A Look Back • Missouri was home to enemy POWs during World War II [View all]
CHESTERFIELD • Cpl. Helmuth Levin and Private Rudolf Straussberg left notes of explanation on their bunks. They slipped past the guards at night and fled through the vegetable fields they tended.
“Returning to Germany would just be going from a Nazi dictatorship to a Russian dictatorship,” Levin wrote in German. Straussberg added an apology to his keepers for causing “the trouble of looking for us.”
Levin and Straussberg were among the 420,000 German and Italian prisoners of war who spent part of World War II under guard in the United States. About 15,000 of them were sent to 30 camps scattered across Missouri.
Most of the POWs went to large camps, including one covering 960 acres near Weingarten in Ste. Genevieve County. Others were confined in small outposts such as Hellwig Brothers Farm, near U.S. Highway 40 on the Missouri River bottomland then known as Gumbo Flats.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/look-back/555611ac-cfd9-58d5-915d-a3bdda5c1c28.html
The article includes some photos and links to additional pics.
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