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18-432: Called Schlaraffenland —the land of milk and honey—by its mostly U-boat -crew inmates, Camp Papago Park was very different from Axis POW camps, especially with regard to how prisoners were treated: Inmates were not required to work or study, though many chose to as a means of combating boredom (though mostly the latter, as there were only 700 volunteers for labor tasks). The camp had a theater where films were screened twice

36-417: A book that covers the history of the camp, including the murder of Werner Max Herschel Drechsler and subsequent executions of seven men implicated in the crime. Eppinga said she first stumbled on the topic about two decades ago. "I was reading a military book and saw that there was a footnote about an execution at Papago Park," she said. "The more I started looking, the more involved I became in it. It's such

54-536: A game of chess. They brought in this little crippled boy. He didn't know anyone who could play chess with him, and he wanted to know if we knew how to play. I told Reinhard, in German, to let the kid win, because I thought we might win favor with our captors. And this kid didn't look like he had long to live, so why not let him beat the great captured war prisoners? He could tell his friends about it later. Writer Jane Eppinga published (in 2017) Death at Papago Park POW Camp ,

72-414: A place. From Swedish dialect lubber ("fat lazy fellow") comes Lubberland , popularized in the ballad An Invitation to Lubberland . In the 1820s, the name Cockaigne came to be applied jocularly to London as the land of Cockneys ("Cockney" from a "cock's egg", an implausible creature; see also basilisk ), though the two are not linguistically connected otherwise. The composer Edward Elgar used

90-550: A strange story." There was not much information to be found at first. Eppinga said she used a Freedom of Information Act request to access court-martial papers, which she finally found in the National Archives. "I went to Washington, D.C., and actually looked at the archives and folders and got copies of the court-martial," she said. She also spoke to members of the military, such as Captain Jerry Mason, who provided photos for

108-402: A week and the camp choir could practice. Much of this was discussed, along with anything else the prisoners who wrote The Papago Rundschau, the camp's newspaper, chose to include. In December 1944, twenty-five POWs escaped from Camp Papago Park into the surrounding desert, among them Kapitänleutnant Hans-Werner Kraus . Originally thought to be impossible to tunnel through, the hard clay of

126-574: The book. During the course of her research, Eppinga said she was most surprised to see how Drechsler — who had provided German secrets to U.S. Navy authorities — was handled when he arrived to the camp. "Why the Americans didn’t take better care of him is what is amazing to me... They knew that he would be recognized by his compatriots in Papago Park. He only lived about seven hours once he got to Papago Park." Seven decades later, Eppinga said she finds that

144-568: The camp’s planned Christmas menu. Indeed, most of the escapees were aware that returning to Germany was nearly impossible and had “escaped” as more of a prank. This did not mean all had abandoned any hope of making it home, and a few of the men brought along boards they intended to fashion into a raft. This would then be used to float down the Salt River to the Gila River , which they had seen on local maps but not personally. Unfortunately for their plan,

162-513: The harshness of medieval peasant life. In poems like The Land of Cockaigne , it is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful (skies that rain cheese). Cockaigne appeared frequently in Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at scarcity and Christian asceticism . Cockaigne

180-426: The river was not flowing at the time of their escape, and what they found was a dry arroyo instead. When two escapees were recaptured, subsequent events further illustrated differences between Axis and Allied POW operations: The two men dined with a local customs official at his home. Later nearby residents came to see the escapees first-hand after their story appeared in the news, as did a handicapped boy looking for

198-457: The streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing". According to Herman Pleij , Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life (2003): roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, where grilled geese fly directly into one's mouth, where cooked fish jump out of the water and land at one's feet. The weather is always mild,

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216-405: The surrounding area turned out to be conducive to tunneling as it softened greatly when wet. Over time, the escapees dug a tunnel 176 feet long, three feet high and half as wide, without being detected. Though the guards proved easy to get past, the vast distances and desert terrain were insurmountable, resulting in most returning to the camp within a few weeks. One escapee turned himself in on seeing

234-475: The topic of what happened at Papago Park still brings mixed reactions. "There’s still feelings, if you bring it up, of what was wrong or right in the case." 33°28′15″N 111°56′57″W  /  33.47070°N 111.94918°W  / 33.47070; -111.94918 Schlaraffenland Cockaigne or Cockayne ( / k ɒ ˈ k eɪ n / ) is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of luxury and ease, comfort and pleasure, opposite to

252-466: The wine flows freely, sex is readily available, and all people enjoy eternal youth. A Neapolitan and Southern Italian tradition, extended to Southern Italian diaspora communities and other Latin culture countries, is the Cockaigne pole (Italian: cuccagna; Spanish: cucaña), a horizontal or vertical pole with a prize (like a ham ) at one end. The pole is covered with grease or soap and planted during

270-408: The word "Cockaigne" for his concert overture and suite evoking the people of London, Cockaigne (In London Town) , Op. 40 (1901). The Dutch villages of Kockengen and Koekange may be named after Cockaigne, though this has been disputed. The surname Cockayne also derives from the mythical land, and was originally a nickname for an idle dreamer. The name of the drug cocaine is unrelated: it

288-542: Was a "medieval peasant’s dream, offering relief from backbreaking labor and the daily struggle for meager food." While the first recorded uses of the word are the Latin Cucaniensis and the Middle English Cokaygne , one line of reasoning has the name tracing to Middle French (pays de) cocaigne "(land of) plenty", ultimately from a word for a small sweet cake sold to children at a fair. In Ireland , it

306-648: Was mentioned in the Kildare Poems , composed c. 1350. In Italian , the same place is called Paese della Cuccagna ; the Dutch equivalent is Luilekkerland ("lazy, delicious land"), translated from the Middle Dutch word Cockaengen , and the German equivalent is Schlaraffenland . In Spanish, an equivalent place is named Jauja , after a rich mining region of the Andes, and País de Cucaña ("fools' paradise") may also signify such

324-498: Was named in 1860 by Albert Niemann from the plant coca ( Quechua kúka ) and the suffix -ine used to form chemical terms. Like Atlantis and El Dorado , the land of Cockaigne was a utopia . It was a fictional place where, in a parody of paradise, idleness and gluttony were the principal occupations. In Specimens of Early English Poets (1790), George Ellis printed a 13th-century French poem called "The Land of Cockaigne" where "the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes,

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