German POWs Couldn’t Believe America’s Industrial Might After Arriving in the United States

In the sun summer of 1943, a German sergeant named Friedrich Radke stepped off a prison train in a small Texas town called Mexia. He had been told his whole life that America was weak, starving, on the verge of collapse. Then he looked out the window. Every farmhouse had electric lights burning at 10:00 at night.

Every crossroads had a street lamp. In Germany, his own parents had received electricity 6 years earlier and thanked the Führer for the miracle. That night, in a diary he hid from his own officers, Radke wrote a single sentence, “The Americans must be lying to us. No nation could possess such abundance while fighting a war on two fronts.” He first asked.

He did not yet know that everything he was about to see see the ships built in 4 days, the bombers rolling off assembly lines every 63 minutes, the food thrown away by the ton would destroy the Third Reich more more completely than any battlefield defeat. This is the story of how America won the war without firing a shot.

His story began 4 months earlier on the plain outside Tunis. It was May 13th, 1943. Behind him, the ridgelines of Tunisia burned orange in the setting sun. Ahead of him, a column of American infantry advanced across the wadi, their helmets catching the light like a slow tide of steel. He was 32 years old.

Iron Cross first class pinned to the left breast of his tunic where the sweat had darkened the ribbon to the color of old wine. 3 years of war, France in 1940, the deserts in 1941, Two wounds, a wife in Hamburg named Erika, a daughter Ilse, born while he was crossing the Mediterranean on a troopship, whom he had never held.

He unbuckled his belt and let the pistol drop. Beside him, Oberleutnant Hans Müller was still standing at attention, 28 years old, sharp-jawed, his uniform somehow still creased despite 90 [clears throat] days of retreat. Müller had joined the party at 19, believed in the Führer the way a man believes in gravity.

When the American sergeant gestured with his carbine, Müller did not move. “Herr Oberleutnant.” Radke murmured. “It is finished.” Müller’s jaw tightened, but he lowered his weapon. General Jürgen von Arnim had signed the surrender that morning. 250,000 German and Italian soldiers were laying down their arms across Tunisia in a defeat as so complete the men in the trenches were already calling it Tunisgrad.

The Afrika Korps, the legend of Rommel, the desert foxes who had chased Montgomery back to the gates of Egypt were now shuffling toward barbed wire enclosures in columns that stretched to the horizon. Radke walked. The American soldiers who searched him were not the emaciated, opium-addicted degenerates of Dr. Goebbels’ broadcasts. They were tall. Their teeth were white.

One of them, a corporal from Wisconsin whose name Radke would never learn, handed him a chocolate bar without speaking. Radke stared at it in his palm as if it were an unexploded shell. He put it in his pocket. He would save it. He did not yet understand that in America chocolate would not be a thing worth saving.

At the port of Oran, Algeria, the Wehrmacht became a paperwork problem. 30,000 prisoners waited in wire pens beneath a sky bleached white by the North African sun. American clerks moved among them with clipboards, photographing each man, cataloging his rank, his unit, his blood type. The efficiency was almost obscene. Radke, who had served in a German army famous throughout Europe for its precision, watched the Americans process a thousand men an hour and felt something cold move beneath his ribs.

Then came the first meal. He remembered it later in the same way a man remembers his wedding or the birth of a child. White bread, not the gray sawdust cut ration bread of the Reich, but bread so pale it seemed to glow. A slab of beef, real coffee, and an orange, an entire orange whole, unblemished, cold from a crate that had been packed in California and shipped across an ocean the U-boats were supposed to have closed.

Miller stared at his tray. He would not touch it. “It is the theater,” he said quietly in the tone of a man explaining a magic trick to a child. “They staged this the first day. Tomorrow will be soup and moldy bread, you will see.” Radke ate the orange first. He ate it slowly, holding each segment on his tongue until the sweetness became almost painful.

When he was finished, he opened his diary, a small black notebook he had carried since France, and wrote a single line. “If this is theater, it is the most expensive theater in the world. Tomorrow was not soup and moldy bread. Tomorrow was pancakes with syrup and eggs and bacon and a second cup of coffee if a man wanted it.

