German POWs Couldn’t Believe America’s Industrial Power After Reaching the United States

Tunis, May 1943. On a summer night in August 1943, a young German soldier pressed his face against the window of an American train and began to weep. He was 22 years old. He had fought at Elamine. He wore the iron cross of the Africa corpse. And for three years, the radio in Berlin had told him one thing over [clears throat] and over again.

America is weak. America is dying. Um, American cities are burning under the bombs of the Luft Vafa. American factories have collapsed. Then the train pulled out of Norfolk, Virginia and rolled west into the American night. And the lights did not go out. Not in the farm houses and the small towns, not in the shop, the windows or the neon signs or the street lamps that ran on and on to a horizon he could not see the end of.

His name was Gayorg Gertner. And what he saw through that window in the next three days would destroy everything he had ever believed about the enemy he had been sent to fight. This is his story and the story of 370,000 German soldiers who came to America expecting a ruined nation. and found something else entirely.

Tunis, May 1943. The desert wind carried the smell of burning oil across the salt flats of northern Tunisia. For 3 years, this wind had followed the Africa corbs from El Aala to Elamine and back again. Now it carried something different. The smell of defeat. Gayorg Gertner was 22 years old. He stood in a column of men that stretched for 2 kilometers along the coastal road near Cap Bon.

His uniform, once the pride of the desert army, hung in rags. His boots were held together with wire scavenged from a British field telephone. He had not eaten a full meal in 11 days. Above him, the sky belonged entirely to the enemy. American P38 Lightnings crossed and recrossed the horizon in perfect forion, unchallenged, casual, as if the Luftvafa had never existed.

Somewhere behind him, a Panzer of Fourth was being pushed off a cliff by its own crew. They had run out of fuel. Oh, they had run out of ammunition. They had run out of every illusion a soldier can carry into a war. On May 13, 1943, General Jurgen Fonarnim, the man Hitler had sent to replace Raml, signed the surrender of Army Group Africa.

With that signature, approximately 250,000 German and Italian soldiers laid down their weapons. In sheer numbers of prisoners taken, it exceeded even Stalinrad. It was the end of the Third Reich’s dream of empire in the Mediterranean. Huh. Gayorg Gertner walked into captivity carrying nothing but a photograph of his mother in Cellesia and a belief still intact that Germany would win the war.

He was wrong about everything. He did not yet know how completely. The camp at Oruron, they marched him west, always west, toward the sea. The Americans processed them at a rate that made no sense to a mind trained on German efficiency. 12,000 men in a single day. photographs, fingerprints, medical inspections, Geneva Convention rights read aloud in fluent German by American officers who spoke without accent, without hatred, without anything at all except a strange bored competence. Then came the food.

Gayorg Gartner would remember this moment for the rest of his life and he would live a very long life. He would remember the color of the bread white, not the gray brown loaves of the Reich, not the sawdust bread of the final year, but a bread so pale it seemed almost blue in the desert light. He would remember the coffee, real coffee.

He had not tasted real coffee since the winter of 1941. He would remember the meat twice in a single day and the sugar and the butter and the tin of peaches opened by an American cook who tossed the empty can into a pile of other empty cans that was already the size of a small hill. A man beside him, older, a corporal from the 90th Light Division, whispered the only explanation that made sense. Propaganda.

They want to break us with kindness. Gueorg nodded. He wanted to believe this. He needed to believe this. Then he watched the American guards eat. They ate the same food. They ate it without ceremony, without gratitude, without any awareness that anything unusual was happening. One of them, a boy from Ohio, no older than Gayorg himself, ate half a chocolate bar and threw the other half into the sand.

Gayorg watched the chocolate melt. He wrote nothing that night because he had nothing to write with. But something inside him had begun to bend. Not break. Not yet. Just bend. The way a steel rail bends in a fire before it fails. The Atlantic, the ship was called SS Robert E. Piri. Gayorg Gertner did not know, could not have known that this vessel had been built in 4 days, 15 hours uh and 29 minutes at the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California.

Had he known, he would not have believed it. Nothing in his understanding of industry, of physics, of the possible would have allowed such a number to enter his mind. He knew only that the ship was enormous, that it was one of dozens moving in convoy, and that the American sailors on board threw away more food each morning than his platoon had received in a week.

