(bright music) (gentle bright music) (somber pensive music) - [Dean] The story of the prisoner of war camps in Minnesota, people don't know much about it today.

- We had Germans.

They're from World War II.

There were prisoners working just north of the house here.

You know, 100 yards.

- [Dean] Agricultural use was the number one use of the prisoners during the war.

- Not everybody was excited to have the enemy right outside of town.

The challenge was, you are the caretaker of your enemy.

Which road are you gonna take?

- Under the Geneva Convention, you're required to treat prisoners with a certain respect.

What we hear back from the POWs that went back to Germany is that it changed their life.

- I take the liberty of writing a letter to you.

In 1944, I worked for you at your farm as a prisoner of war.

I thank you, and you treated me so well.

- The time I spent in a Owatonna, especially on your command, was the best time in my life as a prisoner of war.

- [Sherry] Please be so kind and send me something to eat.

Where everyone looks, nothing but rubble, despair, and cold.

- Over the course of time, which is now 80-plus years, time has just eroded, and that generation has mostly passed.

So those stories haven't been passed along to a lot of people.

- It's unbelievable to me that for the most part, the folks that were given that choice treated these guys as human beings.

I'd like to think we would do the same today.

(somber pensive music) (uplifting music) - [Reporter] En route to prison camps throughout the United States, 3,000 German prisoners of war arrive in New York.

- The story of the prisoner of war camps in Minnesota really has its beginning with some of the major World War events that were occurring.

The prisoners were arriving from Europe in two main waves: the Afrika Korps soldiers after the surrender to the British Eighth Army in 1943, and then the large influx of prisoners following the D-Day invasion.

About 380 some thousand were German, 50 some thousand were Italians, and the remaining being Japanese, a very small amount.

Most of them were housed out west.

Those prisoners then were housed eventually out of more than 500 camps throughout the entire United States.

- When it comes to moving prisoners around the country, they're moving them from the East Coast by rail.

There's some stories about some German prisoners throwing leaflets out the windows as they're going through, you know, warning citizens that they're gonna lose the war, and so on.

(machine gun firing) - World War II was on, and it was not going particularly well for the Allied powers.

Hitler had spread across Europe, was threatening Great Britain, was on the march to Russia, and it looked like he was unstoppable.

Things were not going well in the Pacific, either.

- The British, they couldn't take care of the prisoners very well in North Africa.

Mainland Europe was occupied by Nazi Germany, so other Allied powers couldn't house these and take care of the prisoners.

And so the British government asked the Americans, "Can you take these prisoners?"

So you have 200,000-plus Afrika Korps soldiers sitting in North Africa.

Conveniently enough, at that time, the US Military was bringing war supplies into North Africa for the invasion into Sicily and up Italy.

Cargo ships were dropping off supplies in North Africa, but they were going back to the United States empty.

So primarily Liberty-class cargo ships, which were for used to bring the war supplies to North Africa, then on the return trip to the United States, started bringing the Afrika Korps soldiers back to the United States.

- We had no beds on the ship.

- No beds.

- No beds.

No.

- [Michael] How fast was it?

- Every one of us got a blanket and a- - The swim vest.

- The swim vest.

(speaking in German) - [Michael] Life jacket.

- Life jacket.

- Life jacket.

- [Michael] But what did the other POW, the other (speaking in German) talk about in the boat?

Was there panic?

Was there anger?

- No.

Panic, no.

But we were very afraid and angry.

- What is the English expression for (speaking in German)?

They looked forward.

- [Michael] Optimistic.

- Yeah, optimistic.

(somber music) - A really important part of the story of Minnesota's prisoners, and it's true nationwide, was a large result of the fact that the United States was adhering to the Geneva Convention of 1929.

So essentially, every aspect of their welfare was to be taken care of.

They were provided with reading materials, medical care, dental care.

And that word did get back to the battlefront.

Germans were well aware.

They were more apt to surrender to Americans.

Not only would they be more apt to surrender to Americans, but they would just be simply more apt to surrender, knowing that they'd be well treated.

So all of this information was part of the plan, and as it played out throughout the course of the war, it proved to be largely successful on that level.

- When given the opportunity to treat folks one way or the other, which road are you gonna take?

Right?

Are you gonna take the high road?

And not everybody was excited to have the enemy right outside of town.

But by and large, across this country, prisoners were treated according to the Geneva Convention.