Miller ate in silence. He did not look at the food. He chewed as if the chewing itself were an act of resistance. On the 14th day at Oran, the ships came. They did not look like troop ships. They looked like cargo vessels, squat, gray, functional. American guards herded the prisoners up the gangway of the SS Robert E. Peary.

And Radke, who had been an engineering student before the war, ran his hand along the steel of the hull as he boarded. It was welded, not riveted. The seams were rough. The ship had the unfinished look of something manufactured in enormous haste. He asked the guard in careful English how old the vessel was. The guard laughed.

Four days, Kraut, Kaiser yards, Richmond, California. They built her in 4 days, 15 hours, and 29 minutes. Uh Radke assumed he had misunderstood the English. He asked again. The guard repeated it slower. Then he shrugged and walked away. Radke stood at the rail for a long time. Four days.

In Germany, in the shipyards of Hamburg, where his uncle had worked before the bombing, a cargo vessel of this tonnage would have taken 8 months at wartime speed. Four days. He tried to make the arithmetic work and could not. Huh. Somewhere in that failure, in that small failure of arithmetic on the deck of a ship in the harbor of Oran, a crack opened in Feldwebel Friedrich Radke that would never close.

The crossing took 2 weeks. For the German officers, it was a kind of slow drowning by observation. The mess hall of the SS Robert E. Peary served three meals a day. The portions were what an American merchant sailor considered normal. The prisoners were given the same rations. Radke, who had subsisted for 6 months in the desert on captured British corned beef and water so thick with sand it had to be strained through a cloth, watched the American cooks throw away food.

They threw away whole steaks that had been ordered and not eaten. >> [clears throat] >> They poured gallons of milk into the sea when the ice ran low and it began to sour. They dumped half loaves of bread over the rail and the gulls followed the ship in white clouds, growing fat on the discards of a nation that had not yet, in Radke’s experience, done anything that could be called rationing.

Miller stood beside him at the rail one evening as another crate of oranges, spotted with mold on perhaps three of the fruits inside, went overboard. “They do it to break us.” Miller said. His voice had a brittleness now like porcelain that has been dropped once and is waiting to be dropped again. “It is psychological warfare warfare.

Oh, they want us to believe the lie.” Radke did not answer. He was watching the ship’s radio direction finder turning slowly above the bridge and the low frequency antenna array strung between the masts, equipment for shore-to-ship communication across the entire Atlantic. In the Reich, such radio gear was reserved for warships and long long-range bombers.

Here it hummed above the wheelhouse of a boat built in 99 hours, and no one thought it worth mentioning. Electronic navigation, encrypted signaling on a cargo vessel. On a cargo vessel. In the Reich, such equipment was reserved for warships and long-range bombers. Here it hummed and blinked above the wheelhouse of a boat built in 99 hours, and no one thought it worth mentioning.

That night in his bunk, by the light of a bulb that never went dark because the Americans did not observe blackout in the mid-Atlantic, Radke wrote in his diary, “We were told the American submarines could not cross the ocean because their industry could not supply them. Today I counted 47 cargo ships in a convoy visible from our deck.

If Germany has already lost the war, when did we lose it? Was it at Stalingrad? Or was it earlier, on the day some clerk in Detroit or Pittsburgh decided that a ship could be built in four days, and no one in Berlin thought this was worth knowing.” He closed the notebook. He did not sleep. On the morning of August 2nd, 1943, the SS Robert E.

Peary passed the coast of Virginia and entered the roadstead of Hampton Roads, and Feldwebel Friedrich Radke saw the United States of America for the first time. He had prepared himself for a coastline. He had expected, perhaps, a port. What he saw was an ocean of ships. Norfolk naval base sprawled across the shoreline for as far as the eye could travel, cranes, hundreds of cranes.

Radke tried to count them and gave up. Cargo vessels stood four abreast at piers that vanished into the heat haze. Destroyers moved in the outer harbor with the unhurried confidence of animals in their own territory. On a single dock, he watched a gantry lift what appeared to be an entire tank from the deck of one ship and lower it onto the flatcar of a waiting train.

Behind him, an old Unteroffizier named Johann Weber, a factory worker from the Ruhr before his conscription, was weeping without sound. The tears simply ran down his face into his beard. When Radke asked him what was wrong, Weber gestured at the harbor. “I helped build the docks at Hamburg,” he said, “before the bombs.

