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Ship in a Bottle

By Lance Nixon

German prisoners of war were put to work harvesting beets on Jack Rathbun’s farm near Nisland.

The war hit home for the Lungrens on a Sunday in December.

“I can remember the Sunday when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” says Don Lungren of Pierre, who grew up in a German-speaking home near Vale.”We went to church. We came home, and on Sunday, Dad always turned on the radio to hear what the markets were going to be on Monday morning in Sioux City. Most of the time we didn’t have anything to sell, but he had to know what the markets were.”

On that Sunday in 1941, his father tuned in the set, as always; but he might have let it stay on longer than usual.”They were making a lot of noise on that radio, I can remember that — yelling and stuff,” Lungren recalls.”Dad shut it off and he told Mom he was going to see Grandpa.”

Lungren’s father returned with a strict order:”Henceforth, we don’t speak German anymore.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war against Japan and its ally, Germany. Perhaps because of the mistreatment of ethnic Germans in the U.S. during World War I, and perhaps because of fears that Japanese and German speakers might be suspected of harboring sympathies with the enemy, the family stopped speaking German then and there.

That Sunday the Lungren children also realized Germans were on the other side of the war. And if they had any doubts that Germans were the adversaries, there was more proof. South Dakota would be one of the places where German prisoners of war were stationed as World War II dragged on.

The first prisoners of war arrived in America in May 1942. Historian Arnold Krammer, who has written extensively about the era, notes that not only Germans but also Italian and Japanese soldiers would spend time in American internment camps before the effort ended in July 1946.

“It is remarkable how many people don’t realize that we held nearly 425,000 German POWs (as well as 53,000 Italian and 5,000 military Japanese prisoners) in some 550 camps across the country. They worked in factories, hospitals and brought in the crops since our boys were overseas fighting in the war,” Krammer told us.

In South Dakota, German POWs ended up in parts of Meade and Butte counties doing fieldwork; in Yankton doing bank stabilization work on the Missouri River; in northeastern South Dakota; and in the Sioux Falls area.

“Every farmer in the valley here used German prisoners for a couple years,” says David Rathbun of Nisland, who was about 9 and 10 at the time his family benefited from POW labor in the fields. His brother Grove, four years older, would drive the truck when they went to fetch prisoners from the Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Orman Dam.

The Rathbuns transported prisoners in their 1937 Ford beet truck. An American guard followed in the family’s Model A pickup.

“It was an old CCC camp in the’30s, and the government turned it into a POW camp. It had machine gun towers and barracks and the whole works, big fence,” Rathbun says.”We’d go up in a truck, get a load of German prisoners, maybe 20 at a time, and haul them back to the farm and they’d work. They had to do so much in a day. I’ll give them credit, they were hard workers.”

During threshing, the German soldiers gathered bundles of barley, oats or wheat into wagons. In that era before combines were common, they also pitched bundles into the threshing machine.

With the sugar beets, the POWs took on many tasks: thinning the beets, hoeing them when they were bigger, pulling them and taking the tops off, loading them on trucks for transport to the railroad, where they were loaded on cars and taken to the factory for processing.

There were also prisoners stationed at nearby Fort Meade. The prisoners came from different sectors of the war, Rathbun recalls.”North Africa was the first ones we got. They came in’43. That’s when we got Rommel’s Afrika Korps prisoners, and they were ornery bastards,” he remembers, referring to the German expeditionary force that fought in Africa under Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler’s favorite generals.”They were the old Nazi type. They stabbed one of their own prisoners, killed him with a butcher knife, up at Orman Dam at the prison camp because he was too friendly with American guards.”

Krammer says such incidents weren’t uncommon, though often concealed by the prisoners.”Almost every camp held a minority of die-hard Nazis who often terrorized the others and sometimes murdered one or two, listing the deaths as suicides.”

The prisoners stayed for growing season, and after harvest were moved to other parts of the country.”They shipped them all out, I don’t know what they did with them,” Rathbun says.”And then in’44, we got prisoners from Normandy. They were just run-of-the-mill German soldiers. They were different. They were damn glad to be out of that war. They didn’t mind working in the beet fields.”

Krammer cites studies saying about 40 percent of German POWs were pro-Nazi. Eight to 10 percent were considered fanatics in their devotion to the Nazi cause, while another 30 percent were”deeply sympathetic.” But just as Rathbun suggested, many of the German POWs were not Nazis.

The prisoners were given small breaks to split up the hours of labor.”Our place had the Belle Fourche River running through it. If they got done early in their work, the guard would let them go swim in the river, and they really liked that,” Rathbun says.

There were even stories that the guard would take a dip with the prisoners now and then.”He did, actually,” Rathbun confirms.”I saw that happen. The guard went swimming and left a sergeant, German sergeant, sitting on the hillside looking for the colonel.”

Locals would often practice German with the prisoners.”There’s a lot of German around here. Our neighbors were Low German, I think, and the prisoners were High German, but they could understand each other. They’d talk all the time.”

Another mode of communication was the universal language of food and drink. Don Lungren recalls that his parents and grandparents, Germans themselves, coaxed extra labor out of the POWs.

“They would make a big 2- or 3-gallon pail of chicken noodle soup, and man, I’ll tell you, they could pick cucumbers twice as fast. And Grandpa, he made better than that. His bribe was that if they would look at the end of the trees, by the hog house, there would be some beer there if they would get those cucumbers picked today. They had them done by noon, I think.”

After long days in the Butte County beet fields, prisoners sometimes enjoyed a swim in the Belle Fourche River.

Lungren said other locals would do favors for the POWs.”My family and most of the German families always gave them a treat — chicken noodle soup from the old roosters and that sort of thing and beer at the end of the grove in the trees. The guard would come. Grandpa would loan the guard his shotgun and the guard could go shoot pheasants. And because the guard couldn’t get the pheasants home, I suppose Grandma cooked the pheasants and fed them to the prisoners.”

Sometimes the farmers got more than they asked.”Grandma told one of the prisoners she wanted some little cucumbers because she wanted to make baby dills,” Lungren said. His grandmother had business to tend to, but when she got back to the field, the Germans had picked two bushels of tiny cucumbers — far more than she needed.”We had baby dills for years.”

Marian Ruff added that for German-speaking families, even though many of them had immigrated to America from German communities in Russia, it was awkward having German POWs work in the fields.

“My family, like the other German families, was looked down on because of the war — because they were Germans,” she said.”With the POWs, I think we felt sorry for them because of the way they were treated. They would bring this truckload of guys out to the Vale area and they would have two armed soldiers with them with rifles in case they tried to escape. They were supposed to shoot them.”

The guards weren’t just for show, Krammer says.

“There were escapes aplenty, but most were caught within three days,” he notes. But, he adds that many prisoners quickly figured out they would be treated decently in America.

“Those assigned to American farms were well-treated and modern flea markets still have POW-made handicrafts which they gave to the children of farm families,” Krammer said.

That was the case in South Dakota, too, Marian Ruff said.”They were just really happy to get out of the prison situation and do something. Several of them put together some ships inside of wine bottles. We have one of those. One was given to my grandpa. Several of the families that these prisoners worked for ended up with one of these ships inside of a bottle. It always fascinated me because I had no idea how they did it. Someone said to me recently, ëWell, they sawed the bottom of the bottle and put the ship in and sealed the bottom back on again,’ but I don’t know if that’s what they really did or not.”

And no one knows what it meant to a German soldier, either — building a ship inside a bottle in a prison camp to give to a German farmer in landlocked South Dakota.

