Jean Shey was 12 when she first questioned her father's judgment.
He wanted to serve lunch to the Germans. Not neighbors — prisoners of war in her town of Algona.
Five of them. Men captured overseas while her friends' brothers were fighting and dying in Europe.
"Dad, you're inviting those monsters into our home?" she asked in disbelief.
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Her father never hesitated.
"They're just like us," he told her.
Shey, now 93, still remembers those words, and her mother's reply.
"Mom said, 'Well, I'm definitely not going to use my good dishes.'"
In the middle of World War II, the deadliest conflict in human history, in a county struggling to meet federal food quotas with fewer men and limited machinery, the Shey family farm near Algona, Iowa, became one of many places where the lines blurred between enemy and neighbor.
More than 25,000 enemy prisoners of war were transported to Iowa from 1943 to 1946, more than any state except Texas and California.
Most of the prisoners Iowa received were German soldiers captured with the Afrika Korps in North Africa and transported across the Atlantic on gray-painted ocean liners before continuing inland by rail.
Shey remembered lining up to see the prisoners as they stepped off the Pullman railcars and into the heartland of America, their uniforms marked with distinctive large letters stitched onto their backs and chests: PW.
The Geneva Convention barred prisoners from being used for direct war labor. But Iowa's fields still needed planting and harvesting.
Corn had to be cut. Oats shocked. Sugar beets and potatoes pulled from the ground.
Across the state, farms were stripped of labor by conscription and wartime industry. Machinery was scarce. Kossuth County's 4,245 farm families struggled to increase production.
In August 1942, the Algona Upper Des Moines warned, "It begins to look like the Army boys may have to fight on empty stomachs."
The War Department got creative. It asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to identify secure inland sites where prisoners of war could be housed and put to work without competing with free local labor.
Algona met the criteria, and Camp Algona opened in April 1944.A second major Iowa camp also was erected in Clarinda.
German POWs drove tractors, harvested seed corn and processed hemp for rope. They were paid 80 cents per day in camp credit, enough for cigarettes and a Hershey chocolate bar.
The labor program functioned as intended. But inside that system, historians and those who lived it say, something else ripened in a way unlike anywhere else: community.
Skepticism comes first
Don Tietz was an 8 year-old boy when the camp went up in Algona.
Before the prisoners rolled into the rural north-central Iowa town, Tietz, now 89, said the war was something you could only hear or watch.
It came through the radio. It showed up in grainy newsreels: Adolf Hitler shouting, veins bulging, fists clenched, rage flowing.
"The world was scary, no doubt about that," he said. "We'd go to a movie theater and see Hitler. It was scary when he talked. He was just raging mad with anger."
Those images were reinforced by government-curated media and years of escalating violence abroad.
Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 ignited a European war the United States initially watched from afar, and American policy remained largely isolationist even as reports of mass killings spread.
Tietz said he still remembers the day that distance collapsed: Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor and pulled the United States fully into World War II.
By 1942, Iowa families had sons and brothers serving overseas, and the war effort meant producing more at home with fewer workers.
When word spread that a prisoner of war camp would be built near Algona, fear that had lived on screens and in headlines took a new, local form.
According to Mark Davis, vice president of the Camp Algona POW Museum board, residents were openly anxious before the first prisoners arrived.
"There was a lot of fear in Algona about this camp being here," Davis said. "Before the prisoners even arrived, they had public meetings and stuff trying to assuage people's fear about the prisoners."
Historian Chad Timm, a Simpson College professor whose Iowa State University thesis was one of the first to merge the history of Iowa camps together, said resident fears reflected a broader pattern of how war is understood when the enemy is defined mostly through propaganda and secondhand accounts.
"We have ideas about who the enemy is, and we define the enemy, and we fear the enemy, and we create ideas about the enemy in our minds," Timm said. "When Iowans found out that the Germans were coming, they were nervous and apprehensive and really concerned. There were letters to the editor, even from abroad, that were critical of the camp."
