5 Things German Prisoners Found Strange the Moment They Reached America

A man in a desert-weight tunic comes down a gangway and stops at the bottom of it. Not because of the guard in front of him, because of the city standing behind the guard with every light on. The harbor is working. Cranes swinging cargo over open hatches, hulls in the water, warehouse doors rolled up and men moving between them, unhurried.

Nothing is burning. Nothing has fallen down. Beyond the sheds, there is a city with its lights on. No gaps in the skyline, no smoke. He has spent two years being told that this place is on its knees. Something he had been told was impossible is standing in front of him, and nobody on this pier intends to explain it.

Within the next few hours, it will happen four more times. Everything here happens between the gangway coming down and the train pulling off the pier. A few hours on one strip of concrete. They came ashore carrying two descriptions of America. Both were wrong. They came ashore carrying a description of America written for them in Berlin.

Goebbels in Das Reich, 1942. A country of no culture run by others, marked by, in his phrase, naivete or a superiority complex. In a 19-year-old that becomes a picture. A shabby, exhausted, half-ruined country that has already lost the war and has not yet been told. That is the picture he carries ashore. The second description came from their own side.

Erich Głowania, drafted into the infantry at 17 and captured in Normandy, was told by German officers that a prisoner is shot on capture. Tunisia, the 13th of May, 1943. Army Group Africa surrenders and roughly 275,000 Axis prisoners need somewhere to go. The army fits about 250 Liberty ships to carry them. 300 men on some, 500 on others.

West across the Atlantic to Norfolk, Newport News, New York, and Boston. Five things were waiting on those docks that none of them were prepared for. The ship reaches the harbor and does not dock. It anchors in quarantine and for hours the men at the rail can see America and are not allowed to touch it. So they stand at the rail and study America the way you study a photograph.

A port at full work. Cranes, loaded hulls, cargo moving. None of it damaged, none of it rebuilt. 134,293 German and Italian prisoners came through one terminal at Newport News. The same water carried 1.7 million American servicemen out. What they had expected was not vague. A South Dakota farm boy named David Rathbun, 9 years old, remembered exactly what the Africa Corps men working his father’s land told him about America.

Rathbun’s words, “They even claimed New York City had been bombed flat.” A 9-year-old’s memory of what grown men told him and they [clears throat] told it as fact. Glowania’s ship came in at New York. By his own account, his group was allowed up on deck and the rail gave them the Statue of Liberty standing unmarked above a working city.

No rubble, no burnt blocks, no damage anywhere on the waterfront. Before a single American had spoken to them, the country had already contradicted the one thing they were most certain of. They had been told this place was finished. It was standing and it was working. The next contradiction came within the hour and it had nothing to do with buildings. It was about the guards.

Down the gangway comes a column of men who have been told by their own officers that prisoners are shot on capture. They are walking towards men holding rifles. That threat did not come from Allied propaganda. Glowania’s officers told him a prisoner is shot the moment he is taken and he stepped onto an American pier expecting exactly that.

The same belief came ashore at four ports, Norfolk, Newport News, New York, Boston. Thousands of men over three years walking down gangways braced for a wall and a firing squad. What actually governed the pier was a treaty concluded at Geneva in 1929 which both Germany and the United States had signed.

It set out food, quarters, work and pay for prisoners. And what met them on the dock was clerical. Guards, yes, but also tables, forms and a line to stand in. Army photographers recorded the whole sequence because there was nothing to hide. No shooting of arriving prisoners is recorded at any American port of debarkation across three years and four ports.

The men who had promised them execution were the men who had trained them, fed them and sent them to Normandy. The first order given to them on American soil was not an execution order. It was an instruction to take off their clothes and what followed is the strangest hour in the whole sequence. Several hundred men undressing at once in the open on a working dock while their uniforms are collected, tagged, and taken away.

This is a delousing station, and it is the first thing America does to them. In 1943, that means showers. Then the clothing into steam and hot air sterilizers, then powder. The quartermaster is not confiscating anything. He is required to disinfect it and give it back. The method changes in January 1944. Two delousing stations in Naples dust 1,300,000 civilians with DDT.