And what that says is that they have to have food of the same quality and quantity as their American counterparts.

They had to have housing that mimicked what the American personnel had.

And I don't know if it was that way in every camp, but I know in camps in Minnesota, that Geneva Convention was adhered to pretty strictly.

- For years, for centuries, what do you do with prisoners?

We've had them in every war.

Most of the time they were treated very poorly.

And in the 1800s, they began to create some movements toward rules of war or rules of treatment of prisoners in war, but really never took hold until World War II.

And so in World War II, the United States decided, "All right, if we're in this war, we're gonna play it by the book."

- What would it have been like if we had mistreated the prisoners and not adhered to the Geneva Convention?

We don't know how our prisoners would've been treated.

We don't know how many more American soldiers might have been killed on the battle front because the Germans didn't wanna become a prisoner of the Americans and would've shot, let's say, another American soldier or something like that.

So we don't know.

But what we do know is that it did help facilitate some of those things that we were after With the Geneva Convention.

The prisoners would've been processed, they would've been interviewed, they would've had medical examinations, and then they would've arrived on the East Coast, primarily.

And then from there, they would've been transported by train to various locations.

- They would be taken to camps then where they could be given different uniforms.

The ones that they fought in would be taken and put aside for them, and be given World War I uniforms that had a P and a W painted on their pants and their shirt.

- [Narrator] By doing work like this in the shoe shop, captives are able to buy cigarettes and other luxuries.

War prisoners received the same rations as American soldiers.

- So these larger, what we call base camps, which were year-round facilities to house thousands and thousands of prisoners, were then established.

It became pretty much an official objective to have the prisoners work.

Above all, agricultural use was number one use of the prisoners.

- [Jerry Yocum] They worked our fields.

They helped plant our food crops.

They helped to harvest them.

And unwittingly then, what they were doing is allowing us to grow food to not only feed the local population, but feed our soldiers and the Allies.

- Minnesota started to experience some labor shortages.

By the fall of 1943, the University of Minnesota Ag Extension officer Paul Miller organized farm help for the entire state of Minnesota, realizing that there was gonna be some serious needs for farm labor.

(reflective music) (Uwe speaking in German) (Uwe continues speaking in German) (interviewer speaking in German) (Uwe speaking in German) (reflective music) - So this is the actual location where the prisoners arrived in September 1943?

- Yeah.

Yeah, right here.

In fact, these tracks have been restored to the exact location where the mainline track was in 1943.

- The Italians were only here at the very beginning of the Minnesota POW experience and then at the very end, after the war had ended.

And in Olivia, they worked for a seed company and also would do other incidental farm work that was needed.

And then in Princeton they worked for Odin Odegard.

Had a large potato farm operation there.

- This was a big business.

They kept meticulous records as was necessary at the time.

- It's nice 'cause you have some of the stuff from the war era, which shows- - Yeah.

Yeah.

This was a event of necessity because it was fall harvest time in September and potatoes were coming in and onions were coming in.

And this was, at the time, a very manual process.

It had not been deeply automated.

So they needed help.

Many of the young men who would have helped had been in the National Guard Unit in Princeton that got called up, you know, years earlier.

So they were gone.

They could not help with this.

And this was an important war effort also to feed domestically and to provide some food for the overseas troops, too.

At that time also, there had been young men from Princeton who went off to war, who had died.

And there were lots of reasons not to be hospitable or even decent to prisoners of war from the enemy.

Yet this guy, O.J.

Odegard, set the tone with his group of Italian prisoners of war by being more than decent.

He was certainly not brutal.

He was not indifferent.

He was respectful of these people.

He set up a canteen where the Italians had their tent camp on the bog, and they could buy beer and cigarettes from the canteen.

They were paid $3 a day, which was the going rate for field help.

They worked 10 hours a day, as the local people did, who were working also.

(opera singer singing in German) - Everyone who heard the Italian prisoners passing by commented on their singing.

They loved to sing.

They were singing all day while they worked.

They were singing on the flatbed trucks that brought them into town for either warehouse work, or on the weekends, they were taken to the local movie theater.

- They were just a jolly bunch.

That's mainly what I remember, seeing them riding in the truck when they went to and from the bog area.

And I suppose they were happy that they were out of the war area and up here in a nice pleasant deal.

So they were getting the best of both worlds out of that.

