Friday, May 23, 2025
This year is the 80th anniversary of the closing of Camp Concordia, the 10th anniversary of the opening of the POW Camp Concordia Museum, and the 10th anniversary of celebrating Victory Day.
Victory Day is the first Saturday in May. The celebration at Camp Concordia will feature tours, displays, WWII German and American re-enactors, and presentations on how Camp Concordia was built, and when it closed in 1945. Podunk BBQ will have its food truck at the site all day.
At the 50th anniversary of Victory Day, in 1995, three former German POWs came to Concordia for the event. Lowell May, author of Camp Concordia: German POWs In The Midwest, remembers the German prisoners saying, “Being captured and sent to the United States was the best thing to happen to them.”
Reinhard Mohn, one of the German prisoners of war at Camp Concordia, became a German billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He passed away in 2009.
According to Penguin Random House, Mohn was the great-grandson of Bertelsmann’s founding publisher; Bertelsmann is one of the world’s leading media conglomerates.
Camp Concordia was one of the largest POW camps of its kind. The facility housed 4,000 German prisoners on 160 acres of land, employing 800 American soldiers and 200 civilians.
Camp Concordia was run under the rules of the Geneva Convention. This allowed the prisoners to be housed, fed, dressed, and have access to healthcare.
May said that some of the prisoners worked on local farms during their stay at Camp Concordia and even made lifelong connections with those farmers after the war.
This year’s Victory Day celebration is Saturday, May 3, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at POW Camp Concordia, 1550 Union Road, which is located just north of Concordia, off of Highway 81.
The schedule for Victory Day is as follows: 9:45 a.m., Welcome and Flag Raising; 10 a.m., Celebration begins; 10:30 a.m., Museum room tour; 11 a.m., Re-enactment #1; 11:30 a.m., Presentation #1—“Building the Camp in 90 Days” by Susie Haver; noon, lunch break; 12:30 p.m., Presentation #2—“Life at Camp Concordia” by Lowell May; 1 p.m., Re-enactment #2; 1:30 p.m., Presentation #3—“Life at Camp Concordia” by Lowell May; 2 p.m., Museum room tour; 2:30 p.m., Presentation #4—“What happened to the Camp” by Sue Sutton; 3 p.m., Victory Day concludes.
