When WW II starting turning in favor of the Allies in late 1943 and 44 Great Britain could not handle the overflow of captured German soldiers. It became necessary to step forward with the construction of POW camps around the United States. One such camp was located in the rural community of Algona, Iowa.
NAZI PRISONER IN AMERICA - Out of the War (WW2HRT 32-02)
Dean Simmons, Author of: Swords Into Plowshares: Minnesota's POW Camps During World War II provides context for what the German Prisoner of War experience was like in Minnesota Camps. Jerry Yokum, Director of the Camp Algona POW Museum discusses similar history in Iowa camps. Tom Lalim recounts his Masters research into POW camps in Northern Minnesota.
Michael Luick-Thrams lectures about WWII German American Internment
A historian, writer and lecturer, Michael Luick-Thrams work with TRACES began in 1989, when he began to research and record the experiences of eleven U.S. Americans who lived, worked or traveled through Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. In 1993, when he settled in Berlin for eight years and earned a doctorate in modern European history, he researched the lives of refugees who fled the Third Reich and later found a safe haven in non-occupied continental Europe, Britain, Latin America or the United States. The complex legacy of that historical migration fascinated him and served as a motor for further research. That on-going research came to include the experiences of the 10,000 German prisoners of war (POWs) imprisoned at Camp Algona in Iowa and its 35 branch camps in four neighboring states, and the stories of Midwest soldiers and airmen captured by the Germans and kept as POWs in Nazi Germany.
Based in St. Paul, Minnesota, with frequent and long sojourns in Germany, Michael continues to research the causes and effects of fascism—especially the role of the little people who so easily fall prey to clever propaganda, blindly support demagogues and unthinkingly carry out their leaders cynical, often murderous policies. Increasingly, as a scholar and a Quaker, Michael feels compelled to draw contemporary comparisons with past evils and to speak out in a world where democracy is increasingly threatened, where hyper-patriotism and fundamentalist religion are co-opted by insincere politicians for illicit goals, where militarism once casts a destructive shadow across the lives of millions and where war is sinisterly peddled to the enabling masses as peace.