German POWs Expected Starvation—Then America Gave Them Ice Cream and Coca-Cola

The North Atlantic in [clears throat] June 1943 was a graveyard that swallowed men without ceremony. 20-year-old Verer Drexler had been below deck on U1 and 18 when the first depth charge fell from the sky. American Avenger torpedo bombers from the escort carrier USS Bogue had found the submarine on the surface off the Canary Islands.

He remembered the lights flickering. He remembered the smell of diesel and salt water rushing through steel corridors. He remembered the voice of the captain, calm even as the ocean began pouring in through ruptured seams, ordering the men to abandon the boat. 16 of the 59 crew members made it to the surface. Verer was one of them.

He floated in oil slick water for nearly an hour, watching pieces of his submarine drift past him. Bodies of men he had eaten breakfast with a cap, a boot, the whole architecture of his young life reduced to debris on a summer sea. When the American destroyer USS Osmond Ingram approached, Verer did what every German sailor had been taught to do in this moment. He prepared to die. Dr.

Gobles had been very clear. The Americans were savages. They would torture prisoners for information. They would starve them. They would shoot them in the water for sport. Verer had believed this the way a child believes what his teachers tell him because he had been a child when the Nazi party first began teaching him.

The ropes came down from the American ship. Verer climbed. On deck, a young sailor from Ohio, no older than Verer himself, wrapped him in a wool blanket. Someone pressed a mug of hot coffee into his shaking hands. Real coffee, not the burnt acorn, substitute the Criggs marine had been serving for 2 years.

Burner could smell it before he could taste it. Then the sailor from Ohio did something that made Verer sit down on the wet deck and stare. He handed the German a sandwich. Thick white bread, real beef, yellow mustard, and beside it, a small green bottle cold to the touch, filled with a dark liquid that hissed when the cap was removed. CocaCola.

The sailor from Ohio smiled and made a gesture that meant, “Eat, drink. It’s yours.” Then he walked away to help pull another survivor from the ocean. Verard Drexler held the sandwich in one hand and the bottle in the other. And for the first time since he had joined the Navy at 17, he understood that everything he had been told about the world might be a lie.

3 months later in southern Italy in September of 1943, a 28-year-old corporal in the Vermacht named Reinhold Pabble raised his hands above his head and surrendered to a squad of American infantrymen. Reinhold was not a warrior. He had been a theology student in Leipzig before the war. He wore glasses. He carried a small notebook in his breast pocket in which he wrote observations about the world in careful precise German.

He had been drafted not not enlisted. He had served because refusing meant a bullet at dawn. When the American sergeant searched him and found the notebook, he flipped through it, understood nothing, and handed it back. Reinhold would later write that this small act, a man giving him back his own words, was the first American kindness he had known.

He would write about it for the rest of his life. They put him on a truck. The truck took him to a processing camp. At the processing camp, he was fed pancakes. Real pancakes with butter and syrup in September of 1943 when his mother back in Germany was rationing a single egg per week for the entire family. Reinhold ate slowly.

He wrote in his notebook that evening. He wrote three words. Uh, something is wrong. By the summer of 1943, the machinery of American captivity was operating at a scale that no one in Berlin had imagined possible. In May of that year, Field Marshall Irwin Rumls Africa Corpse had collapsed in Tunisia. 250,000 German and Italian soldiers had walked into Allied captivity in a single week.

The problem um problem for the Americans was not how to defeat these men. That had already been done. The problem was where to put them. The answer was America itself. Beginning in the summer of 1943, Liberty ships, which were being built at the astonishing rate of one every 42 hours at peak production, began carrying German prisoners across the Atlantic, up to 30,000 men per month.

By the end of the war, 371,000, 683 German prisoners of war would be housed on American soil, spread across more than 700 camps in 46 states. The Geneva Convention of 1929 required that prisoners be treated no worse than the detaining powers own soldiers. The United States chose to interpret this literally. German prisoners would receive the same rations as American GIS.

