5 Things About American Food German POWs Couldn’t Explain

Behind the mess hall at Aliceville, Alabama, in the summer of 1943, corn came up in rows that nobody had planted. It came up green and even, exactly where the ground had been turned over. By the account of the prisoners interviewed 50 years later, German captives had been burying food there. They had been given more than they could eat, and they had dug holes for the rest.

The camp held about 6,000 men in a town of about 1,500. On arrival, each bunk carried fresh linens and a shaving kit. The prisoners published a newspaper called Der Zaungast, The Fenced Guest. Their spokesman was Hans Kopera, drafted against his will, captured in North Africa. His men brought him a daily request.

It was not about mail, or work, or escape. It was about the ham. The reason there was too much food is written into a treaty. The Geneva Convention of 1929 required that prisoners receive the same quality of rations, clothing, and quarters as the detaining power’s own troops. Most of these men were taken in Tunisia in May 1943. Klaus Meyer and Georg Stangelmeier, both 19 years old, were captured at Porto Farina on the 9th of May.

They had no fuel and no ammunition. Britain had asked the United States to take prisoners in 1942. The Americans eventually agreed to about 425,000. Between May and October 1943, roughly 20,000 arrived every month. They were spread across nearly 700 camps in 46 of the 48 states. Camp Hearne in Texas covered 720 acres. By the end of 1943, the country held about 173,000 men.

They arrived from a country that had spent a decade teaching its people to eat less and to eat differently. An active duty German soldier in 1943 averaged around 1,500 calories a day. One prisoner’s daily ration cost the American government 25 cents. German cooks were handed the raw ingredients and prepared them however they liked.

The Provost Marshal General’s office defended that arrangement in public. From base camps they went to branch camps and from branch camps out to the work. Colorado beet fields, Kansas silage, Alabama peanuts and cotton. Kentucky tobacco and Kentucky corn. So the collision happened twice a day. Once at the mess hall tray. Once at noon at an American farm table where the meal was not a kindness but a legal requirement written into the contract.

Five things recur across the interviews and the farm records. The food that was thrown away, the corn on the cob, the white bread, the peanut butter and a jug of cold water carried out to a field. Not things they had never seen. Things they could not explain and could not stop describing 40 and 50 years later.

The first one was in a bin behind an American officers club. Greensboro, North Carolina. The overseas replacement depot. 650 acres at Bessemer and Summit. 400 prisoners passed through between 1944 and 1946 in one of 18 branch camps. Blue fatigues with the letters P and W stenciled across the back. Eight barracks.

Four Mess hall number 11. The building still stands, selling heating and air conditioning. Luis Felicia supervised eight prisoners a week servicing the officers club. He said they were just kids, real young, and that it was a different batch every week. Part of the job was the garbage. After an evening at the club, the prisoners carried the cans out.

Plates scraped, platters emptied, the leftovers of a dinner for American officers. That is the first of the five. It is also the reason for the other four. To understand why a garbage can could look like that to him, you have to know the table he came from. One of them said to Felicia, of what had just gone into the can, “Hitler would feed the whole army with what you just threw away.

” Felicia remembered the line for the rest of his life. Not the field rations of 1943, the decade before that, at home, at their own tables, where a German state had spent 10 years deciding what its people would eat. In 1939, Herbert Backe of the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture published an article on the farmers’ role in the production battle.

The goal had a name, freedom from food imports. That freedom was paid for at the table. Between 1927 and 1937, German meat consumption fell about 17%, milk about 21%, eggs about 46%. The state steered its people toward brown bread and potatoes, and away from white bread, meat, butter, coffee, and oranges. The word for the shortfall in fats and oils was the fat gap.

None of this was famine. It was direction. A state deciding, year by year, which foods its people would learn to want, and which they would learn to do without. Butter and white bread were on the second list. Quark, a milk product that had previously gone to animals, was promoted as a nutritional innovation.

So was Eintopf, the one-pot meal. Animal food was relabeled as human food when the state needed it to be. By 1939, Germany was about 83% self-sufficient in basic crops. The remaining 17% was the whole reason the policy existed. Then came the war and the ration card. North Africa, the Africa Corps under Rommel. Desert shorts, short sleeves, and by the spring of 1943, no fuel, no shells, and no ships coming.

Around 1,500 calories a day for a man expected to fight in it. That is the body that walked into American captivity. 19 years old in Meger’s case, and out of ammunition. Meger said afterwards that he knew it was finished because there was nothing left to fight with. He also said, plainly, that they had no wish to escape because they had it good.

Tunisia fell in May. The remnants were loaded west across the Atlantic into a country that had entered the war on the 7th of December, 1941, and had not been bombed once. Koepera crossed in a hold with 700 other men. No toilet, tin boxes, everyone soaked. That is the last meal they remembered clearly before the American one.

