January 13, 1945
MINNEAPOLIS (Routers) The Roosevelt administration reeled today from new revelations of atrocities at POW camps in America’s heartland, where German and Italian prisoners have been worked to exhaustion, and many have died. Amid rising calls to shut the camps down, the international community has expressed shock at news of the harsh treatment of the Axis prisoners, eliminating any pretense at moral underpinnings for our war efforts in the Pacific and western Europe.
Produce Farms of Death
For many, the lachrymose ordeal begins when the prisoners first arrive, as they are housed in an onion-drying shed on the Odegard Farm in Isanti County. Many deaths have been reported, as some of the new arrivals are killed by the veteran prisoners, perhaps while camp guards simply look the other way.
But if they survive the first few days, new horrors are in store for them. There have been reports that prisoners were forced to toil in the fields for eleven-hour days, from seven in the early morning, until the late evening at 6 PM. For this, they get only three dollars a day, with no overtime pay. Thus, the local farmers are benefiting in this cruel war from what many say is tantamount to slave labor. Harvesting potatoes and onions in the fields of despair, they come back to their harsh camps each evening, in tears from the onion fumes (a chemical weapon precursor), dirt and “tater” skins under their fingernails, their lives an unending slog of spud-infested misery.
An Archipelago Of Torture
There is no relief for the POWs when they return to barracks. In the long hot, muggy summer twilight, the mosquitos come. Dubbed “swamp eagles” by the locals, they feast like locusts on the flesh and blood of the brutalized men who dare to venture out beyond the safety of screens in their rough-hewn cabins.
There have been claims, so far unsubstantiated, that some prisoners have been cruelly tortured, often kept awake at night by camp guards playing the Andrews Sisters on the radio. Some of them were made the butt of jokes, and forced to put womens’ nylons on their heads. One poor wretch was reportedly given repeated wedgies by the camp staff until he would reveal the words to all of the verses of “Lili Marlene.”
But sadly, this goes beyond physical deprivation and hardship–the prisoners’ spirituality has often been attacked as well. In many cases, the Germans’ beliefs have been ridiculed by their unfeeling captors, with one man’s copy of “Mein Kampf” reportedly torn up by an angry prison guard. Some claim that Adolf Hitler’s picture is used as a dart board at some of the camps, in plain view of the prisoners. There have also been failed attempts to deprive them of their own cultural traditions, forcing them to conform to midwestern mores, with severe punishments for using the word “scheisse,” instead of “uff da.”
The situation at the Odegard “Death Farm” isn’t unique–such conditions reputedly apply across many camps throughout the upper midwest. Olivia, Owatonna, Montgomery, all the way out to Algona, Iowa–like Manzanar, the formerly bucolic names may now go down in history as a vast network of brutal work camps that will shame America for the rest of its existence.
Good Hamburgers
The administration, of course, attempts to defend the camps.
The commanding officer claimed that “…the Italian POWs in Princeton drew illustrations, carved wood and played sports, including baseball and soccer. The POWs cooked their own meals and some visitors sampling the POWs