3,500 calories per day. Fresh meat. fresh bread, coffee with real sugar, milk, and on certain days, if the ship’s refrigeration held, ice cream. On the 4th of July 1943 aboard the USS General M B Stewart mid and Atlantic Reinhold Pable stood in a mess line with several hundred other German prisoners and watched an American cook operate a machine he had never seen before.

It was a barrel with a hand crank. Inside the barrel, according to the sailor who spoke broken German to the prisoners, was cream, sugar, ice, and salt. The machine produced 10 gallons per batch. When Reinhold’s turn came, the cook scooped a mound of vanilla ice cream into a metal bowl and handed it to him with a spoon. around him.

German prisoners were weeping. Some of them had not tasted ice cream since 1938. Some of the younger ones had never tasted it at all. The Third Reich had promised them a thousand-year empire. Um, it had not been able to promise them ice cream. Reinhold ate his portion sitting on the deck of an American transport ship watching the sun set over the Atlantic.

He wrote in his notebook that night. He wrote that the Americans had served frozen dessert to their enemies in the middle of an ocean during a world war and that he did not know what to do with this information. The ships docked at Norfolk, Virginia. Reinhold had seen the port of Hamburg before the bombs.

He he [clears throat] had thought Hamburg was a great port. Norfolk was something else entirely. 4,300 acres of waterfront, cranes moving in coordinated rhythm, trains arriving on schedule, more cargo passing through in a single day than Hamburg had processed in a week during peace time. Reinhold walked between two American guards down a long pier and he understood with a clarity that felt almost physical that Germany was going to lose the war.

He had believed this intellectually before. Now he believed it in his stomach. The train that carried the prisoners inland was not a cattle car. It was a passenger coach, the same kind used by American civilians. There were seats with cushions. There were windows that opened. In the dining car, the prisoners were served fried chicken, mashed potatoes, uh, green beans, and pie, not as a special occasion.

[clears throat] This was the standard meal that American railroads served to standard American travelers. Reinhold watched the American countryside pass outside the window. Farm houses with electric lights burning in every window. Barns bigger than the house he had grown up in. automobiles on rural roads, not military vehicles, family cars.

He wrote in his notebook that night in the barracks at Camp Ko, Mississippi, that the Americans had not yet understood how rich they were. While Reinhold was learning the size of American abundance, Verer Drexler was making a decision that would kill him. At Fort Hunt in Virginia, code camed P. Box 1142, the United States Navy, had established a secret interrogation facility for captured Yubot crewmen.

Verer had been brought there directly from the Osmond Ingram. He was young. He was frightened and he was at his core a decent human being who had never believed in the ideology his uniform represented. The American Naval Intelligence officers who interviewed him were patient. They did not torture him. They fed him well. They spoke to him in German.

Over the course of several weeks, Verer agreed to cooperate. He told them what he knew about Yubot operations. He told them about Wolfpack tactics. He told them about codes and procedures and morale in the Creeks Marin. In exchange, the Americans promised him something precious. They promised that his identity would remain secret.

They promised that when he was eventually sent to a regular prisoner of war camp, he would be sent to a camp for army prisoners, not navy prisoners. He would be given a new name. He would be safe. Verer believed them. He was 20 years old. He had already survived a sinking submarine and an ocean full of oil. He wanted to survive the war.

The United States Navy filed his paperwork. And then through an administrative error, whose exact cause has never been fully explained, the paperwork was processed incorrectly. The German prisoner of war program was in the summer of 1943, quietly being shaped by a man most [clears throat] Germans would never hear of during during the war and most Americans would never hear of afterward.

His name was Edward Davidson. He was 45 years old, a poet of some reputation, born in Scotland and educated at Cambridge, who had immigrated to the United States and taken a commission in the United States Army. Colonel Davidson had been given command of what the army called the Special Projects Division.

The division’s mission was classified On paper, it did not exist. In reality, it was one of the most ambitious social engineering experiments in American history. Davidson’s task was to identify anti-Nazi prisoners among the hundreds of thousands of Germans in American custody, separate them from the fanatics and train them to return to Germany after the war as the intellectual seed of a new democratic nation.