During the final retreat from Tunisia, there was another prisoner on that crossing. His name was Reinhold Pabble. He was 28 years old, a former theology student from Braymond, a vermached infantryman captured in Sicily during the American landings of July 1943. Pabell was thin and thoughtful and carried the quiet doubt of a man who had read too many books to believe simple things.

He would later write a memoir about what he saw in America and he would call it Annies are human and it would be published in 1955 and it would tell the truth as closely as any man could tell it. On the fourth day of the crossing, Pabell stood on the deck watching the horizon. An American sergeant, a Jewish man from Brooklyn whose parents had left Germany in 1935, offered him a cigarette.

Pabell took it. They smoked in silence for a long time. Then the sergeant pointed up at the rotating antenna on the bridge of the cargo ship. “Radar,” he said in German. “Every ship in the convoy has one.” Pebble said nothing. He knew what radar was. He knew that in Germany, radar existed only on major warships and even then in limited quantities.

He was looking at a cargo ship, an ordinary cargo ship, one of thousands, and it carried technology his own navy could not afford to install on its cruisers. He finished the cigarette. He walked back to his bunk. He did not sleep that night. The bending had begun in him, too. Norolk. They arrived at the Norfolk Naval Base on August 2, 1943.

The port covered 4300 acres. Gayorg Gertner counted or tried to count the ships being loaded and unloaded at the docks. He gave up somewhere past 40. The [clears throat] cranes moved with a fluid electric silence. In Bremer Haven, in Hamburg, in Keel, cranes were driven by coal fired engines that coughed black smoke into the sky.

Here the cranes made no smoke at all. He was marched down a long ramp toward a fenced holding area. On his left, beyond a low chain fence, was a parking lot. He looked at it. He looked at it again. He counted. 217 automobiles. He stopped walking. A guard prodded him gently with the butt of a rifle, not unkindly, and Gayorg began walking again, but his mind stayed at the fence.

217 automobiles in a parking lot had a shipyard for workers. In Cellesia, in the town where Gayorg had grown up, there had been three private automobiles. One belonged to the mayor. One belonged to the doctor. One belonged to a Nazi party official who had been transferred in from Berlin. Everyone else walked or rode bicycles or waited for the tram. This was normal.

This was how the world worked. This was the natural order of things. and Adolf Hitler had promised through the KDF savings program of 1938 that every German family would one day receive a Volkswagen. By 1943, not a single civilian car had been delivered. The factory at Wolsburg was building military vehicles instead.

Gayorg looked at the parking lot one more time before it disappeared behind a warehouse. He thought for the first time a thought he could not unthink. What if they were lying to us? Not about small things, about everything. The Pullman cars. The Americans loaded them onto trains. Not cattle cars.

Not the 40 and8 wagons that had carried German soldiers across Europe. Passenger coaches, Pullman coaches, padded seats, sleeping berths, dining cars with white tablecloths, observation decks with windows that ran from floor to ceiling. Reinhold Pabell boarded his coach in a kind of numb astonishment. He sat down.

The seat was upholstered in green velvet. He ran his hand along the armrest and felt polished wood. An American sergeant walked down the aisle with a clipboard. He stopped at Pabell’s row. He looked at the ceiling at the vents and made a small apologetic gesture. Sorry about the air conditioning, gentlemen. It’s not working right in this car.

We’ll try to get it fixed at the next stop. He moved on down the aisle. Reinhold Pabell sat very still. Beside him, an older prisoner, a Feldwebble from Hamburg, leaned close and whispered, “Did he just apologize to us?” “Yes.” “For air conditioning?” “Yes.” on a prisoner transport. Yes. The two men looked at each other. Neither of them spoke again for a long time.

Gayor Gertner in another car was pressed against the window. The train pulled out of Norfolk as the sun was setting. It passed through the outskirts of the city, then through smaller towns, then through the Virginia countryside as full night came down and the lights did not go out. In Germany since 1940, every window had been blacked out, every street lamp extinguished, every farmhouse dark.

The Reich lived in shadow, hiding from the bombers that came each night in greater numbers. It was the natural condition of a nation at war. It was the reality Gayorg had known since he was 19. But the American countryside at 10:00 at night in the third summer of the largest war in human history was covered in light.