Then, the trains. Prisoners in Pullman cars, moving across a continent with the lights on and the crops standing. Some of them wrote later that they assumed it was staged for their benefit. On the 2nd and 3rd of June, 1943, the first German prisoners reached Aliceville, Alabama. They were marched from the train through the middle of town past the people who lived there.

By November 1944, there were 281,000 German prisoners in American camps, 466 of them base and branch. On the 1st of May, 1943, at a farm labor conference in Salt Lake City, the War Department proposed putting prisoners into American fields. Within months, county by county, it was happening. At Aliceville, the beds were made.

There was a shaving kit laid out. Guard Thomas Sweet said later that they had been trained on the Geneva Convention, lectures, and the rules posted on the wall. Then, the first meal, a slice of American white bread, something brown spread on it, and coffee. Walter Fetthauer remembered all three and understood only one of them.

The terms were fixed. 10 cents a day for toothpaste, razor blades, and tobacco. 80 cents a day more if you worked, no more than 10 hours in a day, and one full rest day a week. There was a canteen. Enlisted men could buy toothpaste, razor blades, and tobacco with their 10 cents a day, and in some camps, beer.

Officers drew 20, 30, or 40 dollars a month by rank. The army did not cook German food. It issued American ingredients to German cooks and let them do what they wanted with them, which means most of what follows, the prisoners cooked themselves. At Camp Shelby in Mississippi, barracks held up to 50 men. Every five barracks shared a mess hall with cooks, with waiters, and with silverware.

Beer could be bought at the canteen. In Colorado, a compound was 20 barracks of 50 men, four kitchens, four mess halls, all of it working, all of it full. And at Aliceville, all of it producing ham. At Aliceville, the same arithmetic produced a different problem. There was ham. There was ham again. There was ham the following week.

6,000 men, and nobody could finish it. The camp menus survive. Breakfast, cereal, toast, cornflakes, jam, coffee, milk, sugar. Lunch, roast pork, potato salad, carrots, ice water. Supper, meatloaf, scrambled eggs, coffee, milk, bread. Mississippi, Colorado, Texas, the same menu. American ingredients, German cooks, and portions calibrated to what an American infantryman was issued.

This was the floor, not a favor. So, Capra went to the Americans on behalf of 6,000 men, and asked them, politely, to stop serving so much ham. It is not a request the Geneva Convention anticipated. An American sergeant gave him practical advice. Do not let the captain hear that you are throwing it out. Take it round the back.

Dig a hole. Put it in the sand. Which brings us back to where we started. In the oral histories, the buried food included corn. And corn buried in Alabama in summer does not stay buried. It sprouted, and it gave them away. Here is the measure they were using. In Kansas, when prisoners were collected in the morning for farm work, each man carried a brown paper bag, dried bread, and a piece of sausage.

That bag was the daily comparison. Dried bread and sausage in a paper sack at 7:00 in the morning. At noon, a dinner the farmer was legally required to provide and was credited 21 cents for. Americans, meanwhile, were rationing. Walter Winchell told the country on the radio that the army was catering to Nazis like kings. Congress opened an investigation into what it called coddling.

Greeley, Colorado, Camp 202. About 180 buildings, 3,000 men, a 12-foot fence, 12 towers with spotlights and dogs around it in every direction, sugar beets and corn. The corn came in from the fields the prisoners had themselves worked. It went into the pot and it came out on the tray whole, on the cob, in the American way.

The prisoners refused it. Asked how any person could sit and eat corn on the cob, one of them answered, “That’s for the horse and the cow.” Historian Janet Worrall preserved the line in a lecture 50 years later. 600 miles east in Wabaunsee County, Kansas, the same summer, the same crop, the same answer. The farm families remembered it clearly because they had grown the corn themselves.

The Kansas prisoners called it swine food. Or they described it as the thing you fatten a bird or a steer on shortly before you kill it. In Germany, maize was fodder. The local paper ran the story under a headline about corn on the cob not being fit food for the superior race. The joke is sharper than it first looks.

These were men who had been told for 10 years that they were a higher order of human being and who were now being handed, as they understood it, the pig’s dinner by a farmer. Corn existed in Germany. It went to livestock. What none of them could explain was why a country would put it in front of a man whole on a plate and expect him to be grateful.

In Kentucky, prisoners were sent mainly into tobacco and corn. They spent their working days harvesting the crop they would not eat at night and were paid 80 cents a day to do it. What they would eat, the same paper reported, was mashed potatoes and gravy, peas and tomatoes. Meat and potatoes men, one farmer called them.

And there was one more thing on that tray. German bread was dark. It was sour, dense, heavy in the hand, cut from a whole loaf, and by 1943 it was rationed. But it was real, and every man there had grown up on it. What arrived on the American tray was white. It was soft. It was already sliced, and it was faintly sweet.