(opera singer singing in German) (uplifting orchestral music) - Folks in these parts had not seen a lot of Mediterranean men before.

It's kind of the Nordic stock.

We've got a lot of Germans and lots of Norwegians and Swedes, of course.

And one of the comments that was made as they arrived at this building, the Princeton Great Northern Railway Depot, was, why would they send these men all the way to Princeton?

Because people didn't travel to Europe, or vice versa, with any frequency at all in the 1940s.

So just a backdrop.

And people talk about this story.

If you approach people who are of a certain age, and today, that's pushing 90, they have a vivid recollection, if they had any contact with the Italian prisoners, of who these people were.

So eight weeks with their boots on the ground here, and 80 years later, people are still talking about it.

- I'm from Olivia, Minnesota, originally, and Olivia was one of the first locations for the prisoners, the Italians, in 1943.

So when I grew up in Olivia, people would talk about the prisoners.

Farmers talked about it.

It was something you heard about.

It wasn't a lot.

But if you're there in a small town and you paid attention to some of those stories, you would be aware of it.

(somber music) So initially, part of the concern was sabotage.

As time went along, though, it was realized that sabotage was not a major concern.

So the addition of the need for the labor to establish this branch camp system was because of the labor, but it was also because of the fact that it became clear that sabotage was not gonna be a real concern.

So as Minnesota then moved into 1944, the labor needs became very severe.

Multiple applications were put in for camps in Minnesota, primarily for the canning season.

Some of the canning operations were so dependent on prisoner labor during the war starting in 1944 that essentially 100% of the entire canning operation of those particular businesses were dependent on prisoner labor.

(somber music) - The German POWs that were here came from Rommel's Afrika Korps.

And they were here because we needed a lot of help in Owatonna and Steele County, because we had the canning company, which takes a lot of hand labor, and our local men were serving in the Army.

So this was a place where we needed lots of help.

Not only the canning company, but on farms and the milk production plant we have here in town.

And we were not close to an easy escape.

We were more than 150 miles from a border.

And that was part of the requirements.

And we had a place that was vacant, that was large enough to serve quite a few men.

It was the Thomas Cashman farm, which is north of Owatonna.

And it was right on Highway 65 at the time.

But Thomas Cashman was deceased.

His son was no longer on the farm.

It was vacant.

And so by some arrangement, Mrs. Cashman allowed them to use the farm.

Howard Hong made sure they had good accommodations according to the Geneva Convention.

So besides their work hours, he made sure they had activities to keep them occupied because you didn't want them fomenting escape or whatever.

- So Howard Hong was a St. Olaf College professor.

He was in the audience early in the war at a talk at St. Olaf College, and the YMCA was coming around talking about their work with the war prisoners.

And Howard Hong went up to the presenter after the presentation and said, "I'm interested in helping out."

He came from an educational background, and he understood the importance of education in particular for the prisoners and was providing and facilitating a lot of the things that could be done for the prisoners at that time.

The University of Minnesota, for example, had correspondence courses set up for some of the prisoners while they were in the camps.

All of these different types of things.

Religious services were provided.

They built chapels within the camps, including in Minnesota.

There were chapels built within some of the barracks.

When we talk about the overall experience of the prisoner of war camps and the significance of the camps, instead of them just being laborers, we were treating them as individuals the best we could, people the best we could, that we wanted to elevate them as best we could.

- As you look at the prisoners that came here, you show up and what you know is the German military way of doing things.

You've been given a message for quite some time.

You know, by the time these guys got here, some of them have maybe been fighting since '37 in Spain, '39 with Poland.

And then you get to this country and you see, "Well, here, I have enough to eat.

Here, there's a guy from Minnesota, Howard Hong, bringing me art supplies and woodworking supplies, and I'm being treated as a human being."

You might start to question which side of the story you want to be on.

- The camp commanders recognized if you have these prisoners working, that's important.

But that's 8 to 10 hours maybe in a day.

They also need time where they can be involved in athletic things, music, art, drama.

And they need a facility for this, a place where they can do this.

They needed things to work with.

And one of the prisoners who said the best thing that happened to him in the war was that it made him aware that he could be rehabilitated, or he could gain his humanity back.

- [Narrator] These signal car pictures show a fully equipped recreation room provided for the captives, who even have their own band.

America scrupulously observes the principles of humanity in her treatment of war prisoners.

- We had a wonderful life.