David Ruff of Spearfish, Marian’s husband, grew up near Nisland during the war. He spoke German well enough to understand the German POWs who worked for his father and some of the neighbors.

The Rathbun family dog often provided canine companionship for Germans working the fields.

“I often wondered if they didn’t have feelings knowing that they were in a country so far from their homeland and had people there that could speak their language. I think many of the prisoners were quite pleased to find that there were German-speaking people here. They were appreciative of the extra food that was given them and the friendliness of the farmers that they worked for.

“I don’t know if I personally asked one of them or what, but somehow or another in conversation, I learned from them that they were quite pleased with the treatment they were receiving here. I’m not sure exactly where they became prisoners of war, but they mentioned that when they were in France, they were required to drink out of the troughs that the livestock drank out of.”

POWs also made an impact on the other side of the state. Yankton-area historians Lois Varvel and Kathy K. Grow reflected on the German POWs stationed in Yankton in their 2001 book, The Bridge We Built: The Story of Yankton’s Meridian Bridge. They noted that the Yankton Press & Dakotan reported on April 3, 1945, the arrival of the first contingent of German POWs from the Afrika Korps to take part in Missouri River bank protection work. Officials wouldn’t tell the newspaper how many German POWs would come to Yankton, citing policy on POWs, but the newspaper understood they would make up”a sizable force.”

The POWs worked on a project to make sure the main flow of the Missouri River steered clear of the city of Yankton’s water intake. The work had side benefits for the Meridian Bridge.”We had prisoners of war trucked in from Algona, Iowa, and they did revetment work on the Nebraska shoreline. That was their contribution to protecting the Meridian Bridge,” Varvel says.

After the war ended, most of the 375,000 German POWs went back to Germany — but not all stayed there. Some liked what they had seen of life in America. The United States didn’t track the number of former German POWs who ended up immigrating to the land of their captivity; but it was substantial. Krammer notes that John Schroer, a former POW who immigrated to America after being held as a POW in Alabama, estimated about 5,000 POWs made a similar move. Some reportedly returned to South Dakota, too, where the enemy they had fought showed them decency and kindness in victory.

Editor’s Note: The tally of German prisoners of war in South Dakota at any one time during World War II was a floating figure because they rotated in and out of different states depending on the local harvest and other demands. Curt Nickisch, a South Dakota Public Broadcasting journalist at the time, wrote a story for South Dakota Magazine in 2001 in which he reported the number at more than 1,200 POWs through 1944 and 1945. There are also several books available, including Nazi Prisoners of War in America by Arnold Krammer. This story is revised from the March/April 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Raclette: A Toasty Alpine Delicacy

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Marc and Sonja Hoffmann of Sioux Falls serve a traditional Swiss delicacy called raclette as part of Sonja’s online business, Raclette Corner.

Perhaps you’ve seen the Facebook videos in which half-wheels of creamy cheese are heated until the top layer is melted, bubbly and slightly browned, then scraped off onto a waiting dish of food. That gooey cascade of cheese is a Swiss treat called raclette, and a Sioux Falls woman named Sonja Hoffmann promotes its deliciousness as part of her online business, Raclette Corner.

The daughter of a Swiss mother, Hoffmann grew up in Germany, but her husband Marc’s career as a software consultant brought their family to Sioux Falls in 1998. She started selling European cookware online a few years later.”I decided that as much as I love my children, I needed something a little bit extra,” she says. Hoffmann was the first U.S. distributor for raclette grills, tabletop cheese melters that are common in Swiss, French and German households but were almost unheard of in America. Gradually, her cheesy product lines garnered more attention. In 2007, she started RacletteCorner.com, and by 2018, decided it was time to shutter the original cookware site.”I just decided to focus on raclette because it’s fun,” she says.

The word raclette comes from the French racler, “to scrape,” pointing to the cheese’s origins in the French-speaking Valais region of Switzerland, where the dish was created due to nomadic necessity. For thousands of years, Alpine herdsmen have driven livestock from their winter valley homes to high-altitude summer pastures in a seasonal migration called transhumance. When herds went into the mountains, the herdsmen carried hearty peasant provisions with good keeping qualities, like cheese and potatoes. Add in a fire, and sooner or later, somebody was going to put the three elements together, toasting the cheese over the flames and sliding it onto the boiled potatoes. Racletting references have been found in medieval manuscripts dating back to the 13th century.

Raclette is a semi-hard cows’ milk cheese that has been washed in brine, giving it an edible rind and a somewhat powerful aroma.”It doesn’t necessarily taste that good when you eat it raw,” Hoffmann says, but melting helps tame the cheese’s flavor.”It loses that extreme taste, and it’s just nice and creamy.” Traditionally, the cheese tops a plate of new potatoes, cornichons and salad, but the Hoffmanns enjoy racletting a diverse array of foods, including hamburgers, pork chops, red peppers, mushrooms, pears and shrimp. After all, what doesn’t taste better with a little melted cheese on top?

In addition to online sales, Hoffmann offers raclette melter rentals and caters small raclette parties in the Sioux Falls area. A few years ago, she brought the culinary experience to Sioux Falls Germanfest and a few other special events. And while it’s sometimes difficult to get Midwesterners to try something new, once they have that first taste, they tend to want more, as Hoffmann discovered while serving ham and raclette cheese sandwiches at the Sioux Empire Arts and Crafts Show.”We had one lady who came back, and she was yelling, ‘I have to have a second one of these. This is the best food I ever had!'” Hoffmann remembers.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Grottos of South Dakota

By Michael Zimny

The Midwest was host to a unique folk art movement in the early 20th century, as German-American Catholics brought with them the grotto tradition. There are two small grottos in South Dakota, on opposite ends of the state: Saint Peter’s in Farmer, and Saint Martin’s in Oelrichs.

The Midwestern grotto tradition was kickstarted by Father Paul Dobberstein with the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa. Near-death experiences are a common theme in grotto-building origin stories. Father Dobberstein promised the Virgin Mary that if he survived a bout with pneumonia, he would build one. And he did. In 1894, he built a small grotto, Our Lady of Lourdes, at the Saint Francis de Sales Seminary outside Milwaukee.

He wasn’t done though. He began to amass a collection of boulders for his magnum opus, which he began in 1912 and continued until his death in 1954. A parishioner named Matt Szerence helped him from the start, continuing also until his death in 1959.

The two artists often made excavation runs to the Black Hills, returning with rocks removed by miners or railroads. They studded the surfaces with colorful minerals, gemstones, petrified wood and glass. The Grotto of the Redemption is actually a series of nine grottos that tell the Catholic story of Redemption, beginning with the Fall of Man and culminating with the Resurrection.

Perhaps the second most famous Midwestern grotto is the Dickeyville Grotto and Shrines, built by Father Matthias Wernerus in the eponymous small Wisconsin town between 1925 and 1930. Probably inspired in part by Dobberstein’s work, Dickeyville is a tribute to God and country, combining patriotic and religious themes. With his splashy use of color — utilizing semi-precious stones, glass and pottery shards — Wernerus prefigured later religious folk artists, working in different mediums, like Howard Finster at Paradise Gardens or Leonard Knight at Salvation Mountain.

The South Dakota grottos are neither as grand in scale as the Grotto of the Redemption, or as visually frenetic as Dickeyville.

