Every German POW Said the Same Thing About Fighting Americans—Here’s What Terrified Them

Every German POW Said the Same Thing About Fighting Americans—Here’s What Terrified Them

For over 50 years, the United States government kept these recordings sealed in a vault. Thousands of hours, 150,000 pages. The voices of captured German soldiers speaking in what they believed was privacy about the American boys who had defeated them. When the tapes were finally opened, historians expected to hear boasting, defiance, excuses.

What they found instead was something no one had prepared for. Every single prisoner, huh? From teenage conscripts to Nazi generals said the same thing about fighting Americans. This is what they said. And this is the story America was never told. The forest smelled of pine and diesel and something worse. Something the men had learned to recognize without naming it.

 It was December 1944. The Arden, a place of stone farm houses and narrow roads and hills that folded into one another like the pages of a closed book. Snow had been falling for three days in the gray light of dawn. A German sergeant walked out from between the trees with his hands raised above his head.

 He was perhaps 30 years old, perhaps 40. It was hard to tell. His face was black with soot, and his eyelashes were white with frost, and his uniform hung on him like something borrowed from a larger man. Behind him, the woods were silent. His company was gone. Not retreating, not regrouping, just gone in the way that men become gone when American artillery finds them in the open.

 The American soldiers who took him prisoner did not speak German, did not speak German. They did not need to. The sergeant was muttering something in broken English over and over. the same phrase as though it were a prayer he had rehearsed while lying in the snow waiting to die. Something about the shells, something about the sky.

 The Americans searched him and took his sidearm and gave him a cigarette. Oh, he smoked it with hands that would not stop shaking. [clears throat] And then because this was war and there were procedures for such things, they marched him away toward a rear area and from there to a holding camp and uh from there eventually to a place that officially did not exist.

 He did not know it yet, but he would soon find himself on the banks of the Ptoac River in Virginia in a compound of 87 wooden buildings surrounded by barbed wire. He did not know that the walls of his cell would contain microphones the size of watermelons. He did not know that every word he spoke to his fellow prisoners in what he believed was privacy would be transcribed by men wearing headphones in a concrete bunker 50 yards away.

 He did not know that what he was about to say and what thousands of other German prisoners were about to say would remain classified for more than half a century. He only knew that he had survived and that he needed to tell someone what he had seen. To understand what those prisoners said, we have to go back not to 1944, but to a time before the war had come to America at all, a time when German officers looked at the map of the world and laughed at the idea that the United States would ever be a serious military threat. In 1939, the Vermacht was the

most feared army on Earth. In 5 weeks, they had conquered Poland. In 6 weeks, the following spring, they had done what the Kaiser’s armies had failed to do in four years of trench warfare. They had defeated France. They had driven the British Expeditionary Force into the sea at Dunkirk. They had rewritten the rules of war with a doctrine of speed and steel and radiocoordinated violence that the world had never seen.

 Their soldiers were trained beyond anything the democracies could match. Their non-commissioned officers were given authority that western armies reserved for captains. Their tanks were feared. Their pilots were feared. Their generals were studied in war colleges from London to Tokyo. and their propaganda ministry under a small man with a limp named Joseph Gobles had been very clear about what Americans were.

 Americans, according to the daily broadcasts, were soft. They were decadent. They were a mongrel race of jazz musicians and film actors corrupted by immigration and dominated by Jewish bankers incapable of the discipline required for modern war. Herman Guring the head of the Luftvafa with dismissed the American threat with contempt at a conference in Berlin.

American industry, he said, was a joke. And for a moment in the winter of 1943, it seemed he might have been right. Casserine Pass, February 1943, Tunisia. It was the first time American soldiers had met the Vermacht in serious combat. And it went exactly as the propaganda ministry had predicted. Field marshal Irwin RML, the man the British had come to call the desert fox, struck at the American positions with panzers and shock troops.

What followed was not a battle. It was a route. American units broke. Officers lost control of their men. Radios were abandoned. Halftracks were left running in the sand with their doors open. In 3 days of fighting, more than 6,000 American soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. long column of dazed prisoners were marched back through the mountain passes toward Axis camps.

