Prisoners of war were a boost to the wartime economy. If some were willing to assist in American intelligence gathering by divulging Nazi military information, then the arrangement was even more beneficial. But the United States had never before detained tens of thousands of enemy combatants at one time, and the experience proved immensely challenging. Some German prisoners of war had been detained in the United States during the Great War, but the number was much smaller, and that experience was not remotely reflective of what the country faced in the 1940s.9

From the start, prisoner of war camps were primarily located in the rural South. Eventually camps were erected all over the United States, but building costs in the South were particularly low, and southern farmers had an ongoing need for dependable and cheap unskilled labor.10

Some of the labor needs were specific to the region. In the Appalachian areas and northern Minnesota and Michigan, thousands of POWs were used for logging and lumbering. In Arkansas, they picked grapes; and in New York State and Northern Illinois they worked in canning plants for the food services industry.11 In Arizona, the need, of course, was for cotton picking—a task German and Italian POWs would quickly come to loathe.

Cotton picking had traditionally been the hardest work, reserved for the poorest people. During the Great Depression, 400,000 Mexican cotton pickers were deported after a nativist movement among white residents forced them out. The cotton still needed to be harvested, though, and cotton farmers recruited migrants from what were referred to as dust bowl states—the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas, where farmland had been destroyed by overuse that left it susceptible to erosion by devastating winds, producing dust storms that forced families to flee and become migrant workers. But after a few years of harvesting cotton in Arizona, the migrant workers had moved on, finding less strenuous and better-paying employment opportunities in the defense industries, and the cotton farmers needed help again. They appealed to the U.S. government, and the POWs became the solution.12

Many German POWs were captured in Italy, and Frederick seems to have been one of them, although even his family has a complicated relationship to his wartime story. “My father didn’t talk about his experience,” said his son Chris Albert. The only story the Albert children received was the brief one Frederick shared with them—he had been a paratrooper and was caught in an Italian village while trying to escape from the Allies on a bike with flat tires.

His military papers, which Chris found decades after the war, included a prisoner of war registration card with Frederick’s POW number: 81G-244-649. The United States assigned serial numbers to each captured soldier that indicated the soldier’s nationality and place of capture. Interestingly, and unbeknownst to his family, Frederick’s serial number indicated that he had been captured in North Africa.13