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By Al Zdon
One story author Dean B. Simmons tells concerns a couple of German prisoners who escaped in a row boat from a camp on Day Lake near Grand Rapids.
The two prisoners were determined to row their
boat down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico and then find a way back to the fatherland to help in the war effort.
"They were going to save Germany," Author Dean B. Simmons told a gathering at the Ft. Snelling
History Center recently.
The men were gone several days, and the FBI became involved in trying to find them. Finally, a resort owner on a nearby lake reported the pair of prisoners were rowing around and around
the lake. Only a few miles from the camp, they had made a wrong turn and lost the Mississippi.
Escapes and escape attempts were almost unheard of among the 6,000 prisoners of war sent to Minnesota.
"The escape
rate was higher at federal penitentiaries during the war than it was at prisoner of war camps," Simmons said. "There simply wasn't anywhere to escape to."
The obvious question is why would they bring prisoners
of war all the way from North Africa to Minnesota during World War II?
Because the state needed the workers.
"There was a major labor shortage, particularly in the agricultural industry," said Simmons, the
author of a book on Minnesota's POW camps during the war.
The book, Swords into Plowshares, was published this year — the first book ever written about a little-known part of Minnesota's World War II history.
In all, the prisoners of war — called PWs and not POWs during World War II — worked at 21 branch camps located throughout the state.
In the north, at camps near such cities as Remer, Grand Rapids, Bena and Deer
River, they worked harvesting trees for the paper mill industry. In the Red River valley at Warren, Crookston, Ada and Moorhead, they worked bringing in the harvest.
At camps in southern Minnesota at Ortonville,
Olivia, Princeton, Howard Lake, Bird Island, Montgomery, New Ulm, Faribault, Owatonna, Fairmont, Wells, Hollendale and St. Charles, they worked mainly at canneries and for other small businesses.
The prisoners
were paid 10 cents an hour and could use the money to buy items from the canteen such as soap and cigarettes. Many prisoners saved up a small nest egg during the war, and some of the more entrepreneurial used the
money to buy items they could later sell in the post-war Germany black market.
Generally, Simmons said, the prisoners got along well with the local people, and the men often went to work each day with no guards
present.
One documented story told about how a local family near New Ulm, which had a large German population, stopped and honked at a field being worked by the prisoners. A prisoner joined them and stayed with
the family overnight, went to church with them in the morning, and was returned to the camp the next day.
The family was fined $300 for the offense. Simmons said that one of the interesting things that came out
in the court trial testimony was that when the family honked, several other prisoners began to make their way toward the car thinking it was their ride.
Other prisoners would spend their free time fishing, and it
was discussed for a time whether they needed to buy fishing licenses.
"Only in Minnesota could you have a debate about whether prisoners of war should have to buy fishing licenses." Simmons said.
In other
cases, prisoners were allowed to go to movies, and there was a report of prisoners riding the Ferris wheel at the county fair.
One picture in the book shows a prisoner holding a pheasant he had apparently shot.
There were some Italian prisoners, but most of the PWs were Germans. Among them were two distinctly different groups. Early in the war, prisoners taken from the Afrika Korps, were battle tested soldiers who
strongly believed in the German cause. Later in the war, after D-Day, the prisoners were often young boys and older men who could see Germany's certain demise.
When mixed in the camps, there was often acrimony
and even violence between these two groups, and at least one group of prisoners were taken from a base camp near Algona, Iowa, and sent to a branch camp in Minnesota to protect them from the other prisoners.
In a
prisoner of war camp in the Southern United States, two prisoners were killed by fellow prisoners over their ideological differences.
Simmons spent 10 years researching his book, and interviewed many of the
former prisoners in Germany.
Many of them had very positive memories about their stay in Minnesota.
One of the most remarkable facts about the prisoner camps in Minnesota, and elsewhere in the U.S., Simmons
said, was how well the prisoners were treated.
"It says a lot about that World War II generation that they did the right thing with the prisoners when, with a war going on, they could have easily done the wrong
thing."
He said there was also an official military policy to treat the prisoners correctly, according to the Geneva Conventions, in hopes that the Axis powers would do the same for American prisoners. It was
also hoped that word would leak back to the German Army that prisoners were treated well, and it would encourage more troops to surrender.
Only one prisoner died in Minnesota. After a hot day working the fields
near Moorhead, a 23-year-old German prisoner went swimming with his fellow PWs in a gravel pit and drowned. He was buried with full military honors.
Over 400,000 PWs were brought to the U.S., the greater
percentage of them Germans with some Italians. Almost no Japanese were brought to America. Over 5,000 of the Germans later came back to the United States to become citizens.
A strange part of the whole episode
was that there were more prisoners in Minnesota after the war than during the war. The prisoner pipeline was in place when the war ended, and many American soldiers came home to find the German and Italian prisoners
working the fall harvest in 1945.
The number of prisoners hit its peak in Minnesota in September of 1945 when 3,000 PWs were working the harvest.
It took as long as two years for some of the prisoners to be
repatriated. Many who went back pleaded to be released in parts of Germany held by the Allies and not in the Russian sectors.
Many who were sent home were forced to work in coal mines in England and France
before they could return to their families. Some spent as much as two years in the coal mines, and were very bitter about the experience.
The book Swords into Plowshares can be purchased for $17 from the author,
Dean B. Simmons, 271 Summit Ave., St. Paul, MN 55102.
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