From 1935 to 1942, Camp Tulelake was built and staffed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, established during the Great Depression by President Franklin Roosevelt to reduce unemployment and preserve the nation's natural resources, and its workers carried out local projects including building new headquarters and a stone overlook for Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, reconstructing the Clear Lake Dam, and constructing canals, dikes, roads, and rock walls. For several months in 1943, more than 100 "disloyal" Japanese Americas were separated from the interment center at Newell and housed at Camp Tulelake, where internees cleaned up buildings and grounds, installed new windows, repaired electrical fixtures and plumbing, and also worked at the Wildlife Refuge headquarters maintaining the landscape and buildings. Several months after they were moved from the buildings, the camp was used again as housing for Italian and German prisoners of war after the Tulelake Growers Association requested prisoner labor to help local farmers harvest crops during the critical field labor shortage of World War II. In May 1944, 150 Italian prisoners converted the camp into a full-blown POW camp that held up to 800 German prisoners between June 1944 and the end of the war.