German Generals Laughed When Patton Ran Out Of Gas — Then 6,000 Trucks Drove All Night

June 4th, 1943. Railroad Street, Mexia, Texas. The whole town had come out. Shopkeepers, farmers, children, women with grocery bags still in their arms. They stood along the rail line in the Texas heat and waited. The train came in from the northeast. It was not a freight train. It was not cattle cars.

It was Pullman coaches, passenger cars with cushioned seats, sleeping berths, and a dining service. 1,850 veterans of the Africa Corps stepped down onto the gravel. Rommel’s men, the ones who had driven the British back across Egypt. They had surrendered in Tunisia 3 weeks earlier, and they had spent the last 3 days crossing the United States by rail.

Most of them had expected to be shot on the dock at New York. They formed up and marched 4 miles west of town to a camp that had been a civilian Conservation Corps site the year before. What none of them knew was that this was the beginning of the largest and least examined experiment of the war. Over the next 3 years, 371,000 German prisoners would be held on American soil in roughly 700 camps in 46 of the 48 states.

Nazi propaganda had told them America was decadent, hollow, and finished. Within 72 hours on that train, a great many of them stopped believing it. And at the end of the journey, in the town outside the wire, they would be served in restaurants that turned away the American soldiers guarding them. That last is usually left out.

Here are the numbers before we start. 425,871 Axis prisoners were held in the United States at the peak in May 1945. 371,683 of them were German. Around 700 camps. 130,000 German prisoners arrived in a single month, May 1943, after North Africa fell. Three days on a train from New York to Texas through a country with no bomb damage in it.

Most of what I know about this, I found in the paperwork. The army kept records on the camps. The State Department kept records because the Geneva Convention required it. Historians went through the files afterwards, and one of them, Arnold Kramer, wrote the book that most of what follows rests on. This is not the story where America was generous and everybody learned a lesson.

Parts of it are that, other parts are considerably worse. Every source is in the description. Where the record is thin, I will tell you. The reason they were in Texas at all was that Germany lost North Africa faster than anyone expected. On the 13th of May, 1943, the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. The final figure was somewhere between 250,000 and 275,000 German and Italian troops.

It was Stalingrad-sized, and it happened to the best-equipped army Germany had outside the Eastern Front. The Allies had a problem they had not planned for. They were sitting in North Africa with a quarter of a million prisoners and nowhere to put them. Britain could not take them. Britain was importing its own food under submarine attack and had no calories to spare.

Feeding a quarter of a million enemy soldiers on an island under blockade was not possible. But American Liberty ships were crossing the Atlantic eastbound full of supplies and coming back westbound empty. Empty ships are wasted ships. The prisoners became ballast. That is the actual origin of the whole thing.

Not policy, not generosity. Spare capacity on the return leg. The crossing took about 2 weeks. The men were held below decks in converted holds and most of them were seasick for the duration. The main debarkation point was Camp Shanks on the Hudson River in New York. I want to flag something here. You will find a version of this story that puts the arrival at Norfolk, Virginia with a named German sergeant walking down the gangplank and whispering a line about how the Americans are crazy.

I have seen that told several times. I could not find the sergeant. Camp Shanks is where the records put the main flow. I am telling you that because it matters for what comes next. The scene on the train is real. The man narrating it in most versions, is not. Then came the trains. The distances involved were beyond anything most of these men had experienced.

Germany is roughly the size of Montana. The trip from New York to Texas took 3 days. And the army moved them in passenger stock because that was the stock that was available. The freight rolling stock was carrying war material and could not be spared. So, German prisoners of war crossed the United States in Pullman cars. And a number of them noted afterwards that the accommodation was better than what they had traveled in as soldiers of the Reich.

The windows were the problem. For 3 days, the men sat at those windows and looked at a continent that had not been touched. No rubble, no burnt-out blocks, no fire-blackened church towers. Every German city of any size had been bombed by the summer of 1943. And every one of these men had seen the photographs or the real thing.

Here, there was nothing. Farms with the lights on. Whole towns lit at 10:00 at night when Germany had been under blackout regulation since 1939. Cars, private cars driven by ordinary people on roads using gasoline for no military purpose whatsoever. Petrol was rationed in America, too. It did not look rationed from a train window.

They saw factories running at night. They saw freight yards stacked with material. They saw livestock in numbers that did not make sense to men who had been counting calories since Tunisia. And nobody was hiding. That was the part several of them wrote down afterwards. Not the abundance, the relaxation. A country at war that did not behave like a country at war.

Civilians standing on platforms watching the prisoner trains go by. Curious, unafraid, some of them waving. Three years of political instruction had told these men that the United States was a mongrel society with no unity, no will, and no capacity. Propped up by Jewish finance and about to collapse. Then they spent 72 hours looking out a window at the opposite.

Some of them decided the Americans had staged it. That the lit farmhouses had been arranged. That the trains had been routed through the good parts on purpose. That theory did not survive the second day. There is not enough paint in the world to fake a continent. The camps themselves were a second shock. And the reason for that is a legal document.

The United States had signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. And the army decided very early to comply with it to the letter. The reasoning was not sentimental. There were American prisoners in German hands. And the calculation was the treatment would be reciprocated. It largely was.

So the rules were applied as written. Enlisted prisoners could be required to work. Officers could not. Prisoners were to be housed to the same standard as the detaining powers own troops, which meant the same barracks layout, the same bunks, and the same rations the American Army ate. Prisoners were paid 80 cents a day in canteen script for labor, which was the same rate an American private earned.

They spent it in camp canteens on cigarettes, beer, and toiletries. There were camp newspapers printed in German. There were theater groups, orchestras, and soccer leagues. Some camps ran university-level courses, and credits earned behind the wire in Texas were later recognized by German universities. American critics called them the Fritz Ritz.

The complaints reached Congress more than once. The camps went almost everywhere. 46 of the 48 states had at least one. There were base camps of several thousand men, and hundreds of small branch camps holding a few hundred cited wherever there was work to do. Camp Hearne in Texas, Camp Concordia in Kansas, Camp Papago Park outside Phoenix, Camp Aliceville in Alabama, which for a while held more Germans than the town had residents.

Most of them were built in a hurry on ground nobody wanted, and most of them are gone. What is left in a lot of these places is a concrete slab, a line of trees somebody planted, and a small cemetery with German names on it that the local American Legion post still knows. And there was work because America was short of men.

12 million Americans were in uniform. The farms had lost their labor and the crops were standing in the fields. So prisoners were contracted out to farms, canneries, lumber camps, cotton fields. By 1945, German prisoners were a significant share of the agricultural labor force in several states. They picked cotton in Texas, harvested sugar beet in Colorado, cut pulpwood in the south, and worked canneries across the Midwest.

The farmers who hired them, in a great many recorded cases, ended up feeding them at the family table. That was against regulations. It happened constantly. And this is where the story gets complicated because those men were being driven out to those farms every morning past things that did not fit. The army made one large mistake at the start and men died because of it.

Nobody screened the prisoners. They were sorted by rank and by service branch and that was all. A conscript from Hamburg who had never believed a word of it went into the same compound as an SS non-commissioned officer from the Africa Corps who believed all of it. The committed ones organized first because that is what they had been trained to do.

Within months, a number of camps had a second chain of command running underneath the American one. It controlled the mail. It controlled who got which job. It decided who was a good German. And it held trials. They were called Ehrenrat proceedings, honor courts. A prisoner suspected of cooperating with the Americans or of saying the war was lost was brought before a panel of his fellow prisoners at night.

The panel heard the case. The panel passed sentence. >> [snorts] >> Johannes Kunze was a German soldier at the Tonkawa camp in Oklahoma. He was accused of passing information to the Americans. In November 1943, he was brought into the camp mess hall and a group of prisoners beat him to death on the floor of it.

The same thing happened at Papago Park in Arizona, at Camp Aiken in South Carolina, and at Camp Chaffee in Arkansas. The army prosecuted. The lead prosecutor was a lieutenant colonel from Texas named Leon Jaworski, a name that would mean nothing to anyone for another 30 years until he became the special prosecutor in Watergate. 15 German prisoners of war were tried by military tribunal for murder committed on American soil.

All 15 were convicted. All 15 were sentenced to hang. The sentences were carried out at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in July and August of 1945. Five men went to the gallows there on the 10th of July. 14 executed German prisoners are buried at Fort Leavenworth. For decades afterwards, flowers appeared on those graves left by someone who never identified themselves.

So, the Fritz Ritz had a murder rate. The escapes are the other thing people ask about. And the honest answer is that there were very few, and almost none of them worked. Something over 2,000 prisoners got outside the wire at some point during the war. Nearly all of them were picked up within days, usually by a farmer or a sheriff, usually hungry.

The largest attempt was at Papago Park outside Phoenix on the night of the 23rd of December, 1944. 25 men went out through a tunnel 178 ft long, dug from the camp bathhouse to the Crosscut Canal with a vertical shaft 6 ft deep at the entrance. Three of them had built a collapsible boat because they had studied a map and worked out that the Gila River ran to the Colorado, and the Colorado ran to Mexico.

They reached the Gila and found it dry. It is a desert. The map had not mentioned that. All 25 were recovered without a shot fired. One man was never caught. Georg Gärtner walked away from a camp in New Mexico in September 1945, took an American name, and lived in the United States for the next 40 years. He worked as a ski instructor and a tennis coach. He married.

He did not tell his wife. He turned himself in on national television in 1984. The army also ran a re-education program, and it is worth knowing about because it tells you what the Americans thought they were doing. It was called the Special projects division and it was, strictly speaking, a violation of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits political indoctrination of prisoners.

>> [snorts] >> It was run quietly for that reason. Prisoners were given German language newspapers printed by the program. They were shown films, including footage from the liberated concentration camps in 1945. They were given access to a library of German literature that the Nazi state had banned. The center of it was a small post on the Rhode Island coast called Fort Kearney at Narragansett.

Selected prisoners were moved there quietly. The army did not publicize the place and the men who worked there were not told very much about why they had been chosen. What they produced was a newspaper. It was called Der Ruf, the call. It was written in German by German prisoners of war and it was distributed to around 140 prisoner of war camps across the United States.

The American authorities appointed a prisoner named Hans Werner Richter as editor-in-chief. Working with him were Alfred Andersch and Walter Kolbenhoff. Der Ruf became the most widely read German language newspaper in captivity in America and the most liberal. Now follow what happened to those men because it is not a small footnote.

Richter and Andersch went home to occupy Germany after the war and started publishing Der Ruf again on German soil under American license. They kept the name and they kept the tone. And the tone got them into trouble. They were critical of the occupation. They were critical of both sides of a Cold War that was just beginning.

In 1947, the American military authorities withdrew the license and shut the paper down. So, the men who had been taught to publish freely by an American re-education program were closed down by American censors 2 years later. Their response was to meet in a village in Bavaria and form a writers group instead.

They named it after the year, Gruppe 47, Group 47 became the single most important force in post-war German literature. Heinrich Böll read to it. Günter Grass read to it. Two Nobel prizes came out of the room. For 20 years, if you wanted to be a serious German writer, you went and read your work to that group and let them take it apart. It began as a camp newspaper in Rhode Island produced by prisoners, funded by the United States Army.

Aaron Horton has written the book that traces that line in full, and I am relying on it here. How well the wider program worked is genuinely disputed. Some historians credited with producing a cadre of men who went home and helped build a democratic West Germany. Others point out that the men already inclined that way were the ones selected for it, which makes the result somewhat circular.

What is not disputed is that the trains had done more work than the classrooms. The men had already seen the thing that could not be argued with. Here is what I think this whole episode actually was, and it is not what either side usually says about it. The American treatment of German prisoners was not generosity. It was policy.

And the policy was built on a calculation about American prisoners in German hands. It worked. It also happened to be the single most effective piece of propaganda the United States produced in the entire war, and it was not designed as propaganda at all. You cannot argue a man out of an ideology.

You can put him on a train for 3 days. [snorts] But that is only half of it, and the other half is the part that gets cut because those trains ran through the American South. And what the prisoners saw out of the window on the last day was not only farms with the lights on. When the train stopped, the stations had two sets of doors, two waiting rooms, two water fountains, two sets of lavatories, signs over each one.

German prisoners of war in uniform, wearing the insignia of an army that was at that moment murdering people in Europe on an industrial scale, were walked through the doors marked white. The black American soldiers guarding them used the other doors. On the trains themselves, the porters and dining car attendants were black men. They brought the prisoners their meals.

Several German accounts note with what reads as bafflement that these men addressed them as sir. At the camps, it went further. Prisoners were taken into town on work details and to buy goods. In town, they ate in restaurants. Lloyd Brown was a black American soldier stationed at Salina, Kansas.

He and the men of his unit walked into a lunchroom in town and were refused service. German prisoners were sitting inside eating. Brown wrote about it afterwards, and the line that survives is the question he asked himself in the doorway. He was a soldier of the United States in the uniform of the United States. >> [snorts] >> The men being served were the enemy.

This was not an isolated incident, and it was not a southern peculiarity. There it was worst in the SAS. It happened at bus stations, at post exchanges, at theaters. Black newspapers reported it through the whole war. Complaints went up the chain, and mostly stopped there. The men who guarded, transported, fed, and buried 371,000 German prisoners of war included tens of thousands of black Americans who could not eat in the rooms where those prisoners ate.

I want to be careful about what I am claiming here. I am not telling you the prisoners were treated better than American soldiers in every respect. They were not. They were prisoners behind wire for years, and a number of them were murdered by their own hardline comrades inside the camps for showing sympathy to their captors. What I am telling you is narrower, and it is documented.

In the specific matter of which door you could walk through in an American railway station in 1944, a captured German sergeant ranked above an American corporal from Detroit. The last German prisoners left the United States in 1946. Many of them did not want to go. Thousands applied to stay, and a number came back in the 1950s as immigrants.

There are towns in Texas and Kansas and Colorado where the German cemetery is still maintained, and where families kept up correspondence with men their grandfathers had employed to pick cotton. The story has been told mostly from that side. The reunion side. The farmer and the prisoner shaking hands 40 years later. It is a real story, and I do not want to take it away from anyone.

But the records hold both things at once, and they are not in tension. They are the same record. America was strong enough and confident enough to treat its enemies decently and to broadcast that decency across a continent by accident through a train window in a way no propaganda ministry could have designed.

And America was doing that while making its own soldiers use the other door. We know the numbers. 425,000 871 at the peak. 700 camps 80 cents a day. What we have much less of is what the man in the other waiting room was thinking while he watched them go in. If this was worth your time, the like button helps.

It tells the platform to put carefully sourced history in front of people who actually want it. Subscribe if you want the next one. There are more of these. Stories about ordinary American equipment and the ordinary people who ran it, told with the names and the numbers and the inconvenient parts left in. Every source is in the description.

Kramer’s history, the Army’s own records, the Geneva Convention text, the reporting from the time. You can check all of it. 1,850 men got off a train in Mexia, Texas on the 4th of June, 1943 and the whole town came out to look at them. The camp is gone now. Most of them are gone now. The rail line is still there and it still runs down the middle of Railroad Street.

German Generals Laughed When Patton Ran Out Of Gas — Then 6,000 Trucks Drove All Night

June 4th, 1943. Railroad Street, Mexia, Texas. The whole town had come out. Shopkeepers, farmers, children, women with grocery bags still in their arms. They stood along the rail line in the Texas heat and waited. The train came in from the northeast. It was not a freight train. It was not cattle cars.

It was Pullman coaches, passenger cars with cushioned seats, sleeping berths, and a dining service. 1,850 veterans of the Africa Corps stepped down onto the gravel. Rommel’s men, the ones who had driven the British back across Egypt. They had surrendered in Tunisia 3 weeks earlier, and they had spent the last 3 days crossing the United States by rail.

Most of them had expected to be shot on the dock at New York. They formed up and marched 4 miles west of town to a camp that had been a civilian Conservation Corps site the year before. What none of them knew was that this was the beginning of the largest and least examined experiment of the war. Over the next 3 years, 371,000 German prisoners would be held on American soil in roughly 700 camps in 46 of the 48 states.

Nazi propaganda had told them America was decadent, hollow, and finished. Within 72 hours on that train, a great many of them stopped believing it. And at the end of the journey, in the town outside the wire, they would be served in restaurants that turned away the American soldiers guarding them. That last is usually left out.

Here are the numbers before we start. 425,871 Axis prisoners were held in the United States at the peak in May 1945. 371,683 of them were German. Around 700 camps. 130,000 German prisoners arrived in a single month, May 1943, after North Africa fell. Three days on a train from New York to Texas through a country with no bomb damage in it.

Most of what I know about this, I found in the paperwork. The army kept records on the camps. The State Department kept records because the Geneva Convention required it. Historians went through the files afterwards, and one of them, Arnold Kramer, wrote the book that most of what follows rests on. This is not the story where America was generous and everybody learned a lesson.

Parts of it are that, other parts are considerably worse. Every source is in the description. Where the record is thin, I will tell you. The reason they were in Texas at all was that Germany lost North Africa faster than anyone expected. On the 13th of May, 1943, the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. The final figure was somewhere between 250,000 and 275,000 German and Italian troops.

It was Stalingrad-sized, and it happened to the best-equipped army Germany had outside the Eastern Front. The Allies had a problem they had not planned for. They were sitting in North Africa with a quarter of a million prisoners and nowhere to put them. Britain could not take them. Britain was importing its own food under submarine attack and had no calories to spare.

Feeding a quarter of a million enemy soldiers on an island under blockade was not possible. But American Liberty ships were crossing the Atlantic eastbound full of supplies and coming back westbound empty. Empty ships are wasted ships. The prisoners became ballast. That is the actual origin of the whole thing.

Not policy, not generosity. Spare capacity on the return leg. The crossing took about 2 weeks. The men were held below decks in converted holds and most of them were seasick for the duration. The main debarkation point was Camp Shanks on the Hudson River in New York. I want to flag something here. You will find a version of this story that puts the arrival at Norfolk, Virginia with a named German sergeant walking down the gangplank and whispering a line about how the Americans are crazy.

I have seen that told several times. I could not find the sergeant. Camp Shanks is where the records put the main flow. I am telling you that because it matters for what comes next. The scene on the train is real. The man narrating it in most versions, is not. Then came the trains. The distances involved were beyond anything most of these men had experienced.

Germany is roughly the size of Montana. The trip from New York to Texas took 3 days. And the army moved them in passenger stock because that was the stock that was available. The freight rolling stock was carrying war material and could not be spared. So, German prisoners of war crossed the United States in Pullman cars. And a number of them noted afterwards that the accommodation was better than what they had traveled in as soldiers of the Reich.

The windows were the problem. For 3 days, the men sat at those windows and looked at a continent that had not been touched. No rubble, no burnt-out blocks, no fire-blackened church towers. Every German city of any size had been bombed by the summer of 1943. And every one of these men had seen the photographs or the real thing.

Here, there was nothing. Farms with the lights on. Whole towns lit at 10:00 at night when Germany had been under blackout regulation since 1939. Cars, private cars driven by ordinary people on roads using gasoline for no military purpose whatsoever. Petrol was rationed in America, too. It did not look rationed from a train window.

They saw factories running at night. They saw freight yards stacked with material. They saw livestock in numbers that did not make sense to men who had been counting calories since Tunisia. And nobody was hiding. That was the part several of them wrote down afterwards. Not the abundance, the relaxation. A country at war that did not behave like a country at war.

Civilians standing on platforms watching the prisoner trains go by. Curious, unafraid, some of them waving. Three years of political instruction had told these men that the United States was a mongrel society with no unity, no will, and no capacity. Propped up by Jewish finance and about to collapse. Then they spent 72 hours looking out a window at the opposite.

Some of them decided the Americans had staged it. That the lit farmhouses had been arranged. That the trains had been routed through the good parts on purpose. That theory did not survive the second day. There is not enough paint in the world to fake a continent. The camps themselves were a second shock. And the reason for that is a legal document.

The United States had signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. And the army decided very early to comply with it to the letter. The reasoning was not sentimental. There were American prisoners in German hands. And the calculation was the treatment would be reciprocated. It largely was.

So the rules were applied as written. Enlisted prisoners could be required to work. Officers could not. Prisoners were to be housed to the same standard as the detaining powers own troops, which meant the same barracks layout, the same bunks, and the same rations the American Army ate. Prisoners were paid 80 cents a day in canteen script for labor, which was the same rate an American private earned.

They spent it in camp canteens on cigarettes, beer, and toiletries. There were camp newspapers printed in German. There were theater groups, orchestras, and soccer leagues. Some camps ran university-level courses, and credits earned behind the wire in Texas were later recognized by German universities. American critics called them the Fritz Ritz.

The complaints reached Congress more than once. The camps went almost everywhere. 46 of the 48 states had at least one. There were base camps of several thousand men, and hundreds of small branch camps holding a few hundred cited wherever there was work to do. Camp Hearne in Texas, Camp Concordia in Kansas, Camp Papago Park outside Phoenix, Camp Aliceville in Alabama, which for a while held more Germans than the town had residents.

Most of them were built in a hurry on ground nobody wanted, and most of them are gone. What is left in a lot of these places is a concrete slab, a line of trees somebody planted, and a small cemetery with German names on it that the local American Legion post still knows. And there was work because America was short of men.

12 million Americans were in uniform. The farms had lost their labor and the crops were standing in the fields. So prisoners were contracted out to farms, canneries, lumber camps, cotton fields. By 1945, German prisoners were a significant share of the agricultural labor force in several states. They picked cotton in Texas, harvested sugar beet in Colorado, cut pulpwood in the south, and worked canneries across the Midwest.

The farmers who hired them, in a great many recorded cases, ended up feeding them at the family table. That was against regulations. It happened constantly. And this is where the story gets complicated because those men were being driven out to those farms every morning past things that did not fit. The army made one large mistake at the start and men died because of it.

Nobody screened the prisoners. They were sorted by rank and by service branch and that was all. A conscript from Hamburg who had never believed a word of it went into the same compound as an SS non-commissioned officer from the Africa Corps who believed all of it. The committed ones organized first because that is what they had been trained to do.

Within months, a number of camps had a second chain of command running underneath the American one. It controlled the mail. It controlled who got which job. It decided who was a good German. And it held trials. They were called Ehrenrat proceedings, honor courts. A prisoner suspected of cooperating with the Americans or of saying the war was lost was brought before a panel of his fellow prisoners at night.

The panel heard the case. The panel passed sentence. >> [snorts] >> Johannes Kunze was a German soldier at the Tonkawa camp in Oklahoma. He was accused of passing information to the Americans. In November 1943, he was brought into the camp mess hall and a group of prisoners beat him to death on the floor of it.

The same thing happened at Papago Park in Arizona, at Camp Aiken in South Carolina, and at Camp Chaffee in Arkansas. The army prosecuted. The lead prosecutor was a lieutenant colonel from Texas named Leon Jaworski, a name that would mean nothing to anyone for another 30 years until he became the special prosecutor in Watergate. 15 German prisoners of war were tried by military tribunal for murder committed on American soil.

All 15 were convicted. All 15 were sentenced to hang. The sentences were carried out at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in July and August of 1945. Five men went to the gallows there on the 10th of July. 14 executed German prisoners are buried at Fort Leavenworth. For decades afterwards, flowers appeared on those graves left by someone who never identified themselves.

So, the Fritz Ritz had a murder rate. The escapes are the other thing people ask about. And the honest answer is that there were very few, and almost none of them worked. Something over 2,000 prisoners got outside the wire at some point during the war. Nearly all of them were picked up within days, usually by a farmer or a sheriff, usually hungry.

The largest attempt was at Papago Park outside Phoenix on the night of the 23rd of December, 1944. 25 men went out through a tunnel 178 ft long, dug from the camp bathhouse to the Crosscut Canal with a vertical shaft 6 ft deep at the entrance. Three of them had built a collapsible boat because they had studied a map and worked out that the Gila River ran to the Colorado, and the Colorado ran to Mexico.

They reached the Gila and found it dry. It is a desert. The map had not mentioned that. All 25 were recovered without a shot fired. One man was never caught. Georg Gärtner walked away from a camp in New Mexico in September 1945, took an American name, and lived in the United States for the next 40 years. He worked as a ski instructor and a tennis coach. He married.

He did not tell his wife. He turned himself in on national television in 1984. The army also ran a re-education program, and it is worth knowing about because it tells you what the Americans thought they were doing. It was called the Special projects division and it was, strictly speaking, a violation of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits political indoctrination of prisoners.

>> [snorts] >> It was run quietly for that reason. Prisoners were given German language newspapers printed by the program. They were shown films, including footage from the liberated concentration camps in 1945. They were given access to a library of German literature that the Nazi state had banned. The center of it was a small post on the Rhode Island coast called Fort Kearney at Narragansett.

Selected prisoners were moved there quietly. The army did not publicize the place and the men who worked there were not told very much about why they had been chosen. What they produced was a newspaper. It was called Der Ruf, the call. It was written in German by German prisoners of war and it was distributed to around 140 prisoner of war camps across the United States.

The American authorities appointed a prisoner named Hans Werner Richter as editor-in-chief. Working with him were Alfred Andersch and Walter Kolbenhoff. Der Ruf became the most widely read German language newspaper in captivity in America and the most liberal. Now follow what happened to those men because it is not a small footnote.

Richter and Andersch went home to occupy Germany after the war and started publishing Der Ruf again on German soil under American license. They kept the name and they kept the tone. And the tone got them into trouble. They were critical of the occupation. They were critical of both sides of a Cold War that was just beginning.

In 1947, the American military authorities withdrew the license and shut the paper down. So, the men who had been taught to publish freely by an American re-education program were closed down by American censors 2 years later. Their response was to meet in a village in Bavaria and form a writers group instead.

They named it after the year, Gruppe 47, Group 47 became the single most important force in post-war German literature. Heinrich Böll read to it. Günter Grass read to it. Two Nobel prizes came out of the room. For 20 years, if you wanted to be a serious German writer, you went and read your work to that group and let them take it apart. It began as a camp newspaper in Rhode Island produced by prisoners, funded by the United States Army.

Aaron Horton has written the book that traces that line in full, and I am relying on it here. How well the wider program worked is genuinely disputed. Some historians credited with producing a cadre of men who went home and helped build a democratic West Germany. Others point out that the men already inclined that way were the ones selected for it, which makes the result somewhat circular.

What is not disputed is that the trains had done more work than the classrooms. The men had already seen the thing that could not be argued with. Here is what I think this whole episode actually was, and it is not what either side usually says about it. The American treatment of German prisoners was not generosity. It was policy.

And the policy was built on a calculation about American prisoners in German hands. It worked. It also happened to be the single most effective piece of propaganda the United States produced in the entire war, and it was not designed as propaganda at all. You cannot argue a man out of an ideology.

You can put him on a train for 3 days. [snorts] But that is only half of it, and the other half is the part that gets cut because those trains ran through the American South. And what the prisoners saw out of the window on the last day was not only farms with the lights on. When the train stopped, the stations had two sets of doors, two waiting rooms, two water fountains, two sets of lavatories, signs over each one.

German prisoners of war in uniform, wearing the insignia of an army that was at that moment murdering people in Europe on an industrial scale, were walked through the doors marked white. The black American soldiers guarding them used the other doors. On the trains themselves, the porters and dining car attendants were black men. They brought the prisoners their meals.

Several German accounts note with what reads as bafflement that these men addressed them as sir. At the camps, it went further. Prisoners were taken into town on work details and to buy goods. In town, they ate in restaurants. Lloyd Brown was a black American soldier stationed at Salina, Kansas.

He and the men of his unit walked into a lunchroom in town and were refused service. German prisoners were sitting inside eating. Brown wrote about it afterwards, and the line that survives is the question he asked himself in the doorway. He was a soldier of the United States in the uniform of the United States. >> [snorts] >> The men being served were the enemy.

This was not an isolated incident, and it was not a southern peculiarity. There it was worst in the SAS. It happened at bus stations, at post exchanges, at theaters. Black newspapers reported it through the whole war. Complaints went up the chain, and mostly stopped there. The men who guarded, transported, fed, and buried 371,000 German prisoners of war included tens of thousands of black Americans who could not eat in the rooms where those prisoners ate.

I want to be careful about what I am claiming here. I am not telling you the prisoners were treated better than American soldiers in every respect. They were not. They were prisoners behind wire for years, and a number of them were murdered by their own hardline comrades inside the camps for showing sympathy to their captors. What I am telling you is narrower, and it is documented.

In the specific matter of which door you could walk through in an American railway station in 1944, a captured German sergeant ranked above an American corporal from Detroit. The last German prisoners left the United States in 1946. Many of them did not want to go. Thousands applied to stay, and a number came back in the 1950s as immigrants.

There are towns in Texas and Kansas and Colorado where the German cemetery is still maintained, and where families kept up correspondence with men their grandfathers had employed to pick cotton. The story has been told mostly from that side. The reunion side. The farmer and the prisoner shaking hands 40 years later. It is a real story, and I do not want to take it away from anyone.

But the records hold both things at once, and they are not in tension. They are the same record. America was strong enough and confident enough to treat its enemies decently and to broadcast that decency across a continent by accident through a train window in a way no propaganda ministry could have designed.

And America was doing that while making its own soldiers use the other door. We know the numbers. 425,000 871 at the peak. 700 camps 80 cents a day. What we have much less of is what the man in the other waiting room was thinking while he watched them go in. If this was worth your time, the like button helps.

It tells the platform to put carefully sourced history in front of people who actually want it. Subscribe if you want the next one. There are more of these. Stories about ordinary American equipment and the ordinary people who ran it, told with the names and the numbers and the inconvenient parts left in. Every source is in the description.

Kramer’s history, the Army’s own records, the Geneva Convention text, the reporting from the time. You can check all of it. 1,850 men got off a train in Mexia, Texas on the 4th of June, 1943 and the whole town came out to look at them. The camp is gone now. Most of them are gone now. The rail line is still there and it still runs down the middle of Railroad Street.