Among Camp Beale's 60,000 residents were about one thousand German prisoners of war housed in a compound created by converting several dormitories and storehouses between D and E and 2nd and 4th Streets. Opened on 17 May 1944, the fenced enclosure contained 17 barracks, four mess halls, a canteen, six storehouses that also served as recreation halls, a chapel, and two guard towers with floodlights, and it served as a base camp for five other area camps at Windsor, Davis, Arbuckle, Chico, and Napa, each holding approximately 1000 prisoners. The camps supplied agricultural labor to local farmers and ranchers, while prisoners at Camp Beale also cared for themselves and filled service positions around the post as hospital orderlies and medical technicians, motor pool repairmen, laundry workers, carpenters, plumbers, railroad maintenance men, and warehouse clothing sorters and sewers. Under the Geneva Convention, the government paid prisoners $.80 a day in coupons redeemable for items such as cigarettes, newspapers, ice cream, and beer with a two-glass limit, and their labor saved Camp Beale an estimated $3 million in wages. When not working, prisoners played soccer, practiced on instruments sent by the German Red Cross, staged operettas and variety shows through a symphony orchestra and band, used a library built with canteen profits to buy over five thousand English-language books, watched movies and newsreels screened for derogatory statements about America, attended classes taught by qualified Army personnel in subjects such as English grammar and American history, pursued crafts in a hobby shop, and held religious services with prisoners serving as chaplains. Their murals, gifts to local residents, and surviving written reflections revealed hopes, doubts, and homesickness, and some former prisoners later returned to settle in the area, though today only a solitary confinement cell block remains and most drawings and writings have been destroyed by weather and vandals.