“Are There Left Overs?” – Female German POWs Were STUNNED When They First Tasted Bisquits And Gravy

When German female POWs arrived in the United States near the end of World War II, they expected hard faces, harsh treatment, and the kind of hunger that lived in your bones. They expected barbed wire and barking dogs, shouted orders and starvation rations. Some of them quietly told each other that this was where the real punishment would begin, far away from the front, far away from the ruins of their homes.

They did not expect the smell of coffee.

They did not expect laughter drifting from a mess hall.

And they certainly did not expect to walk into a place that smelled like warm bread and pepper and meat, like a farmhouse kitchen instead of a prison.

For twenty-two-year-old Lotte Weber, the smell hit her like a memory from another life—Sundays as a girl on her parents’ small farm in Saxony, when there was enough flour for real bread and her mother would fry potatoes in bacon fat as a treat. She had not smelled anything like it since 1941.

Now, in early 1945, she stood in a US Army camp somewhere in the middle of a country she had only ever seen on maps and propaganda posters, her hands still rough with desert sand from North Africa, and tried not to show how much that smell unnerved her.

They had arrived just before dawn, the sky still dark over the low shapes of the camp buildings. The train that brought them in had been warm compared to the drafty troop ships and rattling freight cars of occupied Europe, but it had still been a journey of uncertainty. The women crowded together on the benches, trying to read the guards’ faces, trying to guess what awaited them beyond the next whistle.

Most of the guards looked bored, tired, not particularly interested in the prisoners beyond making sure no one tried anything foolish. Their uniforms were clean. Their boots were sturdy. They carried themselves like men who believed their country was winning.

Lotte sat between her two closest friends from the auxiliary unit—Greta, a tall radio operator from Hamburg, and Mia, a nurse from the Ruhr whose hands never seemed to stop moving, always straightening someone’s collar or smoothing a stray hair.

Greta stared out the window as the landscape passed by—endless fields, tall barns, white houses with porches and rocking chairs. It looked like a painting. A fairy tale of plenty.

 

“They don’t know there is a war here,” Greta had said at one point, voice flat with something that wasn’t quite envy and wasn’t quite accusation. “Look at it. Not a crater. Not a burned-out house. Nothing.”

Mia had hugged her coat tighter. “Maybe they know. Maybe they just don’t care.”

Lotte had said nothing. She was too tired to speculate about the hearts of strangers.

Now the three of them stood in line with a group of other women outside a long wooden building, breath rising in clouds, the cold biting through their thin wool coats. A sign over the door proclaimed in stenciled letters: MESS HALL.

“Food,” Mia whispered, almost reverent.

 

“American food,” Greta muttered back. “Who knows what they eat. Maybe it’s all canned and sweet. Or maybe they let us starve and just eat in front of us.”

They had heard stories. Some came from German propaganda broadcasts, thick with righteous outrage and lurid detail. Others from fellow prisoners who claimed a cousin’s friend knew someone who had been mistreated in a camp. Stories about prisoners being beaten, worked to death, fed moldy scraps. It was hard to know what to believe.

The guard at the door glanced over the group. He was young, barely older than they were, with a square jaw and a faint shadow of stubble on his chin. His name tag read HARRIS.

“All right, ladies,” he said, in English slow and clear, as if he’d been told to speak to foreigners and didn’t quite know how loudly to do it. “You’ll eat after the troops. Then processing. Understand?”

Most of them did not understand every word. But they understood “eat.” They understood “after.” They nodded, murmuring among themselves in German.

Inside, they could hear the clatter of plates and the low rumble of male voices, punctuated by an occasional burst of laughter. The smell was stronger now—something rich and meaty and heavy, layered over coffee and something that smelled like fresh bread, though not quite bread as they knew it.

“Rye?” Mia whispered hopefully.

Lotte shook her head. “No. Wheat. Too light.”

“You can smell the flour but not the type,” Greta said with a faint, teasing snort.

Lotte tried to smile, but the nervous knot in her stomach wouldn’t let her.

The door opened, and a wave of sound and warmth spilled out, followed by a group of American soldiers in olive drab. They were still chewing, wiping their mouths, talking about things the women could not catch. Some glanced at the Germans with casual curiosity, but there was no hatred in their eyes, no spitting or shouted insults.

