Since I could read I have been interested in WW2 and all that it encompasses. After a while, you pretty much have read about all of the major battles, campaigns and skirmishes. For the last several years I have been trying to read biographies or other books about tiny slices of WW2 that are of interest.
Stalag Wisconsin is one of those books and it is amazing. Before I get into the book review, a quick aside.
I found out about this book through a blog comment section one day (can’t remember where) and knew I wanted to read about this previously unknown (to me) piece of WW2 history. It is especially of interest since I have lived in Wisconsin for the last 30 years, and have had relatives in Wisconsin all my life and know the state well. Problem is, this book is out of print and the cheapest I could find online had a steep price tag of $140. I found a copy at the library of all places, and I got myself a library card, the first such card I have had since college, 33 years ago. The process was pretty easy and heck, I’m paying for all of it anyways with my tax dollars so I was happy at this find. I was sort of taken aback when I went into the local branch and there were a bunch of people websurfing but when you haven’t been in a library for a while, I guess things change. Back to the book.
Stalag Wisconsin is an extremely well researched book, made up of Army records and hundreds of interviews with locals. It explains in great detail a system of camps set up in Wisconsin to utilize labor of German POWs since the state had a bigtime shortage of workers due to the war. The first wave of prisoners arrived in 1944 and was made up of a lot of the captured Afrika Korps, and later in 1944 and into 1945 most were brought over from surrenders in the European campaigns.
Almost all of the work the POWs did was agriculturally related. With this I was faced with some terms I wasn’t familiar with, remembering that ag production and techniques were very different some 80 years ago. I was surprised as I live on a hobby farm and interact with most of the local career farmers, so this was sort of a double learning experience. I had no idea that there were German POWs (along with some Japanese, the most famous being Kazuo Sakamaki being imprisoned at Camp McCoy) in Wisconsin, and I didn’t know what agricultural role Wisconsin played.
The beginning part of the book describes generally the situation in Wisconsin and how the camp system was run. After that section, each camp is described (alphabetically) and the activities of the POWs and their interactions with the locals at the farms and canneries or fields were described. At the end of each of these chapters is a section called “recollections” that has interviews with locals who saw or otherwise knew something about the POWs.
The first agricultural term I wasn’t familiar with was “vinery” or “pea viner”. This is a large machine that shelled peas, and was centrally located to many pea fields, sort of like how a grain elevator is located today. Once I figured out what a viner was, everything made a lot more sense. I also had no idea that Wisconsin produced so many peas, and found out that to this day Wisconsin is the third largest state in pea production. The mechanically inclined Germans were typically assigned to the viners, as these were relatively large and complicated machines, while others did manual field labor and/or worked in the canneries. I also had to remember that commercial refrigeration wasn’t really a “thing” until later in the 40s and into the 50s, so canned vegetables were much more common. The military took a certain percentage of the pea pack for the season, along with other crops. The POWs were paid a small amount by the farmers and canneries, and the military/treasury took a portion of that, and gave the POWs a smaller portion in script, only to be used at the camp px.
German POWs were used in ’44 and ’45 to help harvest peas, sugar beets, cranberries, hay, potatoes, and other crops that Wisconsin grew.
Interaction with the public was discouraged, but inevitable as curious onlookers talked to the POWs across the fences or in the canneries and other places. There were very few stories about romances. With a large German population, some relatives were able to visit at the camps. In general, it is likely that the POWs had a better life in these camps and working in the fields and canneries than their family members and friends back home. Escapes were not common nor was violence. A few things happened of course, but with that many people and camps, the numbers were very small. Most of the time the Germans could simply walk away if they really wanted but as one noted “there is a lot of water between here and Germany”.
Some communities were more accepting of the POWs than others and of course there was some resentment especially from those who had lost family in the War. For the vast majority however, the Germans were a welcome addition to the labor pool, and most people supplemented their food rations, or gave them cigarettes for helping on their farms. There are many instances of lifelong friendships being struck up and of Americans sending care packages to the German POWs after their liberation and then later the POWs coming back to visit, or Wisconsinites going to Germany to visit them.
The whole book is completely fascinating and was a totally refreshing piece of history to me. Highly recommended if you can find it at your local library.
A slightly different and related story here in Colorado. Chinese in this country, from the 1840’s to 1943 were literally not considered human beings under American law. There were Chinese who came anyway, frequently working in the mines in here in Colorado, and the closest thing we had to a Chinatown was the area called “Hop Alley” in lower Denver near the South Platte River. It was about where the baseball stadium for the Colorado Rockies is now.
On October 31, 1880 the KKK decided it was going to burn down Hop Alley and kill any Chinese they could catch. Net result, soon except for a few Chinese in the mountains, there were not many Chinese here, and with the exception of a few farmers not many Japanese.
