Germans in America
by Joe Palmer
[ places - october 07 ]
One way the government financed the war was to hire out the manual labor of German prisoners of war, especially as field hands, harvesting cotton and food crops in the South and Southwest. The half-million German and Italian prisoners who spent time in the United States generally earned their keep by working, and they ate as well as many of us.
The part of town I grew up in is called Dutch Flats because many German, Dutch and Belgian immigrants had settled there in the low-rent district on the wrong side of the tracks near the glass factory where many of them worked. The people there were about half Catholics and the other half Lutherans, while we were Presbyterian and American because our grandparents didn't come from anywhere. The neighbors on our street were named, as I recall, Van Meter, Van Weg, Wallum, Duesterberg and Schmidt. Sounds like a law firm.
When I was in high school I played cornet on the radio station WAOV [Water All Over Vincennes] 1450 on your dial, in a band called The Hungry Five, part of a program of local news and ads in German. When the announcer took a break, we played oom-pa-pa music: Hi-Le Hi-Lo, Im tiefen Keller, Alpenblumen, Kommt ein Vogel geflogen, Die Lorelei, Jetzt gehts los, and Bier hier Bier hier, the contents of our songbook. Our leader was Harry Weitz, a poor music teacher and trombonist. They actually paid us for playing.
In 1945 my parents and I lived in an expanded shotgun house, one with two side-by-side rooms in the middle, across 13th Street from the big brick building that housed Nelson's Bakery. The old building had for years been a dairy, and even before that an ice factory, with horse barns and delivery wagons. The back part of the old brick building was full of mysterious rusty machines and big pipes where kids played Kill the Japs and Krauts amongst the crumble and rubble. Used to be, milk and ice got put in your icebox by the delivery men when you put a cardboard sign in the front window to tell them when and how much to bring.
That summer, a work detail of German prisoners of war held at a temporary military base nearby, George Field, were brought by armed guards to dismantle the old ice making machinery and load the scrap metal onto rail cars on the nearby siding after some Amish men came and put a wire cattle fence all around the perimeter with the Germans' help. The Amish farmers arrived in a buckboard driving a mismatched pair of mares, one piebald and the other medicine hat, looking a lot like the men, except one was bigger than the other. We all thought that my scoutmaster's father Mordechai Dumes, the owner of the local scrap yard, had bought the tons of cast iron and steel in the old building, but it was a group of Amish farmers who saw a quick profit in scavenging the metal.
They kept the German soldiers at George Field across the Wabash River in Illinois, where they had trained paratroopers to go and catch those Germans the year before. It was pretty smart to use the army base we didn't need any more to shelter the prisoners.
The Germans looked like regular tramps, the ones that often stopped at our house just a few yards from the tracks to ask for food, shabby and unclean boxcar-riding strangers down on their luck who saw a hidden sign that told them that here in this house was a generous and kind woman who would fix them some bacon and eggs or maybe beans and ketchup. Our neighbor Mrs Ridgely also fed the derelicts, and must have had the same secret sign on her house because one day Mrs Ridgely had a shocking story to tell. A tramp had eaten his breakfast sitting on her back steps, and when she was pouring him a second cup of coffee, she asked him whether he had enjoyed his meal. "Yeah," he said, "but the eggs had too goddamn much pepper on 'em."
We had bacon and eggs and everything that comes from farms because we were in the country in a small town, some of our relatives were farmers, and my dad worked for a wholesale distributor, Bierhaus & Sons, that sold produce - vegetables and fruit - and beer to the grocery stores, taverns, and restaurants. He kept the vegetables and fruit on the shelves in the groceries of five towns. There were no supermarkets in those days. Every neighborhood had a little grocery where you knew the owner and everybody else. My dad always told us how lucky we were to have him bringing home the bacon. He could get anything you wanted; he knew so many people.
Lots of folks worked in the defense plants in Evansville, carpooling to work. One of the great pleasures and memories of my childhood was to watch new P-47 Thunderbolt pursuit planes test their machine guns at the Republic Factory next to Highway 41, the old Dixie Bee, firing into an embankment. The war to us kids was all excitement, with news of violence every day on the radio and newsreels at the movies, from the first announcements of the Attack on Pearl Harbor, which I recall, me sitting on the floor, the old Philco radio, my parents glum and rapt, to the German soldiers asking us to go down to Schmidt's Grocery at the corner of 13th and Nicholas Streets to buy cigarettes and candy for them.
Cigarettes: Lucky Strike, Camel, Chesterfield. Old Gold, Philip Morris, Kool, Julep, and the longer effeminate ones Pall Mall and Regent cost 11¢ a pack. The only candy was penny candy, jawbreakers and licorice whips.
I earned my spending money playing Taps at the burials of soldiers, sailors, and marines.
The Germans were not really very foreign prisoners of war. They probably felt more at home here than they would have felt anywhere else in the world. The Red Cross made sure they had the necessities, and they were hardly different from anybody else in the community. I recall some farmers in Texas complaining that Italian prisoners interned there would not work, so they requested Germans instead, to their satisfaction.
Many communities in the US keep their ethnic food and music alive, if not their languages, by consciously promoting their immigrant identity. A popular tourist attraction is the entire town of New Braunfels, Texas, where the local newspaper is called the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, and the motto is "Wilkommen to New Braunfels where German heritage coexists with Texas lifestyle!" Founded in 1845 by Prince Karl von Solms-Braunfels with several dozen farmers, craftsmen and their families, the town is not far from the capital Austin, with its university where a colleague of mine was attending a conference. Professor Ian Catford, a Scotsman, went with his fellows to nearby New Braunfels to see the Wurstfest, the sausage celebration held every November. President LB Johnson was there, with the Kinderchor singing Tief in dem Herz von Texas. For lunch they went to the Smokehouse Restaurant for sauerbraten, kartoffelbrei and bier.
Thinking to take a leak, Ian went into the ladies' john by mistake, amid shrieks of complaint. Instead of Damen and Herren, the doors were labeled Hisn and Hern.
