80 years ago this week, a Cook County forest preserve was converted into a POW labor camp

Not much is left of a once-thriving, tidy little encampment tucked inside a Cook County forest preserve in Des Plaines.

Even memories barely exist anymore. Just tales told second or third hand at this point.

There’s likely only a few still around who remember the time — 80 years ago this week — when the U.S. Army commandeered the site and converted it into a German prisoner of war labor camp to help farmers in the area harvest their crops.

“It kind of sounds worse than it was,” said Kathleen Fairbairn, a volunteer researcher at the Des Plaines History Center. “The prisoners, they weren’t very interested in going home anyway as it turns out most of their homes had probably been destroyed in the bombings and they were being better fed than if they were still on the front lines.”

The vast majority of the POWs were young men who were conscripted late in World War II into the German military, not dyed-in-the-wool Nazis or members of the Third Reich.

By all accounts, the POWs arrived at the campground April 25, 1945. Camp Pine had been used in the past to house farmworkers during the depression and later other laborers. When the war was over and the German prisoners were sent back to Europe, the Girl Scouts used the camp for several years.

Today, there is almost nothing left. From the sky, it looks like nature has reclaimed what might have once been a large baseball diamond. Deer trails meander through the former campground. Without rummaging around a bit, the only remnant of the camp visible to the naked eye is a pole sticking straight out of the ground and standing about 12-feet high at the northwest corner of the former campsite.

“There’s still a lot out there,” said James Meierhoff, an anthropologist and professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago who has led archaeological digs at the site. “There are piles of building materials under brush. We found 600 artifacts, including about 500 that were ceramic. There’s still some exposed cement foundations, particularly where the shower house used to be.”

While relatively unknown to most other than historians, hundreds of thousands of German and other axis power POWs were housed at similar camps across the country toward the end of World War II. There were several more in the Chicago suburbs, including Arlington Heights, Glenview and Skokie. Meierhoff, who happened to be giving a presentation about Camp Pine this week, said it’s likely remained shrouded by time because of how kindly the prisoners were treated in comparison to American POWs. It’s a tremendous success story, he believes.

“We treated them so well,” he said. “We sent hundreds of thousands of ambassadors back to Germany who would talk about how good America was to them, just by showing them basic human dignity.”

It helped that many of the farmers these prisoners worked for were often first-generation German immigrants themselves.

During Camp Pine’s two years in operation as a POW labor camp, few escaped or even attempted. Those who did weren’t heading back to Europe, but instead looked for employment in Chicago at restaurants, news reports from the time show.

At least one former POW wrote back to the farmer he worked for once he returned to Germany to thank the farmer for the kindness he had shown and to update him on postwar Germany.

“Often I remind of the good time when I was working for you,” German prisoner Hans Reinhold wrote Des Plaines farmer Arthur Schroeder in 1947. “There was the best time of my prisoner life. Never I forget the daily dinner in your cellar. Full of thanks I think of this time and all of the good things we got from you.”

Another former POW who worked on a farm operated by Ferdinand “Fred” Pesche, the patriarch of what is now Pesche’s Flowers and Garden Center in Des Plaines, came back in 1996 to visit his former employer with his wife.

That visit by former POW Rudolf Velte remains a point of pride for Fred’s grandson Chris Pesche.

“It’s pretty powerful and just goes to show you the strength of kindness,” Chris Pesche said. “You treat people with dignity and treat people the way you want to be treated, just treat people right, that’s what’s important after everything.”

Growing up, Chris Pesche would randomly hear stories about the two years German prisoners worked on the farm, usually from his father.

“It wasn’t like it was maximum security,” he said. “My dad used to sneak in at night to play cards with some of those guys.”

And the family is still learning things that happened nearly 80 years ago, Chris Pesche said.

“I just learned in the last year that there might have been a little thing between the prisoner and one of my aunts, I’m not going to say which of the nine aunts though,” he said. “But apparently there was a little romance. One of my cousins told me he brought her flowers when he visited in 1996.”

What’s left of Camp Pine is part of the Camp Pine Woods Forest Preserve that straddles parts of Des Plaines and Northbrook along Lake Avenue.