Sweet enough that the men could not work out what meal it belonged to. So, they solved the problem by reclassifying it. If it was sweet and soft and pale, then it was not bread at all. It belonged at the end of the meal. Lake Wabaunsee, Kansas. 5 mi west of Eskridge. A repurposed 1930s youth camp. Barracks, dormitory, mess hall, a view of the water, and a wire fence the prisoners themselves called symbolic.

In Penny Clark’s interviews, the Kansas prisoners preferred their own dark bread and had a word for the American loaf. They called it Haus Kor Cake. Kor, and they saved it to the end of the meal to eat as dessert. It is a small, exact detail, and it survives because a graduate student in 1985 sat down with the farm families who had watched it happen and wrote down what they said.

The Americans had their own bread argument running. In 1941, a science writer worried in print that white bread nations folded, while dark loaf nations produced husky soldiers. In 1942, the government began enriching the national loaf. Two governments, two bread policies, pointing in opposite directions. One trying to push its people onto the dark loaf, the other trying to fix the white one, because it was not going to give it up.

The same comparison turns up on the other side. An American airman, writing about white bread, reached for exactly the same word, cake. Hungry men in both armies described the loaf the same way, which brings us back to Fett holters first Alabama meal, the white bread, the coffee, and the brown paste on top of it, which was the part he could not identify at all.

Alabama held about 16,000 German prisoners across 24 camps. A great deal of the work was peanuts, a cash crop, dug and stacked by men who did not know what a peanut was. Peanut butter was an American staple with no real European counterpart. It was cheap, it was protein, it kept, and by 1943, it was standard issue in the camps.

Fett holters whole account of that first meal is one sentence. I didn’t know what a peanut was. He ate it anyway, and called it the best dinner he’d ever had. The geography explains the meal. Peanuts were a southern crop, and the branch camps sat where the labor was needed, which is how a man came to be introduced to one in a jar in Alabama.

He was an old man when he was recorded saying it, half a century on. Asked about good times, he said he thought of peanut butter. Then, on the tape, he laughed. In Kentucky and Tennessee, the camps served Southern fried chicken, fried catfish, peanut butter sandwiches, and full Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

Antonio Thompson worked through the camp records to establish it. Against all of that, Thompson found the single commonest complaint in the files. Not the strangeness, not the schedule, not the guards. There were not enough potatoes. The letters went home through the censors, and Thompson’s point about them is worth sitting with.

For a German soldier in 1944, the fastest route to a plate like that was to surrender. So, in Alabama and North Carolina, you had men lifting peanuts out of the ground by day and eating them ground into paste by night, without necessarily connecting the two operations. At Camp Florence in Arizona, by Friedrich Riedel’s account, the camp cook skimmed the cream off the milk bottles and baked each man a cream cake on his birthday.

They joked they were in the land of milk and honey. The fifth thing was not on the tray at all. It was the thing the Americans kept carrying out to them in the middle of a field all day, without being asked, for free. Kansas, midsummer, Wabaunsee County, blistering heat, a crew of German prisoners in a field, and at intervals, a jug of cold water coming out from the house.

A prisoner explained it to Edwin Ringle, a farmer who spoke German. By his account, the man said you would never carry water out to workers in Germany. You send beer or wine, because water spoiled by afternoon. And the water was not improvised. Ice water sat on the printed camp menu, in the same line as the roast pork, the potato salad, and the carrots.

Around Eaton, Colorado, farmers went further. Output was low, so they tried sandwiches. Then, they tried cases of beer, carried out to the field at their own expense. It backfired completely. The Germans read the generosity as nervousness, as a farmer who needed them more than they needed him. They slowed down.

The beer stopped coming. Kansas allowed only weak beer, which is why the prisoner, Ernst Kunzel, kept angling to be sent on a cattle selling trip to Kansas City. He called it a trip only a rich man or a prisoner could take. At Fort Lewis, Washington, in late 1944, Gunter Grava stood at the camp shop unable to choose between an ice cream and a Coca-Cola.

He recorded the outcome in a letter 70 years later. He bought both. None of this was policy at the farm gate. Cora Ringel fed arriving prisoners pancakes, bacon, eggs, and hash browns on the grounds that their camp breakfast had been oatmeal and nothing else. The paperwork was exact. In Kansas, from March 1944, the farmer paid 40 cents an hour, furnished the noon meal, was credited 21 cents for it, and was refunded transport by the mile.

None of that was charity, either. Farmers paid $4 a day in advance. In Wabaunsee County, the prisoners worked 2 and 1/2 thousand days in agriculture in the month of November, 1944, alone. The same farmers were handed printed instructions. One line was set in capitals. Don’t ever believe a prisoner of war likes you. He doesn’t.

