When German POWs First Reached American Soil, They Couldn’t Believe Their Eyes

Your father may have fought them. Your uncle may have guarded them. >> [clears throat] >> Between 1943 and 1946, more than 400,000 German soldiers lived on American soil in Kansas, in Illinois, in small towns whose names you would recognize. They ate our food. They worked our farms. And when the war ended, 5,000 of them came back.

Not as enemies, as neighbors. This is the story of one man who saw America through enemy eyes and could not for the rest of his life forget what he saw. His name was Reinhold Pabel. He was 28 years old, a bookseller’s son from Berlin. And in the fall of 1943 in the hills above Salerno, he lowered his rifle for the last time.

Three years in uniform, Poland, France, the long boredom of garrison duty, and now 6 days of American artillery so relentless it had stopped feeling like war and started feeling like weather. His unit, what remained of it, walked down the hillside with hands raised, and the American infantry watching them looked tired more than triumphant.

One of them was chewing gum. Another was reading a comic book. Nobody cheered. Nobody spat. They just pointed toward a road and said in accented German, >> [clears throat] >> “Walk.” Pabel walked. He had been told for 3 years what would happen if he was captured. The commissars would shoot him. The Bolsheviks would work him to death in Siberia.

The Americans, Dr. Goebbels had explained on Reichsrundfunk, were a mongrel nation of gangsters and Jews who tortured prisoners for sport. And even if none of that were true, it hardly mattered because America itself had been reduced to smoking ruins by the glorious U-boat campaign.

There was no America left to reach. The men beside him had believed it. Pabel, a bookseller’s son from Berlin who had read too much before the war, had read too much before the war and drunk too much wine in university cafes, had believed it less than most. But he had believed some of it. Everyone had believed [music] some of it. You could not live inside the Reich for a decade and not carry pieces of it in your bones.

He would spend the next 12 years watching those pieces dissolve um one at a time. The Liberty Ship smelled of diesel and vomit and 800 frightened men. It had carried American soldiers east to fight in Italy and now it carried German prisoners west because empty ships were expensive. And the war economy of the United States did not tolerate waste.

Below decks in the humid dark, the rumors began. They would be handed over to the Russians at sea. They would be handed to French partisans in Casablanca. They would be shot in international waters and dropped through weighted canvas bags. A Feldwebel from Hamburg swore he had heard an American guard say the word extermination.

He had not. The guard had said examination. But in the hold of a Liberty ship in October 1943, a word could kill you before a bullet did. Pabel wrote in a small notebook he had been allowed to keep. He wrote about the sound of the engines. He wrote about the way the men prayed in whispers, even the ones who had stopped believing in God at Stalingrad.

He wrote about a boy of 19 from Bavaria who cried every night and pretended every morning that he had not. For 14 days the ship pushed west through gray Atlantic swells. And on the morning of the 15th day, the guards came down into the hold and shouted for the prisoners to gather their belongings. They were coming into New York Harbor.

Pabel climbed the metal stairs behind 200 other men. The air at the top of the ladder was cold and clean and it hurt his lungs after 2 weeks of breathing exhaust. He blinked in the light. He set his hand on the railing and he stopped. Manhattan rose out of the November mist like a mistake.

The buildings climbed higher than anything in Europe. Higher than the Cologne Cathedral. Higher than any building Pabel had ever imagined a human being could construct. And every window in every one of them was burning with electric light. Not the timid blackout light of Berlin. Not the shrouded gaslight of wartime London. Full, unashamed, prodigal light pouring from 10,000 windows across a skyline that stretched further than his eyes could measure. There was no blackout.