On the Tietz family farm, though, there was no backup plan. Housing prisoners of war in Algona offered one of the few ways the thousands of nearby farms could meet federal food quotas.
He said his father was one of the first farmers to go to the camp and ask for labor.
"There was just no help available, and our farm equipment was very basic. We had no electricity, no running water, we picked the corn and husked it by hand," Tietz said. "We needed all the help we could get."
And the fear ran both directions, Tietz said.
"The prisoners on the shuttles would get scared, thinking that the enemy was going to open fire on the shuttle," Tietz said. "The guards would say, 'No, you're in the United States. The war is not here.'"
A town — and a camp — that adapted
Once the prisoners began arriving, daily life around Camp Algona settled into a routine that few residents would have predicted during those early public meetings.
Each morning, German prisoners were moved out in work details bound for farms, canneries and processing facilities across north-central Iowa. Some were transported by military trucks.
Others were picked up directly by farmers, who signed them out and returned them at the end of the day. Guards were present, but often minimally so.
"The guard never went out into the field where they were working," Shey said. "He sat under the tree in the yard, where there was a lot of grass, and enjoyed the quietness. I think he took some naps."
Historians say that, unlike POWs assigned to factories in other states and larger cities, the men working out of Camp Algona spent their days on family farms, often alongside children and women who had taken on expanded roles during the war.
"Because the nature of the work they were doing here in the Midwest was so agricultural, and many of these farms at the time were family farms, there was a lot of contact between German POWs and Iowans," said Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, a musicologist whose research has examined daily life at Camp Algona.
Language eased that contact. Northern Iowa was home to many families of German descent, and while public use of German had largely been suppressed after World War I, older generations still spoke it.
Many of the prisoners were farm boys themselves, too, drafted into the German army.
"They were strong men," Davis said of the early arrivals from the Afrika Korps. "They had been captured early in the war and brought here because England couldn't feed them anymore."
Trust developed quickly in some places. Prisoners ate meals at farm tables. Children were left alone with them. In a few cases, prisoners wandered away and returned on their own.
"One story that the folks at Algona love to tell is that, one time as a prank, a couple of POWs escaped and then just, like, came back, just to kind of prove that they could," McGinnis said.
The low security environment was partly the result of geography.
"The Midwest is vast," McGinnis said. "They would not get far and would not be able to do much."
Inside the camp, life expanded beyond work. Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners had to be provided opportunities for recreation and cultural activity. Camp Algona became a place of constant movement between the military installation and the surrounding community.
"These POW camps, especially the big ones, had things like instrument collections, record collections," McGinnis said. "You have the Red Cross and the YMCA coming in asking what books and instruments and records were needed, and trying to make life livable and even sometimes enjoyable as possible."
Music became one of the most visible points of exchange, she said. German prisoners organized choirs, orchestras and ensembles. They performed German music openly, something that had not only grown increasingly rare in post-World War I Iowa, but also in Germany itself, where the Nazi regime tightly controlled cultural expression.
Local residents were allowed into the camp for church services and performances. Prisoners attended services led with community participation.
The camp also brought a wartime economic boon to rural Algona.
According to records from Camp Algona's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Arthur Lobdell, the value of labor to those hiring prisoners totaled more than $3.5 million, worth over $62 million today. Lobdell estimated the wholesale value of food and other products handled by POW labor at $101 million, worth over $1.8 billion today.
Shared humanity prevailed
Inside that system, perceptions shifted, Timm said.
In his research, he highlights how Iowa was not only a place where civilians and prisoners interacted, but where those interactions often extended beyond the worksite and into the most intimate spaces.
He described Iowa's experience as one end of a national spectrum. In other states, he said, prisoners often faced far harsher conditions.
"There were POWs in some states who were shot and killed trying to escape and then there were POWs like in Iowa, who sat at the same dinner table and ate meals with Iowa farmers," he said.