Just tired men finishing breakfast before another day of routine.

After the last soldier stepped out into the cold, Harris motioned them forward.

“All right. Come on. One line. Move it along,” he said, gentler than his words.

They filed in.

The mess hall seemed impossibly bright after the gray of outside. Rows of long wooden tables, benches, metal trays stacked at the end of a serving line. The walls bore a few hand-painted signs, some with jokes the women didn’t understand, others with simple instructions: CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS. NO SMOKING IN SERVING AREA.

The smell almost made Lotte’s knees go weak. Her stomach cramped, reminding her how little they had eaten on the journey.

“Take a tray,” Harris said, illustrating with his hands. The women copied him, each picking up a cold metal rectangle and moving forward.

Then they stopped.

Because the serving line was… empty.

The big metal pans were there, but most held only smears of grease or streaks of something pale. A few stray bits of food clung stubbornly to the sides. The soldiers had eaten their fill and left only ghosts behind.

The women stood there, holding their trays awkwardly, not sure what to do.

Lotte’s nose wrinkled as she leaned slightly over one of the pans. A thick, white residue clung to the bottom, speckled with black and brown. It looked like… paste? Or flour mixed with water? But the smell was incredible—pepper, fat, something savory and completely unfamiliar.

Beside it lay a tray with the broken remains of what might have been bread but wasn’t. Not crusty rye, not the dense wartime loaf that German civilians had learned to call “bread” with a straight face. These were soft, round, golden things split open and soaked in the white sauce.

“Was ist das?” Mia murmured.

“I don’t know,” Lotte answered. “It looks… wrong.”

Greta sounded almost offended. “They poured sauce over bread. Who does that?”

One of the women near the back of the group whispered, “Maybe this is the pigs’ feed. Maybe they forgot to clear it away.”

“Americans feed pigs like this?” another replied. “Then I want to be an American pig.”

There were a few nervous laughs.

But the underlying uncertainty remained. Was this for them? Was it allowed to ask? Were they supposed to pretend they weren’t hungry?

Lotte glanced toward the kitchen area. Behind a swinging door, she could see movement: men in white aprons moving between steam and metal, voices raised in casual banter. The smell grew stronger with each passing second, weighing on her.

She hesitated only a moment longer before stepping away from the line and toward the nearest guard.

Harris turned to her, eyebrows lifted.

“Yes, ma’am?” he said, the last word falling a little awkwardly from his mouth. He had been told to address them properly. Ladies. Ma’am. Even if they wore the wrong uniform.

Lotte’s English was limited to a few phrases learned before the war and a handful of words picked up from listening to radio broadcasts. She groped for the right ones.

“Food?” she said, gesturing helplessly toward the trays. “Left… left over?”

She winced at how clumsy it sounded. She didn’t know if she had said what she meant.

Harris blinked. Then he glanced over her shoulder at the serving line, at the congealing remains of breakfast. The corner of his mouth quirked.

“Leftovers?” he asked.

Lotte nodded quickly. “Yes. Are there… left overs?”

Behind her, the other women fell silent, watching.

Harris glanced toward the kitchen. The cook, a broad-shouldered sergeant with a stained apron and a Georgia drawl, looked up from scrubbing a griddle.

“Hey, Sarge!” Harris called. “They’re asking if they can have the leftovers.”

The cook straightened slowly, studied the line of thin, nervous faces, and let out a short huff of breath.

“Hell,” he said. “We ain’t animals.”

He wiped his hands on his apron and came to the serving line, looking down at the women. His eyes were tired but not unkind.

“You ladies hungry?” he asked.

They didn’t understand the words, but they understood the tone.

“Yes,” Lotte said quietly. “We are… very hungry.”

The cook jerked his head toward the back. “Give me a minute. We got plenty of biscuits still in the oven. Gravy’s hot. Ain’t right to throw it out.”

He disappeared through the door. The women looked at one another in confusion.

“Did he say no?” Mia whispered.

“I think he said…” Lotte struggled. “I think he said… yes. Maybe.”

Greta snorted. “You always think people are saying yes.”