Every farmhouse, every barn, every crossroads, every small town with its main street glowing yellow and white, its shop windows lit, its neon signs advertising Coca-Cola and Chevrolet and Camel cigarettes. Gayorg pressed his forehead against the cool glass. He thought about the blackout in Cellesia.

He thought about his mother lighting a single candle in the kitchen at night and covering the window with a heavy blanket and reading her letters from him by that one small flame. The train rolled on into Tennessee. The lights did not stop. They went on and on and on. An unbroken constellation stretching to a horizon Gayorg could not see the end of.

He understood in that moment something that no propaganda film in Berlin had ever prepared him to understand. The war was not going to be lost in some distant future. The war had already been lost. It had been lost before the first shot was fired. It had been lost in these fields, in these factories, in these small American towns with their electric lights burning at 10:00 at night while the rich crouched in darkness 3,000 miles away.

Gayorg Girtner closed his eyes. The train carried him west toward New Mexico, toward Camp Demming, toward a future none of them could yet imagine. It carried Reinhold Pable toward Illinois, toward a farm in Washington County, toward a memoir he had not yet begun to write. It carried Hans Verer Richter in another car on another train toward Rhode Island and a newspaper that did not yet exist.

It carried Alfred And who had not yet been captured toward a decision [clears throat] he had not yet made in a war he had not yet decided to leave. It carried them all toward America. And America was waiting. Not with the weakness they had been pro promised. Not with the collapse Gobles had described on the radio. Not with the burning cities and the panicked crowds and the failing industry that Nazi propaganda had drawn in careful, confident detail for a decade.

America was waiting with something none of them had a word for yet. Gayorg Gertner opened his eyes. Outside the window, another town passed by, small and unremarkable. Its lights burning against the summer night. Somewhere in that town, a family was eating dinner. A radio was playing. A refrigerator was humming in a kitchen.

A child was doing homework under an electric lamp. None of them knew or cared that a train load of the Furer’s soldiers was passing through their darkness on rails that had been laid before any of them were born. The train moved on. The lights did not go out. Three days across America. The train rolled west for three days.

Three days of a country that would not stop revealing itself. Gayorg Gartner stopped sleeping. He could not afford to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he missed something that would have been impossible in Germany. In Kentucky, they passed a rubber plant at Louisville. Four enormous facilities standing in a row.

Each one belching white steam into the summer sky. Each one larger than any chemical works Gayorg had ever seen. He did not know the numbers. He could not have known that these plants produced 800,000 tons of synthetic rubber every year. He knew only that Germany had invented the process and that Germany in its best year had produced 120,000 tons and that here in a single American state the rat of production the ratio honest man was something no honest man could look at without feeling sick.

In Tennessee, they passed the Alcoa aluminum works. Three miles of factory along the river. The electric furnaces glowed orange through the night. A prisoner in Gayorg’s car, a former electrical engineer from Seammens, did the arithmetic in a whispered voice. This one plant, he said, uses more electricity in a single hour than the city of Munich uses in a day.

No one answered him. There was nothing to say. Then came Detroit. The train slowed as it passed the outskirts of the city. To the north, visible through the summer haze, stood the Willowrun bomber plant. It stretched to the horizon. It was longer than any building Gayorg had ever imagined a building could be.

Hman Verer Verley, a Luftvafa pilot shot down over Tunisia, was on that train. He pressed his face against the glass. He counted the aircrafts standing on the tarmac beside the plant. Count he counted 17 B24 Liberators in various stages of completion visible from a moving train. In a single glance, Verly had been told in the officer’s mess in Sicily that American aircraft were inferior.

Hastily built, poorly designed, assembled by women and negroes who could not understand precision work. He looked at the assembly line through the train window. He saw the precision. He saw the quality. He saw the aircraft moving down the line under electric lights that never dimmed. He did not know that within a year this single plant would be producing one B24 Liberator every 63 minutes.

He did not need to know. What he saw through the glass was enough. The bending inside him became something else. Camp Demming, New Mexico Gayorg Gartner arrived at Camp Demming in the last week of August 1943. The camp sat on the flat desert scrub south of the town. its wooden barracks thrown up with the same speed as the hundreds of other camps the Americans had built across their country in the past 18 months.