Shey remembers her family's dinner table as the place where that difference was clear. At noon, she said, the prisoners came inside for fried chicken, potatoes and dessert.
It was there, she said, that she realized the men "were not monsters. They were very nice, and they were polite."
Even decades later, she still returns to one detail.
"This one older man, when he got through eating, he would sit up really straight and he would take both hands and make a fist out of them and pound on his stomach all the way across the front of him," she said. "And I wondered what in the world was going on. 'Well,' he said, 'you know that food was so good, I'm trying to decide if I could eat more.'"
Timm said the repeated contact forced residents to hold two realities at once: What they were told about the German military and what they were seeing in front of them.
"Iowans looking into the eyes of German soldiers and seeing their brothers and their uncles and their relatives who were fighting overseas and realizing that they're human beings," he said, "they realized that the enemy were humans."
The most visible artifact of that cultural life is the nativity scene built at Camp Algona. Assembled over several months and paid for by the prisoners themselves, it remains on display at the Camp Algona POW Museum.
Brian Connick, the museum's director, said it was built for roughly $8,000 in 1945 dollars, worth over $143,000 in today's value, drawn from prisoners' daily earnings of 80 cents.
"That first night, Christmas Eve of 1945, I think that would have been quite a scene to be there and sharing that with, in essence, your enemy during that war," Connick said. "Certainly, it was something that brought people together, and it's still bringing people together 80 years later."
He described the response in Algona not as a single act of goodwill, but as a series of choices made in everyday settings.
"The people of Iowa, and specifically Algona, chose to treat these people as human beings. They didn't have to go that way," he said. "The easy thing would be not to treat them right or not to treat them well. But I think people here did the right thing."
Tietz said he saw that choice play out in real time.
"There was a bond, a bond of friendship and trust," he said. "We viewed the prisoners as our relatives from Germany."
Connections that lasted for generations
When the war ended, the German men who had hoed Iowa fields and eaten at local dinner tables were sent back across the Atlantic to famine conditions and ruins.
Shey said her father made a promise before the prisoners left: "He said 'now, if you need anything when you get back to Germany, you let me know, and I will try to get whatever you need.'"
When letters arrived, Shey said, her father responded with a level of compassion she had never seen from him before.
"He didn't have Mom help him at all," Shey said. "He said, 'I'll just take care of it. I'll send what I think they will need.' He had a special bond with these prisoners."
That impulse — to help first, regardless of who the person is — is what Tietz said stayed with him long after the camp closed.
"I don't know what causes people to go bad," Tietz said. "Hitler was a bad person. He was a bad, bad man. And if we don't learn from history, we become victims of its mistakes."
Those lessons feel especially urgent now, he said.
"We are a divided country right now," he said. "We are a state (and) we're a country of immigrants, and we forget that every day."
Years after the war, former prisoners told Shey's family their time in Algona had stayed with them.
For the Shey family, that connection centered on one man: Wilhelm. He spoke the most English, helped lead the small group of prisoners working the farm and stayed in closest contact after returning to Germany.
His family was starving. There was a newborn at home. Shey's father understood what they needed, and what they missed the most.
"Grandpa sent baby clothes over for his newborn son, Thomas, and we think he probably sent Mom's baby clothes," said Jane Shey, Jean's daughter.
When the packages arrived, Jean Shey was told, Wilhelm's wife opened one right there at the post office.
"At the top was a Hershey candy bar," Shey said. "And she grabbed it and just almost inhaled it."
Years later, Shey said, they found themselves in Germany, hoping the door they were about to knock on belonged to Wilhelm.
When it opened, he was standing there, in dress pants and a sports coat.
"He leapt at me and gave me a hug, and said something I'll never forget," she said.
"My little Jean," he said, as they both cried at the door.
Nick El Hajj is a reporter at the Register. He can be reached atnelhajj@gannett.com.Follow him on X at @nick_el_hajj.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register:Iowa farmers and German prisoners of war built friendships during WWII
