“The Cold Didn’t Kill Us”: How Canadian Kindness and 2,800 Calories a Day Shattered the Nazi Ideology of 34,000 German POWs
LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA — In the dead of winter in 1940, a train rattled across the vast, frozen expanse of the Canadian prairie. Inside, hundreds of German men stared out at the passing landscape with a mixture of awe and terror. They were pilots plucked from the English Channel, U-boat crews pulled from the freezing Atlantic, and soldiers captured in the deserts of North Africa. Now, they were prisoners of war, transported to the far side of the world.
They had been warned what to expect. Their officers and the Nazi propaganda machine had been clear: Canada was a frozen wasteland, a primitive colonial outpost where the winter winds peeled skin from bone and men were left to freeze into statues of ice. They arrived expecting a death sentence delivered by nature itself.
What they found instead was a lesson in humanity that would not only save their lives but dismantle their entire worldview.
This is the untold story of how Canada defeated the Third Reich not just with bullets and bombs, but with wool socks, roast beef, and an overwhelming decency that turned thousands of sworn enemies into lifelong citizens.
The Myth of the Frozen Wasteland
When the first German POWs arrived at camps like Camp 133 in Lethbridge, Alberta, or Camp 30 in Bowmanville, Ontario, they were bracing for the end. The temperature gauges read -30°C, plunging to -40°C with the wind chill. To European men accustomed to the damp but milder winters of Germany, this was an alien, lethal cold.
“They huddled in their barracks, wearing their thin military coats, waiting for the inevitable,” says a historian specializing in Canadian internment camps. “They truly believed the Canadians would simply leave them to the elements.”
But the Canadians had a different plan. The guards, many of them veterans of the First World War or men too old for overseas service, didn’t see monsters to be tortured; they saw men who didn’t know how to dress for the weather.
The “torture” began with a delivery of boxes. Inside weren’t instruments of pain, but survival gear: thick wool socks (three pairs per man), fur-lined mittens, heavy “mackinaw” coats, and the iconic Canadian “toque”—a wool hat that could be pulled down over the ears.
Local farmers and their families arrived at the camps, not to jeer, but to teach. A farmer’s wife demonstrated the art of layering clothes to trap heat. Her teenage daughter showed hardened Wehrmacht soldiers how to stomp snow off their boots to prevent dampness and frostbite.
“These were survival secrets to the Germans,” explains the historian. “To Canadians, it was just common sense. You don’t let a man freeze, no matter who he is.”
The 2,800-Calorie Shock
If the clothing was a surprise, the food was a revelation. In 1940s Europe, rationing was already biting hard. Butter was a luxury; real coffee was a memory. The German soldiers arrived expecting gruel and stale bread.
Instead, they walked into mess halls that smelled of bacon.
Breakfast at 7:00 AM consisted of hot porridge with brown sugar, four strips of crispy bacon, fresh bread baked that morning, real butter, and coffee with milk. Lunch was beef stew with huge chunks of meat. Dinner brought roast pork, chicken, fresh vegetables from root cellars, and desserts like apple pie and raisin pudding.
One U-boat officer, Horst Liebeck, wrote in his diary in disbelief: “I am eating better here as a prisoner than the officers are eating in Berlin.”
He calculated his intake at 2,800 calories a day. It was a staggering amount of food, provided by a nation that had mobilized its entire agricultural sector for the war effort.
“They couldn’t understand it,” says a former guard in a recorded oral history. “They kept asking why we were feeding them so well. We told them, ‘There’s plenty of food. Why would we starve you?’ It completely confused them.”
The Blizzard That Changed Minds
The material abundance of Canada—the refrigerated trucks delivering fresh milk, the farmers with three tractors when a German village shared one—chipped away at the Nazi myth of Aryan superiority. If the Germans were the “master race,” why were the Canadians so much more prosperous?
But it was the acts of personal risk that truly broke the ideological conditioning.