Wooden barracks, electric lights in every room, flush toilets, hot showers, steam heat for the winter that had not yet come. The camp hospital had penicellin. Gayorg did not understand what this meant at first. He was not a doctor. But there was a doctor in his barracks, an older man from the 164th Light [snorts] Division, Dr.

Friedrich Bower, who had served on the Eastern Front and Africa and had watched men die of infections that a single injection could have cured. Dr. Bower walked into the American Camp Hospital on his second day and saw a shelf of penicellin vials being used to treat a prisoner with a minor foot infection. He walked out. He sat down on the steps.

He put his face in his hands. A young American medic came out after him and asked in careful German if he was feeling well. Dr. Bower looked up. He did not answer. He could not answer because the answer would have been, “I am a doctor who has watched German soldiers die for want of a drug that you are giving to prisoners with sore feet, and I do not know how to hold that fact in my mind without breaking.

” The medic waited a moment. Then he sat down on the step beside him. He did not say anything else. He just sat there quietly in the New Mexico sun until Dr. Bower stood up and walked back into the hospital to begin his work. The farms. By the autumn of 1943, the labor shortage in American agriculture had grown desperate.

Millions of young men were overseas. The fields were empty. So the war department under the Geneva Convention sent the prisoners out to work. 80 cents a day. No war production, just farms. Reinhold Pel was sent to Washington County, Illinois. He worked for a farmer named Walter Cronin, a second generation German American who spoke a little of the old language and who fed his prisoners the same lunch he fed his own family.

Pabell had expected hatred. He had prepared himself for it. His own father had died in the Muz Argon offensive in the autumn of 1918, killed by American doughboys in the last weeks of the last war. And Pabell had grown up understanding that the Americans were the enemy of his blood and his nation and his father’s memory.

Instead, Walter Cronining’s wife made him a sandwich with ham and cheese and thick white bread and gave it to him in a paper bag with an apple. She said, “In English, you look thin. Eat.” Pable ate the sandwich in the shade of a corn crib. He looked out over the fields. He counted the buildings on the croning farm.

A house with electric lights in every room. A barn with an electric milking machine. A silo. A granary. A workshop with power tools. Two tractors. A pickup truck. One family in one county, in one state, in one country. He thought of the farms in his own province, of of families who still plowed with horses, of children who worked in the fields at 8 years old because there was no other way to bring in the harvest.

He finished the sandwich. He folded the paper bag carefully and put it in his pocket. He kept that paper bag for the rest of the war. Camp Tonkawa. Camp Tonkawa. Not every prisoner bent. Not every prisoner learned, some hardened. At Camp Tonkawa in Oklahoma on the night of November 4, 1943, a group of committed Nazi prisoners dragged a fellow German named Johan Kunza out of his barracks and beat him to death.

Kunza was suspected of speaking too openly with the American guards, of showing too much interest in American newspapers, of forgetting his oath to the furer. Five men were charged. Walter Byer, Bertld Zidel, Hans Dema, Willie Schultz, Rudolph Stra. They were tried by an American military court. They were convicted on July 10, 1945.

They were hanged at Fort Levvenworth, Kansas. It was the largest mass execution ever carried out by the United States military under a single order. The story spread through every camp in America within days. Prisoners who had begun to bend now understood the cost of bending too far, too openly.

The ideological war continued behind the barbed wire. Quieter than the war in Europe, but no less real. Gayorg Gartner heard the story in Camp Demming. He said nothing. He kept his thoughts to himself, but he began to plan. Fort Carney. Meanwhile, in Rhode Island at a small camp on Naraganset Bay called Fort Carney, the American War Department was running an experiment.

They had selected the anti-Nazi prisoners, the doubters, the intellectuals, the men who had already bent and they had brought them to this quiet place on the Atlantic coast to produce a newspaper in German for distribution to every prisoner of war camp in the United States. The newspaper was called Deer Roof, The Call.

Its first issue would appear in March of 1945 and it would reach every prisoner of war camp in the United States within weeks. Hans Verer Rishtor in his late30s, a former book seller from Berlin, a soldier who had never believed in the party, even when he wore its uniform, was brought to Fort Kernney to join the editorial staff.