 When General Omar Bradley arrived at the battlefield in the days that followed, he saw something he would never forget. Local Bedawin nomads wandering the scattered field of the dead had stripped the American corpses of their boots, of their socks, of their olive drab jackets. Bradley wrote later that the sight of American boys lying half naked in the North African sand was the moment he understood what kind of war his country had entered.

 Raml himself watching from a command vehicle made a note in his war diary. The Americans he wrote had shown themselves to be inexperienced. They had lost sight of the larger picture in the chaos of the fight. They had in his careful professional judgment a great deal to learn. And this is where the story should end in the version Gobles was broadcasting from Berlin.

This is where the Americans having having tasted German steel should have retreated back across the Atlantic and left Europe to its fate. But something strange happened next. Because the same Raml who had beaten the Americans at Casarine sat down not long afterward to write a private assessment of what he had seen.

And what he wrote was not what Berlin wanted to hear. The Americans, Raml wrote, learned faster than any army he had ever faced. They had paid a stiff price for their experience, he admitted, but the price had brought rich dividends. Oh, even at that early stage, their generals were showing remarkable tactical sophistication.

And he sensed with the instinct of a man who had spent his life on [snorts] battlefields that the same army which had broken and run in Tunisia would not break and run again. He was right. Within 18 months, the very forces he had uh humiliated at Casarine would be tearing through France under a general named Pat Patton, executing [clears throat] feats of mobile warfare that Raml himself would call astonishing.

But Raml had noticed something else. something that had nothing to do with infantry tactics or the courage of the men in the foxholes. Something that would haunt every German commander for the rest of the war. At a meeting in Germany, RML complained to Guring about the Allied aircraft that were destroying his supply columns in North Africa.

Guring, ever confident, repeated his line about razor blades. The Americans, he said, could not build proper warplanes. Raml looked at him for a long moment. We could do with some of those razor blades, he said. Her Reichkes, Marshall. It was not a joke. It was a warning. And no one in Berlin was listening. 200 miles south of Washington on land that had once belonged to George Washington himself, the Americans were listening to something else entirely.

 The place was called Fort Hunt. On the maps and in the mail, it was simply PO Box 1142. It sat on ground that had once been part of the Mount Vernon estate, a working farm called River Farm, where the first American president had raised tobacco and horses and men. Now it was surrounded by barbed wire. Now it had 87 wooden buildings and armed guards at every gate and a rule that [clears throat] no officer could ever tell his wife what he did there.

 Between 1942 and 1945, more than 3,400 prisoners passed through Fort Hunt. Some were senior Vermach officers. Some were Ubot commanders who had sent Allied ships to the bottom of the Atlantic. Some were rocket scientists who had helped design the V2 missiles that were falling on London. Some were intelligence officers who knew the secret architecture of the Reich itself.

Every one of them was interrogated, but the interrogations were only the surface of the operation. The real intelligence came from the walls. Every room at Fort Hunt was bugged. Microphones were hidden in the light fixtures overhead, behind wooden panels, inside the frames of ordinary furniture. In a concrete bunker outside the main compound, monitors sat in shifts around the clock, wearing headphones, transcribing every whispered conversation between cellmates who believed they were alone.

 And the men doing the transcribing were not who the German prisoners imagined. They were many of them boys. Boys who had been born in Germany. Boys whose families had fled the Nazis in the 1930s. Who had crossed the Atlantic as children. who had watched from American living rooms as the country of their birth descended into something monstrous.

Many of them had lost aunts and uncles and grandparents in the camps. They had been granted emergency American citizenship at a federal courthouse in Virginia and put to work using the only advantage they had, their language. One of them was a young man named Henry Colem. He would go on after the war to become a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But in 1943, he was a 20-year-old refugee sitting across a chessboard from a German general. Colem and the others had learned something the American public would not understand for another 60 years. Prisoners who were treated with respect talked freely. Prisoners who were offered coffee and cigarettes and conversation and the small dignities of civilized life said things they would never have said under torture.