Powder is faster than steam, and the army has it in quantity. Reinhold Pabel, who landed at Norfolk on a January morning in 1944, gives it one line in his memoir. The customary delousing process. He does not think it worth describing. Nobody does. Then they are fed. At Newport News in 1945, by the Signal Corps photographer’s own caption, “Hash, beans, mashed potatoes, tomatoes, Vienna sausages, and tea served on board, still in quarantine.

” And then the detail that stayed with them. They queued up and washed their own dishes. Not as punishment, not as a test. That was simply how the line worked. Stripped, showered, fed, and handed a plate to wash within a few hours of arriving. The fourth thing was quieter than any of that, and it unsettled them far more.

A table, a stack of forms, and a clerk. Name, rank, date of birth, a serial number issued by the Prisoner of War Information Bureau, a fingerprint, a card that will go to Geneva. One Signal Corps caption records who was explaining the paperwork. Not an American interpreter. A German prisoner who spoke English, walking his own men through their forms, line by line.

Their money is taken. It is sealed in an envelope with the man’s name and number on it, and held. Not confiscated, receipted. Every prisoner watches this happen to his own cash. These were men who knew unit strengths, positions, and equipment. They had expected to be worked over for it. Instead, a clerk took their fingerprints and filed them.

Not kindness, bookkeeping. Across the Atlantic, Britain did the opposite. Every arriving batch interrogated, rank irrelevant, through nine depots, including the London Cage. The techniques there are documented in detail. A Russian-speaking interpreter in a Soviet uniform placed in the room. A file stamped NR, Nach Russland, to Russia.

The United States ran no equivalent. Prisoners were screened and then put on trains. They had expected to be broken for what they knew, and instead, they were written down. The fifth thing is the one that turns up in the memoirs, and it happened at the railway siding. The march from the delousing station to the railroad. Norfolk, morning, the 2nd of January, 1944.

Pabel’s group off the Empress of Scotland, moving on foot across the port to the tracks. Every man in that column knew what military rail transport looked like. Freight cars, sliding doors. That is how the German army had moved them across Europe. It was what they had ridden in themselves, in uniform. Standing at the siding were passenger coaches, upholstered seats, windows, a washroom at the end of the car.

Pabel’s group came around the corner, saw them, and shouted. Glowania’s group got an instruction as they boarded. By his account, four seats face each other in a booth, and they were told to leave one empty so nobody spent the journey cramped. Prisoners of war, weeks off a battlefield, told to spread out so nobody spent two days cramped by the army that had just captured them.

The anonymous diarist who landed at Norfolk in August 1943 expected a slow freight. He got a passenger train, and it put him in Mississippi in two days. There were guards at each end of every car. To use the washroom, a man raised his hand like a schoolboy and waited to be escorted. Pabel found this funny.

He wondered in print what would happen if every man in the coach put his hand up at once. Then, the train pulled out, and a porter came down the aisle. Pabel’s line, the colored porter came through with coffee and sandwiches. A black American serving coffee to captured German soldiers, politely, on their first day in the country.

Pabel wrote that most of them forgot their accumulated anti-American feelings at that moment. Not the shipyards, not the meal, not the paperwork. A stranger handing them a sandwich did it. Five contradictions inside a few hours on a strip of concrete in Virginia. The country was intact. Nobody shot them. They were washed and fed.

They were filed, not broken. None of it made them welcome. The Americans watching them come down the gangway were not charmed. By the end of 1943, there were 172,879 prisoners in the United States. At the German surrender, 425,871. None of which means the men on that dock were welcome. The Americans watching them come ashore were not charmed, and one Norfolk reporter wrote down exactly what he saw in 1943.

The Norfolk Ledger Dispatch on the first Africa Corps prisoners. Their arrogance rests on their shoulders like a faded cloak of royal purple. Both of those things were true on the same dock on the same morning.

