German POWs in Iowa Were Stunned When Farmers Paid Them Same Wages As American Workers

German POWs in Iowa Were Stunned When Farmers Paid Them Same Wages As American Workers
The morning of May fifteenth, nineteen forty-four, a work detail of thirty German prisoners shuffled through the gates of Camp Algona in Iowa, their worn boots crunching against the gravel as an American sergeant called out assignments. Most of these men, captured during the North African campaign months earlier, had resigned themselves to whatever fate awaited them in American captivity. They expected forced labor, starvation rations, perhaps beatings if they didn't work fast enough. What they didn't expect was Sergeant Frank Morrison walking down the line with a clipboard, explaining in broken German that they would receive eighty cents per day for their labor.

The translator, a German-speaking Iowa farm boy named David Kleinsasser, repeated the words slowly, watching confusion spread across weathered faces. "Achtzig Cent pro Tag." Eighty cents per day. Heinrich Bauer, a former machinist from Bavaria, later wrote in his diary that he was certain he'd misunderstood. In Germany, prisoners received nothing but black bread and whatever scraps kept them alive. Soviet prisoners in German camps received even less. The idea that enemy captives would be paid wages seemed impossible, a trick perhaps, or some cruel American joke.

But as the weeks passed and the scrip accumulated in their accounts, these German soldiers began to comprehend something that shattered every assumption they'd held about American society. They weren't just being paid token amounts. They were receiving wages equivalent to American privates, the same soldiers they'd been fighting against in Tunisia and Sicily. The psychological earthquake this created would ripple through the prisoner population at Camp Algona and thirty-four branch camps across Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, fundamentally altering how ten thousand German prisoners understood their captors, their country, and themselves.