America Through German POW Eyes: 7 Sights They Could Barely Believe

There is a moment on a train somewhere west of Virginia in the summer of 1943 when a German soldier stops looking out the window and starts counting count. He counts fields. He counts water towers. He counts the small towns that slide past with their white church steeples and their unbroken windows and their street lights burning at night as if no one in this country had ever heard of an air raid. He counts the hours.

Then he counts the days and somewhere in that arithmetic something in him begins to come apart. He is wearing a tan uniform cut for the desert. Two months ago he was in Tunisia. Two years ago he was told what America was and he believed it because everyone he trusted believed it and because the men who told him had never yet been proven wrong about anything that mattered.

Now he is riding through it and the country outside the glass does not match the country in his head. So he does what men do when the map in their skull collides with the world. He looks for another explanation, any other explanation. And on that train in the summer of 1943, a rumor begins to move from car to car passed between men who fought at Casarine and Marathon Tunis.

Men who are not fools, men who have crossed a desert and an ocean and know something about distance. The rumor is this. The Americans are driving us in circles. They are running the train in loops. They are showing us the same countryside twice, three times, four times. They have staged this. No country is this large. No country is this untouched.

This is a performance and we are the audience. It is easier for some of these men to believe in a deception involving thousands of miles of scenery than to believe the simplest available fact. That the fact is simply true. That America is that big. That America is that whole. That the war they have been fighting for 4 years has not scratched the paint on the country that is going to win it.

This is the story of what happened to 370,000 German prisoners of war when the United States took them off ships and put them in trains and drove them into the middle of itself. It is not a story about barbed wire. It is a story about white bread and cold soda and chewing gum and 80 cents a day. It is a story about the least dramatic weapons ever deployed in a world war and what they did to the men on the receiving end.

But to understand why the train ride broke them, you first have to understand what they had been taught to expect. The country in their heads begin in Berlin in the summer of 1942 when Germany is winning. that August Joseph Gables publishes an essay on America in Dasich, the weekly paper that carries his signature to millions of readers.

Dasich is not a gutter sheet. It is the respectable one, the one that goes to teachers and officers and civil servants, the one designed to persuade the kind of of German who thinks of himself as too intelligent to be persuaded. The portrait Gobles paints is careful and it is contemptuous. Americans, he argues, are a people afflicted by a strange confidence that grows in inverse proportion to their knowledge.

The less they understand a subject, the more loudly they hold forth on it. They are naive. They are gullible. They mistake noise for thought and wealth for culture. And this, he tells his readers, is the nation that has declared itself Germany’s enemy. A country without a real people. A country without a real history.

A country whose soldiers have never fought a serious war on a serious continent. Whose society is split down the middle by race and money. Whose democracy is a marketplace of shouting. Soft. That is the word underneath all of it. Soft. Now understand what this does inside the head of a 22-year-old rifleman in the Africa corpse who has been reading a version of this argument in one form or another since he was a school boy.

He does not merely dislike America. He has been given an entire theory of America and the theory is loadbearing. It explains why Germany can fight the world and win. It explains why the industrial numbers coming out of Detroit Pictor do not matter because a decadent people cannot use what it builds.

It explains why the Americans who landed in North Africa in November were beaten badly at their first real test in the mountains and why they were always going to be beaten. The theory is comfortable. The theory is coherent. And the theory has one fatal design flaw. It has never been checked against the object it describes.

Very few of these men have ever seen the United States. Almost none of them ever expect to. America is an idea to them, a shape in the propaganda, and ideas are safe as long as they stay at a distance. The United States Army is about to close that distance. It’s going to take a quarter of a million of these men, load them onto ships, and carry them directly into the object of their theory.

And then it is going to hold them there for 3 years and feed them three times a day while they look at it. Nobody planned it as an argument. It became one anyway. The rule nobody expect to keep. There is one more thing to establish before ship sail. A piece of paper signed in Geneva in 1929.

It is called the convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war. And it is the work of people who had looked closely at the last war and did not like what they saw. Its logic is not sentimental. It is transactional. It says in effect, “Your enemy holds your sons and you hold his. Behave and he may behave.

Its provisions are specific in a way that will matter enormously. A detaining power must feed prisoners of war at a standard equal to that own garrison troops. Not a starvation ration, not a charity ration, the same food by the same standard as the soldiers guarding them. Prisoners who are made to work must be paid. Officers may not be compelled to labor at all.

Non-commissioned officers may be required only to supervise. Prisoners must be housed under conscience as good as those of the detaining powers own troops in base camps. It is on paper one of the more humane documents of the 20th century. And in practice across the war that is coming, most of the signitories will find reasons to bend it, shave, if it or ignore it outright when the fighting turns ugly and the food runs short and the hatred gets personal.

The United States for a mixture of reasons, law, reciprocity, the very concrete knowledge that Germany holds American airmen and will hold more will mostly keep it. Not perfectly, not everywhere, but mostly and consistently enough that it will become the single strangest fact of these men’s lives.

Almost none of the Germans captured in North Africa know this document exists. They will not be told about it in advance. They will discover it the way you discover most things in an army, by standing in a line and being handed a tray. >> The first stone. >> The system does not begin with a quarter of a million men.

It begins with a handful of wet sailors on a beach in the Carolas. May 9th, 1942. Off the outer banks of North Carolina in the shallow water where the Gulf Stream runs close to the American coast, a German submarine is caught on the surface hunting coastal traffic. This is the season the Yubot crews call the second happy time.

When tankers still burn in sight of American beaches and the glow of unblacked out resort towns silhouettes them perfectly for a periscope. It ends badly for U352. A Coast Guard cutter drops depth charges. The boat is broken and forced up. Men come out of the hatches into water and gun firefire. And the survivors are pulled aboard the same ship that killed their submarine.

They are landed at Charleston, South Carolina. photographed, processed, sent inland to Fort Bragg. There are a few dozen of them in the paperwork of a country that is only 5 months into its war. They are a curiosity. Nobody in Washington is drafting plans for what to do with hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers because the idea that hundreds of thou thousands of enemy soldiers might arrive is not yet a serious planning assumption.

The men themselves are a specific type and the type will matter later. Submarine crews are volunteers. They are among the most ideologically committed formations in the German armed forces. Small closed communities of men who have spent months at a time in a steel tube believing the same things very hard. When those men reach American camps in numbers, they will not be the ones who change their minds.

4 months later in September 1942, another submarine dies in the Caribbean and it produces a man who will run like a thread through everything that follows. His name is Jurgen Vatenberg. He was born on the 28th of December 1900 which makes him 41 years old and older than most of the war. He is a corvette in Capitan, a rank that translates roughly to lieutenant commander.

And he is the captain of U 162. Watenberg is not a hotthead. He is a professional, a man who was at sea before Hitler was a name anyone outside Munich knew. an officer who had served aboard the pocket battleship Admiral Graphspe had been interned in Argentina after that ship was scuttled off Monte Vido in December 1939 and who had made his way back to Germany and back to the war.

He has a good record. He has sunk ships south of Trinidad. Three British destroyers find him. Depth charges bring U162 to the surface and the boat is finished. The crew goes into the water. Almost all of them are picked up. Watenberg is taken alive and he is angry about it and he will stay angry about it for the entire war.

He does not intend to sit out the rest of the conflict quietly in a camp in a country he despises. He is going to become in time the most determined escaper in the American prison system and the last man caught in the largest escape ever attempted from it. But that is 2 years away and it belongs to part part two. For now, remember him. 41 years old, a naval officer captured in the Caribbean in September 1942.

Shipped north into the United States while the American camp system barely exists. He is one of the first. He is about to be joined by a flood. Torch. November 8th, 1942. Before dawn, American and Britisher troops come ashores at Kazablanca, at Orin at Alers. Operation Torch, the first great American amphibious operation of the war in the West and the beginning of the end for Axis North Africa.

For the German high command, it is a strategic disaster disguised as an opportunity. Rather than withdraw from Africa, Hitler pours reinforcements into Tunisia. Divisions, aircraft, armor, men flown in and shipped in across a Mediterranean that the Allies are steadily closing. The bridge head swells with troops who are in the most practical sense being fed into a bag whose mouth is about to be tied shut.

