My goal when I spoke to the Fountain Park Chautauqua in Indiana on July 22 was to get the audience to say “I didn’t know that.” The title of the presentation was “Corn, Tomatoes, and Prisoners of War: Hoosier Agriculture During World War II.” During WWII 10% of the population in Indiana had joined the military or worked in war industries. This created a huge labor shortage in farming and food processing (Indiana was the leading tomato producing state in the country at this point in time). So what was the solution?
One solution was to use prisoner of war labor in agricultural operations in Indiana. There were nine prisoner of war camps in the state and the POW’s were farmed out (pun intended) to work on farms and in processing plants. The farmers paid the government fifty cents an hour for POW labor. ThePOWs detassled corn, picked tomatos, harvested potatoes, hoed corn, shocked wheat, filled silos and performed many other agricultural jobs. If it were not for the POW labor, many farms would have gone under.
Most of the prisoners of war were Geman boys 18-20 years old. Often strong bonds developed between the farmers and the POWs. Several years after the war was over, about 5,000 former German POWs returned to the United States.
The Italian POWs at Camp Atterbury south of Indianapolis built a chapel out of surplus building materials. It still stands today and is the only vestige that remains of the POW camp (see images below).