I know what a port looks like. This is not a port. This is not even a country. This is something else.” The prisoners were formed into columns on the pier. A young American lieutenant walked the line with a clipboard, checking names in fluent, faintly Bavarian-accented German.

He was, Radke would later learn, a Jewish refugee whose parents had fled Munich in 1936. The lieutenant spoke to the men courteously. He apologized for the heat. He He explained the Geneva Convention. He offered water from a canteen to any prisoner who felt faint. Miller, standing at attention in the sun, muttered under his breath about the Jew and the race betrayal, but his voice had gone quieter.

It had been getting quieter for 2 weeks. Then they saw the trains. The German prisoners had been transported across Europe in cattle cars. 40 men or eight horses. The stencil on the wood read, and the Wehrmacht had used both, sometimes at once. The trains at Norfolk were Pullman coaches, cushioned seats, overhead luggage racks, small brass reading lamps at every row.

An American sergeant, apologizing, mentioned that the air conditioning in Radke’s car was malfunctioning, and he hoped the prisoners would not find the ride too uncomfortable. Air conditioning, in August. Radke boarded the train and sat by a window. He took out his diary. He did not write for a long time.

He simply looked at the interior of the car, the polished wood veneer, the small folding table, the glass ashtray built into the armrest, and thought of the freight wagon that had carried him from the recruit depot to France in the spring months of 1940, in which one man had died standing up because there was no room to fall. The train shuddered and began to move.

Outside the window, America began to unroll. They passed a parking lot at the edge of the naval base. It was full of automobiles. Not military vehicles, not staff cars, private automobiles, hundreds of them, belonging to the workers who at that moment were unloading the ships behind them.

Radke pressed his face to the glass and counted the makes he could recognize. Fords, Chevrolets, Plymouths, Buicks. In the Reich, private automobile ownership was a privilege of the party elite and the industrial aristocracy. The Volkswagen, promised to the German people since 1934 had been delivered to fewer than a thousand civilians before the war absorbed the factory.

Here, a long Sherman drove to work. The sun set as they crossed into North Carolina. And as the darkness came down, Radke saw the second thing that would break him. Not the ships, not the trains, not the food, the lights. Every farmhouse they passed had electric light burning in the windows. Every crossroads had a street lamp.

Every small town, Rocky Mount, Wilson, Selma, glowed as if it were a city. Shop windows illuminated at 10:00 at night with no one inside to see them. Neon signs advertising Coca-Cola and Texaco and something called Rexall. Radio antennas on rooftops, porch lights left burning simply because no one had thought to turn them off.

In Germany, blackout regulations had turned the Reich into a country of shuttered windows and shielded flashlights since 1940. Before the war, rural electrification had reached barely 20% of German farms. Radke’s own parents in a village [clears throat] outside Bremen had received electricity in 1937 and considered it a miracle of the Führer’s benevolence.

He watched an entire nation from horizon to horizon burning with light it did not need. He took out his diary. His hands were shaking. He wrote, “The Americans must be lying to us. No nation could possess such abundance while fighting a war on two fronts. And yet and yet, the lights are real. I can see them.

” Miller says, “It is a trick, but you cannot trick a horizon. Well, across the aisle Oberleutnant Hans Müller sat with his eyes closed. He was praying or pretending to. Radke could not tell. The train moved west through the Carolina night deeper into a country that, according to everything he had been told for 10 years, could not exist.

He did not know it yet, but he had another 2,000 miles to travel before he reached the camp at Hearne, Texas. 2,000 miles of factories running three shifts, of grain elevators taller than cathedrals, of cattle herds larger than German provinces. 2,000 miles of evidence. By the time he arrived, the Feldwebel Friedrich Radke, who had lowered his rifle outside Tunis, would already be a different man.

Not yet a democrat, not yet a friend of America, but no longer in any way that mattered a soldier of the Third Reich. The transformation had begun on a harbor full of ships built in four days. It would end, though he could not know this either, in a in in a Germany that rise from its own ashes because men like him had seen uh with their own eyes what a free nation could build when it decided to build. The train rolled west.