That winter in the mountains of central Tunisia, the theory about American softness gets its one and only piece of supporting evidence. At Kasarine Pass in February 1943, green American units are handled roughly by veterans who know exactly what they are doing. The Americans lose ground, lose equipment, and lose a great many men. German soldiers write home about it.

The Americans, they say, cannot fight. They are badly led. They run. [clears throat] It is the last time any of them will be able to write that sentence honestly. Because the thing about the Americans at Casarine is not that they were beaten. It is what happened next. Commanders were sacked within weeks.

Doctrine was rewritten. [clears throat] formations were retrained and the material, the trucks, the guns, the shells, the aircraft, the fuel kept coming across the Atlantic at a rate that no amount of tactical brilliance in Tunisia could ever match. By spring, the bag is closing. The Axis forces in Tunisia are squeezed into a shrinking pocket in the northeast, cut off from resupply, out of fuel, out of ammunition, out of options.

And on the 13th of May 1943, it ends. Tunis, the number is enormous, and the sources argue about it, as sources do with numbers this large. Somewhere in the range of a quarter of a million Axis soldiers, Germans and Italians together, pass into Allied hands in Tunisia in that final collapse.

Many accounts put the figure at roughly 275,000. Whatever the precise count, the shape of the thing is unmistakable. It is one of the largest capitulations of the entire war. An entire army group gone in a matter of days. Raml himself was already out, evacuated back to Europe in early March, 2 months before the surrender, sick and sidelined, spared the surrender of the force that carried his name.

His men were not spared it. Picture the last hours. Vehicles burned by their own crews. so the enemy cannot have them. Radio sets smashed, officers destroying documents, long columns of men walking out of position they held that morning, hands empty, into the c custody of soldiers they had been told could not fight.

One prisoner’s surviving diary opens on that exact date, May the 13th. Not the beginning of a life or a campaign, but the beginning of the strangest three years he would ever spend. They are marched into holding cages in the desert. Wire enclosures near Oruron, near Kazablanca, under the same white sun they had fought beneath a week earlier. Everything is provisional.

Everything is dust. And the men wait and they do the thing prisoners always do, which is talk. Where are they sending us? There are rumors. England. Some say camps in the desert say others. Right here until the war ends and we walk home. Almost nobody guesses correctly because the correct answer is absurd. The Ebles ships here is logistics problem in one sentence.

The Allies have just captured a quarter of a million men in a theater that cannot feed them. North Africa is not a granary. Every ton of food, water, and medicine in Tunisia arrived by ship, and every ton is needed for the armies preparing to invade Sicily. Guarding a quarter of a million prisoners requires troops and troops are needed elsewhere.

Holding them close to the front means holding them where they might in some future turn of the war be liberated. The British have already been struggling with their own captures and their island has neither the space nor the food to absorb this which leaves one solution and it is sitting in the harbor and it is the single most eloquent fact in this entire story. The Liberty ships.

America is building them faster than the war can sink them. welded together in yards on both coasts in a matter of weeks each. And they are crossing the Atlantic in convoys stuffed with everything an army needs. Tanks, shells, canned food, boots, aviation fuel, locomotives. And then they unload and they turn around and they sail home empty.

Thousands of tons of hull capacity going west across an ocean carrying nothing. So they are filled with prisoners. Stop. Stop and look at that from below decks from the point of view of a corporal from Dortmund who has been told that American shipping is being strangled by the Yubot war that the Atlantic is a German lake that the enemy’s supply lines are bleeding out.

He is being carried to America in the empty half of a supply run. The ships are so plentiful that their return trip is spare capacity. His entire captivity is in the accounting of the United States merchant marine a way of not wasting space. Nobody explains this to him. Nobody has to. It is the kind of fact that a soldier works out for himself while lying in a hammock listening to the engines and it is the first crack.

The crossings take one to two weeks depending on the route and the convoy. Conditions vary. This is a troop ship and troop ships are miserable. But the prisoners are fed and [clears throat] what they are fed is already wrong. It is too much. It is too good. Men who spent the last months of the desert campaign on short water and shorter rations are being handed meals with meat in them on a ship in the middle of a war by an enemy who is supposed to be starving.

Some of them decide the food is a trick. That thought will follow them ashore and it will get worse before it gets better. In the spring of 1943, more than 150,000 prisoners arrive in the United States. After that, the flow flow settles into something like a rhythm, an average of of roughly 20,000 men a month.

They dock at Norfolk in Virginia, at Boston, at Camp Shanks up the Hudson from New York. On the 4th of August 1943, one transport ties up at Norfolk and disgorg’s men who will be routed inland to Camp Clinton, Mississippi. Names on a manifest, moving into the interior of a country they know only as a caricature.

They come down the gangways in tan tropical uniforms into the humidity of an American summer. And the first thing many of them notice is not a soldier or a gun. It is the harbor. Cranes, ships in every birth, rail lines running right down to the water. A port working at full industrial speed at night with the lights on in a country at war with no blackout because there is nothing in the sky over Virginia that anybody needs to hide from. Their own ports have been bombed.

Hamburg that very month is being burned in one of the most destructive air raids in history. Norolk is not blacked out. They are not permitted to write that in a letter home. It would not have passed the sensor on either side. The generals on film. Not everyone goes inland immediately. And one early group produces a moment worth pausing on because it shows how strange this all looked at from the American side, too.

In June 1943, a group of captured German generals is held at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. The old immigration station, now a processing point. Among them is a general officer of engineers, one of the senior men swept up in the North African collapse. American news reel cameras are allowed in. Fox [clears throat] movie tone films them in the barracks and in the mess hall.

German general officers in uniform eating American army food in California. and the American press covered it the way it covered everything bluntly and without asking permission. The tone of the coverage was that the enemy appeared to be comfortable. Sit with that for a second.

That kind of story ran in major American newspapers in the middle of a war for the general public. It was not propaganda. It is not a morale piece. It is a slightly beused human interest story about the enemy being comfortable. No newspaper in Germany could have printed its mirror image, not because the fact would have been inconvenient, but because the entire apparatus of the German press existed to prevent facts of that shape from reaching print at all.

The American press did not need permission to be embarrassing. It simply was routinely about everything and it was going to keep being embarrassing for the next 3 years in newspapers that the prisoners would eventually be allowed to read. That is the first true strangeness and it arrives before most of them have even seen a camp.

The country that was supposed to be crushed by censorship and propaganda was printing stories that made its own war effort look ridiculous and nobody was arrested for it. The now the trains. If there is one single experience that every German prisoner in America shares, it is this one and it is the one they will still still be describing 40 years later.

When historians come with tape recorders, they are marched from the docks to the rail heads expecting cattle cars. That is not pessimism. That is the standard. That is how the German army moves prisoners in Europe. That is how the German state moves everyone it does not care about in freight wagons standing for days with a bucket.

Some of these men have seen it. Some have guarded it. Instead, they are put aboard passenger cars. Pullman coaches in many cases older stock pulled out of surplus but uh Pullman coaches nonetheless upholstered seats, windows, a roof that does not leak, a car attendant meals brought through. The reaction is not gratitude.

The first reaction over and over in the accounts is suspicion and then a kind of vertigo. Why would they do this? The answer is mundane. The United States has enough rolling stock. Freight capacity is precious and desperately needed for war material. Passenger capacity for a country this size is comparatively available.

Moving prisoners in seated coaches is administratively simpler, requires fewer guards, and produces fewer sick men at the far end. It is not kindness. It is abundance. But to the man in the seat, abundance and kindness are indistinguishable and both are impossible according to everything he has been taught. Then the train starts moving.

And this is where the theory in their heads begins to da die not in an argument but through a window. The arithmetic of distance understand the scale problem these men are facing because it is genuinely physically difficult for a European to absorb. Germany at its widest is a day’s drive. A German soldier’s mental map of a long journey is Berlin to Paris.

From the ports of the American East Coast, the trains carrying prisoners run for 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, and in some cases longer to reach camps in Kansas, in Nebraska, in Wyoming, in Arizona, in Texas. Day one, they are still absorbing the coaches. Day two, the countryside start to work on them. farmland. Then more farmland.