 There was no need for violence. There was only the chessboard. There was only the pingpong table in the recreation room. There was only the quiet German voice of a boy who understood exactly what his opponent had lost and exactly what his opponent had done. And in the transcripts they produced day after day, month after month, a single theme began to appear.

 It was there in the words of the yubot captains. It was there in the words of the panzer officers. It was there in the words of the teenage conscripts who had barely fired their rifles before being captured. They all talked about the artillery. They all talked about the sky. They all talked about the moment they had understood in the marrow of their bones that the war was already lost.

 In Normandy in the summer of 1944, three men who did not yet know each other were about to become part of that story. The first was Fritz Berline, 45 years old, a lieutenant general of the Vermacht. [clears throat] He had served in Poland in 1939, in France in 1940, in the deserts of North Africa as Raml’s own chief of staff, and on the Eastern Front where he had commanded a panzer division through the worst months of 1943.

He was a professional soldier of the old school. He was proud and he was tired and he had seen more war than any human being should see. Now he commanded Panzer [music] Lair, one of the most powerful armored formations in the German army, and he was about to see something that would make everything else he had witnessed seem small.

 The second was Hans Funluck, 33 years old, a major of the 21st Panzer Division, Prussian nobility, aristocratic in his bearing and skeptical in his politics. He had served under Raml in France in 1940 and later in the deserts of North Africa. He was in France on the 6th of June 1944, commanding a battle group of the 21st Panzer Division just south of the invasion beaches.

 When the news came, he waited for the order to counterattack in force. what he would learn about why the strongest German reserves never moved that morning would follow him for the rest of his life. The third was a young lieutenant named Friedrich Langfeld. He was 23 years old. He commanded a company of infantry in the 275th division.

 He was serious and thoughtful and had been raised in a Catholic household in Rhineland in a forest called the Herkin on a morning in November. He would make a decision that no one had ordered him to make and it would cost him his life. None of them knew each other. None of them knew that their stories would end up in the same archives spoken into the same hidden microphones transcribed by the same young men in Virginia.

 None of them knew that a sergeant they had never met would walk out of the Arden on a December morning with his hands raised. Huh. muttering the same words that all of them in one form or another would eventually say. The Germans had thought they knew what America was. They were about to find out. There is a sound that the German veterans of the Western Front would remember for the rest of their lives.

 It was not the roar of a tank engine. It was not the whistle of a shell. It was not even the drone of aircraft overhead. It was smaller than any of those things. It was almost domestic. It was the sound of static and then a voice and then more static. It was the sound of an American walkietalkie held to the ear of a young man in an olive drab helmet standing in a hedro perhaps 200 yard away.

 The German soldiers who lived long enough to be interviewed after the war said the same thing about that sound. They feared it more than they feared the machine gun. They feared it more than they feared the tank because they knew what came next. What came next was called time on target. It was an American invention and it was mathematics turned into slaughter.

American artillery batteries scattered across miles of countryside could be coordinated by radio so that every shell they fired arrived at the same target at the same instant. Not within a minute, not within 30 seconds, within 3 seconds of each other. There was no warning. There were no ranging shots.

 There was only silence. And then the world ended at Dominbach. In December of 1944, the American First Infantry Division fired more than 10,000 artillery rounds in a single day to stop a German armored attack. In March of 1945, during the American 9inth Army’s crossing of the Rine, more than 2,000 guns supported the assault.

 In the opening hour of the bombardment, over 65,000 shells fell on the German side of the river. A single American forward observer, a young man with a radio strapped to his back, could summon that firepower with a sentence. He did not need to ask permission. He did not need to wait for approval to travel up a chain of command.

 He spoke into the handset and within minutes the sky opened. In the German army, calling in that kind of fire required approval from a regimental commander. In the American army, a corporal could do it. The German veterans understood slowly and terribly what this meant. The war they had trained for their whole lives no longer existed. And then there was the sky.

 The Germans had a word for what fell from it. They called it jabotod. It was short for yag bomber Todd. Death by fighter bomber. By the summer of 1944, no German vehicle could move on a French road in daylight without being seen. No column of trucks could resupply a frontline unit without being hunted. No tank could reposition.