The lights of America burned behind him and ahead of him and all around him in the summer dark. The train did not stop for the night. It ran on. Somewhere past midnight in a place where it Kagey would later learn was was called Roanoke, Virginia, they pulled onto a siding to take on water and coal.

He pressed his cheek to the window glass and watched two men in coveralls perform in 30 minutes what would have taken a German railway yard 2 hours. An automated coal loader dumped a full tender in 4 minutes. An electric water pump filled the boiler while a third man walked the lengths of the train greasing the wheel journals from a mechanized cart.

No shouting, no supervisor with a clipboard, just three men and their machines moving through the dark with the calm of men who had done done this 10,000 times. Rodke watched the yard lights burning above them. He counted the bulbs. He stopped counting at 200. Beside him, Unteroffizier Johann Weber whispered a number into the dark.

He was calculating in his head the kilowatt-hours consumed by this single rail yard in a single hour. He compared it to his home district in Berlin. He gave up when the ratio passed 50 to 1. “It is the carelessness,” Weber said. “That is the thing. They leave the lights on in empty buildings.” Müller, across the aisle, did not speak.

He had not spoken since Norfolk. His hands lay in his lap, palms up, as if he had dropped something and could not remember what. Morning came over the Tennessee River and the train ran west along the Alcoa Aluminum Works. It ran for a long time. Rodke, who had studied engineering, knew what an aluminum plant looked like.

He had toured one in Silesia in 1938. It had been the pride of the region. This one at Alcoa stretched for 3 miles along the riverbank, 3 miles. “Its electric furnaces,” a guard told him casually, “drew more current than the city of Munich. He wrote in his diary, “We invented this process.

We patented it, and they have built four of them.” The train ran on into Kentucky, and past Louisville, the prisoners saw the Rubbertown complex. Synthetic rubber. Germany, who had invented the chemistry, had never produced more than 120,000 tons in the best year. The four plants at Rubbertown, together with dozens of others across the country, would produce over 800,000 tons a year by the end of the war.

Oberleutnant Erich Hofmann, a chemist from IG Farben, who had been captured near Trier, sat with his forehead against the glass and murmured the names of the distillation columns as they passed. He knew every one of them. He had helped design their German cousins. >> [clears throat] >> He had believed, until that morning, that Germany led the world in the science.

“Four of them,” he said to no one. “In one town, and they told us there are dozens more.” By afternoon, they were passing Willow Run. Radke would remember Willow Run for the rest of his life. The Ford plant at Willow Run, outside Detroit, was a single building 1 mile long. It had been built in 9 months on what had been farmland.

42,000 workers moved through it in three shifts. Radke pressed his face to the window as the train slowed on a curve, and he counted, in the parking bays visible from the tracks, 17 four-engine B-24 Liberator bombers in various stages of completion. 17. In 5 minutes of watching, a guard told him, unprompted, that the plant produced one bomber every 63 minutes. Rod closed his eyes.

He did the arithmetic. 22 bombers a day, 660 a month, from one building. From one building. He thought of the Luftwaffe pilots he had known in North North Africa, boys of 19 and 20 sent up in Messerschmitts against American formations, told that the enemy was running out of aircraft. He thought of their faces.

He did not write in his diary that day. Some things a man does not trust himself to put on paper while while his hands are still shaking. At a rail junction in Memphis, Tennessee, the train stopped for 2 hours. The prisoners were allowed to step down onto the platform under guard. Rodkey stretched his legs and walked to a drinking drinking fountain near the station house. He was thirsty.

He had turned the handle before he saw the small enameled sign screwed to the wall above it. Whites only. He looked up. There was a second fountain, 10 ft away. Its sign read, “Colored.” Beyond it, in a separate waiting room with a separate entrance, a black American soldier in the uniform of the United States Army sat on a bench.

He was in transit like Rodkey. He wore corporal’s stripes. He held his cap in his lap and looked at the floor. Rodkey stood between the two fountains for a long moment. He was a prisoner of a nation that was at that instant sending its sons across the ocean to die for the proposition that all men were equal.

And the black corporal who might soon die for that proposition could not drink from the same fountain as the German who had tried to kill him. That night on the train, Rod wrote, “America is not what Germany said it was, but America is not what America says it is, either. It is stronger than the Reich. It is more merciful than the Reich. And it lies itself the way all nations lie to themselves.

