7 Things German Prisoners Found Strange About America

Summer 1943. A train moves west out of Norfolk, Virginia. On board, hundreds of men in tan desert uniforms, soldiers of the Africa Corps, prisoners now. The journey inland takes days, and that is the problem. Somewhere past the second day, a rumor moves through the cars. The distances make no sense.

Some of the prisoners settle on an explanation. The Americans are driving the trains in circles to make the country look bigger. They ride in surplus Pullman cars, upholstered seats, not the boxcars they know from Europe. Farmland rolls past for a full day, then another. No ruins, no craters, not one burned town. Behind them, Tunisia and a surrender of 275,000 men.

Ahead, a camp in Mississippi, or Kansas, or Wyoming. In between, the first of seven things about America no Africa Corps briefing ever mentioned. To understand why grown soldiers preferred a conspiracy to a map, you have to know what they had been told. In August 1942, Joseph Goebbels published an essay on America in Das Reich.

He wrote that Americans suffered from naivete or a superiority complex that, quote, “The less they know about a matter, the more confidently they speak.” America, in this telling, a mongrel land, no culture, soft. That was the country these men expected, weakened by racial division and democratic chaos, as the framing went.

Instead, roughly 375,000 German prisoners would end up seeing it from the inside. By January 1945, they would fill 130 base camps and 295 branch camps scattered across nearly every state in the Union. Wyoming, Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Kansas, and in those camps seven ordinary things: white bread, cold soda, chewing gum, an unlocked truck, an endless horizon, a shared cotton row, a paycheck would do what no Allied broadcast ever managed.

This is what the prisoners of the Reich found strange about America. The story starts before the war, 1929, Geneva. The powers sign a convention on prisoners of war. A detaining nation must feed and house prisoners to the same standard as its own garrison troops and pay them for work. Most signatories will bend that rule when the fighting comes.

The United States, for reasons of law, recipro- city and habit, will mostly keep it. Few Germans captured in the desert know the document exists. May 9th, 1942. The first German prisoners reach American soil, survivors of U-boat 352, sunk off the Outer Banks of North Carolina, landed at Charleston, and moved to Fort Bragg.

A handful of sailors photographed, processed, and filed away as a curiosity. Nobody in Washington is planning for hundreds of thousands. Within a year, that planning gap will be arriving by the shipload. Because in November 1942, American forces land at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. The United States is now fighting Germany in North Africa, and North Africa is about to collapse.

May 13th, 1943. Tunis. The Africa Corps surrenders. Roughly 275,000 Axis soldiers pass into Allied hands in a single stroke, one of the largest capitulations of the war. One surviving prisoner’s diary opens on that exact date. May 13th, the day the fighting ended for him, and the day something much stranger began. The men are marched into holding enclosures in the desert wire cages near Oran and Casablanca under the same sun they fought beneath.

From here, the logistics problem begins. What do you do with a quarter million prisoners? The answer is floating offshore. Liberty ships. They cross the Atlantic loaded with American supplies, deliver their cargo, and turn around empty. Empty holds going west. The prisoners fill them. Track the shipping lanes, and the fact announces itself before anyone lands.

A country that can afford to send ships across an ocean, and send them home carrying nothing but its enemies. Below decks, the men have only rumor and two years of propaganda to navigate by. Whatever country they are picturing as the ship moves west, it is not the one waiting at the pier. In spring 1943, more than 150,000 prisoners arrive.

After that, an average of 20,000 a month. The ships dock at Camp Shanks, New York, Norfolk, Virginia, Boston. August 4th, 1943, a transport docks at Norfolk. The men aboard are routed to Camp Clinton, Mississippi. Names on a manifest moving into the interior of a country they know only from propaganda.

Even generals make the trip. In June 1943, captured German generals among them, Lieutenant General Carl Bolovius, are held at Angel Island, where Fox Movietone cameras film them in the barracks and the mess. The next day’s Los Angeles Times runs a headline American readers find odd, and German propagandists could never print, Nazi prisoners like war camp in United States.

But the real education happens on the trains. The prisoners board expecting boxcars. They get Pullmans. They expect a short ride. They get days of it through country that shows no sign of ever having been touched. Hence, the theory of the circles. It is easier for some of these men to accept an elaborate deception, thousands of miles of staged scenery, than to accept that the map in their heads is wrong.

The rail lines fan out to the south and the Midwest, where labor is short and land is cheap. Mississippi, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Alabama. The War Department is building an archipelago. Camps rise fast. Barracks, mess halls, canteens, and guard towers that will turn out to be largely ceremonial. The largest, Camp Aliceville, Alabama, will hold 6,000 men.