After December 7, 1941 the government declared all Japanese here, citizens or not, to be the enemy and ordered them interned. Governor Carr here in Colorado was the only governor who welcomed Japanese. An internment camp, Camp Amache, was established near the town of Grenada in the Southeast corner of the state. At its peak it had I think 7-8,000 internees. Their primary industry was agricultural; growing food, not particularly for the market but for themselves and for other internment camps.
Towards the end of the war they started releasing them, but they were in an anomalous position. Legally, they were considered people, many were citizens born here. But they had lost everything when interned. And Americans did not think well of Japanese due to the war.
When the war ended, the camp was closed. Many Japanese/Japanese-Americans ended up in the Denver metro area. There were a few restaurants and stores, and many went back to their normal occupations and their kids became as upwardly mobile as a lot of Asians are when they come here.
Chinese did not start coming back to Colorado in any numbers until the early 1960’s. My family moved to Denver in 1960 and there were a lot more Japanese kids than Chinese around me.
I mentioned restaurants and stores. The Japanese established a shopping area, in lower downtown. The anchor store was the first Asian supermarket I knew of in Colorado, the Grenada Fish Market, named after the town that the internment camp was next to. Used to love that place.
Later when I was in college I was involved in the Asian-American Educational Opportunity Program as a tutor and counselor. There were about twice as many Japanese involved as Chinese.
Subotai Bahadur
.
I worked in South America with a German national who had, courtesy of his mining engineer father, spent nearly all his life in South America. He told me that his uncle spent WW2 in a foreign alien camp in the US- would foreign aliens have been mixed in with POWs?. His uncle told him that it was fairly pleasant living in a foreign alien camp in the US. Definitely not like American POWs experienced in Japanese camps.
Back in the ’70’s, I worked on a farm in the southern Colorado mountains with a potato cellar that German POW’s had partially built when they weren’t otherwise employed working on the farm. This was attested to by my employer who had been working on that farm during WWII. There, the POW’s had been “farmed” out and lived on the farms or near by. Most were remembered fondly and some maintained connections after the war.
Later, in the Texas Panhandle, I often drove past a concrete tower that I eventually learned was a “guard” tower for a POW camp for Italian POW’s, also used on area farms. I say “guard” because people there at the time said that there wasn’t much worry that the inmates would escape with nearly 1,000 miles to the nearest border. A few even returned and took up citizenship. There was a chapel built by the POW’s with a small cemetery although I believe the remains were repatriated.
The worst punishment was denial of outside work privileges. Voluntary farm work was allowable under the Geneva Convention.
Subotai Bahadur
August 17, 2024 at 9:37 pm
….Chinese in this country, from the 1840’s to 1943 were literally not considered human beings under American law.
In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) the Supreme Court ruled that “a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China”, automatically became a U.S. citizen at birth.
Chinese immigrant Hong Yen Chang was admitted to the New York state bar in 1887.
After December 7, 1941 the government declared all Japanese here, citizens or not, to be the enemy and ordered them interned.
After December 7, 1941, the US government interned about 5,000 Japanese-Americans who were known security risks (associates of Japanese diplomatic staff, explicit apologists for the Japanese government, young men who had done military training while studying in Japan).
Several month later, corrupt local officials in Pacific coast states incited an “anti-Japanese” panic, spreading wild claims of sabotage and spying. They used this panic to create a demand for wholesale internment of Japanese-Americans in those states, allegedly in danger of Japanese attack. The motive was to seize the property of Japanese-Americans on various pretexts while they were unable to defend it. 120,000 Japanese-Americans from parts of Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona were interned.
However, Japanese-Americans living in other parts of the US were not interned, including 150,000 living in Hawaii.
The treatment of Chinese- and Japanese-Americans was shameful, and should be acknowledged. (I have personally spent many hours refuting attempts to justify the mass internment of Japanese-Americans.) It should not be exaggerated.
@Gringo – the book did not mention any mixing of foreign aliens with the POWs.
Also from Wisconsin and know the author/topic under discussion. For another odd take on things…(alas, also out of print and hard to find)…. https://www.amazon.ca/POW-Baseball-World-War-II/dp/0786411864
Baseball as played by WWII POWs, mostly US, Canadian, etc, but also …including an attempt to teach those Germans the American pastime…
My first wife was a teacher and had a close friend who taught at the same school in east LA. She was Japanese ethnically and her family were interned during the war. Her father had a produce business in LA, in an area of similar businesses. His American competitors kept his business going and returned it to him when they were freed.
Pea vineries used to be a thing all over Wisconsin. They were not as large as their grain elevator counterparts. I remember one along former Wisconsin 32, somewhere between Reedsville and Wayside. When it was in operation it had a distinctive scent.
German prisoners were employed in farming throughout the Great Lakes region, one small camp was in Sycamore, a sub-camp of Camp Grant in Rockford.