There was no war here. The propaganda men in Berlin had told him for 3 years that American cities had been broken by the U-boats, that Roosevelt hid the truth from his own people, that the harbors were silent, and the factories were dark, and the American economy was one good push from collapse. And here was New York at 7:00 in the morning with tugboats sounding their horns and cranes turning against a pink sky, and the lights of a million windows saying very plainly that everything he had been told was a lie. Somewhere behind him, a man began

to weep. Then another, then a third. Not because they were afraid. They had been afraid for weeks. They wept because they understood in a single unbearable moment that they had been lied to about everything. And that the lie had cost them their friends, their brothers, their brothers, and their war. Hubble did not weep.

He would later write that he wanted to, but that some cold part of him, the part that had kept him alive through Poland and France and Italy, took over instead. And began quietly to count. It counted the ships in the harbor. It counted the cranes on the docks. It counted the smokestacks along the New Jersey shore.

And when the counting reached a number too large to be useful, the cold part of him said in his father’s voice, “You have lost this war. You have lost it more completely than you know.” They were unloaded at a pier in Brooklyn. And the first Americans they met were not soldiers. They were dockworkers, white men and black men working side by side hauling cargo nets and shouting instructions and pausing to light each other’s cigarettes.

In the Reich, this was a crime. In the Reich, a photograph of this would have been used in Der Stürmer as evidence of racial catastrophe. Here, it was Tuesday morning. A woman drove past on a forklift. She was perhaps 40 years old wearing coveralls and a red kerchief. And she was smoking a cigarette, and she did not look at the German prisoners because she had cargo to move and a shift to finish.

Behind her, on the wall of a warehouse, a poster showed another woman flexing her arm. We can do it. Children were selling newspapers at the dock gates. Nobody had evacuated them. Nobody was afraid. Pabel had grown up understanding that a nation at war looked a certain way. Berlin looked that way. London, from the newsreels, looked that way.

Cities at war were tense. Cities at war watched the sky. Cities at war did not permit children near the docks where enemy prisoners were being unloaded. New York had not received the memo. An American officer moved along the line of prisoners with a clipboard. He was young, perhaps 26, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a captain’s bars.

He stopped in front of Pabel and spoke in careful, university-taught German. “Name, rank, serial number, any medical conditions we should know about?” Pabel gave his name and his rank and his number. He mentioned that his left ankle had been sprained in the surrender. The captain wrote it down. Then he handed Pabel a printed sheet of paper.

It was the Geneva Convention in German. [clears throat] Huh, article by article. His rights as a prisoner, his entitlements to food, shelter, medical care, mail, religious practice, his right to refuse work that supported the American war effort, his right to elect a spokesman from among his fellow prisoners, his right to file complaints with the International Committee of the Red Cross. Pabel read it twice.

Then, a third time. Then, he looked up. The captain was already three prisoners down the line, handing out the same sheet in the same careful voice. “They mean it.” Pabel thought. God in heaven, they mean it. At a folding table beside the warehouse, Red Cross workers were distributing small packages.

A sergeant with dark hair and a name tag reading Goldberg was handing them out. He offered one to Pabel and said, in Yiddish-tinged German, in Yiddish-tinged German, >> [clears throat] >> that kosher meals were available if any of the prisoners required them for religious reasons. Pabel stared at him. [clears throat] He understood every word.

The words were individually ordinary. Together, they made no sense. This man whose name announced everything the Reich had spent a decade denouncing was standing in the November cold, offering kosher meals to men who had, until 8 weeks ago, worn the uniform of a government that had murdered his cousins.

Pabel Pabel opened his mouth, closed it, took the package, said in German, “Thank you.” Sergeant Goldberg nodded, already turning to the next man, already asking again about dietary requirements, already patient in a way that Pabel would think about for the rest of his life. Later, in his memoir, Pabel would try to describe this moment and would fail.

He would write three drafts of the paragraphs or and burn two of them. The final version, which appeared in Enemies Are Human in 1955, read simply, “I understood then that we had not been fighting a country. We had been fighting a civilization. And civilizations do not lose to men like us. They were fed in a mess hall attached to the pier.