In February 1943, a massive blizzard struck Camp 133 in Alberta. Visibility dropped to zero, and snowdrifts buried the roads. The camp was cut off from its supply lines. Breakfast and lunch were cancelled. The prisoners, including a young Hitler Youth leader named Klaus Herman, watched the storm from their windows, resigned to hunger.
Then, they saw lights in the distance.
A convoy of trucks from the local town was smashing through the drifts. Civilians—farmers, shopkeepers, teachers—had loaded their vehicles with pots of hot soup and fresh bread. They risked their lives, driving through whiteout conditions, to ensure that the enemy prisoners didn’t go hungry.
Herman stood at the window, watching these “enemies” carry food through the gale. That night, he wrote in his journal: “I understood for the first time that strength is not proved by crushing the weak. It is proved by protecting them when no one would blame you for abandoning them.”
It was the moment the Nazi lie collapsed. Real strength, Herman realized, wasn’t cruelty. It was the capacity to be kind when you didn’t have to be.
University Behind Barbed Wire
The Canadian government didn’t just feed the prisoners’ bodies; they fed their minds. Camps like Bowmanville became known as “Camp University.” The government shipped in 1,200 textbooks. Prisoners who had been professors before the war organized classes in engineering, languages, math, and philosophy. They could even earn credits from Canadian universities.
Men who had spent years being indoctrinated with hate were suddenly reading banned books and discussing philosophy. They learned that cooperation was a survival skill.
“The guards taught them that you survive a winter by helping your neighbor bank snow against their house,” says the historian. “You survive by sharing knowledge. It was the exact opposite of the ‘every man for himself’ mentality of fascism.”
The Hunger Winter and the Return
The war ended in 1945, but the story didn’t. The prisoners were repatriated to a Germany that had ceased to exist. Cities like Hamburg and Dresden were rubble. The infrastructure was gone.
Ernst Bauer, a prisoner who had spent five years in Canada, stepped off the ship in Hamburg to the smell of ash and death. His family home was a pile of bricks. His parents were dead.
Then came the winter of 1946-47, the “Hunger Winter.” It was the coldest European winter in 50 years. There was no coal, no wood, and barely any food. People froze to death in their apartments.
Bauer survived only because of Canada. He taught his neighbors the layering techniques he learned in Alberta. He showed them how to insulate drafty ruins with snow. He shared his prized possession—a heavy Canadian wool coat—with an elderly woman, saving her life.
But survival wasn’t enough. Bauer, Herman, and thousands of others felt a pulling in their chests. They looked around at the broken, cynical remains of Europe and remembered the vast skies and the easy kindness of the prairies.
The Invasion in Reverse
In 1948, Canada opened its doors to immigration. Among the applicants were thousands of former German POWs.
It seemed insane to their families. Why would you move back to your prison?
“Canada wasn’t their prison,” explains the historian. “It was the place where they learned how to live.”
Over 6,000 former prisoners returned. They settled in the towns that had guarded them. They became farmers, teachers, and engineers.
Horst Liebeck returned to Halifax, designing safety systems for Canadian fishing boats. Klaus Herman became a history teacher in Lethbridge, near the site of his old camp. He spent decades teaching Canadian students that “true power isn’t found in cruelty; it’s found in driving through a blizzard to feed people who can’t repay you.”
Ernst Bauer bought a farm in Saskatchewan. He married, raised three children, and taught them to skate on the frozen ponds. He became a pillar of his community, the “enemy” who became a neighbor.
A Legacy of Decency
Today, the physical remains of the camps are mostly gone. The wooden barracks have rotted away or been torn down. But the legacy remains in the families of those 6,000 men who chose a new home.
They are a testament to a uniquely Canadian victory. The Allies won the war with tanks and artillery, but Canada won the peace with something far more potent. They proved that ideology is brittle, but a hot meal and a warm pair of socks are undeniable.
In the end, the German prisoners were right about one thing: The Canadian winter is deadly. But they learned that it is not the cold that defines a country, but the warmth of the people who live there. And that warmth was strong enough to melt the hate of a generation.