German prisoners were also sent to the Pacific Northwest to assist in timbering. That’s a whole ‘nother set of stories.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I grew up near Algona, Iowa which was the site of another large German POW camp with satellite camps into Minnesota and the Dakotas. I wasn’t aware of it’s existence until my teen years though. Nobody talked about it until then. The POWs sculpted a creche from concrete purchased with their labor money that was still on display. I suspect their experience with the local German-American farmers was much the same as that in Wisconsin. My dad grew up with German language church services into the 1920s.
Sections of southern Minnesota and northern Iowa still had fairly extensive vegetable farming and canning operations when I was growing up.
Something a little off topic from the comments is just how much diversity has disappeared from American agriculture since the ’40’s. In lots of the Midwest, you can drive for hundreds of miles and never see anything but corn and soy beans. In the 28 years I lived in the Texas Panhandle, potatoes, onions, sugar beets, carrots disappeared along with the plants and packing sheds that supported an off farm population. By the time I left around 2007 corn was going away because of the decline in the Ogallala Aquifer, wells that had produced 800-1,000 GPM were down to 300, some completely dry to the east.
American agriculture is incredibly productive. For corn and soy beans, one full time person per 1,000 acres seems fairly common. Some jobs such as spraying might be hired in and an extra hand or two during harvest, if you can get them. And there’s always the technicians to fix the more and more complicated equipment. But that doesn’t support much of a rural culture and so small towns are also disappearing. Farmers are addicted beyond reason but the few others they depend on get lonely and find living in rural areas less and less appealing. The real problem is that we are running out of farmers and no one seems to have any way to change that.
There was a similar arrangement of POW’s in Texas, with the added complication of, some of the workers that the German prisoners were replacing turned out to be their American cousins, particularly in the New Braunfels and Pflugerville areas. They amnestied a few to families that lived in remote areas, and all of them stayed where they were supposed to be.
It was considered by everyone involved to be an improvement on the existing situation, and supposedly all of the amnestied troops eventually got citizenship here, after being sent back.
The rule was the had to be repatriated home after the war, and then apply to return.
One of the guys from the Afrika Corps had a small store near New Braunfels, and on the counter there was one of large Tamiya models of a Panzer MK III, ans a sign that said “The first time they had to fight to bring me here, the second time I had to fight to come back”.
Rich Rostrom
August 18, 2024 at 3:55 am
———————————-
I used the 1840’s as the starting point because that was when the concept of “extraterritoriality” was introduced into relations with China while negotiating the treaty ending the First Opium War. Short form, it was stipulated that Chinese law was so different from Western law that Westerners in China could not be expected to know what it was. Therefore, by treaty it was declared that no crime committed by Westerners [originally just Brits, but expanded to all Treaty Powers] in China could be prosecuted by Chinese authorities. The issue of the “crime” was left to be dealt with by their home government when they got home. The counterpart of that was that any non-diplomat Chinese in a Treaty Power state was not covered or protected by the laws of that state. Functionally, they were not legally people and any crime could be committed against them.
It is interesting that the concept of extraterritoriality was invented by the American ambassador to China, Caleb Cushing, who was attending the negotiations of the Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War. He suggested it to the British ambassador who promptly added it to the treaty and it became standard practice for all treaties with the Western Powers, including the US. And the US was the last Power to give up extraterritoriality with China. As it happened the events that led to that took place here in Colorado too.
Legally, the ban on Chinese women coming in may have been made unconstitutional by US -v- Wong Kim Ark, but in practicality and functionally the US would not let Chinese women in before or after that because of the possibility of Chinese babies being born here and having to argue whether they were citizens or not [remember, we all look alike to you :-)].
Without going into detail, this created major problems for my own family from the 1930’s to the mid-1960’s. My dad came here, 12 years old, alone, and not speaking English, just a few years before the Depression. In the 1930’s he went back to the old country for an arranged marriage, and returned here to try to find a way to get her in. Shortly afterwards the Japanese attacked our part of China, and he got word from the family that she had been killed by the Japanese.
Believing that he was a widower, he went on with his life here. In 1943 when we became legally people, he was able enlist in the Army. He fought his way across Europe in Patton’s 3rd Army and earned his citizenship in combat. He “remarried” after the war and I am our first ABC. Incidentally, my birth mother was not Chinese. One of my daughters did a detailed genealogical trace and I am half Chinese; with the rest being a mix of English [going back to colonial times], Welsh, Cornish, and German. They got divorced when I was a toddler, and my dad got custody because the judge then could not see a white woman raising me [this was the 1950’s].
Several years after the divorce, we got word from family in Hong Kong that his first wife had survived the Japanese attack, and the war, and had made it out to Hong Kong and found family. As far as my dad was concerned, that WAS his wife, and things got complex. We spent a decade fighting the legal system to get her over here.
I am about 3/4 of the way through writing a book about our family history since my dad was born so my kids, grandkids, and nieces and nephews will know what happened.
Subotai Bahadur