Saint Martin’s in Oelrichs is the most austere, relying less on colorfully ornamented concrete, and more on the stone bounty of the Southern Black Hills to recreate a naturalistic cavern for the Virgin Mary. Father Gerhard Stakemeir, another German American priest, built the icon between 1932 and 1934, with help from parishioner Nick Bogner. According to the National Register of Historic Places, Stakemeir and Bogner utilized, “petrified wood and moss, and fossils taken from Wind Cave National Park.

“The car tunnels leading through Wind Cave National Park were being enlarged in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which left vast amounts of debris … Bogner used a trailer and his Buick to haul the rocks from the passes to aid Father Stakemeir’s project.”

The bells no longer ring at Saint Martin’s, which closed as a church in 1999, a victim of rural decline. The property owner maintains the grotto, which receives few visitors.

Father Peter Scheier built the Byzantine-style Saint Peter’s grotto in Farmer between 1926 and 1933. Scheier may have been more influenced by his contemporaries in West Bend and Dickeyville than Father Stakemeir was at Oelrichs. The facade of the turrets and walls at Farmer are decoratively studded with thousands of fresh-water seashells and shards of colored glass, among the gathered stones. Like Stakemeir, and even Paul Dobberstein, Scheier made excursions to the Black Hills to gather materials. The Farmer grotto is cherished by alums and locals, some of whom took part in a restoration project in the early 2000s.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but Lemmon’s Petrified Wood Park — one of South Dakota’s great folk art monuments, which could be seen as a secular take on the grotto movement, in which fossils and stone foster the contemplation of deep time (or at least put Lemmon on the map) rather than the glorification of God — was built during the peak of the Midwestern grotto-building era (1930-1932).

In its grandiosity of scale, Ole Quammen’s Petrified Wood Park shares more in common with the Grotto of the Redemption or Dickeyville than Stakemeir’s or Scheier’s smaller icons, nearly swallowed by the prairie and demography.

Saint Martin’s and Saint Peter’s remain modest reminders of an interesting moment in sacral folk art.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Suspects in Sturgis

By Paul Higbee

Historic Fort Meade was home to Nazi sympathizers during World War II.

A little less than a year after the United States’ entry into the Second World War, the strange soldiers of the 620th Engineer General Service Company arrived at Fort Meade, near Sturgis. On work details they wore blue fatigues, not green. Prisoners of war were typically issued blue fatigues, but no “PW” lettering adorned the 620th’s work uniforms.

These soldiers numbered between 100 and 200 most of the time. Despite that small number, writer E.J. Kahn would note after the war, the 620th claimed “the distinction of being responsible for four-fifths of the convictions under the Eighty-first Article of War recorded against the 11.5 million men who served in the army during the Second World War.”

Conviction under the Eighty-first Article is deadly serious business: it means being found guilty of aiding the enemy. Members of the 620th were American soldiers, but it didn’t come as a complete surprise when some plotted acts for the glory of the Third Reich.

“What made the company unique was that, except for its officers and a cadre of noncommissioned officers, it was filled entirely with men who were suspected of subversive activity or disloyalty,” wrote Bob Lee in his book, Fort Meade and the Black Hills.

The army had to prove nothing for a soldier to be sent to the 620th, Lee added. Suspicion sufficed.

At Fort Meade the 620th painted barracks, hauled trash, planted trees, graded a landing area for military gliders and made camouflage netting. They were issued no arms.

Like other Fort Meade military personnel, they were free to live off the post grounds. Many lived in Sturgis or Deadwood apartments and commuted to the fort five days a week. Weekends were spent enjoying the Black Hills’ amenities, and pursuing the charms of local young women, many of whom missed boyfriends sent to combat in North Africa, Europe or the Pacific.

Certainly the soldiers of the 620th enjoyed cushy wartime duty, maneuvering their way through pine forests en route to picnics in Custer State Park, rather than through land-mined jungles or sniper-protected villages. The military eventually heard criticism about that, but at the time the army found itself in a bind. Exempting from military service those men who didn’t approve of the nation’s war policy wasn’t fair, plus, doing so would offer an easy out for those hoping to avoid enlistment. At the same time, the army didn’t want these men, some of whom were vocal in their admiration of Adolf Hitler, in regions where they could pass information to the enemy or sabotage American war production. The War Department studied maps, decided Fort Meade was about as far removed from the war as a soldier could get, and formed the 620th under a confidential order in October 1942.

Most of the 620th soldiers were of German or Italian descent. Other companies were established elsewhere for soldiers suspected of sympathy for Japan. It should be noted that many men of the 620th wished the United States no harm in the war, and hoped the whole affair would simply end quickly.

Because formation of the 620th was confidential, the Black Hills public didn’t know of its makeup, although a few remarked that lots of the men spoke with accents and knew all the lyrics to German beer hall songs. “The citizens of Sturgis, had they known the 620th was filled with soldiers the army considered undesirables, would have been shocked, since they had treated these men as freely and as generously as they had the other soldiers from the fort,” Lee wrote.

Stone stables at Fort Meade housed 86 horses each. Located just east of Sturgis, the fort now stands as a National Historic Site.

Along with being shocked, the citizens of Sturgis likely would have worried the soldiers might try something rash if a militant leader joined their ranks. That leader came along in March of 1943, in the person of Dale Maple.

Maple wasn’t typical of the 620th. Maple wasn’t German or Italian. Actually, he wasn’t typical by any standard of American young men. He was, when he arrived in South Dakota, a 22-year-old graduate of Harvard, where he’d studied government and publicly expressed admiration for Hitler’s fascist regime. He attracted enough attention for his views at Harvard that Time magazine once described him as a “native U.S. Nazi.” In his hometown of San Diego, as a child, he’d seen his name in the press often as a piano prodigy. Southern California music critics predicted big things for him in concert halls.

Maple graduated from Harvard, with academic honors, in the spring of 1941. He was still on campus doing post-graduate work the next December when the United States declared war. Hours after Maple heard news of Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor, he phoned the German embassy in Washington. He told an official there it looked obvious the German ambassador and his staff would shortly be expelled from Washington, and said he would like to join them when they traveled home to Germany. The embassy official told Maple no.

So Maple joined the United States Army. Had he been sent overseas, deserted and made his way into German territory, he would have had no trouble communicating his Nazi sympathies. He’d learned German and spoke it fluently. But Maple never got near the war. After training as a military radio operator at bases in North Carolina and Maryland, Maple was transferred to Fort Meade in early 1943. The army decided that the support he declared for Hitler at Harvard made him a case for the 620th.

Speaking to South Dakota Magazine 57 years later, just a few weeks shy of his 80th birthday, Maple recalled the 620th was quartered in barracks built for and by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s, on the west end of the fort grounds. “We received no military training as such,” he said. “Of course, there were no thoughts that we’d be part of the Okinawa invasion.”

While Maple’s well-documented remarks left no doubt why he’d been sent to Fort Meade, he said some of the others “had no idea why they were in that unit.”

Maple rented an apartment in Deadwood, found he had lots of time for reading and backroom gambling, and made some friends in Deadwood’s bars. Black Hills acquaintances recall him as tall, handsome, well mannered, soft-spoken and a remarkable piano player. He had one minor brush with the law in Deadwood when picked up for tampering with someone’s car.

The 620th liked Spearfish Canyon. In the summer of 1943 the soldiers would sometimes rent a cabin there for weekend parties where beer flowed and rousing choruses of German beer hall songs rattled the windows. The army suspected espionage might be being plotted in the cabin and bugged the place. Surveillance uncovered nothing.