He worked from an office in the Pentagon. He read prisoner files late into the night. He was looking for men like Reinhold Pabell. He did not yet know Reinhold’s name. He would learn it soon. At Camp Ko, Mississippi in October of 1943, Reinhold Pel walked into the camp canteen for the first time. He had earned 80 cents that day picking cotton in a field outside Greenwood.

The canteen was operated by the prisoners themselves under American supervision. It was stocked with goods purchased from the same distributors that supplied American civilian stores. Reinhold looked at the shelves. Hershey chocolate bars, five cents, the same price an American child paid. Coca-Cola in green glass bottles 5 cents the same price.

Wrigley’s chewing gum. Camel cigarettes. Lucky Strikes. Bags of peanuts. ice cream sandwiches from a freezer that hummed in the corner, powered by the electricity that ran through every building in the camp. The way electricity ran through every building in America. Reinhold’s mother back in Germany was rationed 280 g of sugar per month when it was available, which it often was not.

Reinhold Pabell, prisoner of the United States, could purchase 16 Coca-Cas with a single day’s wages. He bought one. He carried it back to his barracks. He held it in his hand for a long time before he opened it because he understood that this small green bottle contained something more dangerous than any bomb the Americans had ever dropped on his country. It contained the truth.

The truth was that the Third Reich had been lying not about small things, about everything, about the war, about the enemy, about the future, about the shape of the world. The Americans were not weak. The Americans were not starving. The Americans were not divided. The Americans had built a civilization so productive that it could feed its enemies ice cream while its enemies were trying to kill it.

And it could do this without noticing the cost. Reinhold Pabell drank the Coca-Cola sitting on his bunk in Mississippi. He wrote in his notebook that the drink was sweet, that it burned slightly in the throat, and that it tasted like the end of everything he had been raised to believe. Somewhere in Washington, Colonel Edward Davidson was reading a report about a prisoner in Mississippi who kept a a notebook and wrote in it every night.

Somewhere in Maryland, a young sailor named Verer Drexler was being told to pack his things. He was being transferred at last to a permanent camp. He was told it was a camp for army prisoners. He was told he would be safe. He was being told a lie. The truck was already waiting outside. The truck carrying Verer Drexler rolled west across America for 4 days.

He watched the country change through the small barred window in the back. Green Maryland farms became Ohio. Industrial towns became Missouri wheat fields became the flat brown emptiness of the great plains. At every stop, the guards fed him sandwiches, apples. Once in a railard in Kansas, a bottle of cold milk that tasted so clean it made his eyes water.

He did not know where he was going. He only knew what the naval intelligence officers had promised him. A camp for army prisoners. A new name, safety. The truck turned south into Arizona on the morning of March 12th, 1944. The desert reminded Werner of North Africa, though he had never fought there.

Around noon, the truck stopped at a gate. Verer looked up at the sign, Camp Papago Park. He did not know yet what this name meant. He would learn within 6 hours at Camp Aliceville, Alabama in August of 1943, Reinhold Pable had watched something happen in the messaul kitchen that he would remember for the rest of his life. The humidity had turned several hundred pounds of white refined sugar into hardened bricks.

Rinhold, who had grown up uh watching his mother steam and salvage every grain of sugar she could find, expected the American kitchen staff to do the same. Instead, two American cooks carried the sugar outside in metal buckets. They dumped it into a trash pit behind the messaul. Then they went back inside and opened fresh bags from a stack of hundred more.

Reinhold stood in the kitchen doorway. He did not move. He did not speak. He watched a country waste more sugar in one afternoon than his mother had touched in a year. That night he wrote in his notebook that this was not war. This was another planet. On Thanksgiving Day of 1943, in every prisoner of war camp across the United States, the same meal was served.

Roast turkey, bread stuffing, mashed potatoes with brown gravy, sweet potatoes with butter, cranberry sauce, green beans, pumpkin pie, coffee, fresh milk. 425,000 German prisoners ate this meal on that day. It was the same meal being eaten by American soldiers in training camps in Georgia and Texas.

It was the same meal being eaten by American families in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It was the same meal being flown to American servicemen in the Pacific and North Africa. The same meal for everyone. Huh. For the American farm boy. For the captured Vermont corporal. For the general and the private. For the free and the imprisoned.