We stayed on the barracks, and we could play chess and we could do- - We could play sports.

- Sports.

And we could read and- - Singing.

- [Michael] And could you buy a newspaper?

- Yeah.

Yes.

Yes, of course.

- Tickets.

- [Theo] Newspapers.

(Alfred speaking in German) - No.

- [Theo] No, no, no, no.

(speaking in German) - No.

American newspaper.

- Magazines?

- We had an American newspaper in German language.

(speaking in German) And we had the New York Times.

(reflective music) - So as these prisoners were brought into these small communities, the natural question is, well, what's the reaction?

To be honest, the reaction, generally speaking, was enthusiasm, generally.

There was a number of things being taken care of for the prisoners.

Their barracks and all of the effort that was going in to house them.

But then people would push back.

They'd go, "Well, hold it now.

They're killing our service members.

They're killing our sons.

Why are we..." So there was definitely pushback in several Minnesota communities.

Then in the camps that were more year round, let's say, for example, Owatonna or New Ulm, where you had a strong German presence, well, there you had the ability for the prisoners to establish longer relationships with the people they were working with.

So that assuaged, to a large extent, the ill will feeling towards the prisoners.

It was not uncommon, for example, in New Ulm with, at that time, a lot of people were still speaking German.

Sometimes, they knew people in common back in Germany.

They were trying to make contact with people that knew people, that sort of thing.

(uplifting music) - We're on the south side of what is now Flandrau State Park.

And behind me are eight barracks that were here when the POWs were here.

They had a fence around here with lights on it, and they had 12 US Army personnel were their guards.

You can put about 160 people in here, comfortably.

They had the mess hall, they had latrines, they had the drain field, they had a recreation hall, they had administrative buildings.

Everything was already here.

So it was just kind of a turnkey operation.

Where the state park turned it over to the US Army 'cause the US Army ran the prisons here.

So that's how this one came about to be utilized, was 'cause it was here.

It was being used as a group center, much as it is today.

While they were here in the warm seasons, they worked for farmers, to either get their crop in or to get it out.

And then they worked over at a couple vegetable processing plants in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, handling the corn and peas that were harvested from the farms.

In the wintertime, they were given a little more indoor activities.

So working inside the brick and tile plants in Springfield, the Ochs Brick & Tile, and the New Ulm brick and tile plant.

- In 1944, I was 16.

Saturdays, we would bring a lot of the bread and donuts and other bakery goods out here for the prisoners of war.

And because I spoke German, they asked me to bring it to them.

And, of course, I got to visit with some of them for 15, 20 minutes, whatever it took to unload.

I never really got to know them personally, but I enjoyed visiting with them.

They would ask me questions about what I was doing, you know, and school, and so on.

For me, it was unique in that I could find some people from Germany to speak with.

(gentle soothing music) - My dad served as a guard in the POW camp at Flandrau.

They let people in on Friday and Saturday nights to listen to music or whatever.

Most of the girls came down there.

That's how my dad met my mom.

- I heard stories about people who would go out to the camp in the evening and give a signal.

And I think the signal was probably beeping the horn.

And POWs would come out of the camp and get in the car, and people would take them out for the evening and bring them back.

And, of course, my source for that is that in the newspaper, there was an article about a couple that had picked a couple of the POWs up and didn't get them back in time and got caught, and they were taken to court the next day.

When you work as a research librarian, and specifically at the Brown County Historical Society, we have one of the largest family archives in the state.

So I have over 5,500 family files.

People come in and ask me questions, and one of the most unique ones probably was a woman that came in one day.

She was traveling through New Ulm.

And she came into my office, and she says, "I want to ask you if you have a list of all the POWs that were housed out at the POW camp during World War II."

And I said, "No, I don't have a complete list."

And she said, "Well, the reason I'm asking is because my mother told me that my father was one of the POWs," and she was searching for her father.

- Some POWs got close to some of their coworkers, at the canning company, particularly.

And this is from Karl Teschner, who became close to Irma Schuldt.

And he says, "My dearest Irma, always I'm thinking of you, and often I dream I help you to label the cans.

I was very glad about your letter in German.

You didn't make too many mistakes, and I could read it well.

I'm very glad to know that you can write German better than I can in English.

I very often think back at the many jolly hours which we spent together.

I miss you very much, and I hope to see you before long.