I do not know yet whether this makes it better or worse. I only know that it makes it real.” He read the entry twice. Then he closed the book. They reached the town of Mexia, Texas in the first week of August, 1943. The desert heat had followed him across an ocean and a continent. Camp Hearn stood among the mesquite. Its wooden barracks were laid out with a precision that would have pleased a Prussian general.

Electric light in every building, flush toilets, steam heat for the winter that would come. Hot showers on demand at any hour. The camp hospital had penicillin. Oberstleutnant Doctor Friedrich Bauer, chief surgeon of the 164th Light Division, 45 years old, veteran of the Great War, walked through the hospital ward on his second day at Hearn and stopped in front of a shelf of small brown bottles.

He read the labels. He read them again. He picked up a bottle, held it in his palm, and began to weep. A young American orderly asked him if he was ill. “My men,” Bauer said in careful English, “my men died for want of this.” The orderly did not know what to say. He offered the doctor a cigarette. In the camp kitchen, Feldwebel Otto Krebs, 40 years old, formerly the head chef at a hotel in Munich, was assigned to food preparation.

On his first shift, he was ordered to prepare rations for 4,000 men. The American regulations required him to cook 10% more than would be eaten to guarantee no prisoner received short measure. The surplus at the end of the meal was to be scraped into bins and taken to a pig farm outside town. Krebs stood over the bins after the first supper service and could not move.

He was holding a pan of untouched roast beef. He was crying so hard he could not see the meat. An American mess sergeant, a heavy-set man from Ohio, put a hand on his shoulder. “Kraut,” the sergeant said, not unkindly, “you’re going to get used to it.” Krebs says never did. By September, the labor program had begun. The American harvest could not be brought in without help.

Prisoners were trucked to farms across the plain states, and Radke found himself in a cornfield outside Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, working alongside a farmer named Anderson and his 16-year-old son, Danny. The boy drove a John Deere tractor that had [clears throat] cost, Anderson mentioned in passing, more than a thousand dollars.

The boy operated it with the casual boredom of a teenager. When Anderson’s wife brought lunch to the field at noon, she brought enough for the Germans, too. Ham sandwiches, coffee in a thermos, pie. Radke ate his sandwich sitting in the shade of the tractor. Anderson sat beside him. He did not speak much. When he finished his coffee, he said only, “My oldest boy is in Italy, Fifth Army.

” Radke lowered his eyes. “I hope he comes home,” he said in English and meant it. Anderson nodded once. That was all. Not every farm was Nebraska. Not every day was pie. In the camps, the war did not end at the wire. Oberleutnant Müller, who had grown quieter every day since Norfolk, had found his people. There was a faction among the prisoners at Hearne, and at Tonkawa in Oklahoma, and at Papago Park in Arizona, a faction of SS men and hardline officers who had decided that any German who accepted American kindness was a traitor. They called

themselves the the Heiligeist, the Holy Ghost. They held tribunals at night in the barracks. They pronounced sentences. In November of 1943, at Camp Tonkawa, a Feldwebel named Johannes Kunze, was accused of passing information to American guards. He was dragged from his bunk after midnight. Five men beat him to death with clubs made from mess hall table legs.

His body was left in the compound at dawn. The five men were tried by the United States. They were convicted. [clears throat] On July 10th, 1945, they were hanged at Fort Leavenworth. At Camp Hearne, Radke heard the news of Kunze’s death from a guard. He was standing in the mess line. He set down his tray and walked out into the compound and stood in the Texas sun until his eyes ached.

Müller had transferred to Tonkawa 3 weeks earlier. Radke did not know if Müller had swung the club. He did not want to know. That was Christmas of 1943. The Methodist Church choir of Hearne, Texas, came to the camp in December and sang carols in German for the prisoners. Local women baked cookies and left them at the gate.

A Red Cross letter reached Radke from Hamburg. Erika and Ilse were alive. They had survived the July firestorm. His street was gone, but they were alive. He read the letter three times. Then he walked to the wire and looked out at the town of Hearne, at the small houses with their lit windows, at the church steeple in the winter dusk. He was a prisoner.