But it was proven later in court that the army had good reason to worry about subversive plots. Maple and a few friends in the 620th spent time in the Black Hills, in the words of E.J. Kahn, “exploring, largely in conversation, courses of action they might take to demonstrate their disaffection — espionage, desertion, mutiny, sabotage, guerrilla warfare against the United States, and so on.”

Site of Orman Dam POW Camp north of Fort Meade near Belle Fourche.

Helping German prisoners of war escape appealed to the conspirators, but no prisoners came to Fort Meade until after they had left. The first week of December 1943, the 620th transferred to Camp Hale, Colorado, 120 miles west of Denver. On one hand, the soldiers disliked the move because everyone but married men had to live at the post. On the other hand, 200 German prisoners were also quartered there.

Imagine Hogan’s Heroes in reverse. The German POWs had a still for making schnapps, acquired a pistol and American military uniforms, and regularly got themselves out of their compound and allowed visitors in. The 620th men, in blatant violation of regulations against fraternization, won the prisoners’ confidence and friendship with gifts of candy, tobacco and whiskey. When POW Erhard Schwichtenberg said he wanted to see the American West, the 620th got him out for a couple days and drove him several hundred miles through Colorado. Nobody missed him. When Maple got a three-day leave, the only place he wanted to visit was the inside of the POW compound, where he spent the entire period, wearing a German uniform and drinking schnapps — and learning that Schwichtenberg and another prisoner named Heinrich Kikillus wanted to escape as much as Maple wanted to help them.

Maple bought a decade-old Reo sedan. On February 15, in broad daylight, he simply drove the car to a rendezvous point just off the post grounds, and Schwichtenberg and Kikillus strolled away from a work detail and climbed in. Nobody noticed for more than 24 hours that the prisoners were missing and Maple was AWOL. By the time they were missed, the trio was far south down U.S. Highway 85, in New Mexico, implementing a Black Hills plan that called for getting to Mexico first. From there the idea was to reach Argentina and secure passage by ship to Spain, and from Spain travel to Germany.

After two flat tires and an electrical problem, Maple got the car within 17 miles of Mexico. Then he ran out of gas, and the three companions hiked cross-country into Mexico by night. A Mexican border patrolman stopped them 3 miles inside Mexico on the afternoon of February 18, and turned them over to United States authorities.

At a military trial two months later at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Maple said the escape had been merely a ploy to call public attention to the injustice of companies like the 620th. Further, he claimed, he’d only pretended to be a Nazi at Harvard in hopes of winning German scholarship money to pursue post-graduate studies at the University of Berlin. Nobody bought his stories and he was convicted of desertion and aiding the enemy, and sentenced to death. Three fellow conspirators in the 620th — Paul Kissman, Theophil Leonhard and Friedrich Siering — were court-martialed and sent to prison. The German prisoners, it was noted, simply had exercised their right and duty to attempt escape.

After Maple’s death sentence was handed down, nobody in the military or federal government seemed to want to see it carried out. The secretary of war sent a memo to President Franklin Roosevelt, saying of Maple: “While he is undoubtedly legally sane and responsible for his despicable acts, under all the circumstances I am unable to escape the impression that justice does not require this young man’s life. I feel that the ends of justice will be better served by sparing his life so that he may live to see the destruction of tyranny, the triumph of the ideals against which he sought to align himself, and the final victory of the freedom he so grossly abused.”

Maple did live to see the triumph of American ideals and freedoms, and, in fact, to prosper by them. Roosevelt commuted his sentence to life in prison, and later it was reduced to 10 years at Leavenworth federal penitentiary. He proved a model prisoner and was still a young man when released in the 1950s.

ìI came back to California and got into a venture building commercial fishing boats,” he said. “I learned about insuring boats, and that led me into the marine insurance business worldwide.” He never returned to the Black Hills.

It is possible the Black Hills would have forgotten Maple and the entire 620th had it not been for E.J. Kahn’s series of articles about the company and Maple’s trial, published in 1950 in the New Yorker magazine. Suddenly people who had wondered about those soldiers’ accents and their knowledge of German beer hall songs had answers.

As for Fort Meade, the War Department declared the post surplus the same month Dale Maple went to trial, April of 1944. Fort Meade then became a Veterans Administration hospital.

“Ironically, aside from the station complement, the 620th was the last company-sized army unit stationed at Fort Meade before the post’s abandonment as a military installation,î Lee wrote. ìIt was a strange ending for a garrison that had included many of the army’s most highly regarded and decorated outfits during its long years of service.”

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Hutchinson County’s Holstein War

By Kim Wilcox

Hutchinson County “cowboys,” dignitaries and ship’s crew posed for this picture aboard the West Arrow before beginning the journey.

People in Hutchinson County still talk now and then about the Battle of the Cows that was waged over a herd of 700 milk cows bound for Germany in 1921.

The shipment of cows came about when South Dakotans of German descent became greatly concerned by reports of hardships suffered by the German people after World War I. A milk shortage was caused by the disruption of the German economy that followed defeat in the war.

On December 19, 1920, news stories from Berlin reported on the disastrous results of the loss of the 800,000 milk cows that the Germans were forced to deliver to the Allies under terms of the Versailles Treaty.

Even though anti-German sentiments remained high both in South Dakota and across the nation, many German-Americans could see no reason why they should not help their friends and relatives still living in Germany. They received permission needed from federal authorities to ship dairy cattle to Germany.

But controversy raged over whether or not Americans should be helping the Germans.

Thus, when South Dakota’s German communities announced plans to help feed the beaten Germans, some Americans questioned the patriotism of the plan. Despite threats, the German-Americans, with support of many members of surrounding communities, kept their promise of sending milk cows back to Germany.

In all, three shiploads of milk cows were sent to Germany from various parts of the U.S. According to the Freeman Courier of Sept. 15, 1976, “It is not clear exactly where the first shipment originated. The second consignment of cows, totaling 732, was apparently gathered as donations from German-American farmers in Kansas, Texas and Indiana. The third and final shipment came primarily from Hutchinson County in South Dakota.”

From small beginnings the relief movement grew. Several pastors of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church were chosen to lead the project. The American Dairy Cattle Company asked Pastor Heinrich Friedrich Wildhelm Gerike, who was in charge of two congregations of the Missouri Synod, his own at Tripp and one at Emanuel’s Creek, to supervise the work.

Another leader was Pastor Richard Tauber of the American Lutheran Church in Tripp. Local banks also assisted with the collection because, in addition to cows, money was collected to cover shipping costs and to support those who would accompany the livestock. Two bankers especially associated with the project were Oscar Brosz of Tripp and Reinhold Dewald of Freeman.

Despite protests from neighbors, German-American farmers sent 700 cows on this ship, the West Arrow. On April 13, 1921, the ship set sail on its 18-day voyage to Germany. It took both men and cattle a few days to adjust to the sea motion.

Since the cows had to be fed and milked, local youth were sent along on the journey. Volunteers from South Dakota were Herbert Bender, Theodore Weidenbach and Herbert Hintz (Scotland), William and Reinhold Dewald, Hugo Haar, Christ and Hans Kauffmann, Joe Wallmann and William Wipf (Freeman), W.E. Friedrichs (Alexandria), Hans Gottsche and Joseph A. Gross (Carpenter), Richard Isaak (Parkston), Albert Koehn (Corsica), William Mundt and Joseph Wipf (Bridgewater), John Sattler and Harold Serr (Tyndall), Jacob Schaefer (Armour), August Schmichel (Marion), William E. Voight (Avon), William Warnicke (Paullina), Henry Wettrock (Canistota), and Daniel Winter (Delmont). Original plans called for one shipment of cows by train from Scotland. At least 300 cows were held over the night of March 23, 1921. The remainder of the 700 cows in the total shipment were detained at Tripp along the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad line.