- In the cannery experience, these prisoners were in the canneries, primarily.

But in these intermittent periods where they were working with farmers, sometimes there was no guard.

Often the farmer was expected to feed them.

So they just were fed at the family table.

- One of the ladies that worked for me at the museum, Muriel Juski, told me that she had them on her farm.

And the process was that her husband would have to go out to the camp and fill out paperwork and then was allowed to take however many he was allowed to have on their farm.

It was quite a few if it was threshing time.

And she said they would come with a paper bag with sandwiches in it.

And she said, "We would look at that," and being farmers, they knew that nobody could do a good day's work on simply sandwiches.

And so they would feed that to the dogs.

And then they would bring them all into the house, and they would feed them like they would feed any threshing crew.

And this story I have heard from over and over from different people that had them on the farms.

That they fed them in the house, around the family table, and, of course, they could converse with them in German, and then took them back out to the fields to work.

And also that many of these families kept in touch with them after they left.

They wrote to them for years.

- We had Germans just north of the house here.

You know, 100 yards.

My father and mother both said that young women and young people from the town would come out, bring them sandwiches, bring them beer, and converse in depth in German, their native language.

So a lot of the people here were not that far removed from Germany.

- The number one ethnic group of Minnesota is German.

So no matter which community you were in, essentially every other town where the prisoners were located was also inhabited by people with German ancestry, just by default of the fact that we were a state that had a large influx of Germans between 1816 and 1910.

And so these second-generation families are now interacting with these prisoners.

- I was very surprised by the relationships that they formed with the community members.

Even though they weren't necessarily supposed to form those relationships, they did.

And they met, like, around here the people who spoke German.

They'd communicate back and forth and form these long-lasting relationships.

And that was very surprising to me.

(guns firing) - When you look at it in retrospect, knowing what was occurring in Germany and Europe at that time, the juxtaposition of that is startling.

Here they are drinking a beer at a farmer's table in Southern Minnesota during the Second World War.

- Many of these POWs came and were just average German guys.

Lots of these prisoners were of the three branches, and largely Army and Air Force.

Not all German POWs or soldiers, or Germans in general, were members of the Nazi Party.

And so very few of what you would call hardcore Nazi members.

Like, SS members of the Waffen-SS, like, of the SS that served with the military in their own special army, would not be the ones in the Southern Minnesota camps.

- We needed help.

And my dad went down on the wall, he picked up as many as he could get in the car, which was about five, and then brought them back north of Gibbon, where my grandfather's farm was.

My uncle, Henry, he asked a lot of questions.

He said, "Did you ever shoot at the Allied troops?"

And the guy said, "No."

He said he was drafted.

And if you didn't want to be drafted, they shot you.

I remember this guy went on to say that he was no soldier, he was a teacher.

He said he got drafted, and they put him in a tank.

And he said the first thing he did: He drove to the front lines and surrendered.

- [Interviewer] What are your memories of the landscapes?

- The best memory of landscape was of Whitewater Camp because there was a very big state park, and it was a contrast to the scene I had in mind in Europe, the destroyed cities.

And it was summertime.

Most of the weather was very good.

And it was a state park, as I said.

There was a big rock there, and it was very nice.

And it was, to me, to my inner self, it was a kind of recreation.

- [Interviewer] Did it feed your soul?

- I think so.

(birds chirping) (hopeful music) - In Northern Minnesota, in early 1944, there were three logging camps established: Bena, Remer, and Deer River.

And so those camps were also established to work in the logging industry in the state.

Then as the summer progressed, the camp system changed.

The base camp that was supplying the prisoners for the logging camps then was transferred to Algona.

(gentle piano music) There was a large base camp constructed because the Army could foresee the need for more prisoners being needed in the Midwest for farming.

And then from that point forward, all of the operations in Minnesota operated from the base camp in Algona, Iowa.

- The government wanted towns of around 5,000 people.

They wanted them to be fairly isolated communities where they put their base camps.

And in this general area, Algona kind of fit that.

I think what sets us apart or what makes us unique is that we had this camp here.

And so there was a daily reminder to everyone in our community that this war is going on, that we have up to 5,000 German prisoners living outside of town.

And then what also makes that unique is those German prisoners left here and left behind a part of them.

The connection between Iowa and Minnesota for us is naturally that we were a base camp.

And then from Algona, we would ship them by truck, typically, whether it be Deer River or Bird Island or Olivia or New Ulm.

