Daniel Markowitz grew up listening to his grandparents’ stories and now credits them for his own love of history and storytelling.
Markowitz will read from his first novel, The Spoils of Victory, at a Sunday-Afternoon-at-the-Museum program at Bethel College’s Kauffman Museum, Nov. 9 at 3 p.m. in the museum auditorium.
The Spoils of Victory is the first book in Markowitz’s planned Prisoners of War series that follows “a battle-hardened German POW and a devout Mennonite woman discover[ing] the contours of forgiveness and love in America’s heartland.”
The story focuses on a largely forgotten aspect of World War II history – the confinement and employment of hundreds of thousands of German POWs throughout the United States from 1943-46.
The reading is free and open to the public. Copies of the book will be for sale, with a book signing to follow the reading, along with a pop-up exhibit of POW artifacts from the Kauffman Museum collection.
Kauffman Museum’s current special exhibit is also focused on a World War, in this case the first, in “Voices of Conscience: Peace Witness in the Great War.”
“Voices of Conscience” opened at the beginning of the fall 2025 semester, and will be at the museum through the 2025-26. Itlifts up World War I peace protesters, tells related stories of resistance, and suggests parallels to the culture of war, propaganda and violence in the world today.
More programming specific to “Voices of Conscience” will follow in the coming months, especially in the spring semester but starting with the annual Living Endowment Dinner on Nov. 14, when Dr. Susan Schultz Huxman will speak on “Mennonite Rhetoric During World War I.”
Reservations for the dinner can be made online at https://kauffmanmuseum.org/events/ or by calling 316-283-1612 during business hours.Markowitz is a descendant of German and Slovenian immigrants who came to America in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
He has a bachelor’s degree in social sciences from Emporia (Kan.) State University and a law degree from the University of Kansas.
Now living in southern California, Markowitz grew up in Olpe, Kan., at the edge of the Flint Hills, listening to his grandparents’ and other beloved elders’ stories of their home countries, traditions and the hardships and joys experienced on the way to stability and prosperity.
His “love for history and storytelling grew out of their often humorous and sometimes hyperbolic oral chronicles.”
In The Spoils of Victory, Rolf Mueller is a young corporal from Olpe, Germany, who is captured in Tunisia in 1943. Eventually, he ends up on a farm near Peabody, Kan., as a prisoner of war, and meets a young Mennonite woman his own age, Loretta Unruh.
During World War II, nearly 400,000 German soldiers – most of them taken prisoner, like Rolf, in North Africa in 1943 – were sent to POW camps in the United States. Many were hired out to farmers and are credited with saving the American harvest in 1943-45.
Wynn Goering, Albuquerque, the current chair of the Bethel College board, said about The Spoils of Victory, “Dan Markowitz brings a historian’s curiosity, an attorney’s attention to detail, and a philosopher’s appreciation for moral complexities in this story of German POWs working among Kansas Mennonites in WWII. It is a tale well worth reading – and pondering.
Regular Kauffman Museum hours are Tues.-Fri. 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 1:30-4:30 p.m., closed Mondays and major holidays. Admission to the current special exhibit and the permanent exhibits – “Of Land and People,” “Mirror of the Martyrs” and “Mennonite Immigrant Furniture” – is $5 for adults, $3 for children ages 6-16, and free to Kauffman Museum members and children under 6. The museum store is open during regular museum hours. See kauffmanmuseum.org or the museum Facebook page for more information.
