Article Written by Bill Hughes (dated approximately 1986)
"FORMER POW IS NOW PROUD CITIZEN"
No offense was intended and none taken when the speaker at the Monticello Kiwanis Club remarked that he was the only one in the room attired with a suit coat and tie.
It was quite a difference from what Heinz Booch, the speaker, wore when he last spent time in Jasper County. That was in 1944 and he was wearing the drab government issue clothing of a prisoner of war (POW).
How he came to be back here, some 42 years later, is a story Mr. Booch enjoys telling, and one that enthralls his listeners. His listeners a couple of weeks ago, were members and guests of the local civic club, convened for lunch at the Tillman House Restaurant.
In the audience were a couple of men who knew, or could have known him "when" E. C. Kelly, Jr., now president of the Bank of Monticello and a farmer, was growing peaches in Jasper County in the war days, and he welcomed the help he received, courtesy of the U.S. Army, from German POW's.
Mr. Kelly has kept in touch with several of his one-time involuntary helpers, among them, Mr. Booch, it was that contact that brought the well dressed speaker to the Kiwanis Club.
Also in the audience was Paul W. Hafer who came to Monticello in the 1940's courtesy of the U.S. Army - not as a prisoner but as a guard. He, along with Gordon Mitchell and Harold Axel, were among the soldiers who met and married Jasper County girls. Both he and Mr. Mitchell have lived here since.
But upon being re-introduced, Mr. Hafer and Mr. Booch both admitted they didn't remember each other. That's not surprising, considering that there were as many as 1,500 POW's in the Monticello camp in 1944, and an appropriate number of Army guards.
Documentation of that aspect of World War II is sketchy locally, but the prisoners placed here were among some 425,000 Axis POW's brought to the U.S. during the war and put to work, mostly on farms, to make up for the loss of manpower caused by the need for able bodied men in the armed services.
For Heinz Booch, and undoubtedly many other, it turned out to be a good trip. Though he was repatriated after the war, he later was able to come to this country for formal education and eventually U.S. Citizenship, all part of the story he enjoys telling.
The well dressed remark at the Kiwanis Club was a bit of humor. One thing, Mr. Booch likes about America, including Monticello, he said was the informality of the people. His comment about the assembled group was a good example.
He didn't make the point all that dramatically, but what a contrast it must have been of a man who first saw the U.S. from the deck of a troop ship then sent to North Africa attached to renowned Field Marshal Erwin Rommell's Afrika Korps.
But, about the time he arrived, the Afrika Korps was collapsing under the pressure of the U.S. and British invasions. With a lot of other non-combatant military personnel, Mr. Booch was shunted off into "non essential" duty. He wound up with an anti-aircraft battary with no guns facing the British Seventh Army.
"We retreated to a peninsula" he recalled. "Then we had no choice but to go into the sea or capitulate". He and those with him capitulated.
They later were herded onto a troop ship at the Algerian port of Oran and shipped to Newport News, Virginia. From there, his POW contingent was shipped to what was then Camp Polk in Louisiana, then back to what was Camp Wheeler in Macon. A POW "satellite" camp had been established in Monticello, and that is where Mr. Booch wound up for most of his POW duty in the U.S.
"I had never seen a fresh peach before", he recalled. His employer, of sorts, Mr. Kelly recalls that as many as 100 freight carloads of peaches were loaded daily in Jasper County at the height of the season. "Most of those boys (the German prisoners) were good workers."
Mr. Booch also remembers doing other farm work, including cutting pulpwood. He also came to know and respect his employers, including Mr. Kelly.
He has since dined with Mr. and Mrs. Kelly at their home in Monticello.
Unlike many of his comrades, Mr. Booch had some knowledge of the English language - he learned it in high school. Thus he frequently was attached to work details as an interpreter.
He fondly remembers his relationship with the late Benton, also a large Jasper County farmer. "We'd talk about politics, the war, economics, philosophy and things like that", says Mr. Booch.
In a favorite story, the ex-POW tells how Mr. Benton once handed him his car keys to go get his automobile, parked maybe a mile away on a dirt road. The young prisoner got stuck in a ditch trying to turn the car around.
"I figured maybe he thought I was escaping," said Mr. Booch, who at the time was merely trying to get the car out of the ditch. At about the time he did, Mr. Benton came walking up.
"I wasn't worried about you escaping", he said to the prisoner, "I figured you'd found that bottle in the glove pocket" (Mr. Booch neither drinks nor smokes, he says now.)
After the war, Mr. Booch was returned to Europe, but spent some 18 months in Britain as a prisoner working in various places. By that time, he was old enough to shave regularly and know something about what was happening in the world.
One of the things that was happening was the partition of Germany and his native town of Koethen was in what now is East Germany. His parents had died, and he saw no reason to return there - and he never has.
Rather, when finally freed, he moved to Wildeshaussen in West Germany to live with relatives. It was there he was visited by the Rev. Bob Hays, a former Methodist pastor in Monticello who had given weekly sermons at the POW camp here.
Through Mr. Hays, Mr. Booch was able to obtain a scholarship to Asbury College in Kentucky. After being graduated there he returned for a short time to Germany where he married the girl who had become his sweetheart. Then, with the help of a friend he had made in the U.S., he returned to this country in 1954 with a job with Sears, Roebuck and Company.
He stayed with that company for some 20 years in Atlanta, then a couple year ago joined the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (MARTA).
That's where he's working now, in MARTA's central control facility. "I'm doing much like I was doing as a control tower operator", he says.
Mr. Booch speaks with only the slightest hint of an accent. He and his wife have reared three children in this country, where he became a U.S. citizen in 1959. He sometimes speaks humbly.
"There are some things you can't choose", he says. "You can't choose the country where you're born. I'm fortunate to have had a second choice."
He says the U.S. has some "faults"., He can't comprehend why so many people don't participate in elections, for instance. "My children have visited in Germany and elsewhere", he says. They agree he continues that the U.S. is the world's best.
"I'm proud to be a citizen", he says. "And I hope I'm a citizen you can be proud of."