalyst for the 1949 updates to the Geneva Convention. Her suffering highlighted the desperate need for stronger protections for female prisoners, mandatory medical screenings upon transfer, and more rigorous oversight of joint Allied facilities.

Greta was a “64-pound ghost” who walked through the cracks of a crumbling empire. While she never saw her attacker face a courtroom, the documentation of her trauma ensured that her story didn’t die in that Mississippi infirmary. It remains a haunting reminder that even when the guns go silent, the war continues in the bodies and minds of those left behind.