But when the cook returned, he was carrying a fresh pan piled high with round, golden biscuits, steam still rising from them. Behind him, another kitchen worker ladled new white gravy into the previously empty pan, the thick sauce glistening under the harsh mess-hall lights.

The women stared.

The cook set the pans down with a heavy clank.

Harris grinned. “Sure,” he said. “You’ll like this.”

Moments later, the women were staring down at their own plates.

Each tray held two soft, split biscuits drowned in white, pepper-speckled gravy. The sauce pooled in the corners, thick and almost shiny, flecked with bits of sausage.

They whispered among themselves.

“Is this sweet?”
“Is it salty?”
“Is it… edible?”

To German women who had grown up on rye bread, butter when they were lucky, jam on holidays, and maybe cold cuts on Sundays, this made no sense. White sauce poured over bread? Bread that wasn’t really bread, but something softer, almost like a cake with no sugar?

Lotte poked her biscuit with the edge of her fork. It yielded easily, spongy and warm, soaking up the gravy like a sponge drinking water. She brought the fork closer to her nose and inhaled.

It smelled of pepper. Milk. Flour. Meat.

Greta leaned in, eyes narrowed. “It looks like… paste,” she said. “Or wallpaper glue.”

“It smells better than glue,” Mia countered.

One of the women at the far end of the table raised her hand as if in class and called, in accented English, “Is… sweet? For dessert?”

The cook, who was watching from behind the counter, laughed, a short, genuine bark.

“No, ma’am,” he called back. “That’s breakfast.”

The first bites were cautious.

Lotte cut a small piece of biscuit, making sure it held some of the gravy, and lifted it to her mouth. For a heartbeat, fear mingled with hunger—fear that it would taste foul, and that she would have to pretend it didn’t. Fear that it would be wonderful, and that she would never taste it again.

She bit down.

The biscuit was soft and hot, its crumb tender and slightly salty. The gravy enveloped it in warmth and richness, the pepper sharp on her tongue, the sausage adding a depth she hadn’t realized she’d missed since the rationing began.

Her eyes widened.

She chewed, swallowed, then immediately took a larger bite. The warmth slid down into her stomach, easing the hollowness, loosening something tight in her chest.

Beside her, Mia made a sound that was half laugh, half sigh.

“Oh,” she said, hand flying to her mouth. “Oh, that is… that is very good.”

Greta hesitated a moment longer, then gave in and tried it. Her expression went from suspicion to shock in an instant.

“It is ridiculous,” she muttered between bites. “Who pours sauce on bread? It is… stupid. It is…” She took another bite. “It is the best thing I have eaten in four years.”

Around the table, the same transformation played out over and over. Forks that had moved cautiously began to move more quickly. Conversations paused as women focused on their plates. The air filled with the clatter of utensils and the soft sound of people trying not to eat too fast, trying to maintain some dignity while their bodies urged them to shovel the food in.

Within minutes, most of the plates were empty.

Lotte stared at hers, at the streaks of gravy she had chased to the edges, at the crumbs she had pressed into the tines of her fork to get every last bit.

Her stomach felt full for the first time in months.

She looked up.

The cook was still watching.

She exchanged a glance with Greta and Mia. They all felt the same urge, but none wanted to be the one to speak.

Finally, the youngest of their group, a nineteen-year-old from Dresden named Anja, stood. She clutched her tray in both hands, cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and walked slowly back to the serving line.

The mess hall had grown quieter now that the initial hunger was sated. A few American staff watched with mild interest as the girl approached the counter.

Anja cleared her throat.

“Excuse us,” she said in halting English, rehearsed in her head a dozen times in the ten steps from the table. “Could we… have a little more?”

For a second, no one moved.

Then the cook grinned.

“I thought you might,” he said. “Bring your trays. We’ve got plenty.”

The second round tasted even better than the first.

Later, when they returned to the barracks assigned to the female POWs, the conversation was less about fear and more about food.

“What did he call it?” Mia asked, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders. “Biskits?”

“Biscuits and gravy,” Lotte said carefully, tasting the foreign words. “Bisquits. Gravy.”

Greta lay on her bunk, staring up at the wooden slats above her. “It sounds like nonsense,” she said. “But I would eat nonsense every morning if it tasted like that.”