Long wooden tables, metal trays, and at the far end of the hall, perhaps 50 ft from where the prisoners sat, American sailors from a destroyer escort were eating breakfast. The sailors did not stop eating >> [clears throat] >> when the Germans came in. They did not turn to stare. They did not shout insults. Two of them glanced over, registered the presence of the enemy, and returned to a radio broadcast at the end of the counter.

It was a rebroadcast of a baseball game. The World Series had ended 3 weeks earlier. The Yankees had beaten the Cardinals in five. The sailors were arguing about a call at second base in the fourth inning of the third game. Pabel sat down in front of a tray of food and looked at it for a long time before he could bring himself to eat.

There were two eggs. There were four strips of bacon. There was toast with butter, actual butter, the color of buttercups. There was oatmeal with brown sugar. There was black coffee and beside the coffee was a small pitcher of cream. There was an orange. He had not seen an orange since 1940. The sailors at the end of the hall laughed at something on the radio.

One of them slapped the counter. Another shouted for more coffee and the cook shouted back cheerfully that he could get his own damned coffee. Nobody was watching the Germans. Nobody cared that the Germans were there. Pabel ate the orange first. He peeled it slowly the way his mother had taught him when he was six and the smell of it went up into his sinuses and made his eyes water for reasons that had nothing to do with the orange.

Across the table, the boy from Bavaria was crying again, quietly this time, into his oatmeal. They boarded the train that afternoon. It was not a cattle car. Pabel had heard from a corporal at the transit camp in North Africa that the Americans transported prisoners in cattle cars. The corporal had heard it from a lieutenant a lieutenant who had heard it from a captain who had read it in a pamphlet published by the propaganda ministry in 1942.

The train was a passenger coach. The seats had cushions. The windows had curtains. A porter walked down the aisle offering water from a metal pitcher. Pabel sat by a window and watched America go past. They passed through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. Uh they passed factories with their names painted on the roofs in letters 10 ft high.

Glenn L. Martin, Hamsteel, Westinghouse. No camouflage. No blackout paint. In the parking lot of one aircraft plant outside Baltimore, Pabel counted 47 B-26 medium bombers lined up in rows waiting for delivery to combat units. He counted them again to be sure. He was sure 47 bombers. One factory. One morning, he thought of the Ruhr where his cousin had worked before the IRAF found it.

He thought of the camouflaged factories of Essen and Bremen hidden under netting painted to look like meadows from the air. He thought of German industry running three shifts in the dark. And here was one American factory in the sunshine producing more aircraft in a day than a Luftwaffe wing could shoot down in a week.

The train stopped at Union Station in Washington that evening. Through the window, Pabel watched an American family on the platform. A father in a business suit, a mother in a green coat, two small children waving small flags. They were seeing off a young man in an olive drab uniform, a soldier headed south for training, and the mother was crying, and the father was pretending uh not to cry, and the children were confused because their brother was smiling.

At the counter of the station restaurant, teenagers were drinking milkshakes. The war had come to their brother. The war had not come to the milkshakes. Pabel watched them through the glass, and he understood with a clarity that would never afterward leave him that he was traveling through a country that had not yet been touched, not in the way Europe had been touched, not in the way Germany was about to be touched.

The Americans were sending their sons to die, and they were mourning them, and they were also drinking milkshakes, and there was no contradiction in it because the country was so vast uh Oh, and so rich that it could afford both the grief and the milkshake at the same table. This, Pabel wrote later, was the moment I stopped believing we could win.

Not the bombers, not the harbor, the milkshakes. The train pulled out of Washington after dark, headed west into the country that would spend the next two years dismantling everything he thought he knew. He did not yet know the name of the camp. He did not yet know the name of Camp Ellis, Illinois, where he would spend the next 20 months.

He uh did not yet know about the library or the cotton fields or the executions at Fort Leavenworth or the small Midwestern town whose citizens would give him a Christmas present he could not accept without weeping. He knew only that he was hungry and that the orange had been the best thing he had eaten in 3 years.