 No artillery piece could be towed. No uh ambulance could reach a wounded man uh without the risk of uh an American P47 Thunderbolt appearing out of the sun. The Thunderbolt was a monstrous machine. It weighed nearly eight tons fully loaded. It carried 850 caliber machine guns in its wings. It could drop bombs and fire rockets and it could keep flying with damage that would have destroyed any other fighter of the war.

 German pilots had laughed when they first saw it. They stopped laughing very quickly. Field marshal Hans Funluga, commanding Army Group B in Normandy, wrote directly to Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1944. His words were the confession of a professional soldier who had run out of answers. There were no tactics, he wrote, that could compensate for enemy air superiority.

There were no maneuvers, no ambushes, no clever deployments. There was only retreat. There was only night. The Battle of the Bulge itself, Hitler’s last great gamble in the West, was timed to begin during a stretch of overcast weather that would keep American aircraft on the ground. It was the only way Germany could still fight in daylight.

 When the skies cleared on the 23rd of December and the fighter bombers rose from airfields across France and England, the offensive died within days. On the 25th of July 1944, in the fields west of a Norman town called Sant Low, Fritz Berline learned what it meant to stand beneath an American carpet bombing. 2,500 aircraft came out of the summer sky.

They dropped more than 4,000 tons of bombs on an area 7,000 yards wide and 2,500 yd deep. It went on for hours. There was no place to run. Oh. Uh, the ground itself became liquid. Bayerline had commanded Panzer Lair, one of the finest divisions in the German army. only that morning. By nightfall, he had almost nothing left.

 His tanks were overturned. His guns were destroyed. Uh his infantry dug into deep foxholes with overhead cover had been buried alive by concussion alone. He wrote later in a report prepared for American historians after the war that the men who survived came out of the wreckage unable to speak. They did not fight. They did not run.

 They simply surrendered. Or they walked slowly toward the rear. or they sat down in the craters and waited for whatever came next. Their morale, he said, had not been broken. It had been erased. Byerline had fought in Poland. He had fought in France. He had fought in the deserts of North Africa. He had commanded a panzer division on the eastern front in late 1943 in the brutal fighting withdrawals across Ukraine.

 And of all of it, he wrote a single sentence that told the whole story of what fighting Americans meant. This, he said, was the worst he had ever seen. Not the desert, not the eastern front, not any battle he had commanded in five years of war. Sanlow. And yet the Germans still mocked American infantry. They said the Americans bunched too close together.

They said the Americans fired their rifles without discipline. They said the Americans could not camouflage a position properly and could not patrol quietly and did not in the strict professional sense know how to fight. General Patton blunt as always agreed with them. “The poorer the infantry,” he told a French officer, “the more artillery it needs.

” And the American infantry, he said, needed all it could get. But the German veterans, when they spoke honestly to hidden microphones or wrote memoirs many years later, admitted something they could not admit to their commanding officers. The Americans were not skilled. But they were something worse than skilled.

 They were aggressive in a way that no professional army had prepared for. When they were fired upon, they did not take cover and wait for orders. They fired back immediately. They called in their artillery. They called in their aircraft. And then as soon as the smoke cleared, they came forward again. One German veteran described them decades later as enthusiastic amateurs with a disposition to violence he had never seen in any other army.

 What they lacked in refinement, he said they made up for in something more frightening. They simply would not stop. Hans Funlook lived to write his own memoir. He called it Panzer Commander. It was published in 1989 when he was an old man with white hair and a soft voice. And in its pages, he described the morning of the 6th of June, 1944.

In words that never quite lost their disbelief. his division, the 21st Panzer, was positioned within striking distance of the British and Canadian beaches. But the strongest German armored reserves in France, the divisions that might have driven the invasion back into the sea, were not under the local commanders control.

 They were held under Hitler’s personal authority. They could not move without his direct order. And Hitler on the morning of the 6th June was asleep in his mountain retreat at the Burg Hoof. No one dared wake him. No general, no field marshal, no aid. They stood in hallways and looked at telephones and waited. And while they waited, hour after hour, American and British soldiers came ashore in France.

