What Potato Farmers and German Prisoners Have in Common

Cecil Emery glanced back over the potato digger. The 12 new workers looked strong enough and seemed pleasant. They’d do just fine, even if they were prisoners.

German POWs, who helped Cecil Emery and his family hand-pick potatoes during World War II, pose in front of Cecil’s barn. (Photo courtesy of Karen Emery Estey)

The men took up their places in the field as the horse-drawn, one-row digger squeaked slowly past them. Shaped like a broad conveyor belt, it scooped Green Mountain potatoes to the surface.

They remembered that their leader, Adolf Hitler, had promised they would march across the plains of the United States. “What he didn’t tell us,” one soldier told the Fort Fairfield Review, “was that we’d have to pick up potatoes on the way.”

Cecil hoped the men could speak some English because he wanted to chat with them about their homes and what they thought about the war. Little did he realize that he would learn much more.

Long before the 1944 harvest began, Maine’s Aroostook County Farm Bureau Labor Association had been busy recruiting badly needed workers to harvest an estimated 60 million barrels of potatoes. Most of the able-bodied local boys were fighting overseas. Those workers left behind, even counting women and children, were not enough hands to bring the potatoes into storage.

A handwoven basket used to pick potatoes.

The Maine Extension Service had signed contracts from 600 farmers for 2,750 workers. In addition to workers from southern states, about 1,500 German prisoners of war were employed. “Attesting to the value of these former German soldiers are 135 farmers of Aroostook County, whose crops might have frozen in the ground without this unexpected assistance,” the Review reported.

The prisoners worked a shorter day than civilians due to the travel time to and from the base camp at Houlton. They arose at 3 a.m., left camp at 5:30, and ate sandwiches and drank coffee in the fields at noon. They arrived back at camp at 5:30 p.m. to satisfy regulations that limited absences to 12 hours. They were paid on a “gang piece work” basis for picking and on an hourly basis for other work. Each farmer kept a record of the total number of barrels picked by the group and submitted a report at the end of each day to the guard. Farmers filed separate reports for prisoners doing hourly labor indicating the number of hours each had worked.

A worker places potatoes into a basket before dumping its contents into a wooden barrel.

The men were paid 2.3 cents for every 165-pound barrel they filled. But the government collected the going rate of 15 cents. “Prisoners thus are earning upwards of $30,000 a week for the United States Treasury,” stated the Review.

In addition to the prisoners at Houlton, 300 Germans lived in a temporary tent encampment some 42 miles north on the State Road in Presque Isle. It was to this encampment that Cecil and his father, Joe, drove 14 miles from Fort Fairfield daily to pick up their 12 workers and an army guard—one for every 10 prisoners.

Though they had to prevent prisoners from leaving the work site, guards were instructed not to shoot even if some tried to escape, according to a “rumor” reported in the Review. On one occasion the guard told Cecil he had forgotten his ammunition. But “the prisoners never found out,” Cecil said. Or if they did, they did not try to flee.

The day the Emerys’ family dog, a huge boxer, ate the prisoners’ lunches, the guard let his charges eat in the Emery farmhouse. The dog had waited until the crew was in the field, then sneaked into the clean room of the barn where the sandwiches were kept and finished them off.

“It didn’t faze him one bit,” said Cecil.

Cecil’s wife, Aletha, cooked up a hearty stew for the men, while keeping an eye out for her two small daughters, Gilda and Karen. She nervously declined the guard’s offer to have the prisoners wash her dishes.

Aletha regularly supplemented the prisoners’ lunches with apples, candy, and tea. Many farmers thought the rations of four small sandwiches, each containing a piece of meat and maybe some cheese, were insufficient.

Cecil and his eldest daughter, Gilda, planting potatoes in the spring.

The fall of 1944 was a wet one, and it was on rainy days that Cecil found opportunities to chat with his foreign workers. While waiting for the land to dry, he would join them in a cozy room in the barn where they gathered around a stove and deciphered newspapers for word of the war.

Cecil became acquainted with their personalities and occupations, their war experiences and aspirations. He discovered that they were very much like himself. Most were in their 30s and had families back in Germany. They were bookkeepers, plumbers, and mechanics. Some had been wounded. They said they would never forget the sound of the bombs.

The youngest in the group was a tall Czechoslovakian who acquired a reputation for making his co-workers laugh. One day Cecil looked up from his work to see the prisoner standing on a wooden barrel while watching local girls picking in a neighbor’s field. When he had his crew’s attention, he jumped down from the barrel and strutted along his picking section with his arm bent, escorting his imaginary girlfriend.

Cecil developed a lasting friendship with one prisoner named Herbert, who had some military rank. The son of a preacher, he spoke and wrote more English than the others in the work crew. Cecil and Herbert exchanged addresses and corresponded for several years after the war. The Emerys sent care packages that included items such as coffee and cocoa, and in one letter Herbert requested enough cloth, lining, and buttons to make a suit.

“Dear Cecil,

“Can you imagine how great my joy was as I received two days ago again a care package sent by you? I did not expect one because I haven’t been asking you for one. Now the greater was my surprise as I could receive again such a wonderful token of your kindliness. In the present state of our food situation here in Germany, which I am not able to describe in the right words, such a parcel is like a present from heaven…

“There are many people like you in the United States who lend a helpful hand to many needy men in the whole of Europe…I know the purse of the average American is not always in a thriving state. That means he sacrifices oftentimes more than he should.

“All the expenses you have on my behalf, put as I have told you to do in the last letters, on a bill, which I shall pay as soon as possible.”

Herbert’s letter, received just after Easter in 1948, reflected the kind of understanding and bond between people that resulted when “enemies” met face to face in the fields of Aroostook County—and the lessons learned because of it.

“We need badly help from outside. We can never exist without help. We have lost the war, sure, but I ask you, do you blame the average German for the last war? Look at the present situation in world politics and you perceive how foolish the guy is who blames plain people for war.” 

And that was the last communication Cecil had from Herbert. Years passed, and Cecil eventually sold the property with the barn that he and his father had built. But he never forgot Herbert or the others. He carefully kept the photograph of them and showed it to friends and family, retelling the story of how, one wet fall, he befriended some prisoners.

(This story and others about northern Maine are featured in Stories of Aroostook.)