The Tripp Ledger commented on March 17, ” … shipment from Tripp will be made Wednesday, March 23. Cows should, if possible, be in Tripp the day before … about 300 cows are expected to be shipped from here and about 400 from Scotland. Besides the donation of these cows, $16,000 in money has been collected.”

On Wednesday, March 23, the 386 cows in Scotland and the 270 head in Tripp were being herded when Pastor H.F.W. Gerike was notified that trouble might be expected at Scotland. Some non-Germans had sworn that no cows would be sent to Germany and had recruited a gang. They threatened to march against the cows in order to stampede the herd and make shipment impossible.

In the meantime, F.F. Matenaers of the American Dairy Cattle Company had arrived in Scotland. Pastor Gerike led him to the mayor of Scotland to request that the sheriff send deputies to protect the herd of cows.

The mayor agreed with Pastor Gerike and promised to find deputies due to the threats made against the herd. Unfortunately, the mayor didn’t follow through with his promise and when Thursday came neither he or the sheriff were anywhere to be found.

Wednesday night, some 25 automobiles packed with men, and 30 more men on horseback, arrived at the scene and opened fire on the herd. Only four unarmed, young men were on duty to guard the cattle. Several cows were killed and wounded, mostly from being hit by cars. Most of the herd was scattered.

To round up the herd after Wednesday night’s raid, volunteers were called from the area. By Thursday afternoon, the results were two dead, one lame and 26 missing.

First reports said American Legion members and other ex-servicemen from the Scotland, Tripp and Menno areas were responsible for protesting the shipment and had planned the stampede that had taken place Wednesday night. Later, however, the Legion publicly disclaimed any responsibility, saying that if Legion members took part, they did so on their own. It should be noted that some of the men helping with the transport of the milk cows to Germany were Legion members also.

After arriving in Germany with their cargo, the South Dakota farmers who accompanied the cattle became tourists. These two, Christ Kaufmann, left, and Hans Kaufmann, even dressed the part for a photograph.

After the cows had been returned to the corral in Scotland, it was decided that they should be driven across the county line into Hutchinson County. There they were corralled on a farm one-half mile west of Kaylor. At the time, the farm was owned by August Link, who had rented it to Gustav Freitag. Once the cows arrived within his territory, Karl Schmidt, sheriff of Hutchinson County, assumed responsibility for the safety of the herd.

Schmidt deputized Lieutenant Ewald Gall of Menno and put him in charge of a large posse of farmers to protect the cows from further attack. Conflicting reports claim there were 200 to 300 farmers included in the posse.

On the night of March 24, farmers stood guard around the 330 cows, which had been corralled in a bowl-like pasture south of the Kaylor-Tripp road. Some men hid in the cemetery across the street, using the tombstones for barricades. As anticipated, about 10:30 p.m., approximately 30 cars approached, coming north from Scotland. Earlier in the evening, an unidentified call had reportedly been made to a local undertaker. The caller advised him to send an ambulance to the scene because there “soon would be a number of dead.”

When the cars reached the Freitag farm, they were unexpectedly met by Sheriff Schmidt and Lieutenant Gall, who warned them that the first man to cross the fences would be fired upon by at least 200 farmers.

According to the Scotland Journal of March 31, 1921, the attackers were again members of the American Legion. “A large number of Legionnaires from the various posts near Scotland started for Kaylor … On arriving at what was to be fighting ground, the Legionnaires found that they were outnumbered four to one in both men and guns and decided to call off the action.”

Since more trouble was anticipated the following night, when the cows were to be driven to Tripp for loading on the train, the guard was again used.

But that night, guards only had to deal with some curiosity seekers and catcalling protestors who had gathered. No one was injured. A few people from Bon Homme County were arrested and spent the night in the Tripp calaboose.

Reports on the nature of the arrests conflicted. Some even say that poison was taken from the arrested men. There is an agreement that 14 men were arrested and that all of them were implicated in the stampeding of the 300 head of cattle occurring in Scotland on Wednesday. After being taken into custody in Tripp, the 14 were searched. Four men were charged with carrying concealed weapons and were fined $5 and costs. All of the men were released.

On Saturday, approximately 700 cows were loaded aboard 26 rail cars en route to Sioux City. Attempting to stop the train, Legionnaires once again entered the picture, admittedly taking all measures to intercept the shipment.

They first tried to make an appeal to Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace, but it was denied because the Internal Revenue Service had already issued an authorization for the export.

The next attempt was to obtain a court injunction to prevent the cattle from leaving Sioux City. When this failed the Legion men said they would appeal directly to President Harding.

The shipment continued on to Chicago, and finally Baltimore. The train passed, at double speed, through places where threats had been made. The train crew and the boys in charge of the cows were prepared for any situation.

The train made it with success to Baltimore. Upon its arrival, the American Legion made one last formal protest while the cows were loaded on board the West Arrow and headed for Germany.

The cattle were put in stalls with their tail end against the outside walls. The milkers had to crawl through the mess the cows left in order to get to the teats. Sometimes they couldn’t distinguish the milker from the milked for all the filth that covered them.

Reinhold Dewald later expressed his feelings about the trip to Europe. “As you know, the cattle were finally loaded. Practically all of us had pistols in our pockets to hold the howling wolves of Scotland bay. We were glad when the train finally got under way, even if we were threatened with reprisal if this should happen. On the freight train things did not go smoothly, especially with the meals. The noon meal often wasn’t served until 3 o’clock and supper in the morning.

“In Baltimore we, together with the cattle, were locked into the stockyards. The place actually thought of itself as a hotel … Yes, it even had ‘HOTEL’ printed across the top in large letters, but it still resembled a barn more than anything else. And the chickens … They certainly weren’t fried according to mother’s recipe … only one got sick and two departed for the dear hereafter.

“It has been stated that when you’re on the ocean, everything goes well as long as your stomach functions properly. Some of the men experienced this malfunction the first day of their voyage on the West Arrow. The ship was a freighter, not designed to accommodate either man or beast.

“On April 13, the ship finally set sail … after laying around Baltimore for nine days, we were glad to be on the move again. The beds had been very hard, otherwise we might have been content to lay around there till now.

“The weather was beautiful except for those who couldn’t hold up their heads anymore … Then one day and one night there blew a mighty storm. Waves washed over the ship and shook it so hard that some of the boys were thrown from their bunks.

“Before evening, winds and waves abated … Joy turned to despair when a heavy fog embraced the ship and everything else in the vicinity. The steamer’s horn shrieked so boisterously … that even the most dedicated church sleeper was kept awake and alert the whole night through.

“After 18 days we finally arrived in Germany. In Bremenhafen we had to wait till the tide rose and then we slowly proceeded up the Wesser River through locks where Germans on both sides greeted us. We greeted them with milk, of which we had a goodly supply on hand.”

No doubt, some of Germany’s dairy herd today has the bloodlines of the Holstein cows that came from Hutchinson County in 1921.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the July/August 1992 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Legend of Springerle

The Benson family of Brookings likes their Christmas cookies picture perfect. Every year, Leah Benson rolls out an embossed cookie called springerle, which means”little knight” or”jumping horse,” using a special rolling pin carved with pictures.

