It was the spring of 1944 when Gerd Lindemann, along with 250 more of Hitler’s Afrika Korps, which were now POWs, arrived in Allegan. They were first kept at Fort Custer and then transported to Allegan when the need for more laborers arose. They arrived at what was an old Emergency Resettlement Camp built for hobos and tramps in 1933. The only fence was a little barbed wire surrounding the camp. Gerd Lindemann recalled that the POWs could have easily escaped, but they didn’t have anywhere to go. They had to literally fence themselves in with eight-foot-high fencing that had barbed wire on it. Lindemann’s responsibility was to organize his fellow POWs into work teams, but soon he wanted to work alongside his men in the fields.

Lindemann recalls a story where, when a guard fell asleep, they took apart his gun and hid the pieces. They offered to give back his gun if he gave them candy and cigarettes. However, when he got the pieces of the gun, the guard couldn’t put it back together, so they had to do that for him too.

Lindemann was later transferred back to Fort Custer to head another group of POWs who were traveling around the Midwest repairing electrical military equipment. He was supposedly transferred because he was getting too friendly with the natives, including the Weicks, which was against military policy. However, Lindemann was eager to travel around the Midwest to try to get a better sense of what America’s democracy was like, because it was so foreign to him after living under Hitler’s rule. In May of 1946, Lindemann was returned to Germany, but he never forgot America.   

In 1962, Lindemann and his family moved to Michigan. He ended up living not more than fifteen miles from Camp Lakeview on ten acres of Don Weick’s land. He also lived in Byron Center for some time. When Gerd revisited the camp, he knew exactly where everything used to be, even though all that was left were cement foundations, some of which still remain today.

Courtesy of Kalamazoo Gazette from June 19, 1995