He was fed better than he had been fed as a soldier. His wife was alive. His daughter, whom he had never held, was alive. His enemies had told him this news and had baked him cookies and had sung to him in his own language. He did not know, yet, what any of it meant. But he was beginning to understand that whatever it meant, it was not what he had been told.

Winter passed into spring and the camps changed. By early 1944, more than 40,000 German prisoners across the United States had enrolled in educational courses. They studied English. They studied American history. They studied mathematics and agriculture and the strange, quiet science of democracy. At Fort Kearney, Rhode Island, in a secret subprogram the army called the idea factory, hand-picked anti-Nazi prisoners were being trained as future editors and teachers.

By March of 1945, they had launched a newspaper called Der Ruf, Ruf the call. Distributed to camps across the country, it did not preach. It simply printed the truth about the war, about Germany, about what came next. Radke signed up for English lessons in February 1944. By April, he was reading American [clears throat] newspapers in the camp library, comparing the Dallas Morning News to the Chicago Tribune, to the New York Times, watching a country argue with itself in print, and not collapse from the argument. In Germany, a single

dissenting sentence in a newspaper had, since 1933, been enough to end a man’s career or his life. Here, editors called the president a fool on Tuesday and interviewed him on Thursday. He wrote in his diary, “They quarrel in public and it makes them stronger. I do not yet understand how this is possible.” But I have stopped assuming that I understand anything.

Müller returned to Höhn in March, transferred back from Tonkawa after the investigation into Kunz’s death. He was thinner. He did not meet Radke’s eyes in the mess hall. He sat alone at meals. The old certainty in his jaw had been replaced by something Rad could not name. Not doubt, exactly. Something colder than doubt. The look of a man who had built a house on a foundation and had just felt the foundation move.

Then came April of 1945. The Americans set up projectors in the camp theaters. The prisoners were called in by barracks, company by company, and shown the newsreels. Radke sat in the third row. The lights went down. The film began. Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau. The bodies were stacked like cordwood. The living, when they appeared on screen, did not look human.

A British sergeant on the soundtrack described what he was seeing in a voice that kept breaking. American soldiers, hardened men who had fought through Normandy and the bulge, stood at the edges of the frame with their hands over their mouths. Radke watched. He did not look away. Around him in the theater, other men were weeping.

Some were shouting that it was a fake, that it was propaganda, that no such thing could exist. A few walked out. Most sat very still. When the lights came up, Radke did not move for a long time. He had told himself for 2 years that whatever the Reich had done, it had been done in the ordinary cruelty of war. He had been a soldier. He had fought other soldiers.

He had not known. But the newsreel had shown him something worse than atrocity. It had shown him a system, the trains, the camps, the industrial machinery of it. And Radke, who had been an engineer, understood industrial machinery. You did not build a facility like Auschwitz by accident.

You did not build it in secret. You built it with contracts and blueprints and freight schedules. You built it the way America built Willow Run. Somebody had drawn the plans. Somebody had approved the budget. Somebody in a well-lit office in Berlin had signed the requisition for the ovens. He had worn the uniform of the men who signed those papers.

That night he wrote one line in his diary. Only one. We thought we were warriors. We were the janitors of a slaughterhouse. Oberleutnant Hans Müller hanged himself in the barracks latrine on the 22nd of April, 1945. He used a strip of bedsheet. He left no note. He was 29 years old. In the camp records, he was listed as one of dozens of German prisoners of war who took their own lives in American captivity that spring and summer, most of them after the newsreels.

Radke helped carry the body out. The Americans buried Müller in the small camp cemetery with a chaplain present and full military honors. A young lieutenant from Iowa saluted the grave. Radke stood in the sun and did not cry. He had already done his crying weeks before in a dark theater with a projector running.

The war ended on the 8th of May, 1945. The prisoners at Hearn [clears throat] learned it from a guard who came running through the compound shouting the news. There was no cheering. There was, instead, a strange stillness. Hundreds of men standing where they had been standing, letting the fact settle on them like snow.

Somewhere a man laughed once, a short bark of a sound, and then stopped. A few wept quietly. Most just stood. Radke walked to the wire and looked east. He was 34 years old. Uh, he had a wife and a daughter he had not seen in 4 years. His country was rubble. He did not know yet that it would be another 2 years before he saw Hamburg again.