“It is too heavy,” one of the older women observed, though there was no heat in her tone. “Americans are crazy. They will all be fat by forty.”

“Better fat than hungry,” Anja murmured.

Silence followed that, heavy with memories of home—of mothers cutting thinner and thinner slices of bread, of coal deliveries that never came, of soup stretched with water until it was flavorless.

As the days turned into weeks, the routine of the camp settled over them.

They rose at dawn, answered roll call, performed assigned tasks—laundry, clerical work, light maintenance. They were searched occasionally, but not in ways designed to humiliate. They were allowed to write letters, though some never reached their destinations. They were given books in German—Goethe, Schiller, even cheap romance novels from before the war.

And every morning, they lined up in the mess hall after the American troops had eaten.

On most days, the breakfast was simple: scrambled eggs that were sometimes powdered, oatmeal thick enough to stand a spoon in, coffee that tasted like it had been boiled with socks, bread that was plain but fresh.

On good days, the biscuits and gravy returned.

The first time after that initial morning that the smell hit them again, Lotte felt her heart give a little leap.

“There,” she said, nudging Greta with her elbow. “You smell it?”

Greta sniffed, tried to maintain her habitual skeptical expression, and failed. “I am not a dog,” she said. “I do not… yes. Yes, I smell it.”

They filed in, and there it was: another tray of biscuits, another pan of white, pepper-flecked gravy. The cook—Sarge, though they never learned his full name—caught Lotte’s eye as she passed and winked.

“You ladies like that stuff,” he said. “Figures. My mama used to say, ‘If you don’t like biscuits and gravy, you ain’t right in the head.’”

Lotte didn’t understand every word, but she understood enough.

“This is… your home food?” she asked, tapping her plate.

“Yeah,” he said. “Country breakfast. I’m from Georgia. Back home we had this near every Sunday. Sometimes more. Cheap, sticks to your ribs, keeps you going.”

She repeated the word slowly. “Georgia. Like the republic?” she asked, thinking of the distant Soviet region they heard about on the Eastern Front.

He laughed. “No, ma’am. The other Georgia. The one with peaches and football and too much heat.”

She nodded, not really understanding, but liking the warmth in his voice.

Later, sitting at the table with gravy on her lips, she thought about how strange it was that a dish from a place she had never heard of could feel… comforting.

“This food,” she said quietly, “it is strange. But it feels like something made by someone’s mother.”

Mia nodded. “It feels like… like it was made for someone they cared about.”

Greta’s fork paused in mid-air. “Do you think they care about us?”

Lotte thought of Sarge’s rough hands carefully ladling gravy, of Harris holding the door a little longer on cold mornings. Of the way the guards looked away when someone got teary over a letter from home.

“I don’t know if they care about us,” she said. “But they care about what they are. Maybe that is enough.”

One evening, weeks into their captivity, they gathered around a table with a different kind of paper in front of them.

An American chaplain had brought a stack of magazines and newspapers, leaving them for anyone who could read English or just wanted to look at the pictures. Among them was a glossy magazine featuring recipes, advertisements for refrigerators, smiling women in aprons.

Lotte flipped through it, fascinated by the photographs of kitchens bigger than her family’s house.

“Here,” Mia said, pointing to a page with a picture of biscuits, golden and fluffy, stacked in a basket. Underneath was a recipe, written in small neat print.

“Biscuits,” Lotte read carefully. “Two cups of flour. Four teaspoons of baking powder. Half a teaspoon of salt. Shortening. Milk.”

She wrote the words down on a scrap of paper, adding little notes in German when she didn’t know the translation.

“Do you think,” Anja asked, eyes wide, “that we could make it at home?”

“When we have flour again,” Greta said dryly. “And ovens that are not in pieces.”

“When we have homes again,” another woman whispered.

They fell silent.

In the years to come, long after the war ended, Lotte would tell her grandchildren about that moment. Not about the silence, not about the ache that settled in her chest at the thought of Dresden and Hamburg and Berlin burning, but about the taste of biscuits and gravy and the strange, shy question that had started it all.