If there were disciplinary actions that would take place, sometimes those soldiers were brought back from Minnesota to Camp Algona.

So I think Minnesota people would love this.

The punishment (laughs) for messing up in Minnesota is you have to go back to Algona, right?

And so I wouldn't blame them.

You know, I imagine being somebody who's a prisoner of war, and you're being detained in Northern Minnesota, in beautiful country up there, and you screw up.

You're back here in Algona.

So that was a punishment.

- After the war with the Russian blockade, everything was powder.

Egg powder, milk powder, potato powder.

- One of my first connections with a former POW was Alfred Mueller.

I had a chance to interview him in his home.

Alfred was here.

He broke his leg jumping into a bomb crater in North Africa, was captured.

One of the things that I thought was really interesting is after the war, he and his wife moved to the Garner area, Garner, Iowa.

You had to have, at that time, if you were from a belligerent country, Italy, Germany, you had to have an American family sponsor you.

I think, basically, to make sure you had a place to stay, you're gonna get a job, you're not gonna cause problems.

Alfred and his wife moved back, worked in Garner for I think about three years, then moved up to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, and then eventually down to Faribault, Minnesota.

And that's when I met them.

And it occurred to me that you don't move to Minnesota from your home country unless you felt like what you saw while you were here as a prisoner of war was better than what you had at home.

And that really hits me when I think of, so not only I was treated well, but I saw things and I talked to people, and my future's better if I move there.

And so, you know, the fact that he ended up in Minnesota wasn't an accident.

He moved there on purpose.

he came here on purpose because of what he saw as a prisoner of war.

(gentle music) Well, it's a small copy of the nativity scene, but I thought he brought some back as gifts, or maybe that- - I think he did.

I think he did.

- When we were trying to get started, like most small museums, you're living a month-to-month existence.

We reached out to Alfred about what we were doing.

Alfred believed and Edith believed in what we were doing.

The first donation that he gave us was a $1,500 check.

And it's a story that I like to bring up to people that one of the early donations given to us was from a former prisoner of war.

So not only did he move back to this country, not only did he move back to this region, but to keep the story alive, he was willing to put money towards that project.

And I think that speaks volumes of how he was treated.

We wanna make sure we preserve the story of Camp Algona.

As far as this museum is concerned, it's such a unique part of the story of World War II.

Because if you quit talking about it, you quit telling the story, sooner or later, people forget that something really special happened here and in Minnesota.

And that is that, you know, the enemy amongst us, how are you gonna treat those people?

And the people of Minnesota, the people of Iowa treated these people humanely.

And that story I think has to be preserved.

(reflective music) - When I was working for the Historical Society, I came across newspaper accounts of prisoners of war being kept here in Moorhead.

And that really intrigued me.

The idea of Nazi prisoners coming here to the Midwest, Upper Midwest, in small-town Moorhead, Minnesota, and working in fields for local farmers, it seemed, like, so fantastical.

It was a two-acre compound that they had out there.

There was plans to build a guardhouse, but it wasn't needed.

The prisoners actually built the fence themselves.

It was an eight-foot wire fence.

- The first group that came was about 40 men, and they came and there was nowhere for them to stay yet.

So they stayed in tents on the Horn farm the first few nights, and they had to build the barrack.

(gentle upbeat music) - There was a lot of curiosity about these prisoners.

Were these enemies coming into the community?

People were concerned when they first got here.

People would drive by the camp and wanna see them out as a curiosity.

Apparently, according to the Fargo Forum, 500 cars drove by on one Sunday, shortly after they arrived.

They ended up closing off the street because there were just too many cars going by, and they shouldn't be in the public gaze.

That went against the prisoner rights that they had.

So they were on the Hank Peterson and Paul Horn truck farms, but they would also go out to other farmers who needed some additional labor.

- Prisoners preferred to work for Hank.

He was a little lax with the rules.

And there's one famous episode where he took a couple of the prisoners into a Downtown Moorhead bar and bought them a couple of beers.

And that really raised heckles on people around here.

- There was a little bit of rule bending around here.

We have one account of two young women, they both worked at St. Ansgar Hospital, which was a hospital very near the POW camp and just outside of Moorhead.

And they worked there during the day with the nuns.

They had one to four o'clock off in the afternoon.

So during that time, they could kind of go do whatever they wanted to do.

