Washington pencil pushers saddled Kansas with a passel of bloodthirsty thugs who hated us and our way of life.</p><p>Yet Kansans of yesteryear didn&rsquo;t whine when the feds shipped Nazi prisoners of war their way in the 1940s.</p><p>Trainloads of German soldiers and sailors came. Many were the products of Hitler youth camps and a philosophy as scary as anything hatched in a militant madrassa.</p><p>That&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s embarrassing to watch the state&rsquo;s political leaders of today stamping their little feet on rumors that the Gitmo detainees might end up in Leavenworth.</p><p>&ldquo;Not in my backyard. Not in Kansas. I will shut down the Senate before I let that happen,&rdquo; a fearful-sounding Sen. Pat Roberts said Monday &mdash; and he&rsquo;s a former Marine.</p><p>It&rsquo;s a different world than it was then. Now we cower.</p><p>Then, community leaders in cities like Leavenworth, Concordia and Hays were of somewhat the same mindset about Nazis as the folks in Standish, Mich., are today with regards to the Guantanamo detainees.</p><p>They saw a way to make a buck.</p><p>&ldquo;In fact, governors, congressmen, senators, railroads and chambers of commerce often lobbied the War Department for the establishment of a POW camp,&rdquo; R. Douglas Hurt writes in &ldquo;The Great Plains During World War II,&rdquo; published last year by the University of Nebraska Press.</p><p> Nearly every state took some of the 425,000 prisoners of war shipped from Europe and North Africa. The camps meant much-needed commerce coming out of the Depression.</p><p>And POWs were cheap labor at a time when American boys were needed at the front. Kansas had more than its share of prisoners housed at 18 locations.</p><p>And while most of the men were happy to be out of the conflict, it wasn&rsquo;t true for all.</p><p>Gestapo and other hard-line Nazis tended to fill the leadership roles in camps.</p><p>They were the English-speaking liaisons with the Americans who ran the camps. And while few hard-liners tried to escape, the loyal Nazis were as ruthless as any member of al-Qaida.</p><p>The Fuhrer&rsquo;s true believers carried out executions of suspected collaborators. For instance, at Camp Concordia, the largest camp in Kansas, with 5,000 POWs, four Germans were found guilty in kangaroo courts.</p><p>All died of faked or coerced &ldquo;suicides.&rdquo;</p><p>And now, six decades after the camps were dismantled, Kansas officials are afraid of housing a couple of hundred suspected extremists under tight security at a military installation in a town known for its prisons?</p><p>One more reason to believe this war on terror is different from the ones that came before.</p><p>Lack of backbone on the home front.