“Are there leftovers?” she would say in English, exaggerating the foreignness of the words for the children’s benefit. “We could not say it right, but they understood us anyway.”

Back in 1945, the question lingered in her mind, not just about food.

Were there leftovers?

Leftovers of kindness after so much cruelty.

Leftovers of humanity after years of propaganda and hate.

Leftovers of a world in which people from different countries could share a table instead of a battlefield.

One morning, near the end of their time in the camp, an American officer visited the women’s barracks. He was older than most of the guards, with silver at his temples, and he spoke careful, accented German.

“You will be processed for repatriation soon,” he told them. “The war in Europe is finished. It will take time, but you will go home.”

Home.

The word rippled through the room like a stone dropped into water.

After he left, the women talked late into the night. Home to what? Bombed cities? Missing fathers, brothers, husbands? Ration cards and rubble?

Lotte lay awake, listening to the soft breathing around her, and thought about the mess hall, about the cooks, about biscuits and gravy.

Some part of her, the part that had seen tanks and trenches and men bleeding out on desert sand, understood that this memory was small in the grand scale of the war. Armies moved; governments fell; borders shifted. The history books would talk about D-Day and Stalingrad and the Bomb, not about a group of women tasting white sauce on bread for the first time.

But another part of her thought maybe it mattered precisely because it was small.

Because it was a choice.

A choice by one cook not to throw leftover food in the trash when he could give it to hungry prisoners.

A choice by one guard to grin instead of sneer when a young woman stumbled over foreign words.

A choice by an army to feed its enemies in ways that felt humane, even when those enemies wore the insignia of a regime that had bombed their ships and shot at their planes.

In 1947, back in a ruined Germany struggling to rebuild, Lotte stood in a makeshift kitchen that had once been a horse stall and tried to recreate biscuits and gravy with what she had.

The flour was coarse and dark. The fat was lard from a neighbor’s pig. The milk was thin, half water. She improvised, guessing at amounts, remembering the way the dough had felt between her fingers when she’d helped in the camp kitchen once, asked to peel potatoes and ended up learning to cut biscuit rounds.

The biscuits that emerged from her chipped enamel oven pan were dense and a little uneven, but they smelled right.

She made a roux in an old pot, stirring flour into sizzling fat, adding milk slowly while her younger sister watched with wide, disbelieving eyes.

“White sauce?” her sister asked. “For bread?”

“It is not a sauce,” Lotte said. “It is gravy.”

She did her best with what sausage scraps she had, crumbling them into the pan. Pepper was a luxury, but she’d saved a small jar for months. She sprinkled it in until the sauce looked properly speckled.

When she poured it over the biscuits and handed a plate to her sister, she saw a familiar hesitation.

Then a first bite.

Then a widening of eyes.

She laughed.

“Yes?” she asked. “Strange, but comforting?”

Her sister nodded quickly, mouth too full to speak.

In the corner of the little kitchen, where the light from the cracked window fell across a pile of rubble that had once been a wall, Lotte leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment. For just a heartbeat, she could hear the distant clatter of an American mess hall, smell coffee and bacon, hear Sarge’s voice saying, “Ain’t right to throw it out.”

Years later still, in a small apartment in a new Germany that was trying to be something different, her grandson would sit at her table and ask, “Oma, what was America like? When you were a prisoner?”

He would have learned about the war in school: about Hitler and camps and crimes so vast that words could barely hold them. He would know that his grandmother had worn a uniform with two lightning-bolt runes on the collar, and he would be old enough to understand what that meant.

She would look at him for a long moment, seeing both the curiosity and the quiet fear that she might say something that made him ashamed.

“America is big,” she would begin. “Big and full of too much food and too many cars and too much of everything. I saw only a tiny part of it, behind a fence.”

He would wait.

“And how did they treat you?” he would ask.

She would think of the train ride. The first morning. The question. The taste.

“They treated us… like people,” she would say slowly. “Not like what our newspapers said they would. Especially the cooks.”

She would smile then, lines deepening at the corners of her eyes.

“They used to make us something called biscuits and gravy,” she would tell him. “We had never seen anything like it. We thought it was a mistake. Bread covered in white sauce! We thought, ‘This cannot be right.’ But we were hungry, and one of us asked, in very bad English, ‘Are there left overs?’”