And there wasn't a lot to do, so they liked to go to the prisoner of war camp.

They would meet behind barns and kind of on edges of fields.

And this is where they were meeting two of the German soldiers when the wife of the next-door neighbor saw them.

- They were hiding behind a haystack.

They were just talking.

There wasn't anything too crazy going on.

But they did arrest the two nurses for a short period, bring them to the jail, keep them there.

And then there was some concern about what would happen to these girls for fraternizing with enemy soldiers.

But they ended up being kind of scared and then released.

So many of them were young.

Florence Drury, the bookkeeper at the Hank Peterson farm, described some of them as kids.

She described some of them as babies, and they took offense to that.

But 16.

Some of them were 16 and 18.

So he kind of took them under his wing.

- My dad, he treated these POWs like his own.

He took them places.

He had them over to our house for a meal.

I remember one incident when they were painting a barn at the farm.

They were painting it white.

And I had my black Lab with me, and they put a stripe down my black Lab's back.

They thought it was so funny 'cause he looked like a skunk.

Well, I didn't think it was so funny.

I was only eight years old.

He took them in the truck with him very often, and they cared a lot for him.

We have a lot of letters from the POWs addressed to this one esteemed Mr. Peterson.

I wanted to write you from Germany.

I truly believe that you would still know me.

I worked for you in work detail as a prisoner of war for a long time.

We did have a beautiful time in America and on your farm.

Now, Mr. Peterson, I have a request.

I have a check with a value of $400.

Might you possibly send me used clothes for that?

It doesn't matter what kind because I have only the uniform, and my wife and child also have very little.

Obviously, when they went back to Germany, they did not have very much.

They didn't have anything.

They wanted to come back to the United States and work for him.

(gentle upbeat music) (wind blowing) - There are a lot of indicators in letters written by guards or prisoners that there was a belief by the prisoners that leaving the camp, the woods were full of wolves, the woods were full of bears.

Many of these Germans had grown up hearing about the American West.

I think guards recognized fairly early that if they would perpetuate that story, that would act as another deterrent from these prisoners running away.

- [Dean] Prisoners did escape the compounds on what would probably be considered a fairly regular basis.

All defenses were easy to get out of.

In Deer River, for example, there was a long time where there wasn't even a fence.

So the prisoners could just walk away.

- Three of them escaped in August of 1945.

And if you're a Steele County resident, you know the important happening in the third week of August is always the Steele County Fair.

And so somehow they got out, and they were located later at the Steele County Fair having a good time.

(upbeat music) - It is true that there was one fairly dramatic escape, or one that was a little bit more dramatic in Minnesota, and that was the escape of two prisoners out of the Bena camp.

They kept it quiet.

I interviewed one of the prisoners that was there at the time, and he said none of the other prisoners knew about their plan.

The prisoners were allowed to fabricate these small little boats on Lake Winnibigoshish, which is where the Bena camp was located, and they hid one of the boats.

They planned then.

They saved up provisions.

They saved up some bacon, they saved up some bread.

And then their plan was to get on the boat, get on the Mississippi, which flows near where the camp was located, and get down to the Gulf of Mexico and get back to some neutral country.

The FBI was notified.

Local sheriff's authorities were stopping cars around Northern Minnesota.

After three days, they were finally apprehended.

It caused a bit of an alarm because it lasted longer than the normal situation.

(somber music) (somber music continues) The prisoners that arrived after 1944 was a dramatic change of the makeup of the prisoners that were captured from Rommel's Afrika Korps.

Most of them still felt that Germany could win the war.

They had large German nationalistic pride.

So we had these Afrika Korps soldiers.

But then the prisoners that came in after D-Day, they arrive in these camps at the same camps where the Afrika Korps soldiers are located.

And friction emerged.

So bad in some parts of the United States, other prisoners were killed.

(Uwe speaking in German) (Uwe continues speaking in German) (Uwe continues speaking in German) (Uwe continues speaking in German) - At that time, some of the prisoners who stand around, I heard the first time the word "traitor."

(speaking in German) The first time I heard it.

They took me out of the camp to the commander, and they told me, the Americans told me, that I was (speaking in German).

- [Interviewer] Threatened.

- Threatened.

That I was threatened.

If he comes back, they are going to kill him.

(tense music) - The Howard Lake, Minnesota camp is unique because it was populated all with prisoners that were being threatened at the main base camp.

