Most Americans have no idea that, in the middle of World War II, thousands of enemy prisoners were shipped into the rural Midwest and put to work in the very fields that were feeding U.S. troops overseas. In Iowa alone, more than 25,000 German, Italian, and Japanese prisoners of war passed through a network of camps from 1943 to 1946, with the largest sites at Algona and Clarinda sitting right in the heart of farm country.
By the early 1940s, Iowa farmers were under orders to grow more food with fewer hands. Young men were gone to war or working in defense plants, leaving women, older men, and kids to try to hit federal food quotas. Machinery was scarce, electricity was not yet in every place, and a lot of work was still done by hand. Newspapers at the time warned that if something didn’t change, “the Army boys may have to fight on empty stomachs,” and they weren’t exaggerating.
The War Department’s answer was unconventional: bring the enemy to the US farm. At Britain’s request, the United States began taking shiploads of Axis prisoners off gray-painted ocean liners, unloading them on the coasts, and sending them inland in Pullman railcars to newly built prison camps. Iowa’s two major camps at Algona and Clarinda were chosen in part because they were far from any coast and close to the farms that desperately needed labor.
Camp Algona opened in 1944 and ultimately processed around 10,000 German POWs, mostly Afrika Korps soldiers captured in North Africa. Clarinda housed similar numbers and later became one of only two camps in the country to receive Japanese prisoners captured in the Pacific. Across branch camps and work details, prisoners were scattered to canneries, hemp plants, beet fields, corn fields and potato patches across Iowa and neighboring states.
On paper, the arrangement followed the Geneva Convention. Only enlisted men could be required to work. They could not be used directly in war-related factories, but they could do agricultural and other civilian jobs. They were paid a small wage in camp credits, about 80 cents a day, enough to buy cigarettes, a Hershey bar, or a few small comforts at the canteen. In practice, that meant German soldiers, uniforms stamped “PW” across the back, climbing into trucks or farm pickups every morning and riding out past corn cribs and windbreaks into the same fields families had been trying to cover on their own.
If you step back into that moment, the fear is easy to understand. Rural Iowans had spent years seeing Adolf Hitler’s face in newsreels, hearing about invasions and atrocities on foreign soil, then waking up to the shock of Pearl Harbor. Many already had sons and brothers in harm’s way. When word spread that hundreds of German prisoners, and later Japanese prisoners, would be housed just down the road, anxiety ran hot in church basements, cafés, and letters to the editor.
Local officials held public meetings to reassure people, but the questions came anyway. Would it be safe to have “the enemy” living on the edge of town? Could they escape? What would it do to morale to see German soldiers walking past Iowa homes and churches? At the same time, there was a simple, hard fact: the crops were not going to plant, weed, or harvest themselves. Contemporary accounts describe farms with no hired men, no modern machinery, no spare hands, and no backup plan. For many families, signing up for POW labor was the only way to get the corn out, shock the oats, dig the potatoes, or keep a canning contract. So, farmers drove to the camp, filled out the paperwork, and asked the U.S. Army to send them prisoners.
Once the system settled in, a routine emerged that almost nobody would have predicted. Each morning, work crews left Camp Algona and Camp Clarinda in trucks or farm vehicles, bound for fields and processing plants across the region. Guards usually stayed at the house or in the yard while the prisoners walked rows, ran tractors, or threw hay. On many farms, especially the smaller family places, that meant POWs working shoulder to shoulder with farm wives, teenage sons and daughters, and older relatives trying to hold things together.
A few things helped soften the edges. Northern Iowa was full of German-American families, and older folks still spoke German, even if it had been frowned on after World War I. Many of the POWs themselves were farm kids from Germany, drafted young and swept into a war they didn’t control. The open geography made escape almost pointless; there was nowhere to disappear on the prairie, and the war was very far away.
Trust grew in surprising ways. There are accounts of prisoners being invited in at noon for fried chicken, potatoes, and dessert, sitting at the same kitchen tables as the families they worked for. Children were sometimes left alone with them while parents ran errands or worked other fields. Stories surfaced of prisoners “escaping” as a prank, walking off for a few hours just to show they could, then returning to the camp on their own. One Iowa woman remembered thinking of the men as “monsters” before they arrived, parroting what she had heard and seen in the news.
Perhaps the most enduring physical legacy is a nativity scene carved and built by German prisoners at Camp Algona in 1945, paid for with their own camp earnings. It still stands today at the Camp Algona POW Museum, drawing visitors every Christmas season and quietly reminding people that this unlikely community once existed on an Iowa hillside.
That everyday contact with “the enemy” forced people to hold two truths at once. On the one hand, they knew and believed that the German army and its leadership had done terrible things, and many had family members risking their lives to stop them. On the other hand, they were now looking across the field at young men who reminded them of their own sons, neighbors, and cousins. In return, many farm kids in parts of Iowa grew up with memories of those men as just another set of seasonal workers who happened to wear different clothes and speak with an accent.
That shift didn’t erase what the war was about or what the Nazi regime represented, but it did plant a seed: the idea that human beings on the other side of a conflict can be both dangerous in the abstract and deeply familiar up close. When the war ended, the prisoners went home to a Germany in ruins and, in many cases, to famine conditions.
If you were that farmer in 1944, with quotas to meet, no help, and a busload of enemy soldiers at your disposal, would you have brought them into your fields? Would you have let them sit at your kitchen table? Most of us like to think we know the answer. The reality, as these Iowa stories show, is that real people had to make that choice in real time, under real pressure, with imperfect information and strong emotions.
In an era when our own country feels extremely divided, it’s worth remembering that, not all that long ago, American farm families in places like Algona and Clarinda managed to treat enemy soldiers both as prisoners and as human beings. (Source: timesrepublican.com, pubs.lib.uiowa.edu)