Ryan Hold Pavell sat at a long wooden table in Camp Ko and ate his turkey. He wrote in his notebook that the Nazis had built an entire philosophy on the idea that some human beings were worth more than others. And here in a country at war with them, that philosophy had been answered without argument. Answered by a plate of food, the same plate for everyone.

Some of the older prisoners around him wept into their pumpkin pie. Camp Papago Park held approximately 3,000 German prisoners. Every one of them was a captured yubot sailor. Every one of them had been at sea when Verer Drexler had made his choice at Fort Hunt. Every one of them belonged to a brotherhood that valued one thing above all others, loyalty.

Wernern arrived at the camp on the afternoon of March 12th, 1944. He was processed through the administration building. His papers were checked. The clerk noted his name in the log. Not a new name, not the false identity he had been promised. His real name printed on his real transfer documents which the United States Navy had failed to alter. Verer Drexler.

By dinnertime, the camp council of senior prisoners knew he was there. They knew who he was. They had seen his testimony used against captured Yubot crews. His name was on a list that had circulated through the Yubot prisoner network for months. Seven men were selected. Their names are recorded in American court documents.

Helmut Fischer, Fritz Frank, Gunter Kilzen, Hinrich Ludvik, Baron Hut, Rayak, Ottoangle, Ralph Wizoui, sailors, all of them from the same silent brotherhood of the deep. They found Verer in the shower building shortly after midnight. He had been in the camp for less than 7 hours. They used a length of rope.

They hoisted him to a pipe running along the ceiling. It took a long time. When the morning guards found him, his feet were only inches above the concrete floor. 17 months later, on the morning of August 25th, 1945, at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Levvenworth, Kansas, all seven of the men who had killed Verer Drexler were hanged.

Six of them were executed in a single 14-hour period. It remains to this day the largest mass execution in the history of the United States military. They died believing they had done their duty. They died believing the boy they had killed was a traitor. They did not know and could not have known that the boy they killed had been 20 years old, had joined Navy at 17, and had never wanted anything more than to survive a war his country had started without asking him.

In the Pentagon, Colonel Edward Davidson read the report of Verer’s murder with a face that his aids described as gray. Davidson had been building something in secret, a program that depended on the idea that not every German soldier was a Nazi. That the men in American custody could be sorted. that the good ones could be saved.

Verer Drexler had been one of the good ones and the system Davidson served had killed him through paperwork. Davidson did not stop. He accelerated. At Fort Kernney, Rhode Island, a small camp on Naraganset Bay, Davidson began quietly assembling a group of prisoners hand selected from across the American camp system.

Men who had proven through [clears throat] observation and interview that they hated the Third Reich. Reinhold Pavell’s name appeared on the list in the spring of 1944. American officers had noted his intelligence, his English fluency, and his quiet resistance to the Nazi loyalists in his camp. The men at Fort Kernney were not treated as prisoners.

They were treated as students. They were given access to American newspapers, to American books, to American radio. They were asked to produce a newspaper of their own printed in German to be distributed to the hundreds of thousands of their countrymen still held in camps across the country.

They called the newspaper dir roof the call. Its purpose was to prepare the men who read it for what would come after Germany’s defeat. To prepare them to go home, not as defeated warriors, but as founders of something new. Reinhold Pabell worked on Duo for the rest of the war. He wrote articles about democracy. He wrote articles about the free press.

He wrote articles about what it meant to disagree with your government and not be shot for it. He wrote articles in the end about ice cream and Coca-Cola, about what those things really meant. Uh, by late 1944, German prisoners across the United States had begun doing something that no one in Berlin could have predicted.

They were sending food home using the wages they earned from farm labor and factory work. Prisoners purchased American products from camp cantens and mailed them across the ocean to their families. Chocolate bars, instant coffee, canned meat, powdered milk, sugar. The International Red Cross recorded approximately 11 million such packages over the course of the war.

The mothers and wives and [clears throat] children of Germans soldiers starving in bombed cities opened packages from their captured men that contained more food than they had seen in months. The German government could not feed them. Their sons in American prison camps could. There has never been a propaganda defeat like it in the history of warfare.