Uh uh and that the country outside the window was on fire with light. He closed his eyes and slept. Camp Ell- Ellis, Illinois, sat in the flat farmland west of Peoria, and Reinhold Pabel arrived there on a cold morning in November 1943 expecting a prison. He found a small city. The barracks were wooden, painted white, arranged in neat rows along gravel streets.

Each building had electric lights. Each building had hot running water. Each building had a coal stove that a prisoner could feed himself at his own discretion whenever the Illinois wind came howling down from the north. There were flush toilets, there were showers, there were beds with mattresses and sheets and two wool blankets folded at the foot of each one.

Pavel [clears throat] had slept on straw in Poland. He had slept on stone in France. He had slept on sand in Italy. He set his hand on the mattress and pressed it down and felt the springs push back and he sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at his boots for a long time without moving. An American lieutenant explained the rules in German.

The prisoners would elect their own spokesman. The prisoners would run their own kitchen, their own laundry, their own recreation hall. The prisoners could work if they chose for 80 cents a day in canteen script, the same base pay as an American private. With the script, they could buy cigarettes, chocolate, soap, writing paper, playing cards, musical instruments, art supplies.

Pavel raised his hand and asked what happened to prisoners who refused to work. The lieutenant said that nothing happened. Work was voluntary. The Geneva Convention was very clear on this point. Pavel lowered his hand and did not ask another question that day. By January, he was working on a farm outside the town of Bushnell, picking corn stubble and mending fence in the cold.

The farmer was a man of about 60 whose two sons were fighting in the Pacific. He drove Pavel and three other prisoners out to the fields each morning in a pickup truck and at noon his wife brought lunch in a wicker basket. Sandwiches, apples, a thermos of hot coffee. She set the basket on the tailgate and nodded at the prisoners and drove back to the house. There was no guard.

Um Pavel understood slowly over the course of that winter that he could have walked away at any moment, into the corn, into the tree line, into a a country the size of a continent where a young man with a decent coat and passable English could disappear the way a stone disappears into a river. He did not walk away.

Not yet. He watched instead. He watched the farmer pour milk into a ditch behind the barn one morning in February. Three full cans of it. White milk running down into the frozen mud. Pavel asked in his slow English, “Why?” The farmer shrugged and said the government paid him not to sell it. Prices, quotas. Quotas? Something about parity.

He said it the way a man talks about the weather, without anger and without shame, and he wiped his hands on his overalls and walked back to the barn. That night in the barracks, Pabel wrote a letter to his wife in Berlin. He wrote about the milk. He wrote that a single American farmer in a single county in Illinois had poured into the mud more milk than his daughter had drunk in the last 6 months of her life.

He did not send the letter. He tore it up and burned it in the stove. His daughter was 3 years old. He had not seen her since she was one. He did not know then what the winter of 1943 uh had already done to a small child in a cold Berlin cellar, and would not learn the truth for many months to come. In March, they moved him south on temporary transfer to work the cotton harvest in Arkansas.

The camp there was smaller. The heat, when it came, was something he had no European word for. And it was in Arkansas that Reinhold Pabel walked into a diner in a small town called Wilson and understood for the first time what kind of country he had been sent to. The diner had two doors, one in front, one in back.

The front door opened onto the main street. The back door opened onto an alley. Above the back door, a small hand-painted sign read, “Colored.” Pabel and two other German prisoners walked in through the front door in their work fatigues stenciled PW in 6-in letters across the back.

The waitress brought them coffee and pie. She called them “honey.” She refilled the coffee twice without being asked. Their guard that afternoon was a black corporal from a segregated support unit. A young man who had escorted them from the work site and who was by regulation responsible for their custody until sundown. The corporal was not permitted to enter through the front door.