He did not know that he would be transferred for along with tens of thousands of other prisoners to work camps in Britain and France before repatriation, that the allies would keep German labor in the fields of Europe until 1947 because the the fields needed working. He did not know that when he finally stepped off a train in Hamburg in the summer of 1947, he would walk for 2 hours through a city he could not recognize before he found the street where his family lived.

He did not know that Ilse, 6 years old by then, would hide behind her mother’s leg when he opened the door because she did not know who he was. But he knew standing at the wire and to Texas in May May of 1945 that he was going to go home to a Germany that would have to be built again from nothing. And he knew because he had seen it with his own eyes for 2 years how such a thing was done.

You did it with electricity. You did it with tractors. You did it with women in the workforce and immigrants and in the factories and unions that argued with management and newspapers that argued with the government and small farmers who owned their own land and drank coffee from thermoses at noon. You did it with light on every street, in every house, all all night if you wanted to.

The men who came home from American camps went back to a Germany in ruins. And they went to work. Hans Kroll, who had been a prisoner at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, became West German ambassador to the United States. Walter Hallstein, held at Como, Mississippi, taught law to his fellow prisoners in the camp classroom and after the war became the first president of the European Commission.

Reinhold Pabel, who had escaped from a camp in Illinois and lived undetected in Chicago for years before turning himself in, went home and wrote a book called Enemies Are Human. Georg Gärtner, who had escaped from Camp Deming, New Mexico, stayed hidden in America until 1985. 371,683 German soldiers were repatriated from American camps between 1945 and 1946.

Of the men who had walked into captivity in North Africa in 1943, believing that America was a nation of degenerate weakness, 95% when surveyed after the war described their treatment as good or excellent. Less than 1% had attempted to escape. They went home carrying something the guards had not put in their pockets.

They went home carrying the memory of what a country could be when it decided to feed its enemies and light its houses and let its people argue. In August of 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the war’s end, more than 500 former prisoners returned to Texas for a reunion. They came with their wives.

They came with their grown children. They walked the ground where Camp Hearne had stood. Most of the barracks were gone by then, absorbed back into the mesquite, and they they wept. Some of them at things their families did not fully understand. An old man from Bavaria, who had worked in the sugar beet fields of Nebraska in 1944, [clears throat] told a reporter from the Austin American Statesman that he had come back because he wanted his grandson to see the place where his grandfather had learned what a free country looked like. Feldwebel

Friedrich Radke was not at that reunion. He had died in 1982 of a heart attack at 71 years old. He had spent his working life as an engineer in the reconstruction of Hamburg. He had voted in every West German election from 1949 onward for the Christian Democrats. He had never, so far as his family knew, spoken publicly about the war, but his diaries survived.

His daughter Ilse, who had eventually forgiven him for being a stranger when he came home, kept it among the family papers for the rest of her life. The last entry was written on the day of Radke’s release from British custody in the summer of 1947 at a repatriation center in the British zone of occupied Germany. It reads in his careful engineer’s hand, “I go home now to build.

I have seen how it is done. God grant that we do it better this time. God grant that we do not forget what we were shown. That is the true weapon that won the Second World War, not the tanks, not the bombers, not the ships built in 4 days. The light in the windows, the pie in the field at noon, the choir that sang carols in German for for men who had 6 months earlier been shooting at their sons.

The Germans who came home from America did not come home defeated. They came home converted, and the Germany they built out of ashes and memory stands to this day as their answer to the men who had taught them once that strength came from cruelty and greatness came from conquest and the future belonged to those who would take it by force.

They had learned in the camps of Texas and Nebraska and Rhode Island that none of that was true. They had learned it because someone had shown them. That was America’s secret. That was America’s arsenal and in the end that was how the war was won. >> Friedrich Rödder’s story is a composite drawn from the surviving diaries, letters, and memoirs of German prisoners of war held in the United States between 1943 and 1946 including those of Reinhold Pabel, Georg Gärtner, Heino Erichsen, and dozens of others documented by historian Arnold

Kramer in his work Nazi Prisoners of War in America. >> Every camp, statistic, date, and historical figure named in this account is real. The prisoners who lived it changed a nation twice.