Shelby County P.O.W. Camp

Shelbyville was home to a Prisoner of War camp from 1944-1945. Surrounded by barbed wire, around 300 (mostly) German P.O.W.s resided in camps set up in Shelbyville across from the current location of Shelby County High School, and in Eminence, at the Henry County Fairgrounds. Most had been captured in North Africa, while serving under Rommel.

There was a severe labor shortage at that time, since a large number of our young men were fighting in Europe and the Pacific, so the War Department set up these camps all over the country to work the farms and in various factories. The prisoners here were said to have saved the tobacco harvest in 1944, as there was no one else to do the work.

The camp was administered by Fort Knox, and a detail of around twenty P.O.W.s would be dispatched to the fields at a time, under the surveillance of soldiers armed with machine guns. Despite concerns from the community, there were few escape attempts, and there were no other issues reported. Some local residents built friendships with the prisoners and continued to correspond with them after their return to Germany.