Three German POWs Escaped Just to Attend a County Fair

In the middle of August, 1945, a few days after Japan surrendered, three German prisoners of war walked away one at a time from a farmhouse camp north of Owatonna, Minnesota, and each of them went to the county fair in town. German soldiers had been told, in an instruction sheet that the American War Department captured and translated, that a man taken prisoner must exert himself to get back home as soon as possible. CHAPTERS 0:00 Three Prisoners at the Fair 17:56 Camp Algona and Its Branches 23:28 Prisoners and Fairgrounds 38:25 The County Fair 44:11 Why Men Escaped 1:04:28 Discipline and the Geneva Convention 1:17:36 After the War FOOTAGE AND IMAGES U.S. National Archives (public domain), NAIDs: 338955140, 100310554, 74227588, 78274, 543958556, 7017204, 148727418, 404792386, 523413, 77404, 158884098, 204882693, 79406, 204896417, 79277, 204901412, 81590 Wikimedia Commons and Openverse images are credited with author and licence in the pinned comment. Some scenes are AI-generated reconstructions of historical moments where no photograph exists. No real, identifiable person was AI-generated.