[jjotto]

The POW camp at Algona, Iowa, is well remembered for leaving behind a hand-made Nativity set of 60 half-lifesize figures.

At least one of those POWs remained around Algona, Iowa, after the war. My father, a WW2 Navy vet, knew him well.

Link to the Nativity story:

https://algonanativityscene.omeka.net/

[niteowl77]

We went to see the nativity scene at Algona many years ago; I remember being a bit put out that there wasn't really anything out there that remotely looked like what I thought a POW camp should look like. I want to say that we visited around the time Edmund Kaib came from Germany as a guest of the town.

One of the Camp Algona satellites was at Eldora, Iowa, and Eldora still has one of the small buildings that housed prisoners... I think it may have originally been a CCC barracks in the 1930s. Some of the POWs got to Camp Algona by being taken in a troop train to Eldora, where they de-trained and were trucked to Algona. Nobody seems to know why this was done when there was rail service to Algona, but the war department moved in mysterious ways.