Sites are chosen for space and distance. Fairgrounds, fresh-built compounds on the edges of farm towns. 19 camps in Wyoming alone, by that state’s own count. The Midwest and the South carry the bulk. Under the Geneva rules, the standard is set by the American garrison soldier. Same rations, same housing. The prisoners do not know this yet. They find out in the mess hall.

Consider who is stepping off these trains, veterans of Rommel’s desert army. Many grew up in the hungry years after the last war, in cold Flats, and then under a state that told them what America was. They have been told American society is decadent, its army soft, its people divided by race and money. Some of that they will find is not entirely wrong.

Most of it is about to fail on contact. By midsummer 1943, the system is running. Ships to the coast, trains to the interior, trucks to the camps. Ships to the coast, trains to the interior, trucks to the camps. A POW pipeline running into small-town America almost without incident. Local papers photograph the arrivals.

Farm towns turn out to watch the columns march up from the depot. The enemy, an abstraction for 2 years, is suddenly local and about to be handed a lunch tray. The guards are minimal from the start. The War Department has done the math. Where, exactly, would an escaped German go? In uniform, in the middle of Nebraska in 1943.

The ocean is the fence. So, the stage is set. A quarter million men raised on Goebbels, delivered by empty cargo ships into the richest country on Earth. The first thing that gets to them is not an argument. It is the food. Strange thing number one, the food. The first mess hall meal. White bread, soft and sliced, meat, fruit, coffee.

Portions that would have fed a squad back in the desert campaign. By some later accounts, a few men held back at first. Food this rich, given this freely, looked like a trick. They waited to see what happened to the ones who ate. It was not a trick. It was regulation. The Geneva standard applied by a country still able to meet it.

Prisoners ate what American garrison troops ate, three times a day, every day of the war. White bread carried a particular charge. In the Reich, bread was dark, rationed, stretched. Here it came in soft white loaves, effectively without limit. Decades on, it was the detail former prisoners kept returning to.

Hans Wecker, held at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, remembered the treatment and the food as first-rate. Many prisoners, the Smithsonian later noted, had grown up in cold-water flats. Now they were gaining weight at the enemy’s table. The writer Alfred Andersch, prisoner first, novelist later, gave the arrangement its lasting name, Der goldene Käfig, the golden cage. White bread, wages, no shooting.

Comfortable, well-fed, still a cage. Strange thing number two, the cold. Not the weather, the drinks. Ice cream in the canteen, soda at meals, Coca-Cola at 5 cents a bottle, chilled in the middle of a world war. Consider the context. In Germany, and for German soldiers everywhere, such things had vanished years earlier.

Here they were handed to prisoners, while American civilians outside the wire lived under sugar rationing. The canteen became the camp’s central institution. Chocolate bars for about a dime, cold bottles lined up in coolers, small luxuries at prices a prisoner’s wage could comfortably cover, and the prisoners did have wages.

That comes later. Cold, sweet, cheap, endless. To an American, this is a corner store. To a soldier off the Tunisian front, whose homeland has rationed sugar for years, it is a daily, quiet piece of evidence. Strange thing number three, chewing gum. To a certain kind of German soldier, gum was shorthand for everything wrong with America.

The camp newspaper at Aliceville put that contempt in print. In October 1944, Der Zaungast reviewed an American film and sneered, “Quote, we know these boys who run around with long hair chewing gum. They are not our friends.” That was the official contempt. Here is what actually happened in the fields.

German prisoners on work details met American farm children and handed them gum and candy across the fence rows. Mel Luchins was a boy in Murdock, Nebraska when the prisoners worked his family’s land. Decades later, he remembered it plainly. “Quote, they played games with us and brought us candy and gum. They were people like us.

They were people like us.” From a Nebraska farm boy about men wearing the uniform of the Reich, the gum, the sneer, and the fence row, a whole war of ideas carried in one small object. Some of the men handing over that gum had read the sneer in their own mess hall. The distance between the editorial and the fence row is the distance this entire story travels.

Meanwhile, the war kept delivering. After Normandy in June 1944, arrivals jumped to 30,000 prisoners a month. In the war’s final months, 60,000. The camps kept absorbing them. By January 1945, the count peaked. Some 375,000 German prisoners of war on American soil, held from the Carolinas to the Arizona desert.