Then a town whole and lit and ordinary with cars on the street and washing on lines and shops with things in the windows. Then more farmland. Grain elevators standing up out of the flat like cathedrals. Factories with the shifts changing. Freight trains running the other way. One after another after another.

so many that men begin counting them and then stop counting them because the number stops meaning anything. And this is the part that does the damage. No ruins. Not one. Not a single bombed building. Not a burned out street. Not a crater in a field. Not a chimney standing alone where a house used to be. Not an anti-aircraft battery.

Not a queue outside a shop. Not a boarded up window. Not one damn thing to indicate that this country is in a war at all. They have come from Europe. Every one of them has seen what modern war does to a landscape. Some of them made a good part of it themselves in Poland, in France, in the Balkans, in Russia.

They know exactly what the aftermath looks like because they have driven through it in trucks. And here is a continent that has none of it. By the second day, a certain kind of man on that train has done the calculation that no lecture could ever have forced on him. We are bombing their cities.

They are not bombing ours because they cannot reach. No, wait. They are bombing ours. Hamburg, Cologne, the ruer. We are not touching this. We cannot touch this. There is no version of this war in which we reach Kansas. Some men reach that conclusion on the train and never let go of it. Some reach it and push it away and some do something else entirely and it is the most human thing in this whole story.

They decide it is fake. The circles here. The rumor moves through the cars sometime after the second day and it is repeated in enough separate accounts that it has become one of the small famous details of the whole prisoner of war program. The Americans are running the train in circles. They are taking us around the same loop of countryside again and again to to convince us that the country is enormous.

This is a psychological operation. That that town we passed, we have passed it before. That grain elevator, that river, it has staged all of it. A pmpkin landscape assembled to break our morale. And we are not going to fall for it. It sounds like a joke. It is not a joke. It is one of the most revealing things in the entire archive of this program because of what it costs to believe it.

To believe in the circles, a man has to believe that the United States has the resources to run a multi-day theatrical performance for a few hundred prisoners. He has to believe they can commandeer the rolling stock, coordinate the routing, and stage undamaged towns full of civilians going about their ordinary lives.

He has to believe, in other words, in an America of practically unlimited surplus capacity in order to avoid believing in an America of practically unlimited surplus capacity. The lie he invents to protect the theory requires the theory to be false. That is the shape of the first great turn in this story. Not a conversion, not an epiphany, just a man on a train looking out a window building an increasingly elaborate structure to keep from seeing what is directly in front of his face and discovering that there is no structure strong enough. The train keeps

going. That is the thing about the circles. Even if you believe in them on day two, the train is still moving on day three and on day four and eventually you arrive somewhere that is not the coast and the arithmetic has to be faced. Fewer of them believed it by the end than at the beginning. The archipilago, where were they all going? The war department built an archipelago and it built it fast.

By the peak of the program, there were roughly 130 base camps and around 295 branch camps scattered across nearly every state in the union. The base camps were the permanent installations with headquarters and hospitals and full administration. The branch camps were smaller satellites, sometimes just at a fenced compound and a set of tents near a canery or a cotton gin or a lumber operation.

holding a few dozen or a few hundred men close to where the work was. The distribution was not random. It followed three things: space, distance from the coasts, and from war industry, and labor demand. The South and the Midwest carried the bulk. Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas.

Wyoming alone accounts for around 19 camp sites by that state’s own reckoning. Camp Aliceville in Alabama became one of the largest built to hold on the order of 6,000 men. A townsiz population dropped into rural Pickkins County, Alabama in a place where the arrival of that many people of any nationality would have been the biggest event in living memory.

Camp Clinton in Mississippi took the senior officers including general officers. Papago Park outside Phoenix, Arizona took naval personnel. Yubot officers and crews, the hardest cases concentrated in the desert. That is where Jurgen Vutenberg was going to end up. And that concentration of committed submariners in one compound was going to have consequences.

The camps were built to a pattern and built quickly. Barracks and rows, messaul, latrines, infirmary, a canteen, an administration block, a perimeter fence, guard towers. The guard towers deserve a note because they are one of the small ironies of the whole system. They were built because that is what you build.

Many of them were manned lightly and some were barely manned at all as the war went on and guard personnel were stripped away for combat theaters. The security architecture was to a significant degree ceremonial. The Americans had done a piece of arithmetic of their own and it was very simple. Where exactly is he going to go? A German soldier who gets over the fence in central Nebraska in 1943 is a man in a foreign uniform or in a work shirt with the letters P and W painted on the back in a size visible from a passing car who speaks accented English if he

speaks it at all. In a rural county where every adult knows every other adult by sight. 3,000 miles from anything that could be described as home with an ocean at each end. The ocean was the fence. Everything else was the decoration, the towns. Now, hold the other side of this in your head for a moment because it is easy to forget that there were two sets of people in this story who had been told things about each other.

Imagine you are a farmer’s wife in Concordia, Kansas or Aliceville, Alabama or Murdoch, Nebraska in the summer of 1943. Your son is overseas, possibly in the Pacific, possibly in Europe. You have a flag with a star in the window. You have been reading about the Nazis in the papers for 4 years and you have been watching news reels and you know what Germans are.

And now the government is building a camp outside town. And the first columns are marching up from the railroad depot in the afternoon heat and the whole town has come out to look. The local paper photographs the arrival. People stand along the road. What they see does not immediately match what they expected either.

They see young men, very young, some of them teenagers, sunburned, thin, dusty, tired in the specific way that men are tired after a captivity in an ocean and 4 days on a train. Many of them are blonde and a great many of the people standing along that road in Kentanis and Nebraska and Wisconsin are the grandchildren of German immigrants and some of the older folks in the crowd still speak German at home.

The enemy an abstraction for 2 years has just become local and the local people are about to be responsible for feeding him. That is the collision at the center of everything that follows. Not soldiers against soldiers. Farm towns against the men they had been taught to hate at close range every day for 3 years in the middle of a harvest emergency.

Neither side had a script for it. The tray now the messaul. Now the moment the whole first act has been building toward. The men come off the trucks, are counted, are assigned to barracks, and are marched to eat. And they are handed a tray. And on the tray is the first physical evidence, the first thing they can put in their hands and their mouths of what kind of country they have arrived in.

Meat, not a smear of it, a portion. Potatoes, vegetables, fruit, in some camps, oranges, which several of them had not seen in years. Coffee. real coffee, not the roasted barley substitute that had been standing in for it at home since before the war started. And bread, you have to understand what bread meant.

In Germany, bread was dark, dense, and rationed. It was stretched with whatever was available. It had been the barometer of the German economy since 1914, and the country had a long collective memory of what happened when it ran short. Bread was serious. Here it came in soft white sliced loaves, effectively without limit. Put out on the tables like it was nothing because to the Americans it was nothing.

Of all the things these men would see in America, the factories, the trains, the trucks, the sheer unbombed enormity of the place, the detail that men returned to decades later again and again when historians came with microphones was the white bread. Not because it was good. By most accounts, it was not especially good because of what its abundance said.

You cannot fake bread. A regime can stage a factory for a delegation. It can put on a parade. It cannot casually over supply bread to its enemies three times a day, every day for 3 years in 600 locations at once as a piece of theater. That is the second great turn. And it happens quietly at a table with a tray.

And the first reaction, this is important, is not gratitude. The first reaction in a number of accounts is fear. Some men held back. Food this rich, offered this freely by an enemy looked like a trick. Poison or a test or the prelude to something. In several tellings, the men waited to see what happened to the ones who ate first.

Nothing happened to the ones who ate first. They ate again the next morning and the morning after that and eventually the suspicion could not be sustained because a trick that goes on for a thousand consecutive days is not a trick. It is a policy. The policy was Geneva article by article the same rations as American garrison troops.

The Americans were not being generous. They were being legalistic. There were officers in Washington who thought the whole arrangement was excessive. And there were American civilians who would become genuinely furious about it once they understood it because those civilians were living under sugar rationing and meat rationing and coffee rationing while enemy soldiers ate steak in Alabama.

The press would eventually give the camps a nickname that stuck like a splinter, the Fritz Ritz. But policy is policy and the trays kept coming. Hans Vucker held at Fort Robinson in Nebraska would remember his treatment and the food in America as first rate for the rest of his life. He would say so in later years without hedging.

