News-Info-Alerts

Re: Ex-POW Returns to Camp 60 Years Later

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: August 30, 2003

"German POW returns to state camp

Gannett Wisconsin Newspapers

WISCONSIN RAPIDS — Nearly 60 years ago, Rudolf Kleinmanns was knee deep in cranberries and a long way from his home in Goch, Germany.

As a 19-year-old prisoner of war during World War II, Kleinmanns’ Wisconsin Rapids experience consisted of sleeping on a cot in a hangar at the POW camp at the local airport and working at the Gaynor Cranberry Co., marsh in Nekoosa. Yet Kleinmanns holds no bitter feelings of his time in the POW camp.

Now 77, his sense of adventure and desire to reconnect with his roots brought him back to Wisconsin Rapids this week. Kleinmanns, along with friends Paul Dunnebache and his wife, Barbara Eck-Dunnebache, are on a monthlong tour of the United States. The trio visited the Nekoosa marsh and other sites in his memory and met with city officials and business people.

“There were 120 to 150 of us staying at the POW camp when I was here,” said Kleinmanns, a civil engineer. “We came here from Germany on convoy ships in April 1945 and were in the States for one year. It wasn’t something I feel bad about. I try to remember, it was a very different time then, and at 19, it was something of an adventure.”

More than 20,000 prisoners of war from Germany, Japan, Italy and other countries were housed in 38 seasonal camps around the state during World War II, according to “Stalag Wisconsin,” a book about Wisconsin’s POW camps by Betty Cowley of Altoona.

Prisoners worked for area farmers, with the U.S. military paying for most of their wages. In Wisconsin Rapids, private firms covered the cost of POW labor from May to September 1945.

For Kleinmanns, the highlight of his return to Wisconsin Rapids was spending the day with members of the Dempze family, touring the Gaynor marsh where he once worked.

“It was really exciting to meet Charles Dempze’s son, Gordon,” Kleinmanns said. “I remember Charles talking about his son in the Air Force. (Gordon’s) father owned the farm, and he was an old-fashioned guy. I remember he had this old and beautiful Buick that he picked us up in. He treated us very well while we worked for him.”

Gordon Dempze of Biron also enjoyed the visit.

“It was interesting meeting him because I was in the service when he was here at the camp,” Dempze said. “I recall my father talking, not specifically about Rudolf, but about the prisoners of war who worked at the marsh.

“My father could speak German fluently so he could visit with the men a lot and enjoyed that.”

Return visits by POWs are not unique, with as many as 5,000 former POWs immigrating to the United States, Cowley said of reports from the U.S. government.

“We can and should be learning that people are people, more similar than different,” Cowley said. “My faith in the humanity of man and the understanding that war is made by the leadership of the various countries and only fought by the people were both renewed as I learned of our generous treatment of the POWs, especially by the farmers and co-workers that had contact with them.”

©2003 Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune"