German POWs Came to America as Enemies. They Left as Something Else.

The train has been rolling for two days, and the German soldier at the window has stopped trusting his own eyes. He is a prisoner of war. He was told America had been bombed flat, its cities rubble, its people hungry. And for two days and two nights the window has shown him the opposite. Whole cities burning with light, no blackout anywhere.

Automobiles beyond counting. Some of the men on this train will insist, for weeks, that the Americans are driving it in circles to make the country look bigger. This is the story of more than four hundred thousand enemy soldiers who were brought to America as prisoners. What happened to them here is not what any of them expected.

And when it was over, the very last German prisoner still on the run did something no one expected either. He was not running home. He was running deeper into America. The first of them were Rommel’s men. In May of 1943, the Axis armies in Tunisia surrendered, and over a quarter of a million German and Italian soldiers went into captivity in a single stroke.

Britain was already holding more prisoners than the island could feed, so London asked Washington to take a hundred and seventy-five thousand of them off its hands. And America had one strange advantage. The convoys carrying troops and supplies across the Atlantic were coming home empty. So the empty ships were filled with prisoners.

In some months, thirty thousand of them stepped onto American docks. One of them was a nineteen-year-old from the Afrika Korps named Heino Erichsen, three weeks out of Oran in the hold of a transport. He said later that the moment he saw the Statue of Liberty, he knew where he was. What he did not know was what came next.

What came next was a passenger train. Not a boxcar. A passenger train, with upholstered seats. A soldier of the 115th Panzer Grenadiers named Reinhold Pabel wrote about that ride out of Norfolk, Virginia, years afterward. A porter came down the aisle with coffee and sandwiches and offered them around, he wrote, as though the men in enemy uniform were human beings.

And most of the car, in his words, forgot the anti-American feelings they had accumulated. Then the men pressed their noses against the windowpanes and watched Virginia and Kentucky roll past, and what struck them first was the automobiles. Everywhere. In the middle of a world war. Not every ride was gentle.

The men were forbidden to wander, and a prisoner who needed the washroom raised his hand like a schoolboy and waited for a guard. One of them, a soldier named Hans Galhard, was angry enough to file a formal complaint with the Swiss diplomats who looked after prisoner welfare. His train, he protested, had rolled for about a hundred hours.

The complaint went into the record, and the record survives. The Reich told its men the Americans would work them to death. The Americans logged their complaints about the train. The trains carried them deep inland, to hundreds of camps spread across nearly every state. Texas alone held close to seventy-nine thousand prisoners, more than anywhere else in the country, partly because the Geneva Convention said prisoners should be moved to a climate resembling the one where they were captured.

Somebody in Washington looked at Texas and decided it resembled North Africa. Camp Hearne, in Texas cotton country, took in its first Germans in June of 1943, barely a month after Tunisia fell. The war these men had been fighting was three weeks and half a world behind them. At the receiving camps they were showered, deloused, and issued fresh clothing with two white letters stenciled across the back.

Then came the food. Meat, real coffee, and a soft white bread unlike anything left in a German kitchen. Some men would gain weight in captivity; one later admitted to fifty-seven pounds in two years. And a few, once the shock wore off, complained to the Red Cross inspectors about the quality of American white bread.

These were men who had been told they were being shipped to a starving country. And here is the detail that decided everything that followed. America ran those camps by the book. Not out of tenderness. The Army’s own field manual said it plainly: treat prisoners strictly by the Convention, because Germany was holding American boys, and every corner cut here could be paid for over there.

So the rations matched what American soldiers ate at home stations. The barracks matched. Prisoners who worked were paid eighty cents a day in canteen coupons. And because the Convention excused sergeants from labor, and Camp Hearne happened to be full of sergeants, whole compounds turned their captivity into something closer to a strange, fenced college.

Soccer leagues with standings. Orchestras. Classrooms where a man could study English or bookkeeping, and at Hearne, courses taken for actual credit through Baylor University. These were the enemy’s soldiers, in the middle of Texas, doing homework. And they built. In their spare hours the men of Camp Hearne raised twelve stone fountains among the barracks, with working pumps and water wheels and moats, with sculpted frogs that sprayed water.

They built a miniature German castle in careful detail. They built an outdoor stage with a pit for the orchestra, and the orchestra, led by a prisoner named Willi Mats, who was said to have conducted in Leipzig, performed in white tuxedos, and townspeople from Hearne came to hear them. Half a century later, archaeologists from Texas A&M would dig those fountains out of the Texas dirt like the ruins of a lost civilization. Which is what they were.

American newspapers looked at all this and sneered. They called the camps the Fritz Ritz. Letters to editors demanded to know why the enemy was being coddled. The Army took the complaints and did not change the policy. The book was the book. If any of this is starting to sound invented, I understand, and I want to be plain with you for a moment.

Every name, every number, every letter in this story comes out of the record, and the record is listed below this video. Pause and check me any time you like. You will want to, because the next thing that happened is the part historians keep circling back to. America opened the gates and sent its prisoners to work.

The young men of Texas and Kansas and Minnesota were overseas. The crops were standing in the fields with nobody to bring them in. So farmers drove to the camps in the morning and drove home with German soldiers in the truck bed. A prisoner named Walter Schmid spent his war picking cotton and melons in the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico, working the rows beside Mexican-American field hands, playing trumpet in the camp band at night, and writing careful letters to a girl back home who would one day be his wife.

Erichsen went out to the farms around Hearne for ten cents an hour. And all across the country, the same scene kept repeating itself. Farm families fed the prisoners at their own tables. The arithmetic underneath it all was pure Washington. A farmer paid the government the going rate for the labor, about a dollar and a half a day for a man.

The prisoner drew his eighty cents in coupons, good at the camp canteen for cigarettes, razor blades, and watery three-point-two beer. The difference stayed with the Treasury. In 1944 alone the government collected twenty-two million dollars in prisoner wages and reckoned it saved eighty million more by putting prisoners to work on its own bases.

The enemy was turning a profit for the United States, and in Texas they picked the peaches, gathered the pecans, and brought in the cotton in record amounts. Guards got used to it. In a lot of places the guarding itself grew thin, one bored soldier with a rifle watching twenty men pick peaches, and then no soldier at all.

Out of some three hundred and seventy thousand German prisoners, just over two thousand ever tried to run, and most of those were back inside the wire within a day. The escape file reads less like a thriller than a farce. Just before Christmas of 1944, twenty-five men tunneled out of Papago Park in Arizona, the biggest German breakout of the war in America.

The first of them to quit, a young U-boat sailor named Herbert Fuchs, got cold, wet, and hungry, hitchhiked into town, and asked the driver to drop him at the sheriff’s office. When the sheriff phoned the camp to say he was holding a prisoner who wanted to come back, the camp did not yet know anyone was missing.

Three others had built a boat in secret, piece by piece, and dragged it through the tunnel to paddle a river their map showed running down to Mexico. The river was a bed of mud. The last of them to be caught, a U-boat captain named Jürgen Wattenberg, lasted five weeks. He spent most of his last seventy-five cents on a restaurant meal in Phoenix, then asked a street sweeper for directions.

The man heard the accent and called the police. The punishment for all of it was bread and water, one day for each day gone. There was nowhere better to run to. Now stop, because this next part is the one nobody puts on a postcard, and this story cannot be told honestly without it. Inside the wire, the Third Reich did not surrender.

In camp after camp, the hard men, the committed National Socialists, ran their own quiet government behind the fences. They held their own courts. They kept lists of prisoners who had grown too friendly with the Americans, lists meant for use after the final victory. When the Army centralized all prisoner mail at Camp Hearne, the clerks who sorted it were exactly those men, and they read everything.

At Camp Hearne, a corporal named Hugo Krauss, who had lived in New York as a boy and liked the Americans, was beaten in his bunk one December night with lead pipes and clubs. He died three days later. At Camp Tonkawa in Oklahoma, a prisoner named Johannes Kunze was accused of passing notes to the Americans, tried by a courtyard full of two hundred fellow prisoners in a single evening, and beaten to death before morning.

Five men hanged for it. The Army prosecutor who convicted them was a young Texan named Leon Jaworski. Thirty years later he would be the special prosecutor of Watergate. And at Papago Park in Arizona, somebody made a filing error. A U-boat sailor named Werner Drechsler had been quietly informing for American intelligence, and the Army moved him into a compound filled with U-boat crews.

The men inside knew his face. He lasted about seven hours. Seven of his killers went to the gallows for it. The third case was the coldest of all. At a camp in South Carolina, two prisoners named Erich Gauss and Rudolf Straub killed a fellow soldier, Horst Günther, for cooperating with the Americans, and arranged the body to look like a suicide. Army investigators took the scene apart anyway.

At trial, Straub explained himself without a trace of apology. The killing, he said, was a complete, absolute German matter. The court did not agree. It was an American matter now. Fourteen German prisoners were hanged at Fort Leavenworth in the summer of 1945, in three separate cases. President Roosevelt had approved the sentences long before, but the executions waited until Germany had surrendered, for one cold reason.

While the Reich still stood, it could still take revenge on American prisoners. The same system that paid the enemy eighty cents a day and let him study for university credit also hanged fourteen of him, by law, after trial, on the record. That is what running it by the book means. The book cuts both directions. And there was one more shadow, and it was not German.

It was ours. In April of 1944, a letter arrived at Yank, the Army’s own magazine, from Corporal Rupert Trimmingham, an American soldier. He and eight other Black soldiers had been traveling under orders through the Deep South, and the only place at the railroad lunchroom that would serve them was the kitchen out back.

While they ate there, they watched through the doorway as two dozen German prisoners of war sat down at the tables with their guards. The enemy talked, smoked, and had what Trimmingham called quite a swell time. His letter asked, Are these men sworn enemies of this country? Are we not American soldiers, sworn to fight for and die if need be for this our country? Then why are they treated better than we are? The magazine printed it.

The letter set off a storm of replies, most of them furious on his behalf. Within weeks The New Yorker ran a short story built on the scene. And Trimmingham’s lunchroom was not a freak accident of one bad town. At least two camps in Mississippi opened their whites-only facilities to German prisoners while Black American soldiers stood outside.

A Tuskegee airman named Charles Dryden watched German prisoners walk into a post cafeteria in South Carolina that he, an American combat pilot, was barred from entering. It changed nothing that year. But those letters are in the record too, and any honest accounting of the Fritz Ritz has to eat at that same lunchroom. The country that kept its word to the enemy had not yet kept its word to all of its own.

Some of the men who saw that most clearly were the prisoners themselves. Which raises the question the whole experiment turns on. Berlin swore that no German soldier could be changed by enemy hands. The rest of this story is the answer, and it begins with the strangest thing America did to its prisoners.

Which is what it chose not to do. There was no forced indoctrination. No loudspeakers, no struggle sessions. Instead, in secret, the Army gathered a handful of anti-Nazi prisoners, writers and teachers and professors, at a small post on the Rhode Island shore called Fort Kearny. The prisoners nicknamed the unit the Factory.

What the Factory manufactured was a newspaper, in German, by Germans, called Der Ruf. The Call. It printed war news the men could check against reality, and essays about what Germany might become. It went out to camps across the whole country. It was sold, not handed out, five cents a copy, because a free newspaper would have smelled like propaganda to men raised on propaganda.

Circulation climbed to seventy-five thousand an issue. And the hard men understood exactly what it was. In some camps the Nazis bought up the copies and burned them. In others they threatened anyone seen reading it. One prisoner wrote to the editors that a man had stood over his bunk shouting that traitors read such newspapers, and had said he would try to kill him if he went on reading.

He wrote that letter to the editors anyway. Two of the men who edited it, Hans Werner Richter and Alfred Andersch, went home after the war and founded Gruppe 47, the writers’ circle that rebuilt German literature out of the rubble. The men America trusted with a mimeograph machine ended up helping draft the conscience of the new Germany.

In the last months, the Army went further and ran six-day crash courses in democracy, at Fort Getty and Fort Eustis, for prisoners headed home to help run the towns of the occupied zones. An Army survey claimed that three out of four prisoners left America with, in its words, a friendly attitude toward their captors. Take the number with salt.

It was the Army grading its own homework. But one prisoner at a Massachusetts camp put the honest version in a sentence. Through American magazines and papers, he said, I learned there was something in the rest of the world besides what Adolf Hitler thought. The letters home said the same thing, inside the limits of the censor’s pencil.

Prisoners wrote that they had meat, that they had white bread and coffee, that no one should send them packages because nothing was missing here and everything was missing there. Letters like that landed in German kitchens like dispatches from another planet, so far from everything Berlin was saying that some families simply set them aside and refused to decide.

Then the war ended, and the story turned cruel one more time. The prisoners assumed the ships would take them home. For most of them, the ships went east and stopped short. By agreement among the Allies, the men were handed on to Britain and France as labor for the countries their army had wrecked, a year in the coal mines or the fields, two years, for some of them three.

In 1946, one out of every five farm workers in England was a German prisoner of war. The last of them did not get home until the summer of 1948. A prisoner named Wolfgang Johner, who had spent his captivity at a camp in Massachusetts, was put on a ship in September of 1946 believing he was bound for Germany and walked down the gangway in Liverpool. He worked English fields until the spring of 1948.

He said, long afterward, that he believed the Americans had lied to him, and he stayed disappointed for a very long time. He had earned the right to be. And yet. When those men finally did get home, to bombed cities, to a country cut in half, thousands of them turned around and looked west again.

An estimated five thousand former prisoners came back to America to stay, and thousands more came back to visit the towns where they had been held. A man who had been imprisoned near Dallas wrote to the local newspaper in 1951, in plain desperate English. I want back in old Texas and I can work. Who can help me? Hans Reinhold, who had pulled onions and carrots on Arthur Schroeder’s farm outside Chicago, wrote the family a thank-you letter from ruined Germany in 1947, and the Schroeders answered with care packages, food parcels now flowing from the American farmer to the former enemy soldier.

Heino Erichsen went home to Kiel, found it broken, and came back for good. He became an American citizen. He settled in Texas, ninety minutes down the road from the camp where he had been a prisoner. Decades later, a German grandfather’s dying wish sent his grandson, Harald Goldfuss, across the ocean to Minnesota, to find the family of Hank Peterson, the farmer who had treated him decently in the last summer of the war.

The grandson wrote to the mayor of Moorhead because he did not know where else to begin. The farmer’s daughter was still there to answer. The historian who spent his life interviewing these men, Arnold Krammer, put it as simply as it can be put. I have yet to meet a German prisoner, he said, who does not tell me it was the time of his life.

A few of them refused to wait for permission. Reinhold Pabel, the panzer grenadier who watched the porter hand out sandwiches on the train, slipped away from his camp in Illinois in 1945 and simply became an American. He called himself Philip Brick, and by the time the FBI knocked in 1953 he was running a bookshop in Chicago.

And here is what the country he had escaped into did with him. It processed his paperwork, sent him briefly home, and then let him back in through the front door, legally. The United States government could not quite bring itself to punish a man for the crime of wanting to stay. Which brings us back to the last man.

The one still running. His name was Georg Gärtner. Afrika Korps, captured at Tunis, held at Camp Deming, New Mexico. In the fall of 1945, repatriation was coming, and Gärtner knew exactly what it meant for him. His home was Silesia, and Silesia was gone, handed to Poland, behind the new Soviet line. Going home meant going east.

So one September night in 1945 he went under the wire, caught a Southern Pacific freight rolling west, and did what every escaped prisoner in history has done, except in reverse. He did not escape from America. He escaped into it. For forty years he was Dennis Whiles. He taught skiing in California. He worked as a tennis pro.

He estimated costs for a construction firm. He married an American woman named Jean in 1964 and never told her. His face appeared in Life magazine in 1952, in a crowd photo at a train wreck rescue, and nobody looked twice. The FBI kept his file open but stopped truly hunting him within twenty years, having concluded the fugitive was dangerous to no one. He was not hiding from America.

He was hiding inside the life it had shown him. It ended quietly. In 1984, with his marriage strained by the secret, he told his wife the truth. The next year he walked onto the Today show and surrendered, forty years late, to the host, Bryant Gumbel. He wrote a book with Krammer and called himself Hitler’s last soldier in America.

The government looked at his case, declined to prosecute, declined to deport, and closed the file. He died in Colorado in 2013, ninety-two years old, an old man of the American West. The last German prisoner of the Second World War never went back at all. No lecture converted these men. That is the part worth carrying out of this story. What converted them was a train window nobody blacked out.

A porter who said please. A paycheck for enemy labor, small but real. And a country that kept to its own rulebook when not one soul on earth would have checked. Germany told its soldiers America was a lie. America let them walk around inside the truth for three years. The propaganda never recovered. They came here wearing the enemy’s uniform.

They left knowing the way back. So here is the one thing I am going to ask you for. Somebody in your family may have touched this story without you ever hearing about it. A grandfather who stood guard at one of those camps. A family farm that hired prisoners for a harvest. A town with a fence line nobody talks about anymore.

Put his name below, and this time add the place. The name and the town. The camp, the farm, the county. I am going to build the map of this story down in the comments, one name and one place at a time, and by the time we are done it will stretch across the whole country. Just like it did then.