5 Things German Prisoners Found Strange the Moment They Reached America

A man in a desert-weight tunic comes down a gangway and stops at the bottom of it. Not because of the guard in front of him, because of the city standing behind the guard with every light on. The harbor is working. Cranes swinging cargo over open hatches, hulls in the water, warehouse doors rolled up and men moving between them, unhurried.

Nothing is burning. Nothing has fallen down. Beyond the sheds, there is a city with its lights on. No gaps in the skyline, no smoke. He has spent two years being told that this place is on its knees. Something he had been told was impossible is standing in front of him, and nobody on this pier intends to explain it.

Within the next few hours, it will happen four more times. Everything here happens between the gangway coming down and the train pulling off the pier. A few hours on one strip of concrete. They came ashore carrying two descriptions of America. Both were wrong. They came ashore carrying a description of America written for them in Berlin.

Goebbels in Das Reich, 1942. A country of no culture run by others, marked by, in his phrase, naivete or a superiority complex. In a 19-year-old that becomes a picture. A shabby, exhausted, half-ruined country that has already lost the war and has not yet been told. That is the picture he carries ashore. The second description came from their own side.

Erich Głowania, drafted into the infantry at 17 and captured in Normandy, was told by German officers that a prisoner is shot on capture. Tunisia, the 13th of May, 1943. Army Group Africa surrenders and roughly 275,000 Axis prisoners need somewhere to go. The army fits about 250 Liberty ships to carry them. 300 men on some, 500 on others.

West across the Atlantic to Norfolk, Newport News, New York, and Boston. Five things were waiting on those docks that none of them were prepared for. The ship reaches the harbor and does not dock. It anchors in quarantine and for hours the men at the rail can see America and are not allowed to touch it. So they stand at the rail and study America the way you study a photograph.

A port at full work. Cranes, loaded hulls, cargo moving. None of it damaged, none of it rebuilt. 134,293 German and Italian prisoners came through one terminal at Newport News. The same water carried 1.7 million American servicemen out. What they had expected was not vague. A South Dakota farm boy named David Rathbun, 9 years old, remembered exactly what the Africa Corps men working his father’s land told him about America.

Rathbun’s words, “They even claimed New York City had been bombed flat.” A 9-year-old’s memory of what grown men told him and they [clears throat] told it as fact. Glowania’s ship came in at New York. By his own account, his group was allowed up on deck and the rail gave them the Statue of Liberty standing unmarked above a working city.

No rubble, no burnt blocks, no damage anywhere on the waterfront. Before a single American had spoken to them, the country had already contradicted the one thing they were most certain of. They had been told this place was finished. It was standing and it was working. The next contradiction came within the hour and it had nothing to do with buildings. It was about the guards.

Down the gangway comes a column of men who have been told by their own officers that prisoners are shot on capture. They are walking towards men holding rifles. That threat did not come from Allied propaganda. Glowania’s officers told him a prisoner is shot the moment he is taken and he stepped onto an American pier expecting exactly that.

The same belief came ashore at four ports, Norfolk, Newport News, New York, Boston. Thousands of men over three years walking down gangways braced for a wall and a firing squad. What actually governed the pier was a treaty concluded at Geneva in 1929 which both Germany and the United States had signed.

It set out food, quarters, work and pay for prisoners. And what met them on the dock was clerical. Guards, yes, but also tables, forms and a line to stand in. Army photographers recorded the whole sequence because there was nothing to hide. No shooting of arriving prisoners is recorded at any American port of debarkation across three years and four ports.

The men who had promised them execution were the men who had trained them, fed them and sent them to Normandy. The first order given to them on American soil was not an execution order. It was an instruction to take off their clothes and what followed is the strangest hour in the whole sequence. Several hundred men undressing at once in the open on a working dock while their uniforms are collected, tagged, and taken away.

This is a delousing station, and it is the first thing America does to them. In 1943, that means showers. Then the clothing into steam and hot air sterilizers, then powder. The quartermaster is not confiscating anything. He is required to disinfect it and give it back. The method changes in January 1944. Two delousing stations in Naples dust 1,300,000 civilians with DDT.