He waited in the truck. Pabel sat at the counter and drank his coffee and looked out the window at the American soldier who was guarding him and who was not allowed to eat in the same room as the men he was guarding because the men he was guarding were white and he was not. And the enemies of the United States had in this small town in Arkansas in the spring of 1944 more civic standing than the citizens who fought for it.

He set down his coffee cup. He could not finish the pie. In his memoir 12 years later, he would write, “Everything I had been taught about race I had been taught by criminals. And here in a country that was supposed to prove the criminals right. I found instead that the criminals had been wrong about everything, including the things they were right about.

It was the most disorienting hour of my life. He was still thinking about the diner when the news came that spring, a federal trial in Oklahoma City. Five German prisoners in the dock for the murder of a comrade the previous November. The dead man’s name was Johannes Kunze. He had been a soldier in the Africa Corps.

He had been beaten to death on the night of November 4th, 1943 at Camp Tonkawa in Oklahoma. Uh uh by five of his own countrymen who had convened a secret Ehrengericht, a court of honor, and had condemned him for the crime of speaking too warmly of America to an American officer. Uh They had used tent poles. It had taken 20 minutes. The five men were tried in an American federal court.

They were convicted and on the morning of July 10th, 1945, they were hanged one after the other in the execution chamber at the United States Disciplinary’s Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. News of the hangings spread through Camp Ellis in whispers. Some of the prisoners were relieved. Some were enraged. A small number, the true believers, the ones who still wore invisible SS runes on their sleeves, said that Kunze had deserved it.

That the American verdict was a Jewish verdict. That the hanged men were martyrs. Habel listened to them talk in the mess hall and understood for the first time that he was afraid. Not of the Americans, of his own men. He began to sleep with his boots on. He stopped speaking English in front of the hard cases.

He wrote nothing in his notebook that could be read by another German. The war, he understood now, was not going to end when the shooting stopped. The war was going to end one prisoner at a time inside the men who had fought it. And some of them were going to lose that war, and some of them were going to die of it, and some were going to kill their comrades on the way down.

Six weeks later, on the morning of August 25th, 1945, seven more German prisoners would be hanged at Fort Leavenworth for the murder of a young U-boat sailor named Werner Drechsler at Camp Papago Park in Arizona. Drechsler had cooperated with American intelligence. His countrymen had strung him up in a shower room 7 hours after he arrived at the camp.

12 executions, two shower rooms, one war still being fought inside the barbed wire of a country that had already won it. In the autumn of 1944, Pabel was moved again. This time to help with the harvest near a small town in Central Illinois whose name he would remember for the rest of his life. The details of that town and of the Christmas that came 6 weeks later would form the emotional center of his memoir.

The women of the town, most of them mothers of soldiers overseas, organized a Christmas dinner for the German prisoners at the local Lutheran Church. They cooked turkey. They baked pies. They set up a tree 20 ft high decorated with electric lights that burned all through the service. An elderly woman whose son had been killed at Anzio 8 months earlier stood up during the meal and in halting German learned from her immigrant grandmother wished the prisoners a blessed Christmas and a safe return to their families.

Pabel put down his fork and could not pick it up again. The boy from Bavaria who had cried on the ship was sitting across from him. He was not crying. Now he was staring at the American woman with an expression Pabel had never seen on a human face before. An expression uh that was not gratitude and was not shame and [clears throat] was not grief but was all three at once, arranged in a way that had no name.

That night, walking back to the trucks under a sky full of Midwestern stars, the boy from Bavaria said quietly uh in German, “We are going to lose this war, and it is good that we are going to lose it.” Pabel did not answer. There was nothing to answer. Six months later, in May 1945, the Americans would show them the newsreels from Bergen-Belsen and Dachau.

