Back when I was still teaching at Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, I would sometimes have my freshman English classes read a neat little novel called “The Summer of My German Soldier” by Bette Greene. It’s a historical novel that addresses the issues of love, prejudice and self-worth.
The protagonist, Patty Bergen, is a 13-year-old who lives in Jenkinsville, Arkansas, during World War II. Her family owns the local clothing and general supplies store, in which Patty occasionally works. Her abusive father and uncaring mother have little time for her, instead favoring her younger sister, Sharon. However, Patty does have a friend in the family’s black, middle-aged housekeeper, Ruth.
The U.S. government opens a prisoner-of-war camp in the town for captured German soldiers, and one day Patty meets one of the POWs, one of the few prisoners able to speak English, when the POWs are allowed to buy supplies from her family’s store. Soon after, Anton escapes from the POW camp and is on the run. He is about to escape on a train when Patty sees him and decides to hide him.
Rather than telling the authorities, Patty hides the young soldier in some abandoned rooms above the family’s disused garage and brings him food. The two become close friends, Anton showing Patty a warmth and respect that she has never had from her cold family.
So, OK, there are lots of conflicts in the story. There’s the big, overriding international conflict during World War II between the Germans and the Allied forces. There’s Patty’s domestic conflict with her parents. There’s the social conflict between “outcasts” like Anton (the enemy), Patty (a Jew and “Nazi sympathizer”), Ruth (an African American) and the sociocultural “majority,” and most significant, Patty’s internal conflict over her own self-worth.
So just on its own merits, it was a neat book to teach. There was a lot of meat in it for class discussions. But there was another reason to teach it as well. Part of the Wayland Academy property was used as a POW camp during World War II. Some 300 German prisoners were housed in a tent city on the school’s south campus, which at that time was the Dodge County Fairgrounds.
Before I moved to Beaver Dam in 1961, I was unaware that there had been such camps, but I soon found out there were 38 POW camps in the state, mostly in the central and southern areas of Wisconsin, but also extending to more far-flung cities such as Bayfield, Sturgeon Bay and Galesville.
The following is a list of all the camps in the state. They all had names like Camp Beaver Dam, Camp Fox Lake, etc.: Antigo, Barron, Bayfield, Beaver Dam, Billy Mitchell, Cambria, Chilton, Cobb, Columbus, Eau Claire, Fond du Lac, Fox Lake, Fredonia, Galesville, Genesee, Green Lake, Hartford, Hortonville, Janesville, Jefferson, Lake Keesus, Lodi, Markesan, Marshfield, McCoy, Milltown, Oakfield, Plymouth, Reedsburg, Rhinelander, Ripon, Rockfield, Sheboygan, Sturgeon Bay, Sturtevant, Waterloo, Waupun and Wisconsin Rapids.
Together, by 1945, they housed nearly 20,000 captured German and Japanese soldiers.
Not surprisingly, there was a lot of anti-German sentiment throughout the United States, and in some parts of the country, the prisoners were harassed and threatened. But in some areas where there was already a heavy percentage of Germans who had emigrated from Germany before the war, the prisoners were able to establish friendships.
Many of the prisoners blended with the local community, drinking at taverns and even dating local girls, and in many cases, the prisoners came back to Wisconsin after the war was over.
Not only were the locals able to observe the prisoners in their communities, they often worked side-by-side with them. The camps were located primarily next to fields that needed working, factories in need of workers, or on fairgrounds close to both.
So in Beaver Dam and Columbus, for instance, that meant that prisoners were often near pea, corn and cucumber fields. Because of its great agricultural needs, Wisconsin had three times the number of POWs in the fields than neighboring Minnesota.
The POWs were largely credited with saving the crops during the 1944 and 1945 growing seasons. Without them, the work could not have been accomplished.
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