Magazine

On a quiet day in the St. Olaf College archives, David Scheil ‘25 held in his hands a letter dated just weeks before the sender’s death. It was from Private Paul Swensen ‘45, a former St. Olaf baseball player who fought across Europe with the 81st Chemical Mortar Battalion, and was killed in action 37 days before the war ended. In his final message to Gertrude Hilleboe — the beloved longtime dean and 1912 graduate of St. Olaf who kept up a personal correspondence with hundreds of Oles in uniform — Swensen wrote: “May God bring peace this year.”

 ”It was just one sentence, and that was it — I was like, ‘This is why I became a history major, to be holding him in my hands,” Scheil said of reading that sentence, written in blue pen ink 80 years before. “I got a little emotional when I was holding the letter. It was just so emotionally heavy, thinking that this Ole wrote this while he was over in Nazi-occupied Germany. It’s kind of mind-boggling for me to imagine a place as normal and close to me as St. Olaf having an involvement in these huge world events — and here is a guy who died for his country, who walked around the same campus that I walk around. I think about that a lot.”

That moment became a touchstone in Scheil’s two-year project to tell the story of 36 St. Olaf baseball players who served in World War II. The result is the powerful digital exhibit, “The War Years: St. Olaf Baseball During World War Two,” created in collaboration with Marie M. Meyer Distinguished Professor of History Steve Hahn and the St. Olaf College Archives, that traces the journey of these students from campus to combat — and back again. 

Scheil says the idea for the project began at the intersection of a long-standing interest in WWII and his personal connection to the St. Olaf baseball team, where he’s a pitcher. During his first year, he explored the archived team rosters for sport, but was surprised by his discoveries. 

“I was thinking, well, all of the guys who played baseball at St. Olaf during the war years would’ve been draft eligible, because they were 18 to 22 years olds and they were all healthy because they played a sport,” Scheil recalled on his initial hypothesis. “But actually, we played full seasons every single year of WWII — I would’ve expected to see a drop off or we only played two games. So my first thought was, well, what’s going on here, what’s the story behind it?”

He filed the question away until his sophomore year, when he started cross-referencing Viking yearbooks with family Ancestry.com records and digitized draft cards. Then came letters. Obituaries. Handwritten notes. A letter from St. Olaf President Lars Boe. A POW camp record. A major league baseball questionnaire.

“I kind of nibbled away at it here and there, just on the side, as a project for fun,” Scheil says. “It was spring of my junior year that I met with Professor Hahn at the end of the semester after having a class with him. And I just told him that I had this cool idea: I have the rosters of these baseball guys that fought in World War II, and I told him just from my preliminary research, it looks like a lot of them served in the war and I think it could be a really cool story. He was like, ‘Yeah, let’s make that a project next year.’ So this past year was when we really started to dig into it.” 

Hahn, for his part, recognized Scheil’s research instincts immediately. 

“He was one of those students that you flag right away,” Hahn says. “Highly engaged, highly competent. He’d already won the Rowberg Prize for a different essay on Revolutionary War pension applications and PTSD, so I knew he could pull something like this off.”

Together, they shaped the project into an independent study — first a foundational research paper on the historiography of baseball, then a full semester devoted to archival exploration and digital storytelling. 

While 36 Ole baseball players served during WWII, Scheil chose to center the exhibit on four whose stories could be deeply documented: Ralph Nitz ‘41, Roy “Shorty” Thorson ‘37, Orval Amdahl ‘41, and Swensen. 

Nitz, a German major, had signed a minor league contract before the war. He served as an interrogator of German POWs and appears in official Nuremberg Trial transcripts as a witness to a document in the prosecution of Albert Speer. Nitz’s son, Professor Emeritus of Physics David Nitz ‘73, helped Scheil track down records. 

Thorson was a fighter pilot with the elite VMF-122 (Black Sheep Squadron), credited with multiple enemy aircraft strikes in the Pacific and awarded the Meritorious Achievement Medal. 

Swensen landed at Normandy on D-Day and died near Kassel, Germany, a little over a month before the war ended. He is buried in the American Cemetery and Memorial in Lorraine, France, and he was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart. His final letter is featured in the digital exhibit. 

And Amdahl, a biology major from Lanesboro, Minnesota, was stationed in Nagasaki days after the atomic bomb was dropped. Seventy years later, he made headlines for returning a Japanese officer’s looted sword to the family of its original owner. 

“[Amdahl] and other guys find this huge pile of Japanese samurai swords that had been discarded, officers’ swords that they had to give up when they surrendered that they left identification tags on because they assumed that they would be getting them back at some point,” Scheil explains. “And Amdahl takes this sword, he brings it home after the war, and he takes care of it for years and years and years — he oiled it every day — and in 2013 he was being interviewed, and he mentioned the sword, and they ended up finding the grandson of the original officer who gave the sword up. And Orval returned the sword in 2013 in this big public ceremony at the Como Park Zoo Arboretum of all places. I think that story really highlights the remarkable things these men who served did — and they all started here.”