So the camp commander in Algona, he took all of the prisoners that were being harassed and in fear of potentially being killed and sent them on the first detachment to Howard Lake.

- These POWs were able to pass notes to some of the officers and just say, "We need to get out of here for our safety."

And so that's why a lot of them were then shipped up to here.

So we're in the bottom corner of the fair.

From there, you can see the grandstand behind me.

This whole section was fenced off, from the ticket office to the buildings.

And the grandstand is where the mess hall was.

They were able to separate the disillusioned away from, honestly, the more fanatical types and get them up here to be in a much safer space.

(Kurt speaking in German) (Kurt continues speaking in German) (Kurt continues speaking in German) (gun firing) - As the war ended and some of the veterans started coming back, and with the D-Day invasion and with America's more heavy involvement of the war at that time, a lot more Americans were being killed.

So the feeling changed.

Also at that point in time, the full extent of the Nazi Germany atrocities became well known.

And so all of that together was a little bit more of an uncomfortable situation for dealing with the prisoners.

(somber music) - The Italians, when their country surrendered, were put in a unique circumstance because their government was technically an ally now of the United States.

And they had the option of being a part of the Allied Army, or they had the option of staying in the United States.

Well, you couldn't simply release them into our population because they had been a prisoner of war.

And there were some special camps that they were brought to in places where there were not other prisoners.

That was good because the Italians and the German soldiers did not like each other.

They didn't respect each other.

- Then as the war ended, we had victory in Japan, the war was ending, the prisoners then were slowly being repatriated back to Europe from the United States.

They were all required to be returned back, which the United States did.

But it's often misunderstood that a lot of them stayed.

They did not stay, but a lot of them did come back and become US citizens after the war.

So in effect what we were doing in large part with this, our system in adhering to the Geneva Convention, in particular, here in Minnesota, those prisoners took some of those pieces of that knowledge, that education, that experience back to Europe.

Hitler had been in power since the early '30s.

And so they knew nothing else until they landed here and saw the role of democracy and the ability to have some freedom with their education.

And so they brought that back into their education.

They brought that back into their professions, their careers, but it was all with the flavor of a democracy.

- [Orator] We need to address that- - And they knew by sending them to the Midwest, where you had a large German population, that we could communicate with them and form bonds with them and teach them that the United States was maybe not what they thought that it was and were being told, you know, was the reason why they were at war with us.

It was something far deeper than that, and I think many of them learned that.

- If there's a redeeming value in the war and redeeming value of the prisoners, that may be it.

That they were able to find something that not only helped feed us, but it helped redeem them, give them some of their self-worth back.

(calming ambient music) - Nothing speaks better to having people respect you if you treat them well.

And they were gonna go home eventually, when the war ended, and they did.

And when they went back, they told their families, their friends, their relatives that, you know, while we were in these camps, you know, we were well cared for.

We weren't mistreated.

So that's important that we as Americans remember that.

- Yeah, so this is an interesting photo.

So this was the cake they baked for Odegard at the end of their stay in Princeton, right?

And they have the, looks like the initials O.K.

on the cake, which apparently is the nickname they gave to O.J.

- O.J.

A super friendly gesture.

I don't think you'll find any Allied downed flyers in stalags that were baking cakes shortly before their release.

This was extraordinary.

- Yeah, it's a great photo.

- We had a guest at the museum five or six years ago.

Her name was Marlene.

And she was eight years old at the time that the Italian prisoners came.

I can recall this story almost word for word.

She said, "I remember we all stood back as the guards got off of the train and then ushered the Italian prisoners down, and we didn't know what to expect."

Her words.

"We didn't know what to expect because we had been told these people are monsters.

They're vicious, they're violent.

And about that time, a young girl," Marlene said, three or four years old near her, "broke loose from her mother's grasp, ran across to one of the Italian prisoners, and embraced his leg, gave him a hug."

He lifted her up and there was a gasp in the crowd because they didn't know, what is he gonna do?

Is he gonna dash her to the stone platform below?

And then he started to weep.

(calming ambient music) We all learned a valuable lesson that day, that these were just regular people.

That was her first-person recollection, and I have recounted it very close to word for word.

I think the story of the prisoners of war in Minnesota reaffirms some basic truths about decency, respect, fundamental humanity of all of us.

And that's part of the enduring legacy, I think.

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