1 Cent Lordsburg PoW Camp

The Lordsburg Internment and Prisoner of War Camp in Hidalgo County, New Mexico, operated under the Geneva Convention's requirement that detainees receive compensation for labor — but in scrip, not U.S. currency. This note is part of that canteen currency system, restricted to on-site use and theoretically non-convertible, which was precisely the point: it kept prisoners from accumulating dollars that could fund escape attempts or be passed to outside contacts.

Lordsburg was notably one of the camps implicated in the 1942 shooting deaths of two Japanese civilian internees — Toshiro Kobata and Hirota Isomura — by a U.S. Army guard, an incident investigated but ultimately unprosecuted. The camp later transitioned to holding German and Italian POWs alongside Japanese detainees.

Surviving examples of Lordsburg scrip are scarce; most were redeemed or destroyed at war's end.