She would repeat the phrase with the same exaggerated accent she’d had in 1945, and her grandson would laugh.

“The guard said, ‘Sure, you’ll like this,’” she’d continue. “And he was right. We did. I can still taste it. It was a strange, heavy, ridiculous dish. But it was warm and filling, and it made us feel… safe, for a little while. It was the first time after we were captured that I thought, ‘Maybe I will not die. Maybe people can be kind even to their enemies.’”

Her grandson would look at her, confusion and wonder mixed in his eyes.

“All that from breakfast?” he would ask.

“All that from breakfast,” she’d reply.

The story of those German women in American POW camps is not a story of victories or defeats on maps. It’s not a story of generals or speeches. It is, instead, a story of tired women far from home walking into a mess hall expecting punishment and instead smelling fresh biscuits.

It’s the story of women raised on a continent of ration cards and empty plates stepping into a land of full tables and government surplus, feeling like ghosts in a place that had never seen a bomb crater.

It’s the story of suspicion turning, bite by bite, into something else.

The standard American breakfast in those camps often included scrambled eggs, bacon when it could be spared, oatmeal boiled in huge metal pots, coffee by the gallon. On good days, there were biscuits with sausage gravy—a dish born in the lean times of the American South, when flour and fat and a little meat had to stretch to feed many mouths.

To those German women, it looked strange and overly heavy. It didn’t fit their idea of what food was supposed to look like. They had grown up with brown loaves and thin slices, with butter carefully scraped and shared, with coffee that got weaker every year of the war.

The white sauce and soft bread confused them.

They often declined food at first, out of uncertainty, not knowing how long supplies would last or what exactly they were being offered. When you came from a place where food was scarce, abundance could feel like a trick.

But hunger has its own logic.

Eventually, someone always asks, “Are there leftovers?”

The first plate of biscuits and gravy turned confusion to shock, shock to delight, delight to memory. The dish was unfamiliar but it worked: warm, filling, high-calorie, the kind of meal that stuck with you through a day of work or a life of uncertainty.

For the Americans, biscuits and gravy were comfort food—something that reminded them of home, of mothers and grandmothers in kitchens far from the noise of war. For the German POWs, the dish became something else: proof that their captors were not always what they had been taught to fear.

It is easy, when we talk about war, to focus on the big things. The battles. The leaders. The dates and places that anchor timelines in history books. But history is also made of small things—tiny interactions that never make it into official reports.

A cook deciding not to scrape leftovers into the trash.
A prisoner gathering courage to ask, in a broken language, for a little more.
A guard choosing to grin rather than snarl.

A plate of biscuits and gravy sliding across a mess-hall counter, bridging the distance between enemy and human, if only for a morning.

Those German women went home eventually, to a country split in two and weighed down by the knowledge of what had been done in its name. They lived through shortages and rebuilding, through new governments and old ghosts. The war did not end for them the day the guns stopped. It echoed in their lives, in their dreams, in the way people looked at their uniforms in old photos.

But when they gathered, years later, at kitchen tables in quiet German towns and told stories about the war—the ones they could bear to tell to their children and grandchildren—they did not always talk about fear and death.

Sometimes they talked about a morning in an American camp when they walked into a mess hall expecting cruelty and instead met a plate of food that made them cry, not because it was cruel, but because it was kind.

In those stories, the question always came up, as if it were the title of the memory itself.

“Are there leftovers?” one would say, and the others would laugh, the sound softer now, reshaped by time.

The war had taken so much from them—brothers, sweethearts, cities, illusions.

Biscuits and gravy did not give any of that back.

But they gave them something else.

A reminder, in the darkest years of the twentieth century, that not everyone who wore a different uniform believed in cruelty. That a soldier can still be a farm boy from Georgia who thinks it’s wrong to throw good food away. That a guard can still be a kid from Iowa who says “ma’am” to a prisoner because his mother raised him that way.

That even in war, there can be leftovers.

Not just of food, but of empathy.

Of decency.

Of the simple, stubborn human impulse to feed someone who is hungry, even when that someone is supposed to be your enemy.

And sometimes, that is the part of history that matters most.