Springerle originated in southwestern Germany.”The legend is that back then, the peasants were so poor that they could not afford to give gifts. To celebrate the winter solstice they would carve the gift they wanted to give into a piece of dough, let it dry, bake it and give it to their loved one. Most carvings were things of nature because they worshipped Mother Earth,” says Benson, who has researched the ancient cookie and teaches classes about it at medieval re-enactment fairs.”The dough was leavened with hartshorn, which is a powder that comes from inside a deer’s antler. Today we use baking powder.”

Benson learned about springerle from her grandmother.”She always made these cookies with a special rolling pin that was handed down through the generations. I started collecting these rolling pins when I was 40,” Benson says. Rolling the dough with a springerle pin or pressing it with a carved mold creates pictures on the cookies — some more intricate than others.”Most of the modern rolling pins have simple nature designs, although I do have one very expensive one with the life of Christ carved into its 24 panels,” Benson says.

Her grandmother’s recipe creates thick, mixer-challenging dough. Benson recommends draping a kitchen towel over the back of the mixer to avoid spraying flour and powdered sugar. After mixing and rolling, the unbaked cookies must dry for 24 hours to preserve the pictures through baking. The cookies bake at a low temperature, resulting in hard, pale-colored treats perfect for dunking in coffee.

Many families bake springerle at Thanksgiving and save them until Christmas to allow the flavor to develop, but Benson’s family eats them right away because they prefer a softer texture. Rolling thicker cookies or baking for less time results in a softer cookie as well, but beware of rolling them too thick. You’ll get cookies that are”humped up and cracked and kind of ugly,” Benson says.

Springerle is a German tradition that became a staple of Christmas for many South Dakota families.

Springerle

4 medium eggs, separated

1 pound powdered sugar

3 cups flour with 1/4 teaspoon baking powder added

1/8 teaspoon anise oil extract, or flavoring of your choice

Using an electric mixer, beat egg whites in a large bowl until stiff peaks form. In a separate bowl, beat egg yolks for five minutes until light and lemon-colored. Add beaten yolks to egg whites and whip for three minutes. Gradually sift powdered sugar into egg mixture and add anise oil. Slowly add flour and baking powder until dough is stiff, smooth and velvety. You may need to knead in the last of the flour by hand.

Divide the dough into 3 or 4 pieces. On a well-floured surface, roll out each piece 3/8-inch thick using a regular rolling pin. Using a springerle pin, roll across the dough to create imprints. Cut cookies apart and place onto ungreased cookie sheets close together but not touching. Cover with a light kitchen towel. Allow them to dry for 12 hours, then flip to let the undersides dry for another 12 hours.

Flip cookies right side up and bake at 250 degrees for 45 minutes. They may turn tan on the bottom, but should not brown.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Noodles & Strudels for the Soul

By John Andrews

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

A man sporting a thick salt and pepper beard eyed me suspiciously from his slowly passing pickup as I approached the back door of the Dakota Cafe. It was shortly after 10 a.m. on a Monday morning, and we both knew the cafe hadn’t yet opened, but owner Cris Mayer had assured me I would find the key in the door.

The Dakota Cafe in Hosmer was my first stop on a journey exploring South Dakota’s rich heritage of German cuisine. In two days of eating my way through McPherson and Edmunds counties — two of the most German-rich counties in South Dakota — I’d consumed German noodles, cheese buttons, strudels, dumplings, kuchen and sausage that is fried in kitchens from coast to coast. Had my trip simply been about discovering delicious ethnic food, it was a resounding success. But it also became a fascinating journey through hundreds of years of American and European history, tracing how Germans from Russia were forced to cut ties with their homeland twice, and how the food served in several South Dakota restaurants helps descendants retain their cultural identity.

Miranda Brower (left) and Sarah Aman prepare German noodles at the Dakota Cafe in Hosmer.

Hosmer and Eureka are decidedly German communities in a predominantly German state. The federal government stopped asking census respondents about their ethnic heritage in 2010, but in 2000 over 40 percent of South Dakotans claimed a German background, the largest ethnicity reported. Out of 208 people surveyed in Hosmer, 141 (78.8 percent) indicated German heritage and 51 (28.5 percent) marked Russian. In Eureka, 706 of its 868 residents claimed German lineage and 207 said Russian. Listen closely and you’ll still hear a slight German brogue among locals.

So it might have been easy for Dan and Cris Mayer to feel out of place when they moved to Hosmer in 2000. The Mayers had earned a living revamping restaurants in Scandinavian-rich Minnesota and sought a change of scenery. They attended an auction in North Dakota and learned the following day that their $1,000 bid had purchased a house in Hosmer.”We didn’t know what we bid on,” Cris Mayer says.”It was a huge leap of faith.”

A higher power may indeed have been involved. The city of Hosmer had built a restaurant in 1994, but it lacked consistent ownership. The Mayers, with their extensive restaurant background, bought the business and have been making meals ever since.

The Mayers are admittedly comfortable cooking standard restaurant fare, but the town’s German citizenry had grown accustomed to eating a traditional ethnic meal once a week. German cooking was a foreign concept, so they turned to Ruth Schumacher, a Hosmer native who grew up on a farm learning recipes for strudels, dumplings, cheese buttons and hot potato salad from her mother.

“I enjoyed helping my mother any chance I could,” Schumacher says. She discovered as a child how seriously her mother treated cooking.

“My mother was very particular about when her bread rose, and when it was time to go into the oven,” she recalls.”My brother was mischievous anyway. The bread was ready to put in oven and he pinched it and it flopped down. Mother happened to come in the kitchen. My brother was fast, but mother caught me and I got a spanking. I always said it wasn’t my fault, and I blamed my brother until his dying day.”

Schumacher taught at a rural school and in Hosmer for 43 years, all while retaining the German recipes she had learned. When her granddaughter began waitressing for the Mayers, she bragged about the German food Schumacher made. The cafe owners invited her to help on Tuesdays. Now she helps plan the weekly meal and keeps track of what is served.

Ruth Schumacher (left) and Cris Mayer prepare a traditional German meal weekly at the Dakota Cafe.

Schumacher was busily preparing batches of cheese buttons on the day I visited.”You can boil them or you can fry them, just a couple of minutes,” she says, carefully placing a spoonful of dry cottage cheese mixture onto the dough, and folding it into a tiny pocket.

On the east side of the restaurant, box fans on full blast were busily drying piles of German noodles produced by M.A.’s Noodla, Hosmer’s noodle company. Long, flat pieces of dough are run through a machine that produces strings of noodles that can be cooked in soups and dozens of other German dishes. M.A.’s makes 19 varieties that are sold in nearly 30 grocery stores.

Hosmer’s Noodle Company had been in business since 1987 when the Mayers and Hosmer resident Sarah Aman bought it in July and moved its operations to the cafe. A portion of the restaurant is blocked off once a week so the noodlers can work.”Noodling was big for the Germans of this area,” Mayer says.”They noodled when they first arrived here as pioneers. They’d cut them out and lay them over their cupboards to dry.”

Dough foods like noodles, strudels and dumplings are staples of the German diet. They require years to perfect, as I discovered when I met the strudel queen of McPherson County. Vicki Lapka makes a variety of German foods, but she’s the person everyone in Eureka seeks when looking for strudels. We visited her restaurant, the Lyric Lanes, on a Tuesday morning as she prepared her weekly German meal.

