My family had German POWs working on their farmland here in SC during the war. My mother would tell me stories of them working in the fields, driving tractors, and building barns, porches, etc. She and her sister were tasked with taking the soldiers drinks and snacks during breaks, she would allays say they were very nice and thankful for their treatment on my grandparent’s farm. My grandfather, on the other hand (whom I never got to meet because he died when my mother was in high school) couldn’t stand the Germans and only agreed to accept them on his property because so many of his workers had gone off to war and they needed the labor. He himself was a military man and I believe he had fought in Germany in WWI. He could speak German and my mother would say every time he walked out the back door the POWs would immediately come to attention and drop whatever they were doing. She said they were terrified of him (he was a big man too- he stood at 7’1”- big enough to scare off local Clan members who came to threaten him in the early 50’s for allowing blacks to shop in his stores, but that’s a story for another day) but she never could understand why, but she knew it had something to do with whatever he would say to them in German. Apparently he was the only one around who could speak their language.
The Texas German communities (Rockne, Bastrop, Castroville, New Braunfels, Schulenberg, etc.) had several German POW camps also: My uncles were in the army out of state, my mom didn’t see them working on her farm though she knew others who had their labor.
Interesting story. I’ve read that there were as many as 400,000 German POW’s in the US, a lot of them working on farms. I read one German POW’s story about working for a farmer who used to occasionally tell the POW’s that if they worked really hard that day, they would have ice cream that night. The POW said the POW’s would really go at it when he told them that so they would get ice cream.
One of my uncles by marriage ended his WWII service as an NCO guard at one of the main POW camps. Born into a German-speaking farm family in eastern Iowa, he spoke the language well enough to converse with the prisoners and picked up some of the more colorful idioms in common use by German soldiers. When I was a very young boy, at family get-togethers he would occasionally teach me some atrocious German expletive, which caused the men to roar with laughter, but infuriated my mother. All these years later, I can only recall one common profanity.
He and another of my uncles who had extensive contact with German POWs were impressed with the discipline and work ethic of most of the prisoners. The other uncle had a couple of Germans he "kept on the company's payroll" doing vehicle maintenance.
Back in the mid-1970s when I was in the Army in Germany, one of our gun section staff sergeants was named Emmerich. His father’s story was similar to the stories you related. His father was captured in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in Alabama. He worked for a farmer and at the end of the war wanted to stay in the US, however he had to be repatriated back to Germany. He went back and returned to the US as soon as he could. He returned to the Alabama farm and married the farmer’s daughter.
“My family had German POWs working on their farmland here in SC during the war.”
German POW’s were working on many America farms/ranches before the War ended.
One of my uncles by marriage was born here on about 1900 and his parents were German immigrants. He fought his former countrymen in WWI and hated them. He had 3 uncles, who came over with his parents, and they were German to the core and were card carrying German Bund members. He hated them and turned them into the FBI after Germany declared war on us after Pearl Harbor. They were arrested and sent to not nice places of hard labor.
He was a cattle rancher, and he spoke excellent German and interviewed our German POW’s to see if they could be trusted to work on ranches and farms. Often, he would have them work on one of his ranches and monitor them. If they showed any sign of being real Nazis, he had them trucked away.
In the summers and weekends, his son, a first cousin of mine, a huge high school kid 6’5” and about 250#’s of muscle would work with the German pow’s. They did not know that he was my uncle’s son.
At night, he would tell his dad, who to send to some American hell hole. The next day, they would be rounded up a little before noon and sent to the hell hole.
My cousin’s aunts by marriage were good people, and they were so called prisoners in a NE Oklahoma former mental hospital. In fact their security guys were German POWs, who probably hated Hitler more than we did.
When the war with the Germans was over, this uncle had his German uncles sent to Germany to live. His aunts stayed over and lived and worked on one of my Uncle’s ranches for the rest of their lives.
His huge son joined the Army shortly after WWII was over and became a MP. He was sent to Germany to find and take care of any surviving SSers and other criminals. When they arrested a suspected SSer, he would have them take off their shirts. Then, he would look for their blood type tattooed in their armpits. If they found that tat, the problem was handled quietly.
They also took care of German Werwolf’s. (google werwolfs).
After about a year, this cousin and some of his toughest and biggest MP’s finished crash study courses in speaking and reading Japanese.
Then, they went to Japan to handle the leftover Japanese bad thugs. They finished out their Army enlistments doing to the bad Japanese what they did to the bad Germans left in Germany after WWII was over.