And his flight did not end in Germany. He became a physician in the United States in Georgetown, Maine. It was a cage. That is not a small word. These men were prisoners of a foreign government. behind W counted twice a day, unable to go home, unable to know whether their families were alive under the bombing. And many of them would be held for a year or more after the war ended. Men died in these camps.

Some were shot trying to escape. Some were killed by their own comrades. And we will come to that because it is the ugliest thing in this story and it is coming in part two. But it was g gilded and everybody involved could see the gilding and the gilding did something to them that no interrogation ever could. What arrived with them? One last thing has to be established before part two because without it the rest makes no sense.

The men getting off those trains were not a single population with a single mind. There were roughly roughly groups inside the wire and the Americans did not initially understand this and the failure to understand it was going to cost lives. First the committed VAF SSmen, submarine crews, Luftvafa personnel, officers who had built entire careers and identities inside the regime.

For them, captivity was not the end of the war. It was a different front. They organized. They enforced. >> They ran the barracks controlled the camp administration from the inside because the Americans short of manower delegated internal discipline to German NCOs and they punished anyone who showed signs of drifting. Second, the vast middle conscripts, farm boys and clerks and mechanics who had been drafted, sent to Africa and captured, who had believed a general version of what they were told because everyone did, and who were now extremely tired and extremely interested

in staying alive. Third, the doubters. Men who had never believed or who had stopped believing and who had learned very carefully to say nothing. Some were political, social democrats, communists, Catholics who had watched their ch church squeezed. Some had simply seen too much in Poland or Russia. In a German barracks in Alabama in 1943, that third group kept its mouth shut because the first group was watching and and because being marked as a traitor inside a compound of 6,000 men was not a social problem. It was a physical one. That is

the war inside the wire. It runs for the next 2 years and it gets violent and it produces the only Germans executed on American soil during the Second World War. Meanwhile, outside the wire, America was running out of farm hands. 16 million Americans were in uniform. The crops were still in the fields. And there were sitting in camps across the agricultural heartland several hundred,000 physically fit young men with nothing to do.

The solution was obvious and it was legal under Geneva. And it required one thing that ran against every instinct the war had trained into everyone involved. It required letting them out. Not permanently, not unsupervised, at least not at first, but out onto trucks in the morning, onto farms and into orchards and caneries and timber lots alongside American civilians, often with a single guard for a work detail of dozens, and sometimes as the war ground on, and the guards were drawn away with no meaningful guard at all. Every safety

assumption said this would fail. Every instinct said these men would run across 3 years and roughly 370,000 prisoners. The total number of escape attempts would come in somewhere between 2,200 and 2,800 depending on whose count you use. Fewer than one man in a 100. And of the ones who ran, almost every single one came back.

Some caught, some hungry, some simply walking back through the gate on their own because there was nowhere in the enormous, unbombed, well-fed country outside that fence that was better than the enormous unbombed, well-fed country inside it. But there were exceptions. In December of 1944, in the Arizona desert, 25 German naval officers and crewmen were going to go under the wire through a tunnel of nearly 180 ft in the largest prisoner of war escape ever staged on American soil.

At the head of it was a 44year-old submarine captain who had been in America’s custody since September 1942 and who had spent every one of those days refusing to accept a single thing this country had offered him. Jurgen Vatenberg was not finished. The truck leaves the camp gate at 6:00 in the morning and there is one guard on it.

one, he is maybe 19 years old or he is 51 and has flat feet and a heart murmur and was never going so overseas. And either way, he is sitting up front with drivers and behind him in the open bed are 22 German soldiers. 22 men who fought at Marath and Elgatar and Tunis. Oh, men who know weapons. Men who 18 months ago would have killed him without a second thought and gone on to breakfast.

The truck rolls out onto a dirt county road in Kansas or Alabama or Nebraska and the sun comes up over a horizon that has nothing on it and nobody moves. Nobody jumps. Nobody rushes the cab. Nobody runs. They ride out to a field and they climb down and they pick cotton or thin sugar beets or stack pulp wood for 9 hours. And at the end of the day, they climb back onto the truck and go home to the camp.

And the guard counts them. And the count is right. Day after day, season after season, across 3 years and hundreds of camps and hundreds of thousands of men, that is the central strangeness of this entire story. And it is the thing that makes American veterans and farm families shake their heads about it 70 years later. They didn’t run.

uh to understand why and to understand the men who were the exceptions because there were exceptions and they were spectacular. You have to understand what was happening inside those camps in 1943 and 1944 because two wars were being fought behind that wire at the same time. One was quiet and it was fought with white bread and chewing gum and 80 cents a day. The other one was not quiet.

The other one had beatings and secret tribunals and murder and it ended on a gallows in Kansas. Both of them mattered. Let’s take them in order. The harvest emergencies start with the reason the trucks were going out at all because it was not charity and it was not an experiment in rehabilitation. It was panic.

By 1943, the United States had put roughly 16 million people into uniform, and it had pulled millions more off the land and into shipyards and aircraft plants and steel mills, where the wages were three and four times what a farm handmade. The Great Plains and the Deep South were stripped, and the crop crops were still out there.

The cotton was still opening in the Mississippi Delta. The sugar beats were still swelling in Colorado and Montana and Nebraska. The peanuts in Georgia, the pulpwood in Alabama, the citrus in Florida, the tomatoes and the corn and the peas standing in front of caneries that had government contracts to fill and nobody to fill them.

Food was ammunition. Everybody [clears throat] understood that. A crop rotting in a field in Arkansas was a shell that didn’t get fired in France. and sitting in camps across the exact geography of the emergency were several hundred,000 physically fit young men in their 20s eating three American meals a day with absolutely nothing to do.

The Geneva Convention permitted it. Enlisted prisoners could be required to work. The work could not be dangerous, could not be directly connected to war operations and had to be paid. So in 1943 the branch camps started opening the small satellites sometimes just a fenced compound of tents next to a canery sometimes a converted CCC camp sometimes a county fairground and the trucks started rolling out at dawn and rural America met the vermach in an its own back 40 the first morning try to hold both sides of that first morning at once

because this is where the story stops being about policy and starts being about people. You are a farmer in central Kansas. You are 61 years old. You have 400 acres and no help. Your two sons are gone. One in the Pacific, one somewhere in England waiting for whatever is coming next. And you don’t know where because he can’t tell you.

You have a photograph on the mantle and a star in the window. And you have not slept properly in a year. and the county agent has told you that you can get labor, German labor. Prisoners, you pay the government the prevailing wage and they send you a crew. You said yes because the wheat does not care about your feelings.

And now the truck is in your yard and men are climbing down off the back of it and they are wearing shirts with PW stencled between the shoulder blades and one of them is looking at your barn and you are standing there with your hat in your hand thinking about your boy. Now the other side you are 20 years old. You are from a village outside castle or from Hamburg and you don’t know if Hamburg is still there because you have heard things.

You were told these people were soft, mongrelized, incapable. You were told their country was collapsing. You have now been in America for 4 months and you have eaten better in those four months than in the entire 2 years before them. And you have ridden a train for 4 days through country with no craters in it.

and something in you has already gone very quiet and you climb down off a truck into a farmyard and there is an old man standing there with a hat in his hand and he looks exactly like your grandfather. Nobody had a script. What happened next across thousands of farms is the single most consistent thing in the oral histories and it is not dramatic and that is why it is so devastating.

They worked and then they ate. farm families over and over brought the prisoners into the kitchen, fed them at the table. Sunday dinner, coffee in the afternoon. Sometimes the guard ate too, and sometimes the guards fell asleep in the shade of the truck and nobody thought much about it. There were rules against this. The rules said fraternization was prohibited.

The rules said prisoners were to be fed from camp rations in the field. The rules lost. They lost in about a thousand farm farm yards quietly because a farm woman who has spent her whole life feeding whoever is working her land does [clears throat] not stop doing that because Washington sent a memo.

In accounts collected from that county decades later, a man named Don Kerr remembered delivering milk to a camp in Kansas as a young man. Decades later, he remembered a conversation with one of the prisoners. And the man’s explanation of his own contentment was one sentence long. He liked it here, the man said, because nobody was shooting at him. Sit with that a moment.

That is a soldier of the Third Reich in the middle of the deadliest war in human history, explaining that he had found the one place on earth where the shooting had stopped, and it was a wheat field in Kansas. That is not a man planning an escape. The pes check. Now, the part that Americans found hardest to swallow at the time and that a lot of Americans still find hard to swallow, they were paid.

Under the Geneva Convention, a prisoner of war who works must be compensated. The United States set the rate for enlisted prisoners at 80 cents a day, not cash, canteen script, coupons good inside the camp, which kept real currency out of the hands of potential escapers and kept the whole economy closed. The mechanics were pure bureaucracy and they are worth spelling out because they explain why the program survived politically.

The farmer or the contractor did not get free labor. He paid the United States government the prevailing local wage commonly around $1.50 a day or roughly 45 cents an hour depending on the crop and the region. Out of that the prisoner received his 80 cents in script. The difference went into the federal treasury.

The program made money. That is the answer to the objection every congressman raised. The provost marshall general’s office could show on paper, camp by camp, labor report by labor report that prisoner labor was bringing revenue into the government while bringing crops in from the fields. The rank rules held too, and they mattered inside the wire.

officers could not be compelled to work at all. Non-commissioned officers could be required only to supervise. So in a camp like Papago Park full of naval officers or Camp Clinton in Mississippi which held German generals, you had a substantial population of men with nothing to do but think and organize and enforce. Idle officers.

Remember that it becomes important. What did 80 cents buy? Uh, one prisoner in Arkansas kept the arithmetic and his numbers survive. A pack of cigarettes 13 cents. A bottle of Gold Crest beer 10 cents. Reckoned another way by the figures usually traced back to the historian Arnold Kramer whose book on the program remains the standard work.

A single day’s wage covered something on the order of 16 bottles of Coca-Cola or a stack of 10 cent chocolate bars. Now, put that next to the American homeront. Sugar was rationed in the United States from 1942. Coffee was rationed. Meat was rationed. An American housewife in Alabama was counting ration points at the counter of a store where 3 mi down the road, a German prisoner of war was buying a cold Coca-Cola with money the United States government had paid him.

That is where the phrase came from, the Fritz Ritz. There were furious letters to editors. There were congressional inquiries. There were gold star mothers who could not comprehend it and they were not being unreasonable. The army’s answer never changed and it was not sentimental. It was this. There are American boys in German hands.

Every rational we cut here, they will cut there. Every courtesy we withdraw, they will withdraw. The convention is a two-way document. And we are not going to be the ones who tear it up. That was the calculation. Cold, institutional, and as far as it went, it worked. And it produced a fact that no ideology on earth was equipped to survive.

Some prisoners went home to the ruins of Germany with savings. At Camp Douglas in Wyoming, one man reported returning with close to a thousand marks accumulated out of of prison wages. Money earned from the enemy carried back to a country that no longer had a government. Fewer than one in a 100.

So now the number and this is the one to hold on to. Across the entire war, 3 years, 600 camps, roughly 370,000 German prisoners. The total number of escape attempts was somewhere between 2,200 and 2,800, depending on which accounting you follow. Fewer than one man in a 100 ever tried. And of those who did, essentially all were recaptured, most within days, many within hours.

A great number simply walked back through the gate on their own, cold and hungry and out of ideas. Now, this is the part that a lot of retellings get wrong and it deserves to be said plainly because it matters for what these men were. That number is not a story about gratitude. It is not a story about Germans falling in love with America and giving up the war.

It is a story about arithmetic. Consider what Escape actually offered. You are in a work shirt with PW painted on the back and letters a foot high. You speak German. You’re English. if you have any, is accented in a way that a Nebraska sheriff will notice in 4 seconds. You are in an agricultural county where every adult knows every other adult by sight and the arrival of a stranger is news. You have no papers.

Ration books, draft cards, identity documents. Wartime America is a paper country and you have none of it. And where are you going? There is an ocean behind you and an ocean in front of you. Mexico is a thousand miles and a foreign country of its own. Even if you got to a coast, no German vessel is coming. Escape meant walking away from three meals a day, a bed, a canteen, a paycheck, and safety toward nothing.

The fences were never the main thing keeping anybody in. The continent was, and here is the small human evidence that the arrangement was more than arithmetic, and it is still standing. In 1943 in Kansas, four German prisoners who happened to be stonemasons built a concrete garage for a farm family named Bus. They had no level. They worked with a nail and a string.

Decades later, Keith Bus showed it to reporters. Still square, still solid, still in use. Four enemy soldiers, a nail, a piece of string, and a building that outlived everybody in this story. The men wjo did run, but some men did run. And the ones who ran were almost without exception. The ones for whom none of it had worked.

Not the farm boys. Not the conscripts eating pie in a Kansas kitchen. The submariners, the officers, the believers. Which brings us to Arizona and to a 44year-old naval officer who had been refusing this country for 2 years and 3 months. Papago Park. Camp. Papago Park sat in the desert outside Phoenix, Arizona. And the army had put its hard cases there on purpose.

Naval personnel, yubot officers and crews, men who had volunteered for the most ideologically committed branch of the German forces who had spent months at a time sealed inside a steel hull with the same handful of men and the same handful of beliefs and who had come out of that experience with those beliefs annealed like glass. Officers under the convention could not be made to work. So they had time all of it.

Jurgen Vottenberg born the 28th of December 1900 former captain of U 106 taken from the mur south of Trinidad in September 1942 was the senior man among them in the way that mattered not by paperwork alone but by force of personality. He had been at sea before Hitler. He had served aboard the Admiral Grath SP.

He had been interned once already in Argentina and had gotten himself home and back into the war. Being caught a second time did not read to him as an ending. He was, by every account, disciplined, intelligent, humorless about his duty, and completely unmoved by American hospitality. The white bread did not work on Jurgen Vatenberg. The Coca-Cola did not work.

The farm families did not work because he never went to a farm. He considered escape an officer’s obligation, not a hope of getting home. He was too intelligent for that. An obligation. The tunnel began by the usual telling with a request to build a volleyball court. The prisoners asked for tools and permission to level ground in the compound.

The Americans, who were generally happy I have prisoners occupied, agreed. Excavation began under cover of a bath house and the spoil went out onto the volleyball ground into gardens into the pockets of men walking the perimeter and letting dirt run out a trouser leg. They dug through hard desert kalish. They shored the shaft.

They ran a line of about 178 ft. Some accounts say a little more from inside the wire under it and out to a drainage canal. It took months in a compound of naval men with officers exempt from labor and every day identical. It was the only real work available and it was done with the patience of people who had nothing else. On the night of the 23rd of December 1944, Christmas Eve Eve, when the American garrison was thinnest and the holiday had loosened everything, 25 German prisoners went into the hole and came out in the desert. It was and

remains the largest escape by German prisoners of war ever carried out on American soil. They went out in groups with rations saved from the canteen. Some had made civilianlooking clothes. Two of them had built a collapsible boat. That detail deserves its own moment. They had studied a map. The map showed the Hila River and the Hila running into the Colorado and the Colorado running down to the Gulf of California and Mexico.

Two German sailors in the middle of the North American desert had planned to boat their way to neutral water. They carried the boat out to the riverbed and the river was dry. There is no better single image in this entire story. Two men from the North Sea standing in a wash in the Arizona desert in December, holding a boat, looking at a river that exists on the map and does not exist on the ground. They walked south for a while.

Then they gave up and turned themselves in. That is how most of it went. The desert in winter is cold at night and empty in every direction. Ranchers and sheriffs, deputies and civilians spotted men walking. Some prisoners surrendered at farmhouses. Some were picked up on roads.

The FBI, the border patrol, and local law enforcements swept the country south of Phoenix. One by one, over days and weeks, they came back in. All except one. Watenberg’s 36 days. Wadenberg did not go south. He went to ground in the hills just north of the camp in a cave in the rocks near the Papago boots, and he stayed there.

Two of his men, still at large in Phoenix, kept him supplied. He had food brought to him. He had newspapers brought to him so he could read what the Americans were saying about the manhunt. He was, in the most literal sense, hiding in plain sight of the camp he had escaped from, watching the search for himself. Eventually, his supply line was rolled up, and he came down into Phoenix himself.

And here the story arrives at the detail that says everything about why almost nobody escaped in America. He was clean shaven. He was in decent clothes. He had money. His English was good enough to pass in the dark. He had by any standard run a professional evasion for over a month, which is more than most escapers in any theater of the war managed.

He was caught because he asked a man on the street for directions to the railroad station. was a Phoenix city employee. One account has him a street sweeper working a night shift and something about the accent at that hour on that street in January 1945 did not sit right. He noted it. He alerted a policeman.

Jurgen Vottenberg was taken into custody on the 28th of January 1945. 36 days after he went into the tunnel, the last of the 25, every single man was back behind the wire. And this is the point of the whole episode. And it is not a story about American cleverness because the Americans were not clever here. They hadn’t even noticed the tunnel until the men were gone.

It is that the country itself was the prison. You could dig for months. You could plan brilliantly. you could execute the largest mass escape of the war on American soil and then you stood in the desert 3,000 m from Germany holding a boat next to a river that wasn’t there. The punishment incidentally was bread and water and a stretch in the stockade under the convention escape was a disciplinary offense not a criminal one.

You could not be tried for it. You could not be H shot for which is more than you can say for what was happening to Germans inside those camps at the hands of other Germans. The other war because here is the thing that gets left out of the comfortable version of this story. While farm boys from Bavaria were eating Sunday dinner in Nebraska kitchens, other Germans were being beaten to death in the barracks by their own comrades.

Understand how the camps were run. The American army was short of everything and guarding prisoners was the lowest priority on the list. So the army did what armies do. It delegated. Internal discipline in the compounds was handled by German non-commissioned officers under the German chain of command which the convention itself preserved.

That meant that in many camps the hardest men ran the inside. They controlled the work rosters, the mail, the rations distribution, the social life. They ran the camp newspapers, and they ran something that had no legal existence at all. And everyone knew about it. And it had a name, the Holy Ghost, the Roll Commando, what the Americans, when they finally understood, called Kangaroo Courts.

A man who spoke against the war got a visit. A man who was too friendly with the guards got a visit. A man who applied for a transfer or was suspected of informing or was heard listening to the wrong broadcast, he got a visit. Sometimes the visit was a beating, sometimes it was a blanket over the head in the dark, and sometimes it was a trial with an officer presiding, a verdict rendered, and a sentence carried out.

At Camp Tonkawa in Oklahoma in November 1943, a prisoner named Johannes Kunza was accused by his fellow prisoners of passing information to the Americans. He was denounced in front of the compound. A crowd formed. He was beaten and cut and he died. Five German prisoners were convicted by American court marshalful and sentenced to death. at Papago Park, the same camp as the tunnel.

But months earlier, in March 1944, a German sailor named Verer Drexler was transferred into the compound. Drexler had been a submariner who had cooperated with American interrogators, working as an informant, among other prisoners. Putting him into a compound full of Yubot men was a catastrophic administrative error. He was recognized within hours.

He was dead before morning, beaten and hanged in a shower room. He had been in the camp less than a day. Seven German prisoners were convicted and sentenced to death for his killing. There were other cases at Camp Chaffy in Arkansas. At Camp Gordon in Georgia, men who were judged to have gone soft on America, tried by their own and killed.

In July 1945, two months after Germany had already surrendered, 14 German prisoners of war were hanged at Fort Levvenworth, Kansas for these murders. They went to the gallows for enforcing loyalty to a state that no longer existed, the largest mass execution in the history of the United States military.

Not for anything they did to Americans, for what they did to Germans inside American camps over the question of whether a man was still loyal to a regime that by then no longer existed. That is worth saying twice. The killing in these camps was not between capttor and captive. It was between Germans.

The violence in these camps was not between capttor and captive. It was between the men who were changing and the men who could not allow it. Which tells you something enormous. If nothing was happening inside those camps, if the white bread and the paycheck and the Sunday dinners were just comfortable trivia, then there would have been nothing to enforce.

You do not run secret tribunals to punish deviations that aren’t occurring. One reading of that violence, not not the only one, but a hard one to dismiss, is that the enforcers could see men changing around them. They could not stop it with argument. So, some of them tried to stop it with fists and rope. They lost anyway.

But it took the American army an embarrassingly long time to notice the war it was hosting. Eventually, the army did act, segregating hardline Nazis into separate camps, most notably Alva in Oklahoma, and moving identified anti-Nazis to camps of their own, including a facility at Fort Deans in Massachusetts. But that sorting came late, and it came after the bodies, the paper war.

The other front in that internal war was fought with ink. The camps produced newspapers, dozens of them. The prisoners wrote them, edited them, printed them, and circulated them, and the Americans permitted it under a mro reading of the convention’s provisions on recreation and intellectual activity. At Camp Aliceville in Alabama, 6,000 men in rural Pickins County, the prisoners pulled their canteen script and bought a used printing press.

On the 16th of July, 1944, the first issue of their paper appeared. They called it Der Zongast, the guest at the fence. And Dez Zangast for a long stretch was exactly what the hard men wanted it to be, correct, confident, contemptuous. In October 1944, it ran a review of an American film, and the review contained a line that has survived because it is such a perfect fossil of a world view.

We know these boys, it said, who who run around with long hair chewing gum. They are not our friends. That is the official position printed in Alabama in the fall of 1944 by men who were at that moment being fed by the country they were sneering at. Now put it next to what was happening three states north on a farm road in Murdoch, Nebraska at almost exactly the same time.

German prisoners on a work detail passing chewing gum and candy through a fence road to American farm kids. In an oral history recorded many years later, a man named Mel Lucian remembered being one of those kids. He was a boy in Murdoch when the prisoners worked his family’s land. He remembered it his whole life.

And when he described it decades later, he did not use the language of war at all. They played games with us, he said. They brought us candy and gum. And then the sentence that ends the argument. They were people like us. That is a Nebraska farm boy talking about men in the uniform of the Third Reich.

The gum in the newspaper and the gum in the fence row were the same gum. The distance between the sneer and the boy is the distance this entire story travels. And some of the men and handing candy through that had read the sneer in their own messaul that morning. The seventh strange thing, which brings us to the last and hardest of the strange things, and it is the one that does not flatter anybody.

The prisoners had been told America was a nation crippled by racial division, fattally divided, hypocritical, rotten under the paint. That was the one piece of the propaganda that survived contact with the United States. It survived because it was true. German prisoners in the South were routinely assigned to labor that local custom classified as work for black Americans.

Picking cotton in the Delta, harvesting peanuts in Georgia, cutting pulpwood in Alabama. They worked in the same fields on the same rows at the same tasks as black American laborers. The historian Matias Rice studied those work gangs closely. What he found in the records was notably free of the conflict you might expect.

The two groups largely got on. Each in its way recognized something of its own position in the other. Men doing hard labor for a government that had decided what they were. And then the prisoners noticed the second thing which was worse. In town after town across the South, a German prisoner of war, a soldier of the enemy, captured in arms against the United States, could be taken into a restaurant, a lunch counter, a diner, and served.

The black American soldier guarding him in the uniform of the United States Army could not. That is not an anecdote. That is a pattern documented at the time and complained about loudly and repeatedly by the black press and by black servicemen themselves who were not confused about what they were seeing. Men who had shot at Americans got the front of the room.

Men who had volunteered to defend America got the back door. In the winter of 1944, Lena Horn came to perform at an army camp in the American South. The accounts differ for on which one. Fort Riley in Kansas appears in some tellings, Camp Robinson in Arkansas in others, but every version agrees on what she saw when she walked out.

She was 27 years old, and she was one of the most famous entertainers in the United States, a singer and film star. At the absolute height of her fame, touring camps for the USO, she walked out to perform and looked at the hall. German prisoners of war were seated in the front rows. Black American soldiers were seated at the back.

She wrote about it later, and the fury in the line has not faded in 80 years. She said she did not think she had ever been angrier in her life. She did not finish the song and complain afterward. She walked down off the platform. She walked past the Germans in the front rows. She went to the back of the hall, turned her back on the enemy soldiers occupying the good seats, and sang the rest of the concert to the American soldiers who had been put at the rear.

That is the single most eloquent moment in this entire story. And it was performed by a 27year-old woman with no rank, no authority, and everything to lose. And here is the part that sits badly and should sit badly. The prisoners saw it. They saw the color line. They saw it in the diners and the halls and holes the fields.

It was the one thing they had been told about America that turned out to be exactly as advertised and it did not save them because they were also looking at everything else and the arithmetic could not be argued with. Yes, this country was divided. Yes, it was unjust in ways that were visible from the back of a truck.

And it was still out producing, out shipping, out building, and outlasting the the Reich by margins that no propaganda could pepper over. Both facts were true simultaneously, and the men inside the wire had three years to sit with them. Their entire theory had said that the division was the fatal weakness, that a country split like this could not fight a real war.

The country was split like that. The country was winning in any way. There was no ideology available to them that could hold both of those things at once. Something they had to give. And in the winter of 1944 and into the spring of 1945, as the camps filled past 370,000 men, as the news from Europe came in over American radios and out of newspapers were increasingly permitted to read, as as the maps in the papers show the lines closing from the east and the west, the thing that gave was the theory. Not all at once. Not for

everyone. Never for Jurgen Vutenberg sitting in the stockade at Papago Park after 36 days in a cave. But for a great many of the men in that vast quiet middle, the conscripts, the farm boys, the mechanics, the ones eating pie in Nebraska kitchens and saving their script and building garages with a nail and a string.

The theory was already dead. It had died somewhere between the tray in the mess hall and the fourth day of the train. They just hadn’t said it out loud yet. In March 1945, the United States Army was going to hand them a newspaper and invite them [clears throat] to. And a month after that, it was going to show them a film that would take everything left standing and knock it flat.

There is a room in Rhode Island in the winter of 1945 where a small group of German prisoners of war sit at desks with typewriters. And what they are doing is the strangest thing in this entire strange story. They are writing a newspaper, not a camp bulletin, not a recreation sheet. a serious literary and political paper in German, written by German prisoners for German prisoners in six 600 camps across the United States and it is being funded and printed and distributed by the United States Army.

The place is Fort Kernney on Narroance at Bay. The army has quietly gathered here a hand-picked population. Prisoners identified as anti-Nazi, men with backgrounds in journalism, teaching, publishing, law, writers, editors, men who in another life made sentences for a living. Among them is a man named Alfred Anders. He is 31 years old.

He is not an Africa Corp veteran, and he did not come off a ship in 1943. Anders had been a young communist in Munich in the early30s, arrested after the Nazi seizure of power and held in Dao in 1933 when Dao was still a camp for political prisoners and not yet the thing it would become. He survived it. He kept his head down through the years that followed.

He was eventually conscripted and in June 1944 on the Italian front near the Allied advance, Alfred Andersh walked away from his unit and gave himself up. He deserted deliberately. He would later write a book about that decision and about what it cost him and had title it with the plainest possible description of what he had done.

A single word meaning desertion, freedom, disengagement. a man removing himself from a war he had never agreed to. He came to America late in the last stretch of the program and he passed throughout camps in the south before the army’s screening found him and sent him north to Rhode Island. On the 1st of March 1945, the first issue of the paper appeared.

It was called Daru, the call and it went out into the camps into barracks where men had spent two years learning to say nothing. The reconing in print. You have to hold the two mast heads side by side to feel it. Dear Zast, Camp Aliceville, Alabama, October 1944. We know these boys who run around with long hair chewing gum.

They are not our friends. Daru Fort Kernney, Rhode Island, March 1945. a paper arguing in German to Germans that the thing they had given their 20s to was catastrophe crime and that when it was over they would have to build something else out of the rubble. 21 months separate those two documents. 21 months and a continent. Daru was not a leaflet.

That is what made it work. It did not shout. It ran essays, criticism, literature, discussions of what a post-war Germany might even mean. It treated its readers as intelligent men capable of reaching conclusions on their own, which was in its way the most American thing the army ever did in this entire program and also the most subversive because it was the exact opposite of everything those readers had experienced since 1933.

The army called it re-education. Officially, it barely existed. The whole program was kept quiet because the Geneva Convention frowned on political indoctrination of prisoners and because Washington did not want a public fight about it. But the truth is that Derof did not have to convert anybody. It arrived at the end of a 2-year argument that had already been won by white bread and empty liberty ships and four days of unbombed countryside through a train window and a farm wife in Kansas putting a plate down in front of a man from

Hamburgg. D. Roof simply gave the men permission to say out loud what most of them had privately concluded somewhere between the messaul and the harvest. Not everyone read it. Some burned it. In camps where the hard men still ran the barracks, being seen with a copy was a risk, and the kangaroo courts had not entirely stopped operating.

At its peak, the paper was printing on the order of 75,000 copies, and men waited for it. And then, in the spring of 1945, the argument stopped being about theory. The film in April 19455. Allied troops in Germany opened the gates at Ordrouv at Bhanvald, at Bergam Bellson, and the Army Signal Corps was there with cameras on orders because Eisenhower himself had understood immediately that this would one day be denied and had demanded it be documented.

Within weeks, that footage was being shown in prisoner of war camps across the United States. Picture it. a mess hall in Alabama or a recreation building in Kansas with the chairs pushed into rows. Several hundred German soldiers sitting in the dark, a projector running and unscreened the pits, the bodies stacked like cordwood. The survivors who were not quite survivors yet, the camp guards and the ovens and the American soldiers walking through it with their hands over their mouths.

The reactions were not uniform and it does nobody any good to pretend otherwise. Some men refused it outright. It was a fabrication. It was American filmm and everyone knew what what Hollywood could do. This was the counter propaganda they had been warned about for years and here it was at last and they had been right all along.

Some men said this was the enemy’s doing or the SS’s doing and it has nothing to do with me. I was in Africa. I was in a tank. I never saw a camp and some men broke. There are accounts of prisoners walking out of those screenings and being unable to speak for days. Of men weeping openly in front of comrades in a culture where that was unthinkable.

Of arguments in barracks that went on all night. Of a few who could not be talked down at all. Understand what was actually taken from them in that room. For two years, everything they believed had been under pressure. The food had contradicted it. The trains had contradicted it. The paychecks and the Sunday dinners and the fact that fewer than one man in a hund wanted to leave had contradicted it.

But a man can absorb being wrong about a country’s wealth. That is embarrassing. That is not annihilating. What the film said was different. It said, “You were not merely mistaken about the enemy’s strength. You were wrong about what you were. No amount of a white bread softens that.” And the Americans, for their part, did not soften it either.

In the spring of 1945, as the news came out, ration levels in the camps were cut. Partly because of genuine global food shortages, partly because the political ground in the United States had shifted under the whole program overnight. The Fritz Ritz did not survive bukinvald as an idea. The white bread got thinner. Nobody in the camps complained very loudly about it.

>> The surandunger >> on the 8th of May 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally. The news reached the camps by American radio and American newspapers, which is to say the prisoners learned it at almost the same moment as the guards. And here is the peculiar thing about that day inside the wire.

For most of these men, the war had ended 2 years earlier in the dust outside Tunis. They had been out of it since 1943. They had missed Normandy, missed the Bulge, missed the whole cataclysm of the last 12 months. So the 8th of May did not land as defeat. Defeief had already happened to them personally long ago. What landed was something colder.

The state they had sworn to had ceased to exist. The country they were from was occupied. Dupa divided, burning, and being administered by four foreign armies. Their cities were gone. Cologne, Hamburgg, Dresdon, Berlin. The numbers coming out were beyond comprehension. Their families were somewhere in that or they weren’t.

Many of these men had not had reliable mail in years. Some did not know whether the street they grew up on still existed. There is a particular kind of silence that comes over a camp on a day like that. And the American guards who were there remembered it. Not celebration, not despair. Exactly. a very large number of men sitting still, understanding at once that they had survived and that there might be nothing left to survive into.

And then they asked the obvious question, when do we go home? The answer was not the one they wanted. And it should be said plainly that the American side of this story is not spotless either. Prisoners died in these camps. Some of illness, some in work accidents, some by suicide, and some were shot by American guards.

A number of them in circumstances that were investigated and found wanting. The worst of it came in July 1945 at a branch camp outside Selena, Utah. A guard on night duty turned a machine gun on the tents where German prisoners were sleeping. Nine men were killed. More than 20 were wounded. They had survived the desert, the Atlantic, three years of captivity and the end of the war and they died in their sleep in Utah in peace time at the hands of the army that had fed them.