Lapka, a fifth-generation descendant of Germans from Russia, learned strudels and other German delicacies from her grandmother while growing up around Mound City. But after high school she and her husband moved to the Twin Cities, and those German recipes lay dormant for 15 years. In January 1992 they moved back to Eureka, bought the Lyric, and inherited its Saturday night German buffet. Lapka’s mother helped her relearn German cooking, and the weekly German meal, now on Tuesday afternoons, has remained a tradition.

Meals include sausage, dumplings, pigs in a blanket or knoepfle soup, but Lapka’s specialty is strudels. It was one of the first recipes she learned, and years of practice have made her an expert. Three electric skillets sat atop her counter when I arrived. She added water, lard, onions and potatoes, then set strudels on top and closed the lid.”If you open them while they’re cooking they just drop,” Lapka explained.”You’ll have flat dumplings and flat strudels. My kids learned the hard way. If I was making dumplings or strudels, they stayed out of the kitchen.”

Strudels are a temperamental food. If the water is just a few degrees too cool or too hot, the yeast won’t react correctly. And of course they must remain covered. Since Lapka can’t see them cook, she tips the pan after 30 minutes of cooking and listens to see if they are frying inside. If there’s no sizzle, she knows they need more time. Before I left, Lapka showed me freezers packed with 150 pounds of strudels to fill orders from townspeople.

Strudels are a local staple and can be served with sausage and carrots at Vicki Lapka’s weekly German meal.

The foods I sampled in Hosmer and Eureka have been staples of the German diet for centuries, and became part of the South Dakota culinary scene because of events that began unfolding in Europe nearly 250 years ago. Eighteenth century Germany was embroiled in near constant war and home to a state religion that all citizens were required to practice. In 1763, German-born Russian empress Catherine the Great extended an olive branch to her people: she offered freedom from military service and 162 acres of land near the Black and Caspian seas.

Nearly 40,000 Germans relocated over the next century, settling in the Volga River valley and the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. They lived in tightly knit pockets, practicing their own religion, making their food and observing other social customs. Their successful farming practices transformed southern Russia into the region’s breadbasket. But in 1871, Czar Alexander II revoked Catherine’s edict. Once again, the Germans sought a new homeland.

At the same time, promoters in Dakota Territory were busily recruiting homesteaders to settle the land many Americans derisively called the Great American Desert. Land agents, aware of the Germans’ plight, sent literature to the Russian steppes, hoping to lure the farmers across the ocean. The Germans were intrigued by the Dakota proposition and sent five men to Yankton in 1873 to scout settlement locations.

Thus began the great German migration, which coincided with the Dakota Boom years of 1878 to 1887. In 1880, there were 81,781 people in Dakota Territory. By 1890 the population had swelled to 328,808. Many Schwartzmeerdeutsche, or Black Sea Germans, settled in what became known as the German Russian Triangle of southeastern North Dakota and northeastern South Dakota, especially McPherson County. Another pocket emerged around Freeman and Menno in Hutchinson County.”We were the original draft dodgers,” explained Sally Roesch Wagner’s uncle John in Wagner’s Daughters of Dakota series.

Wagner’s ancestors left their home in Glueckstahl for a new life in America. Like other German families who endured similar relocations, one comforting constant was food. Wagner wrote that her grandmother’s life remained centered around German cuisine.”Grandma cooked like she had in the old country,” Wagner wrote.”Halupsi, or pigs in a blanket as we called the rice, hamburger, cream and tomato wrapped in a cabbage leaf she made for us.” Other German dishes included hot potato salad, a deep red beet soup called borscht, wine soup, kuechla and kuchen,”the bread dough with a fruit and custard filling that some call a cake and others a pie.”

Gerard Heier and his brother David make pepper sticks, sausage and brats at their Hosmer meat market.

Food has remained a constant comfort for South Dakota’s Germans in a way that’s unmatched among descendants of other European homesteaders.”Nationalities still are associated with cuisines, but the interest in preserving these associations by eating specific foods everyday may vary widely,” wrote Gregory Mader in his master’s thesis on ethnic food in the Upper Midwest. Norwegians continue their traditional lutefisk feeds during winter months. Danes make pancake balls called aebleskiver every summer at Viborg’s Danish Days. And the Dalesburg Midsommar Festival features a Scandinavian smorgasbord annually on the summer solstice. But you can find a traditional German meal in cafes across South Dakota every week throughout the year.

The tiny town of Tolstoy in Potter County was without a cafe until Brad and Joletta Naef arrived in 2009. The Naefs had careers in California, but they retired to the town of 36 people and opened Dakota Jo’s Cafe in the old post office. On Thursdays the Naefs serve a German buffet with dishes Joletta learned to make while growing up on a farm five miles northeast of Tolstoy. Favorites include halupii (a cabbage roll with rice, hamburger and tomato), cheese buttons, spaetzle with German sausage, fleisch kuchle and a pumpkin-filled pastry called plachinda.”And there’s a group of ladies who leave sad if we’ve run out of knoepfle soup,” Naef says.

The Main Street Cafe in Bowdle serves German food on Thursdays and stages a grand German buffet the first Sunday of the month. Farther south, Rita Hoff responded to the demands of Menno’s citizenry and began serving German food on Tuesdays. Another delicacy with German origins is chislic, a local favorite served anytime at Papa’s in Freeman or Meridian Corner, at the junction of highways 18 and 81 halfway between Freeman and Yankton. The skewered mutton arrived in Hutchinson County with John Hoellwarth, a German immigrant from Russia. Papa’s serves 3, 6, 9 or 12 sticks either deep fat fried or grilled with lemon pepper, garlic pepper, barbeque or plain. Meridian Corner offers chislic with garlic salt or a special Greek seasoning.

All the German food served in cafes is homemade, including the sausage, which most likely comes from the local meat market. Gerard Heier and Larry Kauk may not realize it, but they are among the most respected members of the German food culture hierarchy.”Germans developed butchering and sausage making into a fine art,” wrote Rose Marie Gueldner in her book, German Food and Folkways.”Even after the wane of farm butchering in the last half of the 1900s, the reputation of the German Metzger and Wurstmeister was carried on by individuals doing custom butchering and small town grocers making and selling sausage. During settlement and succeeding decades most country people had no reason to patronize the town’s meat market except to occasionally buy several rings, sticks or links of sausage from a butcher so esteemed in the craft that his name and products were spoken with a certain reverence.”

Eureka butchers Larry Kauk (left) and his son Tim ship their authentic German fry sausage from coast to coast.

Meat is king in German cuisine, and pork is the star. German families chose to butcher hogs because cows produced milk and far more meat than a family could consume before spoilage. With hogs, families could”use everything but the squeal,” Gueldner wrote. Butchers carved hams, roasts, bacon and sausage. Hog fat became lard, and the intestines provided perfect casings for specialty sausages.

Heier and Kauk both come from butchering families. Heier’s ancestors followed the Germany-to-Russia-to-South Dakota route, disembarking the train in Hosmer and homesteading six miles northwest of town. His father, Joseph, opened Heier’s Meat Market one block off Hosmer’s main street in 1966 using his grandfather’s locally famous sausage recipe.

Heier began working in the locker at age 10, but he left Hosmer to work as a computer technician in Rapid City. He returned in 1981 to take over the meat market after his father died. He and his brother, David, have tinkered with the family recipe, and their sausage remains so popular that they make 100,000 pounds every year.”We’ll sell the spices, but we won’t give out the recipe,” Heier says.”We’ve had a lot of calls from people who want to know, but we won’t give it out.”