Some of the prisoners would weep. Some would insist it was a hoax. A few would refuse to speak for weeks. Pabel would watch the footage twice in silence and would walk out of the recreation hall into the Illinois sunlight. And he would understand that the country that had fed him oranges and driven him to church and hanged its own prisoners for murdering their comrades was the same country that had, in doing all of these things quietly and without ceremony, ended the world he had been born into. He had two decisions

left to make. Whether to go home and what home now meant. The war ended on a Tuesday in May, and the prisoners of Camp Ellis learned about it from the same radio that had, 3 years earlier, been broadcasting baseball games in a mess hall in Brooklyn. Reinhold Pabel was 30 years old. He had been a prisoner for 20 months.

He owned a toothbrush, a a spare shirt, a notebook half filled with observations he had never dared to send home, and a photograph of a wife and daughter whose faces he was beginning, against his will, to forget. The Americans did not send him home, not for a year. The War Department, in its careful bureaucratic wisdom, had decided that the German prisoners would be released in stages, and that many of them [snorts] would first be sent to Britain and France to help repair the damage their army had done.

Pabel was not among those transferred. He was kept in Illinois, and he was put into a classroom. The classroom was part of a program the Americans did not advertise. 31,000 German prisoners of war were enrolled that final year in vocational training. 18,000 were studying English. 12,000 were studying American agricultural methods.

6,000 were studying business administration. A smaller group, hand-picked and never told they had been hand-picked, were reading translations of the Federalist Papers in a converted barracks at Fort Kearney, Rhode Island, under the supervision of a major named Maxwell McKnight and a staff of German emigre who had fled Hitler in the 30s.

The program was called re-education. >> [clears throat] >> The prisoners were told it was voluntary. It was voluntary the way weather is voluntary. You could refuse to go outside, but you could not refuse the climate. Pabel studied English. He studied bookkeeping. He read John Dewey in German and Thomas Jefferson in translation and a novel by a young American named John Steinbeck about migrant workers in California and he began to understand that the country outside the wire was not one country but a thousand countries

arguing with itself in a hundred languages and that this arguing was not weakness but the actual engine of the thing. In April 1946, 17 months after the war ended, the Americans finally put him on a ship. He did not want to go. Berlin was rubble, his wife was alive, his daughter had been dead for two and a half years.

Nobody had told him. There had been no way to tell him. He walked from the train station to what had been his neighborhood and his neighborhood was not there anymore. It was a field of broken brick with paths worn through it by women carrying buckets. His mother-in-law’s building was standing, three of its four walls.

His wife was living on the second floor with two other women and a Russian officer’s ration book. She did not recognize him at first. He had lost 40 lb in Italy and gained 20 back in Illinois, and his hair had gone >> [clears throat] >> gray at the temples in a way that made him look like his father.

She stared at him in the doorway for perhaps 5 seconds. Then she said his name, and then she said their daughter’s name, and then she told him. He did not weep. He had done his weeping already on a farm in Illinois in a winter he could no longer explain to anyone who had not been there. He held his wife in the doorway of a bombed building in a broken city, and he understood that he had come home to a country that no longer existed, and that the country he now missed was not Germany.

It was the one across the ocean. >> [clears throat] >> He tried for 2 years to be a German again. He worked in a bookshop. He rebuilt what could be rebuilt. He wrote letters to the farmer in Illinois, and the farmer wrote back, and inside the envelopes came photographs of the farm and coffee, and once a small parcel of clothing that Pabel gave away to a neighbor’s family because there was no one in his own household who needed it.

In 1949, he made his decision. He applied through the normal channels to emigrate to the United States. He was denied. Former enemy combatants were not at that moment welcome as immigrants. So, in the spring of 1951, Reinhold Pabel walked onto a freighter in Bremen with a forged Swiss passport and $80 in his pocket. And he crossed the Atlantic a second time.

And he walked off the ship in New York Harbor and disappeared into the country that had once held him prisoner. He called himself Phil Brick. He took a job at a bookshop on Chicago’s North Side. He married an American woman. He learned to like baseball, though he never fully understood it. And he read the newspapers every morning and argued with the editorials the way he had watched Americans argue in Illinois in 1944, out loud, without fear, as if the arguing itself were a form of prayer.