In April of 1945, American forces liberated the concentration camp at Bergen Bellson. The photographs were published in every major American newspaper within days. skeletal survivors, piles of the dead, children who weighed less than infants. The American public, which had tolerated the generous treatment of German prisoners for 3 years, snapped.

The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial titled Coddling the Nazis. Newspapers across the country demanded that the ice cream stop, that the CocaCola stop, that German prisoners eating turkey while American boys came home in coffins was an obscenity that had to end. Rations in the camps were cut. Meat was reduced. The cantens still operated, but the abundance was quieter now.

more restrained. Reinhold Pabell sat in his barracks in Rhode Island in April of 1945 and read the newspapers about Bergen [clears throat] Bellson. He looked at the photographs. He looked for a long time. Then he wrote in his notebook for the first time in nearly 2 years of captivity that he finally understood what uniform he had worn, what flag he had served, what country he had fought for.

He wrote that the Americans had been feeding him ice cream while his own government had been doing this. He wrote that he did not know how a man was supposed to live with such a thing. He wrote that he would have to learn. Germany surrendered on May 8th, 1945. The news reached the American prison camps by radio and by newspaper and by the sudden silence of the guards who did not know how to look at their prisoners on that day and so mostly did not look at all.

Reinhold Pable heard the announcement in Rhode Island. He did not cheer. He did not weep. He walked out of the barracks at Fort Carney and stood on the shore of Naraganset Bay and watched the water for a long time. He was 30 years old. He had been a prisoner for 20 months. He had spent those months eating better than his mother had eaten in six years.

He had learned English. He had read American books. He had written for a newspaper that had tried to teach his countrymen [clears throat] how to be free. And now the war was over and he did not want to go home. The Americans did not let the prisoners go home right away. Most of them were held into 1946. Some were transferred to Britain and France where they worked for another two years rebuilding the countries they had helped destroy.

The men who had gained weight in American captivity were sent back to a Europe where their families were still starving. When Reinhold Pabble finally returned to Germany in the spring of 1946, he walked through streets he did not recognize. The city of his childhood had been erased by fire. The theology school where he had studied before the war was rubble. his mother had survived.

Like many who had lived through the bombing and the hunger, she had aged years in the months since he had last seen her. Reinhold had brought with him a small package, Hershey chocolate bars, a tin of instant coffee, a bag of sugar. His mother opened the package on the kitchen table of the small apartment where she was now living and she sat down and she did not speak for several minutes.

His younger sister, who had been a small girl when he left for the army and was now a teenager, tasted chocolate for the first time in her conscious memory. She asked her brother what country made this. He told her America. She asked if America was a real place. He told her yes. He told her he had been there.

He told her the people there had been kind to him. She did not believe him. Not for a long time. Verer Drexler was buried in an unmarked grave at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. His mother in Germany was informed of his death by mail months after it happened. She was told only that her son had died in American custody. She was not told how. She was not told why.

She was not told that the country he had chosen to trust had failed to protect him because a clerk had filled out a form incorrectly. The seven men who killed him were buried in the same cemetery. Their graves are near his. They lie in American soil. Oh. Oh. all of them together in a place none of them ever wanted to be.

Colonel Edward Davidson went home to his family after the war and returned to writing poetry. He rarely spoke about the special projects division. He rarely spoke about the men he had trained at Fort Kernney. He died in 1970 and the program he had built remained largely classified until decades later when historians began to understand what had actually happened in that small camp on Naragans at Bay.

Many of the men Davidson had trained returned to Germany and became teachers, journalists, and elected officials in the new Federal Republic. Some became business leaders. A few became members of the Bundustag. They rarely spoke publicly about where they had learned what they knew. But they had learned it. Most of them in a prisoner of war camp in Rhode Island from a Scottish poet in an American army uniform.

Reinhold Pabell could not adjust to post-war Germany. He tried. U he worked odd jobs in Hamburg. He wrote articles for small newspapers. He watched his country begin the slow work of rebuilding under Allied occupation. But something in him had shifted during those months in Mississippi and Rhode Island and he could not shift it back.

