BUS-eum visit: Mobile display tells of Midwestern World War II POW camps

Visitors to a mobile museum climb aboard the bus Monday afternoon, during a stop in Nevada. Photos, a documentary video and other displays are incorporated in the exhibit. --Steve Moyer/Daily Mail

Monday a BUS-eum, a mobile museum in a bus, came to Nevada. Sponsored by the Vernon County Historical Society and the American Legion, the bus spent the morning at the Nevada High School and the afternoon at the parking lot by the Bushwhacker Museum.

"The program has been active for six years," bus driver/tour guide Irving Kellman said. "We've visited 17,000 towns in 13 states and we've had 140,000 people pass through."

Titled "Held on the Homefront: German POWs in the U.S., 1943-46," the bus includes photos, display cases of authentic artifacts from the POWs, and video stories of people from the Midwest and Germany or Austria who encountered each other during World War II when the United States held some 380,000 German POWs in about 660 camps across the country.

The bus is a project of the Traces Center for History and Culture. Traces is a non-profit educational organization created to gather, preserve and present stories of people from the Midwest and Germany or Austria who encountered each other during World War II.

"We're telling untold stories of how the war affected the Midwest and how the Midwest affected the war. We pride ourselves on telling untold stories," Kellman said. "Everyone knows of Anne Frank but few know she had a pen pal in Iowa."

Traces has a page up on their Web site detailing the story of Anne Frank's correspondence, which was cut short by the war. Frank had replied to an Iowa schoolgirl's introductory letter just 11 days before the Dutch surrendered to the Germans, ending the budding relationship.

Missouri had 30 camps, Nevada's own Camp Clark among them, including some of the most unique in the country.

"Missouri had some very unique camps," Kellman said. "There was a camp at fraternity houses at the University of Missouri, there were houseboats at Gasconade and Chesterfield and they even held POWs at a baseball field, Clemen's Field in Hannibal."

Camp Clark, 101 years old, started life as a target range for the National Guard but it has been used for a variety of purposes in its century of service. In 1916 it served as a staging point for soldiers deploying to the Mexican border, in 1918 the soldiers deploying from there were headed to Europe. After World War I it was used as a training site until the outbreak of World War II.

It was during World War II that Camp Clark was used as a prisoner of war camp. The first prisoners to use the camp were Italians but after Italy surrendered and its soldiers repatriated it housed German POWs. Between 3,000 and 5,000 prisoners from the two countries were housed at Camp Clark during the war.

The camp was divided into four compounds with 163 buildings behind the fence, including a 200 bed hospital.

After World War II all of the structures built for the camp were taken down, leaving only the original buildings intact.

David Fiedler wrote a book, "The Enemy Among Us: German and Italian POWs in Missouri during World War II," and was interviewed by the Daily Mail's Nancy Malcom in 2004.

"They were in 30 different camps in Missouri," he explained.

"Lots of times these were just agricultural work camps set up in a pasture. POWs worked side by side to bring in potatoes, pick cotton, put up hay, whatever the task was to get done. These prisoners had an amazing amount of involvement with the ordinary people."

He found the most amazing things were the friendships formed between the enemy POWs and the local Americans. Some of these friendships have lasted for years.