Powder is faster than steam, and the army has it in quantity. Reinhold Pabel, who landed at Norfolk on a January morning in 1944, gives it one line in his memoir. The customary delousing process. He does not think it worth describing. Nobody does. Then they are fed. At Newport News in 1945, by the Signal Corps photographer’s own caption, “Hash, beans, mashed potatoes, tomatoes, Vienna sausages, and tea served on board, still in quarantine.

” And then the detail that stayed with them. They queued up and washed their own dishes. Not as punishment, not as a test. That was simply how the line worked. Stripped, showered, fed, and handed a plate to wash within a few hours of arriving. The fourth thing was quieter than any of that, and it unsettled them far more.

A table, a stack of forms, and a clerk. Name, rank, date of birth, a serial number issued by the Prisoner of War Information Bureau, a fingerprint, a card that will go to Geneva. One Signal Corps caption records who was explaining the paperwork. Not an American interpreter. A German prisoner who spoke English, walking his own men through their forms, line by line.

Their money is taken. It is sealed in an envelope with the man’s name and number on it, and held. Not confiscated, receipted. Every prisoner watches this happen to his own cash. These were men who knew unit strengths, positions, and equipment. They had expected to be worked over for it. Instead, a clerk took their fingerprints and filed them.

Not kindness, bookkeeping. Across the Atlantic, Britain did the opposite. Every arriving batch interrogated, rank irrelevant, through nine depots, including the London Cage. The techniques there are documented in detail. A Russian-speaking interpreter in a Soviet uniform placed in the room. A file stamped NR, Nach Russland, to Russia.

The United States ran no equivalent. Prisoners were screened and then put on trains. They had expected to be broken for what they knew, and instead, they were written down. The fifth thing is the one that turns up in the memoirs, and it happened at the railway siding. The march from the delousing station to the railroad. Norfolk, morning, the 2nd of January, 1944.

Pabel’s group off the Empress of Scotland, moving on foot across the port to the tracks. Every man in that column knew what military rail transport looked like. Freight cars, sliding doors. That is how the German army had moved them across Europe. It was what they had ridden in themselves, in uniform. Standing at the siding were passenger coaches, upholstered seats, windows, a washroom at the end of the car.

Pabel’s group came around the corner, saw them, and shouted. Glowania’s group got an instruction as they boarded. By his account, four seats face each other in a booth, and they were told to leave one empty so nobody spent the journey cramped. Prisoners of war, weeks off a battlefield, told to spread out so nobody spent two days cramped by the army that had just captured them.

The anonymous diarist who landed at Norfolk in August 1943 expected a slow freight. He got a passenger train, and it put him in Mississippi in two days. There were guards at each end of every car. To use the washroom, a man raised his hand like a schoolboy and waited to be escorted. Pabel found this funny.

He wondered in print what would happen if every man in the coach put his hand up at once. Then, the train pulled out, and a porter came down the aisle. Pabel’s line, the colored porter came through with coffee and sandwiches. A black American serving coffee to captured German soldiers, politely, on their first day in the country.

Pabel wrote that most of them forgot their accumulated anti-American feelings at that moment. Not the shipyards, not the meal, not the paperwork. A stranger handing them a sandwich did it. Five contradictions inside a few hours on a strip of concrete in Virginia. The country was intact. Nobody shot them. They were washed and fed.

They were filed, not broken. None of it made them welcome. The Americans watching them come down the gangway were not charmed. By the end of 1943, there were 172,879 prisoners in the United States. At the German surrender, 425,871. None of which means the men on that dock were welcome. The Americans watching them come ashore were not charmed, and one Norfolk reporter wrote down exactly what he saw in 1943.

The Norfolk Ledger Dispatch on the first Africa Corps prisoners. Their arrogance rests on their shoulders like a faded cloak of royal purple. Both of those things were true on the same dock on the same morning.