Other wurstmeisters follow the tenets of sausage secrecy, but not Larry Kauk. Both of Kauk’s grandfathers were butchers, and he learned the trade on the family farm near Artas. In 1982 he built a huge locker and processing facility on the north side of Eureka along Highway 47. Kauk’s meat market produces hams, steaks, brats, but their signature item is fry sausage. They ship hundreds of pounds of fry sausage to McPherson County expatriates from coast to coast.

“There’s no secret to it,” Kauk says, matter-of-factly.”We make it the way the old Germans did in the old days. You take good, fresh pork meat and add salt, pepper and garlic. I’m sorry if you were looking for some big surprise. The people who used to make it years ago are all in the grave, so that’s why I keep doing it. That’s what I hear all the time. ëDad used to make that and now we can’t find it anymore.’ So we’re not doing anything different.”

Still, people can’t seem to replicate Kauk’s fry sausage. That’s evident in the 2,000 pounds he and his cadre of butchers make every week.

Traditional German cuisine remains popular around the state.”You should have bought me some liver sausage,” one relative said after he’d learned I had visited Kauk’s. The butchers and chefs I met are artisans, guardians of a food culture that dates back hundreds of years and across three continents. But I noticed a lack of youth in the places I visited. Perhaps they are steering clear of the heavy German food, especially when so much attention is directed toward obesity. Foods cooked in lard don’t necessarily subscribe to any nutritionist’s plan for healthy eating. Many German recipes have stood the test of time, but some small town chefs worry that eventually no one will remember how to prepare them.

“That’s really sad,” Lapka says.”They’ll come in and ask for a pan full of strudels. Well they could cook them, but they don’t know how. It’s so easy to just come buy the strudels, go home and cook them, but they don’t want to do that. Once I get up there to where I can’t really do it anymore, my kids have never really learned it. My daughter can do knoepfle, but she hasn’t mastered strudels yet. I hope to teach them. If we don’t keep this going, we’re going to lose it all.”

If any 20- or 30-somethings want to learn to make strudels, dumplings or fleish kuechle, they will find many willing teachers. In the meantime, a hot bowl of knoepfle soup or a plate of cheese buttons is never more than a few days away.

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Ruth Schumacher’s Cheese Buttons

Traditional German cheese buttons can be boiled or fried.

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Ingredients

Dough:

3 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 eggs

3/4 cup water

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Filling:

22 ounces cottage cheese

2 eggs

salt and pepper to taste

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Combine ingredients and roll out dough. Cut into 4-inch squares. Put 1 tablespoon of the cheese mixture onto square. Press edges to seal. Boil for 7 to 10 minutes until they float and then drain, or fry in butter at 350 degrees for 2 to 3 minutes on each side. Top with fried breadcrumbs or seasoned salt.

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Hutchinson County Haven

The fertile fields of Hutchinson County became a haven for ethnic Germans fleeing Russia in the 1870s. They had lived there for years, enticed by Catherine the Great to transform the region around the Black Sea into Europe’s breadbasket. She offered freedom from military service, but when Czar Alexander II rescinded that promise in 1871, the pacifist Germans sought new land. Several thousand emigrated to southeastern Dakota Territory beginning in 1873. By the end of the decade, Germans had established farms up the James River Valley to the Menno and Freeman areas, where their descendants still work the land. Joel Schwader, of Rapid City, grew up in Freeman. He visited his hometown this summer and shared these photos from rural Hutchinson County.

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Freeman’s Savory Soup

By John Andrews

Green beans star in Joyce Hofer’s soup, but its flavor comes from summer savory, an herb rarely used in other German cooking.

Call it what you want: pepper weed, bohnenkraut, gartenkraut or a pillar of the spice mixture”herbes de provence.” Germans in Freeman know it simply as summer savory, an essential component of the green bean soup that has been part of Schmeckfest‘s first course since the annual”tasting festival” began in 1959.

Summer savory boasts a piney, peppery flavor, similar to thyme or oregano. It is believed to help digest beans, which could explain how savory, otherwise used sparingly in German cuisine, became such an important ingredient in green bean soup.”It has such a distinct flavor,” says Joyce Hofer.”I don’t know that they use it anywhere else but the green bean soup. That’s all I ever use it in, too.”

Green bean soup, along with noodle soup and salad, is one of the first dishes served at the family style buffet in the basement of Pioneer Hall on the Freeman Academy campus. The soup has its origins with the Low German people, one of three Anabaptist ethnic groups that founded Freeman in the early 1880s. The others (the Hutters and the Swiss) traditionally prepared their own signature dishes to be served at Schmeckfest. Hutters made noodle soup, beef stew and their unique sweetened sauerkraut. The Swiss were known for their poppy seed rolls.”You just kind of stuck to the dishes you knew,” says Hofer, who counts herself among the Hutters.”Now it’s done communally, because there aren’t enough Low German women to make just the green bean soup.”

Summer savory isn’t a culinary secret, though Schmeckfest diners are often heard asking what gives the soup its unique essence. The herb’s history can be traced to early Greece. Mythological creatures called satyrs were often shown wearing crowns of savory. People in the Middle Ages wore savory garlands to prevent drowsiness. When the Emperor Charlemagne ruled over Western Europe in the early ninth century, he included summer savory on his list of herbs to be grown in his royal gardens. Savory’s role in German cooking began at about the same time, when monks brought the herb from its native region along the Mediterranean Sea in southern Europe to their monastery gardens in Germany.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the upper class citizenry of Western Europe grew savory in”gardens of delight.” Today you’ll find it growing in the backyard gardens of several Freeman chefs. A handful of gardeners sell tiny bags of savory at the Country Kitchen shop set up during Schmeckfest every year. Hofer bought a bag for $3.50 in 2013, and was still using it as 2014’s festival approached.”I try to buy enough to use through the year,” she says.”What you can grow is better than what you can buy, but what you get at the store is better than nothing.”

While savory dispenses a unique flavor, large quantities of the herb eaten directly can be unpalatable. That’s why Hofer places sprigs inside a tea strainer, and hangs it over the edge of the pot as the soup simmers.”You probably wouldn’t want to eat the savory itself,” Hofer says.”It has a slight aroma, but it really comes out when it mixes with other ingredients of the soup.”

Bought or grown, that’s what makes Schmeckfest’s green bean soup a dish to savor.

Schmeckfest 2019 is scheduled for March 29-30 and April 5-6 on the Freeman Academy campus.

Gr¸ne Schauble Suppe

Joyce Hofer’s green bean soup recipe is adapted from the Schmeckfest recipe that feeds 1,000 guests and 250 workers on each of the festival’s four nights.

ham bone (optional)

1/2 gallon water‚Ä®

1/2 lb. smoked ham‚Ä®

2 1/2 to 3 cups potatoes

1/2 cup chopped onion

3 or 4 sprigs summer savory‚Ä®

1/2 cup finely diced or ground carrots

2 cans string beans (16 oz. total)‚Ä®

2 tablespoons sour cream

Cook smoked ham bone or smoked ham in water until tender. The last half hour before serving, add potatoes (cut in 1/2-inch cubes), carrots, onions and summer savory, using a tea strainer hung over the edge of the pot. When the vegetables are tender, add beans, including the juice, and sour cream. May substitute 1 pound of fresh-cut green beans and cream or butter for sour cream, if desired. Ham base may be added for extra flavor. Hofer says the soup is best when allowed to simmer at least an hour, but it can be eaten when completely heated.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.