In 1951, 6 years after the war ended, Reinhold Pabell did something that no one in his family understood. He boarded a ship in Bremer Haven under a false name. He arrived in New York with forged papers. He made his way to Chicago where he opened a small used bookstore on the north side. He married an American woman. He lived quietly.

He did not tell his neighbors what he had done during the war. He lived this way for 2 years before the FBI found him. When the agents came to his bookstore in 1953, Reinhold did not run. He put down the book he was reading and he stood up and he told them who he was. He told them he had been a prisoner in Mississippi.

He told them he had worked on Daru in Rhode Island. He told them he had come back to America because America was the only place he had ever felt like a free man. The deportation hearing became a small national news story. Americans who had never heard of the German prisoner of war program read about a man who had loved this country so much that he had smuggled himself into it.

Public sympathy shifted. Congress intervened. Reinhold Pabell was granted permission to stay. He became an American citizen. He wrote a book about his experiences called Enemies Are Human. It was published in 1955. He ran his bookstore in Chicago until his retirement. He died an American. In the country that had once been his enemy, in a city his younger self could not have imagined, the Coca-Cola Company resumed production in West Germany in 1949.

Bottles began rolling off the lines again in plants that had stood silent through the war. Within a decade, Coca-Cola was as ordinary in German cities as it had been in American ones. Ice cream parlors appeared in Munich and Frankfurt. Chocolate returned to store shelves. Sugar came back. Coffee came back.

The former prisoners of war became in many cases the strongest German supporters of the Marshall Plan. They understood in a way few of their countrymen could. That American aid was not a trick. They had seen what America could produce. They had eaten it. They had held it in their hands. The historian Arnold Kramer in his 1979 study Nazi prisoners of war in America would later write that the abundance itself had done what no propaganda program could have accomplished.

The prisoners had not been argued out of their beliefs. They had been fed out of them. There is a temptation temptation in telling this story to make it into something sweeter than it was. To let the ice cream and the Coca-Cola cover the harder truth underneath. That harder truth is this. While Reinhold Pel was eating pumpkin pie in Mississippi on Thanksgiving Day of 1943, six million Jews were being murdered in Europe by the government he had served.

While German prisoners in Alabama were watching Americans throw away sugar, the ovens at Awitz were burning day and night. The Vermach that Reinhold Pabell had worn the uniform of was not a neutral army. It had helped make the Holocaust possible. It had cleared the roads. It had guarded the trains.

It had held the perimeter while other men did the killing. American kindness did not cancel any of that. American kindness did not resurrect a single child murdered at Trebinka. American kindness did not undo what had been done in the name of the flag that Reinhold Pabell had once saluted. American kindness was a choice made unilaterally by a democracy that had decided for its own reasons to be better than its enemies. It was not a reward.

It was not deserved. It was simply what the United States chose to do. Because a country strong enough to give ice cream to its enemies was strong enough to believe that mercy was not weakness. That is the whole lesson. [clears throat] That is the only lesson worth taking from this story. Reinhold Pel lived out the rest of his life in Chicago, dying there in old age, decades after the war that had brought him to America against his will.

He had lived longer as an American than he had ever lived as a German. His bookstore was gone by then, sold to another owner decades before. His wife had passed before him. His children had grown up speaking English as their first language. In his obituary, which ran in a small Chicago newspaper, there was a single line about his years as a prisoner of war.

It said only that he had been captured in Italy in 1943, that he had been held in the United States, and that he [clears throat] had descri described his treatment by his America American captives as the reason he had chosen to spend the rest of his life among them. Somewhere in a box in his family’s possession, the notebook still exists.

The one he carried in his breast pocket when he surrendered in Italy. The one the American sergeant handed back to him without reading. The one he wrote in every night for the length of the war. He had learned English in a barracks in Mississippi from a CocaCola bottle and a stack of life magazines. Years later, he would tell an American interviewer that by the end of the war he already knew what freedom tasted like and that he would never forget it.

In the spring of 1945, he waited in Rhode Island to go home to a country that no longer existed. He did not know yet that he would come back one day for good to the country that had fed him. But he would and he