From the start, Hahn challenged Scheil to approach the project like a professional historian or museum curator. 

“One of the reasons we went with the digital project is because [Scheil] has already demonstrated that he’s a superior writer — he had nothing to prove there — and the digital platforms allow for an engagement with the public that a long essay just wouldn’t,” Hahn says.

“It’s  public facing — this isn’t a paper that you write for professor and one person reads it and it gets recycled at the end of the semester. This is something that has a value beyond the walls of Holland Hall, beyond St. Olaf, and I like to provide opportunities for students to really do hands-on historical work. It’s really about not just being a passive consumer of history or any discipline. Imagine doing a science curriculum and you never stepped into a lab, you know, and in a sense that we don’t have labs in history, but this is sort of our way of providing a lab experience, if you will.”

In addition to weekly advising meetings, Hahn guided Scheil through the interpretive process: refining his questions, grappling with fragmentory records, balancing narrative and analysis. But he emphasized that the work belongs to Scheil. 

 ”[Scheil’s] the perfect independent study researcher, because he’s so self motivated,” Hahn says. “One thing we share is we’re both big sports fans, so I was invested because of him and also invested because I enjoy sports — we had a lot to talk about.”

Now that the project is complete, Hahn feels it reflects the heart of the History Department’s philosophy. 

“I use the phrase, you come into St. Olaf maybe as a consumer of history, and we want you to leave a producer. You’re generating knowledge, you’re generating deliverable outputs — and [Scheil’s] project just fits so perfectly in that,” he says. 

None of it would have been possible without the College Archives — and the stewardship of Lead Archivist Kristell Benson, who assisted Scheil throughout his research. 

“[Scheil] came in and he said ‘There are these baseball players here at the school who went off to war, and I’m interested in seeing what you might have on them.’ I listed the types of materials we had, and I said, ‘Unfortunately, none of that’s described at an item level, meaning you’re going to have to go through lots of files to find anything that might be pertinent with the chance of no success.’ And he was like, ‘Okay. Good to know,’” Benson recalls with a laugh. “But he actually did find quite a few letters that the soldiers had written to the school.”

Among the discoveries: emotional letters from soldiers to Dean Hilleboe, reflections on St. Olaf’s wartime campus culture, and newspaper clippings with local perspectives on international affairs. 

“Seeing these primary sources where you’re connecting to this person on a different level and you’re seeing their words — sometimes in their own handwriting — I think it really deepens the learning and understanding, and it kind of gives you a different sense of empathy with what they went through,” Benson says. 

While the digital exhibit offers depth, the next goal is visibility: a physical display in Skoglund Athletic Center, near the Hall of Fame wall (which contains the names of several baseball veterans).

Scheil has secured a display case and is working with Athletics and College Archives to include artifacts like a 1930s baseball glove, scanned letters, and a uniform. A QR code will link visitors to the full online exhibit. 

Though the Skoglund display will be temporary, President Susan Rundell Singer has expressed support for a permanent campus installation. 

“It’s important that their stories aren’t just told once and then never repeated,” Scheil says. “They deserve to be known.”

Scheil, who is playing a final baseball season on campus this spring while preparing for law school, says the project has shaped his understanding of St. Olaf’s mission. 

“ I choose to believe that St. Olaf, and their experience here, played a big role in the people that they were when they were involved in the greatest conflict the world has ever seen,” Scheil says of the featured soldiers. “I, as a senior myself, getting ready to graduate and hearing about St. Olaf preparing us and sending us out into the world, I think about the fact that St. Olaf, without knowing, prepared these guys to be sent out and participate in this huge conflict. I think it reflects really well on the school and its athletics program. We talk a lot about St. Olaf not being just a place to get an education, but also a place where you gain values and your worldview is broadened. And I like to think that maybe that played a role in Ralph Nitz interacting with a German POW in maybe a more kind way, or in Orval Amdahl deciding to return this Japanese sword 70 years after the war ended.”

Hahn says the project also helps bridge a growing generational distance from the WWII era. 

 ”As the Greatest Generation has died off, many living Americans, especially the younger ones, have no real direct connection to World War II era or the Great Depression, they have no direct memory of things like the rise of fascism in Europe or the Cold War,” he says. “They grew up in a world that is cynical about the United States and its role in the world, and for good reason, but I think there are moments in the World War II era where the United States was presenting its best self, and that these young men who fought are presenting in microcosm the best that the United States had to offer.”