That actually sounds pretty interesting. Was there a video recorded of the lecture?
Heh, I hope not. I'm not very good at public speaking.
It was pretty simple though, since the first half was just discussing the camps themselves, while the second half was our analysis very much distilled. Summed up basically, the camps ran from 1943-1945 and housed 3,000 prisoners each. Italians built the camps, then left, Germans from North Africa lived in them for pretty much the whole time, while one of the camps held 3,000 Japanese towards the end of 1945.
The most surprising part of the research, besides the great amount of liberties given to the German prisoners (as well as the Japanese, but not nearly to the same extent) such as being fed the same food as American troops, getting beer and cigarette rations, writing their own German language newspaper, and hell being paid for work (most prisoners left America with 100 dollars or more in savings) was how conflict free it was. Everyone was completely chummy. The Americans in Iowa/Minnesota came to really like the Germans who worked on their farms. A lot of them made lifelong friends and acquaintances, keeping contact after moving back to Germany (and some even moving back to the U.S.).
The Germans as well really enjoyed their stay, for the most part. Of course, through their letters, all they want is to go home, but they all acknowledge that they could have it way worse. Living out the war in the U.S. meant getting paid for work, three good meals a day, and no threat of death. They kind of became fixtures in the town, allowed to go out to bars escorted to drink, and sometimes, unescorted when working on farms. There are stories of guards coming to pick up prisoners from farm duty only to find the guard posted to them napping in the grass. At one point, a farmer who had hired the prisoners to work for him let the Germans take a break and go pheasant hunting! They were given guns! And everyone was completely ok with it.
This is going longer than I actually planned it, but summing it up the Americans running the camp made a real effort to live up to the Geneva convention on POWs. In doing so, a lot of Germans were given a fantastic image of America. They wrote letters back to their families in Germany about their treatment and ended up encouraging not only better treatment of American prisoners, but for Germans to surrender to allied forces. A lot of Germans towards the end of the war would also come out as vehemently anti-Nazi, going on to support democratization in Germany. Hell, close to a thousand actually volunteered after the surrender of Germany to go with the Americans to fight the Japanese!
Goes to show if you treat prisoners like actual human beings, good things happen.
Oh yeah, and the other theme we kind of touched on was of course connecting Iowa to the global war. The war from the American perspective ends up being fairly isolated, its all about us going abroad to fight. In this case, we have foreign nationals being forced to come to the U.S., and living within. It brings the war home, and internationalizes Iowa.