He sat in a small wooden building on the shore of the bay and he wrote articles about democracy, about post-war reconstruction, about a Germany that might one day be free of the men who had ruined it. The Americans did not tell the prisoners that this program existed. They did not tell them that the special projects division of the provost marshall general’s office had designed it or that it was classified or that it’s classified uh would remain a cultist secret um until the 1970s.

They simply printed the newspaper and shipped it to every camp. They let the prisoners read it and they waited to see what would happen. What happened was this. By the end of the war, more than 73,000 German prisoners had had passed through voluntary courses on democracy, American history, and constitutional government. They studied English.

They read Thomas Jefferson. They watched films of the depression, of the New Deal, of a country that showed its own failures on the screen and did not seem afraid. They were not being propagandized. They were being educated. And they were the ones who had chosen to sit in the classrooms. Hans Verer Richtor in his small office at Fort Kernney edited the newspaper and thought about the Germany he would return to.

He was already writing the first sentences of the literary movement he would found after the war. Group 47, the most important circle of writers in post-war West Germany. the men who would drag the German language word by word out of the ruins the Nazis had made of it. The bending continues. By the spring of 1944, 370,000 German prisoners were held on American soil. They worked in 46 states.

They picked cotton in Texas and sugar beats in Nebraska and apples in Washington. They cut timber in Louisiana and canned tomatoes in New Jersey. They saw everything. Um uh they saw the factories running three shifts. They saw the trains carrying tanks and aircraft and artillery and numbers that made the Eastern Front look like a rehearsal.

They saw women welding ship hulls at Higgins in New Orleans. 700 landing craft a month, each one built from 20,000 parts. They saw black workers operating precision machinery in Detroit. They saw teenagers running drill presses. They saw a nation that had in four years become the greatest industrial power in human history. And they began quietly, one by one by one, in their own private darkness, to understand what had happened to them.

The Reich had not been strong. The enemy had not been weak. The war had not been winnable. Every promise they had marched under had been a lie told by men who knew it was a lie to boys who had no way of finding out until now. April 1945, the films arrived at the camps in reels flown across the Atlantic from Europe.

Silver canisters stacked in the corner of the mesh halls. The prisoners were not told what was on them. They were told only that attendance was required. The projectors ran in the dark. The first image was a gate, a rot iron gate with words worked into the metal. Harb fry work makes you free. The camera moved through the gate.

It moved into the yard beyond and then it began to show what the American soldiers had found when they opened the doors of Bukinvald and Dakau and Orof and the smaller camps whose names most Germans had never heard. Gayorg Gertner sat in the third row at camp Demming. He watched the film. He did not move. He did not look away.

He watched the bodies in the ditches and the bodies in the ovens and the survivors standing at the wire and the American soldiers turning their faces from the camera because there were things a soldier is not built to see. When the lights came up, no one spoke. A prisoner in the front row stood, walked to the door, and vomited into the desert sand outside.

Another sat with his hands pressed flat against his knees, weeping without sound. An SS Unerstorm Furer in the back row stood up and said loudly that it was all a lie that the Americans had built the sets in Hollywood. No one answered him. No one even turned to look at him. His voice went into the room and died there.

And he sat back down. And after a long moment, he too began to cry. Reinhold Pel in Illinois watched the same film in a farmtown movie theater alongside American civilians. H. When it ended, an old woman two rows behind him leaned forward. She touched his shoulder. She said nothing. She simply left her hand there for a long time.

And then she took it away and she walked out into the afternoon. Pabell would remember that hand for the rest of his life. The long journey home. The war in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945, but the prisoners did not go home. The American government held them through the summer and into the autumn. Some were sent to England and then to France to help clear the rubble their own army had created.

Some stayed on American farms through the 1945 harvest because the farm still needed them. The last German prisoner did not leave American soil until July of 1946. 371,683 men had passed through the American camp system. [clears throat] Oh, of these 2,222 had attempted escape. That was 6/10 of 1%. Zero had succeeded in escaping permanently.

