In late May 1980, two German men and their wives drove a rental car down a rural Kansas road toward the farm country near Wamego. The last time either man had traveled a farm road in Kansas, he had been riding in the back of a county truck, a prisoner of war. Now, thirty-five years later, they were coming back to see the people who had once held them captive. One of them was heading to a farm where a small boy named Richard Mertz had often sat on his lap.
The question was what a handful of Kansas farm families had done in 1944 to bring two former enemy soldiers across the ocean to see them again. In the spring of 1944, Kansas had planted its wheat and corn, but there were not enough men left to harvest it. The young men were in uniform. Farmers around Eskridge warned that many of them would not plant a crop they could not bring in.
There was one remaining source of labor: the German prisoners of war living in a nearby satellite camp, leased out to farms by the day. Eskridge did not want them. On April 3, the city council rejected the idea of hosting a camp by a vote of three to two. Two weeks later, a group of farmers appeared before the council to argue for it, among them a farmer named Wynn Stratton.
On April 21, the council changed its mind and agreed to establish a camp for one hundred German prisoners at Lake Wabaunsee, about five miles west of town. The camp had originally been a youth camp from the Great Depression era, with barracks and a mess hall. Farmers would pay forty cents an hour per man and provide lunch. Frank Fletcher, the state farm labor supervisor, had already told the town what kind of food was required.
The prisoners were to be given the same food served to the farmer’s own family and other workers. They should not be pampered. Among the prisoners who arrived were Klaus Maier and Georg Stanglmaier. Both were nineteen years old when they surrendered together on May 9, 1943, at Porto Farina in Tunisia, after running out of fuel and ammunition.
A ship carried them to England, another to New York, and from there trains took them west. By summer, Camp Lake Wabaunsee was full. Every morning, trucks left the gate carrying forty men and headed toward Alma, Wamego, and Belvue. On most days, no guard accompanied them, and no one at Lake Wabaunsee attempted to escape.
Klaus Maier went to the farm of Lawrence Mertz near Wamego, where little Richard Mertz sat on his lap. Georg Stanglmaier went to Ralph Stratton in Eskridge, who was about twenty-one, only two years older than his prisoner. Back at camp, breakfast was lumpy oatmeal. At the farms, things were different.
At the Alma camp, Cora Ringle fixed pancakes, eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes for the men before they left for work. Another farmer’s wife fed her men again at four thirty before the truck returned, and some farmers sent food back to camp with them. According to one prisoner, the camp commander sent a message to the farmers asking them to feed the men extra. By that time, many farmers were already doing so.
The Army had rules, and the farmers simply ignored some of them. Farmers were not allowed to buy clothes for the prisoners. Even so, the McKnight family bought the men straw hats to keep the sun off. The prisoners knew the hats were against the rules, so they did not carry them into camp.
They hung them on hooks on the McKnights’ back porch instead. The Warren family was not allowed to give gifts, so they left apples and gloves where the men could easily find them. John Scholl at the Alma camp introduced his prisoner as “my German boy. ” When the young man’s twenty-first birthday arrived, he asked for the day off.
Scholl told him there was work to do, but the Scholl family threw him a surprise birthday party instead. Benny Clark, a history student at Emporia State University, interviewed these families forty years later. The Americans often broke the rules about using and treating prisoners of war simply out of goodwill toward them. The camp closed on December 1, 1945.
The men returned to Fort Riley, and from there began the long journey home. Some passed through prisoner-of-war camps in France first. Maier’s military medical card shows he was still in American care in January 1946. The Germany they returned to was starving.
In the winter of 1946 and 1947, an adult German lived on between one thousand and fifteen hundred calories a day. Letters began arriving in Wabaunsee County bearing German postmarks, and Kansas families answered with parcel post. Arnold and Cora Ringle sent a former prisoner named Werner Burrow razor blades, tobacco, cocoa, soap, and clothes for his wedding. At Christmas in 1947, they sent coats, a suit, shoes, five pounds of sugar, and five pounds of flour.
When Burrow needed tires for his bicycle, the Ringles sent him a page from a Montgomery Ward catalog to mark which tires he wanted. The tires did not fit quite right, but he hammered them on and rode anyway. Lawrence Mertz and his wife offered one former prisoner a job on the Mertz farm and said they would cover the cost of his return to Kansas. Klaus Maier and Georg Stanglmaier kept writing to the Mertz family and Ralph Stratton, and the replies kept coming.
The letters went back and forth for decades. In 1977, an American colonel from Fort Riley named Ed Hood was in Göppingen, West Germany, taking part in a NATO exercise called Reforger. The 1st Infantry Division had set up its forward headquarters in the town. Hood walked into a wine shop.
The staff went to bring the owner from the back room, and the owner was Georg Stanglmaier. When Stanglmaier began to speak, Hood noticed his English carried the accent of a Kansan. Stanglmaier told him he had been a prisoner of war there, and introduced his friend Klaus Maier. Hood asked Stanglmaier to come back and visit his old camp.
Stanglmaier accepted the invitation, and brought Klaus Maier with him. In late May of 1980, they flew to Chicago with their wives, Margaret and Frieda, rented a car, and drove to Kansas. Stanglmaier and Maier told their hometown newspaper they had come to show their wives where they had spent those years and to meet the farm families again. Maier drove to the Mertz farm near Wamego.
The little boy who had sat on his lap was a man now, the same Richard Mertz they had been writing to all along. Stanglmaier and Maier went to Eskridge to find Ralph Stratton. Stratton was fifty-seven, still single, living alone on the same farm. The moment they left Stratton’s house, Stanglmaier and Maier broke down in tears.
Stanglmaier said he thought they had made the old farmer happy for at least one day. “He was so happy yesterday,” he said. “They were beautiful days, warm family days. ”
They returned to Fort Riley during Big Red One week, in time for the division’s annual parade.
A general insisted on meeting them. At the post cemetery, they found the grave of Wilfred Firgal, an inmate from their camp who never made it home, and photographed his headstone for his family in Germany. Four American reporters came to speak with them. Klaus Maier told a Wichita newspaper, “We love this state and its people.
It has beautiful scenery. Kansas is the best state we have seen so far. ” He later said they had lived a good life in Kansas. The Mertz family and Ralph Stratton had kept answering their letters since the end of the war.
When an American colonel asked Stanglmaier and Maier to return, the first thing the two men did was drive to those two farms. Four years after that visit, Benny Clark called Ralph Stratton in Eskridge. He told her that a German prisoner had wired his family’s barn with electricity during the war, and that the wiring was still in use.
He said he had searched for years for someone who could do electrical wiring that well.