By the time the furer awoke and gave his permission, it was afternoon. By the time the panzers began to move, the beach head was secured. By the time they reached the coast, the Allied navies were waiting for them offshore. Fawn Luck understood, standing in the dust of that lost day, that the German army had not been defeated by American firepower.

Not yet. It had been defeated by itself, by a system so terrified of one man that it could not act without his permission, even to save itself. The Vermacht was not losing the war to better soldiers. It was losing the war to a regime that had made losing inevitable. 6 months later in the snow of the Ardens, an American general named Anthony McAuliffe received a formal demand for the surrender of his men.

 They were surrounded at a Belgian crossroads called Baston. They were low on food, low on ammunition, and low on hope. McAuliffe read the German ultimatum. He handed it back to his aid and he said one word, “Nuts.” The German officers who received the reply had to ask what it meant. They were told it was the American equivalent of go to hell. They did not understand.

In their army, in their language, in their tradition, a surrounded force surrendered. But Baston did not surrender and the war did not end the way Berlin had planned. Irwin Raml understood something that his fellow generals did not want to hear. He said it plainly in a private letter written before the war had even reached its darkest hours.

 The battle, he wrote, is fought and decided by the quarter masters long before the shooting begins. Wars were not won by the bravest men. Wars were won by the nations that could produce and deliver the most steel. The Germans had a word for this kind of war. They called it material schllock, the material battle. It was a word spoken with contempt because it described a way of fighting that had nothing to do with courage or honor or the ancient virtues of the Prussian soldier.

It described a war of factories, a war of cargo ships, a war of assembly lines in Michigan and uh Ohio and California running 20 24 hours a day, staffed in large part by women whose husbands were in Europe or the Pacific. A German prisoner marched past an Allied supply dump in Normandy in the summer of 1944, stopped and stared.

 He stared at the crates of ammunition stacked as high as houses. He stared at the drums of fuel that stretched to the horizon. He stared at the rations and the boots and the endless rows of tires and radios and spare tank engines. He turned to his American guard and he said in halting English that he understood now how Germany had been defeated.

 You piled up the supplies, he said, and then you let them fall on us. By the last winter of the war, German soldiers on the Western Front had made a decision that shocked their commanders. They wanted to be captured by Americans. It was not because the Americans were kind. It was not because the American camps were comfortable.

 It was because the alternative on the Eastern front was almost certain death. More than 1 million German prisoners would die in Soviet captivity. They would die of starvation, of disease, of forced lab slab in Siberian mines, of the simple fact that the men who had burned Russia to the ground could expect no mercy from the men who had watched it burn.

American captivity was different. American captivity meant a train ride to a place they had only seen in Hollywood films. A young German soldier named Gunter Grow was captured in 1944. He was perhaps 20 years old. He had grown up in a Germany where sugar had been rationed since he was a child, where meat came once a week, if it came at all, where the small luxuries of ordinary life had disappeared into the machinery of total war.

 He was put on a Pullman railroad car and taken across the American continent to a place called Fort Lewis in Washington State. He was given clean clothes. He was given three meals a day. And on the afternoon of his arrival, he stood in front of a small shop inside the prisoner of war camp. and he could not decide what to buy.

 Ice cream, he told an interviewer many decades later. Or CocaCola. He had not tasted ice cream in years. He had never tasted Coca-Cola in his life. He bought both. He stood in the sunlight of the American Pacific Northwest, a boy in enemy uniform, drinking a CocaCola and eating ice cream and trying to understand how the country he had been told was weak had produced this, how it had produced all of this.

 But the deepest truth about what German prisoners said was not spoken in the sunlight. It was spoken in the dark in rooms they believed were empty at a country estate north of London called Trent Park. Trent Park held the highest ranking German prisoners of the war. generals, field marshals, men who had commanded armies. The British gave them a billiard room.

They gave them a library. They gave them beer and whiskey and long walks through manicured gardens. And they hid microphones in the light fixtures and the fireplaces and the plant pots and inside the trees themselves. One evening in October of 1944. General Dietrich Fanchchultitz spoke to a fellow prisoner.

