Why German POWs Begged America to Keep Them After WWII…?

In the final agonizing months of the Second World War, the German weremocked. Once the seemingly invincible conqueror of Europe was a hollowedout shell. On the Western front, American, British, and Allied forces had breached the Rine. Their industrial might and unstoppable avalanche.

In the east, the Soviet Red Army, a force of millions, was exacting a terrible, vengeful price for the invasion of their homeland. For the German soldier, often a terrified teenager from the Hitler youth or a weary old man from the Vulkerm. The war was no longer about victory, but about which enemy to be captured by. The horror stories from the Eastern Front massacres, starvation.

The frozen hell of the Gulags were not just propaganda. They were a terrifying reality. And so, given the choice, they ran west. Millions of German soldiers in a state of total collapse dropped their weapons and raised their hands, creating the largest mass surrender in modern history. For over 370,000 of these defeated men, their journey would not end in a European camp.

It would end across an ocean in a land they knew only as the ultimate enemy, America. The journey across the Atlantic was a psychological crucible. These men, now classified as Ps, were herded onto the very Liberty ships that had just delivered the tanks, bombs, and bullets that had ensured their defeat. They were packed into the dark, cavernous holds, swaying in the rough seas with nothing but their fears.

Their minds were filled with the vivid, terrifying propaganda of Joseph Gobles. They had been told for years that Americans were culture barbarian, univilized barbarians. They were a degenerate nation of gangsters and lynch mobs, a mongrel race that had no respect for the rules of war. The PS whispered to each other in the dark, convinced they were being taken to America to be used as slave labor, subjected to medical experiments, or simply executed and dumped at sea once they were out of sight of land.

Every swell of the ocean, every clanging metal door was a prelude to their imagined brutal end. Their rival was the first jarring crack in this ideological armor. They had been told that American cities were crumbling, that yubot warfare had starved the nation, that the population was riotous and broken.

Instead, they were processed at ports like New York or Boston, and they stared mute and dumbfounded. They sailed past the Statue of Liberty, a symbol they had only seen in mocking political cartoons. And it was real, and it was undamaged. The city skyline behind it was not a field of rubble like Berlin or Hamburg.

It was a forest of intact, impossibly tall skyscrapers. They were marched onto the docks and saw civilians. The men were not in rags, they wore suits. The women wore fashionable dresses and bright lipstick. The streets were choked with so many private cars they caused traffic jams, a luxury unimaginable in their world.

They were herded onto trains and their new life as prisoners in this bewildering, powerful, and utterly untouched land began. The trains carried them deep into the American interior into a secret, sprawling archipelago of over 500 camps, a hidden city of prisoners spread across 46 states. They arrived at places like Camp Hearn in the flatlands of Texas, or Camp Alva in Oklahoma, or Camp Alona in the corn fields of Iowa.

They saw the guard towers and the barbed wire fences and braced for the brutality. They knew was coming, but the brutality never came. Instead, they were put through an orderly, almost bureaucratic process. They were delaused with DDT powder, given hot showers, and issued new uniforms, sometimes old US Army fatigues, dyed blue, with the large, unmistakable letters PW stencileled on the back and legs.

They were given medical and dental exams and assigned to clean wooden barracks with actual beds and blankets. The routine was rigid, but it was one of sanitation and order, not terror. The next phase of their disorientation was the food. They were fed and they were fed well. They received by military mandate the exact same daily rations as the American GI as who were guarding them.

For men used two years of sawdust laced black bread, watery turnup soup, and airts coffee. The American diet was a decadent fantasy. They were given white bread, real butter, fresh milk, and meat, not just once a week, but often once a day. They were introduced to alien luxuries like jell-o, ice cream, and peanut butter.

Many who had arrived gaunt and half starved began to gain weight. They were allowed to play soccer, form camp orchestras, and take university correspondence courses. This treatment was profoundly baffling. It made no sense. It was soft. And in their total war mindset, softness was weakness. They couldn’t understand a victor that wasn’t cruel.

America was now faced with a second challenge. What to do with the minds of 370,000 men, many of whom were still ardent, fanatical Nazis. The answer was a sweeping secret psychological operation known as the special projects division. The most fanatical black Nazis were quietly identified and segregated into special camps to prevent them from intimidating the others.

The rest, the whites and grays, were subjected to a vast ray education program. They were required to attend classes where they were taught English, American history, and the basics of democratic government. They were given camprun newspapers like the famous duff the call which was edited by anti-Nazi Puse and promoted democratic ideals.

Most critically as the war ended they were sat down in makeshift theaters and forced to watch the first uncensored harrowing news reels from the liberated concentration camps at Dau Buchananwald and Bergen Bellson. This was the moment of truth. Though many initially shouted propaganda, the sheer, undeniable, horrific evidence began the long, painful, and necessary process of unlearning the monstrous lies they had fought and died for.

The re-education was the theory, but the practice was the labor program. The war had pulled millions of American men off the farms, and the nation faced a critical labor shortage. Crops were rotting in the fields. The government made a pragmatic decision. The po would work. This was not slave labor. It was paid, organized, and vital.

The US government was paid by the farmers and from that the Ps were paid 80 cents a day in Camp Script, which they could use at the Camp PXER store. They bought magazines, Coca-Cola, cigarettes, and even beer. They were trucked out by the thousands, logging in the Pacific Northwest, harvesting cotton in Mississippi, picking tomatoes in Indiana, and cutting sugar cane in Louisiana.

