Christianity Today September 10, 2026 7 min signal 2026-09-10

When Nazi Prisoners Worshiped with Iowa Farmers

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

September 10, 2026

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Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Courtesy of Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

On April 9, 1944, a line of cars carrying members of a church choir passed by a guard station and through a break in a fence capped with barbed wire. The choir, along with a church organist and a minister from Trinity Lutheran Church, had agreed to lead a worship service for inmates at a prisoner-of-war camp in Algona, Iowa. Months earlier, the POWs had been fighting in service of the Nazi cause as members of the German military. Now it was Easter Sunday, and the captives wanted to worship. The minister led the service in both German and English.

When I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation, I came across brief accounts from the Trinity Lutheran Church choir director, Bernice Rising, who recalled singing “In the Garden” and “Have Thine Own Way, Lord” with the captured Nazis. “The prisoners sang beautifully,” she wrote. Organist Florence Brown said the experience of leading worship for the POWs was “inspiring.”

“It was an emotional time for [the prisoners],” Rising said. “They were in a strange land thousands of miles from home.” She recalled that many of the Germans cried when they sang the Lord’s Prayer in their language.

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“There was not a dry eye in the service,” she wrote.

Perhaps surprisingly, sentimental stories about the relationships between POWs and Iowans during World War II are commonplace. Most able-bodied Iowan men eligible for service had been summoned to active duty, so Camp Algona—a hastily constructed complex in rural Kossuth County where over 10,000 prisoners lived during the course of the war—was minimally staffed and relatively low security. One might assume Iowan neighbors were skittish about the captured Nazis down the road. But in the midst of a labor shortage on Midwestern farms, the community welcomed the much-needed farm hands and other economic benefits. It takes a lot of food to supply a mess hall that serves thousands every day.

When I spoke to Iowans whose parents and grandparents remembered Camp Algona, they shared stories about eating dinner with POWs on family farms, visiting on Christmas to view a Nativity sculpture the prisoners had created, and practicing German together. Enemies worshiping in two languages could easily become another of these heartwarming anecdotes.

But nostalgia can get in the way of understanding how this Easter service actually worked—not by pretending the war didn’t exist but by humanizing the other worshipers. This service provides a lesson for Christians today in our fractured political culture.

For Iowans, the confrontation with a much-feared group of soldiers was both uncomfortable and mundane. The Nazis had crooked teeth and broken bootlaces. They weren’t a different kind of human after all. That insight was reiterated by recognizable hymns both sides could sing. If nothing else, German soldiers and Iowans could make music together—much like how having read the same book as a fellow passenger provides something to talk about when you’re stuck sitting next to each other on an airplane.

Still, this wasn’t small talk on an airplane. The Iowans were singing alongside men who may have once been shooting at their neighbors and sons. I’m sure these Christians couldn’t just forget that grim reality, even as the organ swelled. How could they? Why should they?

Congregational worship doesn’t wipe away enmity or injustice. But it can cultivate empathy. We sing next to people who disagree with us, and we wonder, What do these people believe about the God we’re proclaiming? Or even, simply, Do they like this song? We become aware of the interiority of strangers, friends, enemies. We raise our voices together, even if just for a few passing moments. I hear the vibrations of others’ vocal cords. I know that they have their own petitions and confessions and that God hears us all—these human creatures he has made.

Theologian Jeremy Begbie suggests that music shapes us by “retiming” us. To play or sing a piece, we have to take the time required, no more and no less. You can’t fast-forward through a song, because the tempo, the pace of the passing notes and rests, is integral to the piece of music. When we corporately worship, we collectively take time to create something together.

Christian congregational worship has always facilitated the gathering of people with different political beliefs and social norms. In the body of Christ, we don’t have to fake unity of mind, because Jesus is our unity (Eph. 4:4–5). Singing helps us be together, bear with one another, and say true things about God when there are few other things about which we can agree.

But worship is not a ritual of collective forgetting. We do not set aside our differences at the door. Worship is far more radical. It demands that we actively remember how we are divided yet recognize our shared humanity before God.

Eventually, the music will stop, the service will end, and I will have to decide whether to shake a hand, ask a question, offer a smile and nod, or slip out the back door to avoid interaction. Whatever I choose, I have to contend with the reality that I am one member of the body, and I don’t get to choose who else is included. This can be an uncomfortable membership. I would not have blamed the Trinity Lutheran Church choir for deciding, No, these people are doing too much harm, and we can’t worship with them.

One Easter service certainly didn’t erase the divides between these German POWs and Midwestern farm families. No one pretended there wasn’t a war. Proximity to the enemy possibly felt dangerous or disloyal. Should we be willing to eat and sing with people who have done so much violence?

To some Iowans, driving a church choir through a barbed-wire fence probably felt like giving adversaries an undeserved gift in a moment when coldness and indifference were more suited. They chose grace instead.

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today. She is a coauthor of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting and the author of Thin, Holy, and Never Enough (forthcoming).

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