He lived that life for eight years. In 1953, the FBI found him. He was not arrested at gunpoint. Two agents came to the bookshop, waited for him to close for the evening, and drove him downtown for questioning. He told them everything. He had broken no laws except the one about entering the country. He had paid his taxes.

He had registered for the draft under his false name and would have served if called. The judge deported him. His wife went with him to Germany. She waited. He filed the paperwork again, this time honestly. In 1955, he was allowed to return. In 1959, he became an American citizen. And on the day he took the oath in a federal courtroom in Chicago, he wept for the first time since the day he had learned his daughter was dead.

He wept because he had, at last, come home. He was not the only one. Georg Gärtner had escaped from Camp Deming, New Mexico, on the night of September 22nd, 1945, 4 days before he was to be shipped back to Germany. He was 24 years old. He spoke almost no English. He had no plan. He hopped a freight train. He rode it into California.

He took a new name, Dennis Wiles, and he took a series of small jobs, and he learned English from movie theaters and paperback novels. And over the course of 40 years, he became a ski instructor and then a tennis pro and then the sales manager of a firm in Colorado. And he married a woman named Jean who did not know, for 25 years of marriage, that her husband was the last German prisoner of war still at large in the United States.

He turned himself in on national television in 1985. He was not prosecuted. He was by then more American than most Americans. He wrote a book. He gave interviews. He died in 2013 in Boulder, Colorado at the age of 92 and the obituary in the local paper listed him as a beloved husband and grandfather. And in a small parenthesis at the end as a former soldier of the German Army.

Huh. Of the 425,000 German prisoners who passed through the American camp system between 1942 and 1946, only 56 ever escaped for more than a month. 56 out of 425,000. The men had not been kept behind wire. They had been kept behind something else. In the years after the war, the surveys were taken and the numbers were counted.

And the numbers told a story that nobody in 1941 would have believed. 74% of returning prisoners held favorable views of American democracy. 61% supported the Marshall Plan when it was announced. 5,000 of them over the course of the 1950s, immigrated legally to the United States and became citizens. Of those who stayed in Germany, 48 became members of the Bundestag.

312 served as mayors or on city councils. Thousands more became teachers and shopkeepers and small-town newspaper editors. And they carried with them into the reconstruction of a broken country, the memory of an Illinois farmer who had poured milk into a dish and a black corporal who had waited in a truck outside a diner and an old woman in a Lutheran church who had wished them a blessed Christmas in her grandmother’s German.

They rebuilt Germany with American hands. That was the second victory. The one nobody talks about. The one that did not require a bomb. But the 12 men at Fort Leavenworth must be remembered, too. They died in an American prison under an American gallows for crimes they had committed against their own countrymen in the name of an ideology that had followed them across the ocean and would not let them go.

The transformation this country worked on its enemies was real. But it did not reach every man. And it did not come cheap. Some men, when offered a country, took it. Some men could not. Some men killed their comrades in a shower room in Arizona to prove they had not been changed. And then they climbed the 13 steps in Kansas and were changed at last by the drop.

That is the part of the story that Reinhold Pabel wrote about last in the final chapter of his memoir before he closed the book and went back to selling books in Chicago until he died in 2008 at the age of 93. He wrote that America had won the war twice. Once with its factories, once with its Christmas dinners and that the second victory had been the harder one because it had been won not against an army but against an idea.

And ideas do not surrender at ridgelines the way armies do. They surrender if they surrender at all one man at a time at a counter in Brooklyn over an orange in a ditch behind a barn over spilled milk at a diner in Arkansas watching a soldier wait in a truck in a Lutheran church listening to a mother forgive.

Those were the battles that ended the war. And the country that fought them did not know most of the time that it was fighting them at all. It was just being itself and being itself, it turned out, was enough.