This program was the single most transformative aspect of their captivity, as it took them out from behind the barbed wire and put them for the first time in direct daily contact with the average American. This daily contact with American civilians was a quiet revolution. The Pus expected to be met with curses, rocks, and hatred. After all, these were the fathers, brothers, and wives of the very men they had been trying to kill just months earlier.

Instead, they were met with a kind of baffled, pragmatic curiosity. The farmers who hired them were not ideologues. They were businessmen who needed a harvest. They learned quickly that a P who was treated with a basic level of decency worked harder than one who was screamed at. They would ask the P youth about their families, their homes, and their lives.

The Americans, in turn, expected to meet blonde, goostepping, fanatical monsters, but instead found homesick 19-year-old boys who miss their mothers. The enemy dissolved, replaced by a complex human reality. The most powerful, worlds shattering moments were the small, unthinkable acts of kindness. In many rural communities, it was common for the farmer’s wife to prepare a large midday meal for the whole work crew.

This included the Ps. For a German prisoner, this was beyond comprehension. It was a violation of all logic. He was the enemy, the underched subhuman according to his own doctrine. And yet he was being invited to wash his hands at the farmhouse pump and sit at the family dinner table. He sat, rigid with shock and suspicion, as the farmer’s wife and children, who were perhaps nervous but not hateful, passed him platters of roast chicken, bowls of mashed potatoes, and fresh baked pie.

This simple domestic act of breaking bread, of being treated not as a faceless monster, but as a hungry man did more to dismantle the Nazi ideology of hate than a thousand lectures or propaganda films. Over the months and years of this shared labor, the relationships deepened. The German PW became, in a strange way, part of the community. They were our Germans.

They saved harvests, repaired complex farm machinery, and used their European craftsmanship to make intricate wooden toys for the farmers children. In return, they were treated with a respect that astonished them. When the war finally ended, many farmers and canery owners wrote formal letters to the US government petitioning to be allowed to hire their P workers as full-time free farm hands.

In a few scattered, secret and forbidden instances, some PUS even fell in love with local American women. They had arrived as the enemy, but many had in their hearts already begun to change allegiances. As the PUS lived this strange, comfortable American life, they were haunted by a constant, chilling thought. They were the lucky ones.

They knew exactly what was happening to their comrades who had been captured by the Soviets. They knew about the brutal reality of the gullags. They knew about the starvation work camps in Siberia, where men were dying by the thousands from typhus, exposure, and overwork. They knew that their brothers and cousins on the Eastern front were not learning civics and playing soccer.

They were being marched to their deaths. Their soft captivity in America, which had at first been so confusing, was now understood for what it was, a sanctuary. It was not just a prison. It was a fortress protecting them from a far worse fate. In May 1945, the news they had all been expecting finally arrived over the camp radios.

Germany had unconditioned ah lee surrendered. The war in Europe was over. But inside the barbed wire fences of camp Hearn and Camp Alona, there were no celebrations. There was no joy. There was instead a cold, heavy wave of dread. Their golden cage. Their strange safe bubble was about to be opened. The war was over, which meant their time in this prosperous peaceful country was over.

They were going to be sent home. But the central terrifying question that gripped every man was what and where was home? The push factor, the terror of returning was confirmed by the letters that began to trickle in from Germany. As the mail service was slowly, painfully restored, they began to hear from their families.

The letters and the first photographs that accompanied them did not describe a homeland. They described an apocalypse. Home was stunned. Null, zero hour. Their cities, Berlin, Dresdon, Cologne, Hamburg, were not cities anymore. They were vast lunar landscapes of rubble and ruin.

They read letters from their wives and mothers. The Trummer frown or rubble women who were living in sellers like animals and spending their days clearing bricks by hand for a single extra ration card. There was no food, no fuel, no work, no law, and no hope. The America they were in was a paradise. The Germany they were being sent back to was hell.

The greatest fear of all, however, was not just the rubble. It was political. The Yaltta and Potsdam conferences had carved Germany up like a feast. For any P whose home was in the east, in Pomerania, Celiza or East Prussia, the new reality was horrifying. His home was no longer Germany. It was now part of Poland, or worse, under the direct, brutal, and vengeful control of the Soviet Red Army.

They knew that as former German soldiers, they would be seen as war criminals, as fascists, as traitors, they had a chilling and accurate fear that the Americans would simply load them onto ships, send them to a port in the east, and hand them directly over to the Soviets. They would be traded from a comfortable American camp straight to a Siberian goolag, a fate many considered far worse than death. And so, the begging began.

It started as a trickle and became a flood. It was one of the strangest, most ironic moments of the entire war. Thousands of German PWs wrote desperate, formal, heartfelt letters to their camp commandants, to the war department, to senators, and even to President Truman. They begged in English they had learned in camp to be allowed to stay in the United States.

They pledged their undying loyalty. They offered to work on the farms for free for the rest of their lives. Some even offered to join the US Army to go and fight the Japanese. They were terrified of returning to the ruin of their homeland and even more terrified of the new red masters of their old homes.

They had been captured by an enemy. But in that captivity, they had been shown a world of prosperity, decency, and democracy. And they did not want to leave. If you like this video and want to see more, don’t forget to like this video and subscribe for daily videos about our