7 Things German POWs Found Strange About American Farms

Picture a farm field in wartime America. The guard has taken the clip out of his rifle, handed the weapon to a German sergeant, and gone to sleep under a cottonwood tree. Twenty enemy soldiers walk out to the harvest. Nobody runs. That's how one farm family remembered the war, and it looks like the most careless thing that ever happened on an American farm. It wasn't careless. It was a calculation. By the end of the war the United States was holding roughly 425,000 Axis prisoners, most of them German, in around 500 camps. Guarding them tightly should have tied down a small army. Instead they were sent out in groups of twenty with one guard, to pick cotton, rack peanuts, work sugar beets and the pea canneries, because sixteen million Americans were in uniform and the farms were running out of hands. And the Germans who worked those fields ran into things nobody back home had prepared them for. Pullman cars with upholstered seats instead of cattle cars. Train rides so long that some swore they were being driven in circles. A farm wife in Georgia serving Southern cooking on the porch while American families lived under rationing. And a barn with a tractor in it, in a country that was about to send an army to Europe without a single horse. What we go through: Why the Atlantic and the Great Plains made better walls than any fence, and why fewer than one percent ever tried to escape Twenty prisoners, one guard, and the man who hitchhiked back to camp on his own Johnson County, Indiana, and the 250 people who packed one meeting to sign up for prisoner labor Dried bread, sausage, pork fat, and the "Fritz Ritz" nickname The families who fed the Germans in the cellar-way and scattered when a guard came by A dollar fifty a day, eighty cents in canteen coupons, and the seventy cents that went to the treasury Why prisoners hated picking cotton and wanted to run the machinery instead Farm equipment rationing, and how tractors still went from about a quarter of American farms to more than forty percent Minnesota's corn and pea harvest, and the German farms that ran on Polish, French and forced foreign labor 590,250 horses in the German Army, 53 tons of feed a day per division, and oats taken from Russian farms The letter Bernhard Erbelding wrote to Sam Neville from the Saar in 1947 Said plainly: both countries leaned on captive labor to feed themselves. The difference was in the terms. In America the prisoners were paid under the Geneva Convention of 1929 and sometimes ate at the farmer's table. In Germany much of that labor was coerced and grew out of conquest. Same crisis, very different answers. So go back to that sleeping guard. Every piece of that scene rested on something enormous. The ocean. The labor shortage. The coupons and the farm wives who cooked. And the engines spreading across American farms while the government was rationing them. The Germans riding in the back of that truck every morning at six were riding in the thing their own army never had enough of. Tell me in the comments if your family farmed during the war. And tell me this: did anyone in your town ever talk about the German prisoners who worked the fields? Chapters 00:00 – 00:35 The rifle under the cottonwood tree 00:35 – 02:05 1. The distance 02:05 – 03:03 2. The guarding 03:03 – 03:45 Why enemy soldiers were outside the fence at all 03:45 – 04:46 3. The food 04:46 – 05:52 4. Payday 05:52 – 07:21 5. The machines 07:21 – 08:43 6. The reversal 08:43 – 10:38 7. What pulled the load 10:38 – 12:10 The letter from the Saar #WW2 #GermanPOWs #PrisonersOfWar #WW2History #AmericanFarms #HomeFront #WorldWar2 #POWCamps #FarmHistory #Tractors #GermanArmy #MilitaryHistory #Nebraska #Colorado #History