That sheet sat in kitchens where the men were being fed fried chicken. Myrtle Thierer’s Swedish parents shared their afternoon coffee with the prisoners. She said fried chicken was the favorite. She also remembered one man who gave her the creeps and said so. In September 1944, the farmer Roland McKnight fell off a silo and spent 99 days flat on his back.

The prisoners lifted him into a chair so he could watch his own farm. Then they dressed him in overshoes, coat, and gloves and carried him outside to see his livestock. His wife said they were just like Kansas farm boys. One of them, Helmut Graul, fetched their daughter from school on a pony. It was not sentimental.

Wilfried Fergler was killed putting up silage near Alma when mules bolted at a train whistle and a wagon ran over him. He was buried at Fort Riley. No local paper reported it. The man holding the arrangement together was Howard Myers, the county agent, who took no payment for the work. He combed second-hand stores for coat hooks and stripped mirrors out of his own house to furnish the camp.

All of it rested on a supply of food that nobody had promised would last. On the 1st of July, 1944, the army began a conservation program inside the camps. The order was administrative and quiet. Portions were controlled. Waste was measured. In February 1945, it tightened again with substitutes ordered in place of sugar, butter, and beef.

There was also a blunter instrument where prisoners staged sit-down strikes. The camps applied a rule with three words in it. No work, no eat. It was used and it worked. The camps were also emptying in a different sense. By the war’s end, the prisoners were spread through 46 of the 48 states in about 700 camps, and every one of them had to be closed.

By April 1945, the United States held about 340,000 German prisoners. The peak came on the 8th of May, around 425,000 men in American custody. That same spring, the concentration camps were liberated, and the photographs reached America. Congress opened a second investigation. Provost Marshal General Archer Lerch held the line, saying the United States would not lower itself to Nazi standards.

On the 8th of May, 1945, at Lake Wabaunsee, prisoners and guards were both confined to camp for the day. The war in Europe was over, so immediately was the argument for feeding them like American soldiers. At Camp Trinidad in Colorado, the new schedule was porridge with a little milk in the morning, and pea soup with lettuce salad and a slice of soft bread at noon, and again at night.

Hasslicker had said that before May, there was enough meat and enough variety. Afterwards, the softness of that bread appears in his account as a complaint. The same quality, read the other way round. At Lake Wabaunsee, the men described about 1,000 calories a day, and salt herring at breakfast every single morning. The same herring.

The men who had buried ham 18 months earlier ate all of it. Herman Dorn, describing the same period, said what replaced their rations was closer to animal feed than to food. Two years earlier, that had been their objection to the corn. Not every account agrees on the trajectory. Gustav Kolmel said that after one bad week, the food improved steadily again, right through to December 1945.

The camps were not uniform, and neither was the collapse. Then, the closures. Aliceville was deactivated on the 30th of September 1945. Lake Wabaunsee closed officially on the 1st of December. The men left with about $50 each and a 30-lb luggage limit. Some of them had money in the walls. When the Lake Wabaunsee mess hall burned down in April 1947, the story locally was that it took with it cash two returning former prisoners had hidden there.

The repatriation instructions were specific about what could not go home. No camera, no woodwork, no American money. Whatever they had made or saved in 3 years mostly stayed in Kansas. Heinrich Volgast’s route took 8 months. New York, then Le Havre, then Bolbec, where, by his account, the French guards treated him worse than anything in American captivity.

Then, Bad Aibling, Münster, a British camp, and release. The program itself ended on paper. Prisoner farm labor officially finished on the 16th of June, 1946. The wider emergency farm labor program ran on until the 31st of December, 1947. What moved next moved the other way. The Ringels of Alma, Kansas, began mailing parcels into occupied Germany.

Sugar, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, children’s shoes. The men who had been fed were now being posted food. Eventually, one former prisoner was sent a page torn out of a Montgomery Ward catalog so that he could circle the bicycle tires he needed and mail the page back to Kansas. The parcels went both ways for years.

The friendships were not universal and were not sentimental, but they were durable and they had started at a table where one side had more food than it could use. Fritz Ott corresponded with Edwin Ringel for 40 years in English. Georg Stangelmaier became a beer truck driver, then a wholesale liquor dealer selling German wine in Germany to Germans.

In 1980, Klaus Meier and Georg Stangelmaier came back to Kansas with their wives. They photographed Wilfried Vogler’s headstone at Fort Riley and sent the picture to his family. Meier called Kansas the best state he had seen. Of Greeley’s Camp 202, the 180 buildings, the 12 towers, the 3,000 men, the corn they refused, the accounts agree that essentially nothing was kept.

What Janet Worrall recorded still standing in 1995 was a line of cement fence posts on Highway 34 outside Greeley. They are standing in a corn field.