German POWs, Iowa, and Public Memory
When I first began studying the musical lives of German POWs in America during WWII, I started with Iowa. It's where I live, and Camp Algona, in north-central Iowa, was the first camp I knew about. Before being introduced to the story of Camp Algona, I had no idea that hundreds of thousands of German POWs were interned in the U.S. during the final years of the war. But I quickly realized that many Iowans were well-acquainted with the history of German POW internment and that the relationships between Germans and Iowans on the home front remains a significant public memory for communities like Algona.
The presence of strong German communities in Iowa is well known, but the extent to which this heritage may have shaped interaction with POWs in Algona merits more explanation. Between 1840 and 1940, there were four active German theaters in Iowa; these were located in Des Moines, Davenport, Denison, and Dubuque.[1] German communities in eastern Iowa, such as the Amana Colonies, retained strong ties to their German heritage by continuing to speak German in their homes and religious services, even after the anti-immigrant, “English only” legislation was introduced in Iowa following WWI.[2] When the town of Lakota , which lies just twenty-eight miles north of Algona, was surveyed and filed in 1892, it was named “Germania” after the German immigrants who originally settled there. It retained this name until 1918 when anti-German sentiment prompted a vote to change it. Humboldt , a German settlement located just thirty miles south, similarly was named after German scientist Baron Alexander von Humboldt .[3] These towns and their residents were reminders of the not-so-distant German heritage of many Iowa communities.[4]
Algona and its surrounding communities had many residents who were first or second generation German immigrants. In Algona, where the German language was a familiar aspect of local culture, residents’ interactions with the POWs were less alarming than were those for the Americans who had been encouraged to eradicate any public use of the “guttural” language in their communities during WWI. Although anti-German sentiment in the U.S. during WWI caused German-speaking urban communities to dissipate, the communities in rural Iowa (and other Midwestern states like Wisconsin) seem to have preserved their linguistic heritage quietly, without repercussion.
The Germanness of Iowa is a subtle but significant facet of the story of Camp Algona. While it is nearly impossible to draw direct lines between German-American culture in Iowa and the relative amiability of the relationships between Iowans and German POWs, it is a thread of this research that provides a complex and rich cultural backdrop for these interactions. In some cases, there were direct interactions between German-Americans and German POWs in which shared heritage was acknowledged. Some members of the local Lutheran church who came into the camp to facilitate religious services were second or third-generation German migrants. One POW in Camp Algona had a brother living in a small town in Iowa just thirty miles away. The exploration of the Germanness of Iowa is not meant to draw direct lines of correlation, but to bring forth the many pieces of evidence that suggest that shared heritage may have affected camp-community relationships in Algona.
[1] John Koegel, Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 382.
[2] For a complete analysis and summary of German-language education and exclusion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see Amanda Kibler, “Speaking Like a ‘Good American’: National Identity and the Legacy of German-Language Education,” Teachers College Record 110 (2008): 1241-1268.
[3]The German heritage of Iowa cities and towns is the subject of a comprehensive volume by Pauline Cook: “Iowa Place Names of Foreign Origin,” The Modern Language Journal 7 (1945). Of course, it is necessary to acknowledge the diverse cultural heritage of Algona and the surrounding communities as well. Many Scandinavian and Irish immigrants settled in and around Algona in the mid to late nineteenth century. Algona was, by no means, a “German” town. However, it is documented that there were weekly church services performed in German in Algona during the 1920’s.
[4] Most German-American families in Iowa had lived in the area for less than one hundred years. In many cases, these families still spoke German in the home.