News-Info-Alerts

Re: Camp Lodi

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: May 20, 2002

"Few reminders left of Camp Lodi

By Craig Spychalla - CWN News Service

There are no markings on posts, no tent stakes left in the ground and no names etched into the grandstand.

The old buildings and light poles at the Lodi Fairgrounds show no signs of what took place here 58 years ago. But they do have a story to tell.

It was in May 1944 that the Lodi Fair Association was informed that the fairgrounds would be a prisoner-of-war branch camp that would hold 250 captured German soldiers.

When the first POWs arrived in June, they marched and sang on their way to church, Ann Munz remembered.

"We were not allowed near them, and if we were caught we would be dispelled," she said, noting that she often watched the prisoners at camp kick a ball around. "We would yell back and forth to them, but we couldn't understand them."

Munz's parents would also have some guards over for lunch on occasion.

Camp Lodi was much like other area camps in Reedsburg, Columbus and Cambria -- all located close to canning companies. Prisoners would move from job to job and often worked on farms making as much as 10 cents an hour. The POWs would travel to Baraboo, Pardeeville and Sauk City to work before returning to camp at night.

Kurt Pechmann, a German POW who spent a few months in Camp Lodi before being moved to Camp Columbus, said he was sent to various farms and canning factories while imprisoned there. "We had two-man tents, and it was a nice and friendly camp. There were a lot of Germans in that town," he said.

Pechmann, now 80, said he often drives from his Madison home to Lodi to tour the camp and remember his time there.

"My feelings?" he questioned in a very thick accent. "I show my wife and grandchildren where grandpa was. I go right to the place where the camp was -- 20 feet away from a light pole by the bleachers."

He said you will find no evidence that he and other German soldiers were ever at the Lodi Fairgrounds or any other camp, but he continues to visit the area as a way of keeping in touch with his past.

While Pechmann and most other German prisoners were happy with their time in Wisconsin POW camps, some decided to make a run for it. "War Prisoner is Captured in Portage," a small headline read in the Portage Daily Register on April 16, 1945.

Paul Nagorski escaped from Fort McCoy on April 13 of '45 and hopped a freight train from Sparta to Portage, where he briefly hid in a shed. He missed the train out of town and the "PW" on his prison uniform was spotted on the train landing by a police officer. He made no attempt to resist arrest."