Zero, except for one, Gayorg Gertner. On the night of September 21s, 1945, Gayorg Gertner slipped through a gap in the wire at Camp Demming, New Mexico. He was 24 years old. His hometown in Cellesia had been given to Poland at Potam that summer. His parents had died during the war in the chaos of the Reich’s collapse.

His country, as he had known it, no longer existed. He had nothing to go back to. He walked to the railard in deeming. He climbed into a freight car heading west. He rode into California. He got off the train in Los Angeles with no money, no papers, and no plan. He took a name from a gravestone. Dennis Wilds.

He worked as a dishwasher, then as a ski instructor in Colorado, then as a tennis coach, then as a construction foreman. He married an American woman who did not know his real name. He paid his taxes. He voted in elections. He became in every visible way an American. For 40 years, he lived under that false name. For 40 years, the FBI kept his file open.

For 40 years, he was the last German prisoner of war, still at large in the United States. On September 11, 1985, he walked into the studios of NBC in New York, New York City, and told his story on the Today Show. He was 64 years old old. His hair had gone white. His American wife sat beside him, learning his real name for the first time on national television.

Oh, he was not prosecuted. The government had lost interest in him decades before. He lived out the rest of his life in Colorado. He died there in 2013 at the age of 92 in the country he had once been sent to as an enemy. The others Hans Verer Richter went home to a Germany that no longer existed. He gathered around him a small circle of writers who had also been in American captivity or in the war or in the camps.

They met for the first time in September of 1947 at a farmhouse in Bavaria. They called themselves Group 47. In the decades that followed, they would produce the most important German literature of the post-war era. Hinrich Bell, Gunter Grass, Ingaborg Bachmann, Paul Selin. Names that would win Nobel prizes. Names that would drag the German language, one careful sentence at a time, out of the ruin the Nazis had made of it.

Reinhold Pabell returned to Bremen. He wrote his memoir. He called it Enemies Are Human. It was published in 1955. In it, he described the paper bag from Mrs. Crowining. He described the farm in Illinois. He described the sandwich with a thick white bread. Alfred Anders, who had deserted from the Vermacht in Italy in June of 1944, who had spent the last year of the war at Camp Rustin, Louisiana, went home and became one of the great novelists of post-war Germany.

He wrote about desertion, about the courage it takes to stop believing in what you have been told to believe, about the small door of freedom that opens sometimes in the middle of a catastrophe. The larger story, the numbers at the end tell the rest. Um 95% of the returning prisoners when surveyed after the war rated their treatment as good or excellent.

Approximately 5,000 chose to immigrate to the United States in the years that followed. Thousands more maintained correspondence with American families, with farmers, with camp guards, with strangers who had shown them small kindnesses that they could not forget. Some of those correspondences lasted 40 years. Hans Kroll held at camp Shelby became West Germany’s ambassador to the United States.

Walter Hullstein who had taught university level classes to fellow prisoners at Camp Ko in Mississippi became the first president of the European Commission and one of the architects of the European Union. R Rudiger Fonvekmar held at Camp Hearn in Texas became West Germany’s permanent representative to the United Nations. the reconstruction of Germany, the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic Alliance, the peace that has held in Western Europe for 80 years.

All of it built in part on foundations laid in wooden barracks in the American desert in the American plains in the American South. Built by men who had come to America as enemies and had gone home as something else. The last image there is a photograph from 1985. It was taken in Austin, Texas at a reunion of former German prisoners of war. More than 500 of them came back.

They were old men now in their 60s and 70s. They brought brought their wives. They brought their grown children. [clears throat] In the photograph, an elderly German man is standing in a Texas field. He is holding hands with an elderly American woman. She is the daughter of the farmer he worked for during the summer of 1944.

They are both crying. They are not looking at the camera. They are looking at each other. Behind them, the wheat is coming in. The combines are moving across the horizon. The lights of the small Texas town in the distance are just beginning to come on as the sun goes down. The lights, the lights that never went out, the lights that a young Africa corpse soldier named Gayorg Gortner had pressed his face against a train window to see 42 years earlier.

on a summer night um in 1943 when he was 22 years old and the war was not yet lost and the Reich still believed in itself and the world had not yet shown him what it truly was. The lights had been the first truth. Everything else, everything that came after was only the slow, patient work of learning to see