A captive population the size of a major city. A population that size could not sit idle. So, the prisoners went to work. Cotton in Mississippi, pulp wood in Alabama, sugar beets on the plains, farm labor in a country whose farm hands had gone to war. By then, the strange things were no longer novelties. They were the texture of daily life, and they were doing slow, cumulative damage to everything these men had been taught about their enemy.

Because every one of them, sooner or later, was offered the same deal. A day’s work outside the wire, nearly unguarded, for pay. What happened next ran against every instinct the war had trained. Almost nobody ran. Strange thing number four, the trust. Work details left camp each morning for farms and mills, often with a single guard, sometimes with none worth mentioning.

Men who had fought Americans in Tunisia now rode out in open trucks. Fewer than one man in a hundred ever tried to escape. Total attempts across 3 years and 375,000 men. Somewhere between 2,200 and 2,800, depending on who counted. The security was minimal because it could be. Farmers, by many accounts, invited their assigned prisoners in to Sunday dinner.

Guards shared cigarettes. The arrangement held because everyone involved could see it holding. And because there was, practically speaking, nowhere to run. Don Kerr delivered milk to a camp in Kansas as a young man. He remembered one prisoner explaining his own contentment in a single line. He liked it here because no one was shooting at him.

Escape for most would have meant walking away from three meals a day, a canteen, and a wage. Toward what, exactly? The war had made the inside of the wire the safer side of it. In 1943, four prisoner stonemasons built the Buss family of Kansas a concrete garage, working with no level, just a nail and a string.

Keith Buss showed it to reporters decades later, still standing. The exceptions proved the rule. December 1944, Papago Park outside Phoenix, Arizona. 25 German U-boat crewmen dig a tunnel roughly 200 ft long under the wire and out into the desert. Trace the manhunt across the map, and it ends the same way every time. All 25 are recaptured.

The fences, it turns out, were never the main thing keeping anyone in. Strange thing number five, the scale of everything. 130 base camps, 295 branch camps, a prison system the size of a nation inside a nation too large to read from a train window. Do the arithmetic a prisoner could do, an ocean crossed on a ship running empty, 4 days by rail, three meals a day, every day.

Acres past the horizon, untouched by a single bomb. All of it pointing one direction. Back home, their cities were burning. Here, the abundance itself was the argument. No lecture required. A prisoner could count the Liberty ships, the rail cars, and the acres, and do the strategic arithmetic himself. Strange thing number six, the color line.

It is the one part of the propaganda that survives contact with America, and it cuts in a direction the prisoners do not expect. In the fields of the South, German prisoners are assigned what locals called Negro work, picking cotton, harvesting peanuts, logging pulpwood, side by side with black Americans doing the same labor for their own country.

The historian Matthias Rice later studied those work gangs. The relationships he found were notably free of conflict. Each side recognized something of its own condition in the other. The pattern repeats across the map, Delta cotton, Georgia peanuts, Alabama pulpwood. Men imprisoned by one government working beside men shortchanged by their own.

The prisoners noticed, so did the soldiers, and the claim that rankled most was true enough to sting. Defeated white enemies of the United States often received courtesies that black soldiers in American uniform were denied. The black community said so loudly at the time. December 1944, Camp Robinson, Arkansas.

Lena Horne, one of the most famous entertainers in America, arrives to perform and reads the hall. German prisoners of war seated up front, black American soldiers at the back. She wrote later, quote, “I don’t think I have ever been more furious in my life. I marched down off that platform and sang to the Negro guys in the back of the hall.

” She turned her back on the men in front and gave the concert to the men in the rear. The army meanwhile had assigned its first black nurses to the care of German prisoners of war. None of it fit the story the prisoners had carried in. America was supposed to be weakened by its divisions. The divisions were real and the country was winning anyway.

Both facts demanded explanation. Strange thing number seven, the paycheck. Under the Geneva rules, prisoners who worked had to be paid. The American rate for enlisted men, 80 cents a day, issued in canteen script. The mechanics were pure bureaucracy. A farmer or contractor paid the government the prevailing wage, $1.50 a day or 45 cents an hour.

The prisoner drew his 80 cents. The difference went to the federal treasury. Officers were exempt from labor entirely. Non-commissioned officers could be required only to supervise. The rules were printed, posted, and for the most part, followed. A daily wage from the enemy for being the enemy. What did 80 cents buy? One Arkansas prisoner named Pells kept the arithmetic, by his own account.

A pack of cigarettes for 13 cents, a bottle of Gold Crest beer for 10. The script went a long way. Reckoned another way in figures usually traced back to Kramer’s history, a day’s wage covered about 16 bottles of Coca-Cola or a stack of 10 cent chocolate bars. Some men spent, some men saved. At Camp Douglas, Wyoming, one prisoner reported going home with close to a thousand marks saved out of prison wages.

Money earned inside the wire, carried back into the ruins of the Reich. Multiply it out. Hundreds of thousands of men. 80 cents a day across three years. A small economy administered by the Provost Marshal General’s office and documented down to the camp by camp labor report. The prisoners even ran their own press.

At Camp Aliceville, 6,000 of them pooled money to buy a used printing press. On July 16th, 1944, the first issue of their newspaper, Der Zaungast, appeared. Camp newspapers became one battleground in the war inside the wire, committed Nazis against a growing number of doubters. At camps like Concordia, Kansas, that political fight was real, and it could turn ugly.

Resistance was organized where it could be. Work slowdowns were staged and punished. Camp Nazis enforced the old faith on their neighbors. But discipline can only hold a position. It cannot argue with a continent. And the American government, it turned out, had plans for German minds, as well as German hands, an anti-fascist newspaper of its own, run out of Fort Kearney, Rhode Island.

Its moment was coming. By late 1944, the doubters had material these men could read maps, too. Then, May 8th, 1945, Germany surrendered. What do you do with 375,000 prisoners of a state that no longer exists? March 1st, 1945, Fort Kearney, Rhode Island. The first issue of Der Ruf, The Call, an anti-fascist newspaper written by German prisoners for German prisoners, backed by their captors reeducation program.

Its pages carried what the camps had been living through for 2 years, the reckoning. The certainty of Der Zaungast gave way to a harder admission, that so much of what they had been told was false. For some men, the food had done it. For others, the trains, the trust, the paycheck, or a Nebraska family at Sunday dinner.

Seven small strangenesses doing the work of a thousand leaflets. Nobody pulled the converts. The behavior was the poll. Near zero escapes, savings carried home. Camp papers arguing themselves out of an ideology. May 8th, 1945, Germany surrenders. In the camps, the news lands on men who surrendered two years earlier.

Repatriation planning begins, but the prisoners do not simply go home. Truman orders them sent to whichever country wanted them. For many, that meant France or Britain first and more years of labor rebuilding what their army had wrecked before they ever saw Germany. The golden cage emptied slowly through the spring and summer of 1946.

The oral histories gathered decades later bear this out. Lewis Carlson interviewed more than 150 former prisoners and guards and the American years returned again and again as the war’s unlikely good chapter. July 26th, 1946, the last shipment, roughly 1,500 German prisoners, sails from New Jersey. The program closes a little over three years after the Africa Corps first came ashore.

Der Ruf had already printed its own ending. The final issue, April 1st, 1946, carried a farewell photo supplement assembled by the men themselves titled Abschied von Amerika. Farewell to America. 21 months separated the two mastheads. Der Zaungast sneering at gum-chewing boys, Der Ruf saying farewell to America with a photo album.

The distance between them is the entire story. Then, the letters started coming the other way. From the ruins of occupied Germany, former prisoners wrote to their former guards and to the farm families they had worked for, asking for food. The men who once suspected the white bread was a trick were now writing across the Atlantic to ask for it.

Whatever propaganda survived the camps did not survive that. And some came back. In the years after the war, former prisoners emigrated to the United States, took citizenship, married into the towns that had held them, and opened businesses down the road from their old camps. Marriages, storefronts, citizenship papers, here and there, a German accent behind a small-town counter.

The men who had been shipped in as cargo in empty Liberty ships came back this time on purpose. Hans Waecker, the prisoner who praised the food at Fort Robinson, became a physician in Georgetown, Maine. The golden cage for men like him had been the argument that outlasted the war. In Murdock, Nebraska, the boy who took gum from prisoners grew into a man who still described them the same way, as people much like anyone else in town.

That sentence is the whole distance this story traveled. The paper trail remains. Camp inspection and labor reports in record group 389, Signal Corps photographs of the harvests in record group 111, a used presses worth of newspapers tracking one army’s change of mind. The camps themselves were dismantled, sold, or absorbed into bases and fairgrounds.

What survives is scattered, including a concrete garage in Kansas built by four prisoners with a nail and a string still standing. Fewer than one man in a hundred ever tried to leave. Set that figure against any other wire fence in the century and it reads less like a security statistic and more like a verdict.

In 1995, Smithsonian Magazine went looking for the program’s survivors. One former prisoner delivered the closing verdict and the magazine made it the article’s title. Quote, “America beats by far anything.”