Whatever else this story is, it is not story about a country that got everything right. They did not go home. This is the part of the story that gets skipped and it should not be because it is the hardest thing that happened to them and it happened after the shooting stopped. They were not released in May 1945. They were not released in the summer.

Most of them were were still in the United States a year after the surrender. There were reasons and none of them were cruel exactly and all of them were cold. First, the harvest. The 1945 crop was in the ground and American servicemen were not home yet. Prisoner labor was still holding up American agriculture and the farm lobby said so loudly to every congressman who would listen.

Millions of mandays of prisoner labor were performed in the United States after the German surrender. Sacked, shipping, everything afloat was moving American troops home from two oceans. Prisoners were once again at the bottom of the manifest. Third, and this is the one that hit hardest, the United States had promised its allies.

President Truman authorized the transfer of German prisoners held by the Americans to allied governments that requested labor, and France and Britain requested it. So, a great many men who had spent 3 years in Kansas and Alabama did not sail home to Germany at all. They sailed to La Havra and they went from an American camp with a canteen and 80 cents a day into French and British labor service, clearing rubble, filling filling craters, lifting mines, rebuilding roads and rail lines and towns that the German army had wrecked. Under conditions that

were by every account nothing like Kansas, France was starving in 1945. It had nothing to give. The men who arrived from America came off the ships visibly, almost insultingly healthy, fed for three years by an enemy that had never been touched into a country that had been occupied for 4 years and had every reason to be unsentimental about them.

Some were held into 1947, some into 1948. Think about what that did to the memory of America. For three years, the United States had been the strange strange comfortable incomprehensible interruption in these men’s war. And then it ended and they were handed on. And the difference between the two experiences was so total that it burned the American years into them permanently.

Kansas looked very different from a rubble detail outside Ruong. Not all of them went that way. Repatriation ran through the spring and summer of 1946, and the camps emptied gradually, the branch camps first, then the base camps, the towns of 6,000 men, shrinking to 2,000 to a few hundred to a caretaker detachment and offense.

On the 26th of July, 1946, the last shipment sailed from New Jersey, roughly 1,500 German prisoners of war, the end of the line. 3 years and 2 months after the Africa corpse came ashore at Norfolk in tan uniforms cut for a desert on another continent. The program was over. Farewell to America de Roof had already published its own ending.

The final issues came out on the 1st of April 1946 and the men who made it did something no one had asked them to do. They assembled a photographic supplement. pictures of the camps of the country of the years. They chose the images themselves and they gave the supplement a title. Abasheed fun America farewell to America.

Set that against the other mass head one more time because this is the whole story in two lines of of print. October 1944. We know these boys who run around with long hair chewing gum. They are not our friends. April 1946, farewell to America. with photographs. Same war, same men. 21 months. Nobody pled these prisoners. There was no survey, no exit interview, no measurement of hearts and minds.

But the behavior was the poll. Fewer than one man in a 100 tried to leave. Men went home with savings accumulated out of prison wages. The camp newspapers argued themselves out of an ideology in public, in print, in German over two years and left the paper trail behind. And then when it was over and they were gone, the letters started coming the other way.

The letters, this is the detail that finishes it. It belongs to 1946 and 1947 and 1948 in a Germany with no economy government and calorie rations in the occupied zones that in some periods dropped to levels that would be called famine anywhere else. former prisoners of war back in the ruins sat down and wrote letters to the United States to their former guards.

To the farm families they had worked for, to the man in Kansas whose garage they had built with a nail and a string. To the woman in Nebraska who had put a plate down in front of them on a Sunday. They asked for food and the packages went. Thousands of them from small towns across the American South and Midwest addressed to men in occupation zones.

Coffee, flour, sugar, tinned meat, clothing, whatever a farm family could put in a box. Sit with the full shape of that for a second. In the summer of 1943, some of these same men had sat in a mess hall in Alabama and refused to touch the white bread on the tray because food that good given that freely by an enemy had to be a trick.

They waited to see what happened to the men who ate first. Four years later, from a bombed out street in a country that no longer existed, they were riding across an ocean to ask that enemy for exactly that bread. Whatever was left of the propaganda did not survive that. There was no argument left to have.

There was just a man with a pencil writing to a farmer in Kansas. Careful English or careful German because the farmer in Kansas was the person he knew in the entire world who had food. And some of them came back and then the last turn which nobody planned and nobody could have predicted they came back. In the years after the war, as immigration slowly reopened, former German prisoners of war returned to the United States.

Not in enormous numbers, the paperwork was hard, the quotas were tight, and a former enemy soldier was not first in line for anything. But they came. They took citizenship. They married American women, some of them women they had met through the wire or across a farm fence and [clears throat] corresponded with for years. They opened businesses.

Some of them settled in the same counties that had held them a German accent behind the counter of a hardware store 20 m down the road from a fairground that used to be a camp. Hans Becker, who had been a prisoner at Fort Robinson in Nebraska, and who never stopped saying the treatment and the food had been first rate, became a physician in the United States.

He practiced in Georgetown, Maine. A man who came to this country in the hold of a liberty ship counted as cargo ended his working life as somebody’s doctor on the coast of Maine. They had arrived as freight in ships that were sailing home empty anyway. They came back the second time on purpose with paperwork and stood in a line and raised their right hands.

What stayed behind? >> The camps themselves mostly vanished. Barracks were sold off for lumber and hauled away on trucks to become sheds and chicken houses and additions on farmhouses across a dozen states. Compounds were absorbed into military bases or turned back into fairgrounds or plowed under. The wire came down.

The guard towers, which had never really been the point, came down first. Drive through Aliceville, Alabama, or Concordia, Kansas, or Douglas, Wyoming, and you will find a marker or a small museum run by volunteers, or a foundation line in a field that somebody’s grandfather can still point to.

What survives properly is paper, camp inspection reports and labor records filed in record group 389, the records of the provost marshall general, signal core photographs of the harvest in group 111, payroll ledgers, ration returns, court marshal transcripts from Tonkawa and Papago Park, a used printing press worth of camp newspapers tracking an army changing its mind in real time in its own words with the dates on the front page.

And one concrete garage in Kansas built by four German stonemasons in 1943 with no level, just a nail and a piece of string, still standing, still square, still keeping the rain off somebody’s truck. Historians came later with tape recorders. Lewis Carlson interviewed more than 150 former prisoners and former guards and the same thing kept kept coming back at him from both sides of the wire that these had been improbably the good years.

The unlikely decent chapter in the worst war in human history. In 1995, 50 years on, Miss Smithsonian magazine went looking for the men who were left. What came back from the men who were left was over and over the same shape of answer that nothing in their lives had prepared them for that country and nothing since had matched it. The arithmetic.

So what actually happened here? Uh roughly 371,000 German soldiers were shipped into the interior of the United States and held for 3 years. And the United States did not break them, did not starve them, did not work them to death, and did not in any deliberate organized way even try very hard to persuade them.

It just let them look. And seven ordinary things did the work that no broadcast, no leaflet, no interrogation, and no amount of allied radio ever managed. White bread on a tray offered without limit by a country that was supposed to be starving. cold Coca-Cola for a nickel in the middle of a world war while American civilians counted sugar coupons.

Chewing gum sneered at in a camp newspaper in Alabama and handed through a fence row to a boy in Nebraska on the same afternoon. An unguarded truck going out at dawn and coming back at dusk with the count correct three years running. Four days of countryside through a train window with no craters in it. so impossible that grown men preferred to believe the train was driving in circles.

A color line that was exactly as ugly as they had been told in a country that was winning anyway, which broke the theory that the ugliness was the weakness. And 80 cents a day in script paid by an enemy government, some of it carried home to a Germany that had no currency at all. None of it was designed as an argument. All of it was in the end argument.

The me men who ran the Reich understood propaganda perfectly. They understood that if you control what a man reads and hears, you control what he believes. What they never solved was what happens when you put that man on a train for 4 days and let him look out the window. Fewer than one in a 100 ever tried to leave. That number on its own proves [clears throat] only that the continent was a better fence than the wire.

but set it beside the letters that came afterward, men writing from the rubble to the farmers who had fed them. And it stops being only arithmetic. And it was delivered without a single vote being cast by 370,000 men who had been sent here to hate this country and who spent three years eating its bread, working its fields, taking its money, and looking at it, then went home and wrote back,