 Fanchultitz was 50 years old. He was a career soldier. He had been the military governor of Paris and he had refused Hitler’s direct order to burn the city before the allies arrived. He had saved the Louvre. He had saved Notradam. He had saved the bridges over the Sain. And now he sat in an English country house drinking English tea, believing himself alone.

 His words were transcribed and forgotten for more than 50 years. We all share the guilt, he said. We went along with everything. We half took the Nazis seriously instead of saying to hell with you and your stupid nonsense. I misled my soldiers into believing this rubbish. I feel utterly ashamed of myself. This was what German prisoners said when no one was listening.

 Not that the Americans were brave, not that the Americans were skilled, but that they themselves had served something that deserved to lose. The story of what German soldiers said about Americans was in the end a story about what they said about themselves. In a forest called the Hergan on the 12th of November 1944, a 23-year-old German lieutenant named Friedrich Langfeld heard something that would not leave him.

An American soldier had wandered into a minefield between the lines. He had triggered a device and been wounded. He was lying somewhere in the trees calling for help and no one could reach him. American medics had tried and been driven back. The minefield was too dense. The screaming went on for hours.

 Langfeld had ordered his men not to fire on the American rescue parties. That had not been enough. The wounded man was still out there, still calling. And so Langfeld did something no one had ordered him to do. He gathered his own medics. He raised a Red Cross flag and he walked out into the minefield himself toward the voice of an enemy soldier who did not know he was coming.

 He stepped on a mine. He was carried back to the German lines with terrible wounds. He died a few hours later. The American soldier he had gone to save also died in that forest. Their names were not connected in any official record. But the American veterans of the 22nd Infantry Regiment did not forget. They had heard the story from German prisoners in the days that followed.

They had carried it home with them across the Atlantic into their long American lives. 50 years later in October of 1994, those veterans returned to Germany. They walked into the German war cemetery at Hertgen, past thousands of headstones marking the graves of men who had once tried to kill them.

 They found the place where Friedrich Langfeld was buried, and they placed a stone marker there with words carved in English and in German. No man hath greater love than he who layeth down his life for his enemy. It is the only known memorial ever placed by American soldiers in a German American soldiers in a German military cemetery to honor a German officer.

 The war ended in the spring of 1945. Fritz Berline went home to a country that no longer existed. Hans Fun Luck was captured by the Soviets and spent five years in a labor camp before returning to Germany, a broken man. Dietrich Fonchultitz died in 1966 remembered as the man who had saved Paris.

 Gunter Grow returned to Germany with memories of Coca-Cola and eventually flew back to Fort Lewis at the age of 91 just to say thank you. The recordings sat in vaults for half a century. In November of 2001, a German historian named Sanka Nitel walked into an archive in London and asked a clerk if there were any files from Trent Park.

 The clerk brought him a box, then another box, then another. In the end, there were 150,000 pages and Nitel spent years reading them. What he found was not what he had expected. He had expected boasting. He had expected defiance. He had found something else. He had found men alone in the dark telling the truth. The last of them are gone now.

The German veterans who marveled at ice cream in American camps. The Fort Hunt interrogators who played chess with Nazi generals. The GI who walked into a German cemetery in 1994 to honor an enemy. They have all followed each other into silence. But the transcripts remain. And in those pages spoken by men who believed no one was listening, the same words appear again and again.

 The Americans fought with machines mach not men. The walkie-talkie was the deadliest weapon in their arsenal. No amount of German courage could overcome the weight of American steel. They said something else, too. Something harder to hear. They said they had served a cause that deserved to be defeated.

 They said the Americans, for all their loud confidence and their bunched formations and their wasteful firepower, had preserved something the German army had thrown away. something the historian Max Hastings would describe many years later as the price a democracy pays for remaining a democracy at war. American soldiers were not fanatics.

They were not willing to die for an ideology. They were citizens who wanted to win the war and go home and see their children again. They used steel where other armies used flesh. They used their factories where other armies used their sons. And they never became what they were fighting.

 That in the end was what every German prisoner said. Not in the interrogation rooms, not in the official reports, but in the quiet hours, in the recorded dark when they believed themselves alone, they said the Americans had won because the Americans had remained Americans and the Germans had lost because they had not remained themselves. moves.