The American Camp doctor lifts the girl’s left arm and feels something wrong immediately. The bone underneath her pale skin is not solid. It shifts slightly under his fingertips like a branch rotted from the inside. She does not scream, does not pull away, just stares at the ceiling with eyes that have already seen too much.
The nurse beside him takes a half step back when the smell reaches her. faint but unmistakable, the sweet rod of infection that has been growing for months. The doctor writes one word on his clipboard in careful block letters, osteomiolitis. But that diagnosis is only the beginning of what this medical exam will reveal about the 19-year-old German prisoner of war who just arrived at the camp in upstate New York in the spring of 1945.
We are at Camp Upton, New York in April 1945. The war in Europe is collapsing and thousands of German prisoners of war are being processed through American camps every week. But today, something unusual happens at the intake barracks. A transport truck arrives from the processing station at Fort Dicks, New Jersey, carrying 32 prisoners.
31 of them are men. The 32nd is a girl who looks no older than 17, though her paperwork says she is 19. Her name is listed as Greta Mueller, captured in the Roar Pocket in Western Germany 3 weeks earlier. She wears a dirty Vermach auxiliary uniform two sizes too large. The sleeves rolled up past her elbows. The guards notice immediately that she holds her left arm close to her body, never letting it swing naturally.
When the intake officer asks her to extend both arms for inspection, she hesitates. Then she lifts her left arm slowly and the officer sees the swelling just above her wrist, a dark bulge pushing against the skin like something trying to break free. The intake officer calls for the camp medic immediately.
The medic is a corporal from Ohio who has seen plenty of wounded soldiers, but has never processed a female German prisoner of war before. He asks Greta in broken German if the arm hurts. She nods once, then says in clear English that it has hurt for a long time. The medic writes a note and sends her directly to the camp hospital, bypassing the standard quarantine barracks.
Something about the way she holds that arm tells him this is not a fresh injury. We are now inside the camp hospital, a long wooden building with 20 beds and a small examination room at the far end. The camp doctor, Captain Raymond Howell, is a surgeon from Boston who served in North Africa before being reassigned to prisoner of war medical duty in the states.
He has treated shrapnel wounds, frostbite, dysentery, and tuberculosis in the past 2 years. But when Greta Mueller is brought into his examination room by two female nurses borrowed from the nearby civilian hospital, he knows immediately that this case is different. Captain Howell asks Greta to sit on the exam table and remove the jacket of her uniform.
She does so without protest, revealing a thin cotton shirt underneath that is stained yellow under the left arm. The smell is stronger now, a sickly sweet odor that fills the small room. One of the nurses opens a window without being asked. Howell gently rolls up the sleeve of Greta’s shirt and examines the swelling.
The skin over her forearm is discolored, modeled red and purple, stretched tight over the bulge. When he presses lightly near the wrist, a small amount of fluid seeps from a pin prick opening in the skin. Howell steps back and asks Greta how long the arm has been like this. She answers in English again, her accent thick, but her words precise.
6 months, maybe seven. It started as a bruise after a fall. Then it became hard. Then it began to smell. Howell exchanges a glance with the nurses. 6 months of untreated bone infection means the damage inside could be catastrophic. He orders an X-ray immediately. Even though the portable machine at the camp is old and the images often come out blurry, he needs to see what is happening inside that arm.
If you are enjoying this story and want more untold accounts from World War II prisoners of war, make sure to subscribe to the channel. We are bringing you stories that most history books never covered. We are now in the cramped radiography room next to the hospital ward. 20 minutes after the initial exam, the X-ray technician, a medic with three months of training, positions Greta’s arm on the film plate and steps behind the lead screen.
The machine hums and clicks. Greta does not move. Her face remains blank as if she has learned to shut down all emotion to survive what comes next. The technician develops the film in the dark room and brings it out still wet, clipping it to the light box on the wall. Captain Howell studies the X-ray in silence for a full minute.
The nurses lean in to see. What they see is not a clean fracture or a simple infection. The bone in Greta’s forearm, the radius, has been eaten away from the inside. where there should be solid bone. There are pockets of shadow hollow spaces where the infection has destroyed the marrow and the structure. The cortex, the outer shell of the bone, is paper thin in some places and completely gone in others.
It looks like termite damage in wood, channels and voids spreading through what should be solid. But that is not what shocks Captain Howell. What shocks him is the pattern of the damage. Osteomiolitis, bone infection, usually starts at one site and spreads outward in a predictable way. This infection has multiple sites scattered along the length of the radius like someone planted seeds of rot at different points.
Howell has seen this pattern only once before in a case study from a medical journal about untreated war injuries. The pattern suggests the infection started not from a single injury, but from repeated trauma to the same bone over an extended period. He looks at Greta and asks her a question he already knows she will not want to answer.
What kind of work were you doing before you were captured? We are still in the hospital examination room, but now the mood has shifted. Captain Howell is no longer just a doctor treating an infection. He is trying to understand how a 19-year-old girl ended up with an injury pattern that suggests months of forced labor under conditions so brutal that her body began to break down from the inside.
Greta sits on the exam table with her arm resting on a towel, staring at the floor. Howell repeats the question, “What kind of work were you doing?” Greta does not answer immediately. She looks at the two nurses, then at the door, as if calculating whether she can leave. Finally, she speaks. Factory work, building parts for airplanes.
Howell asks, “What kind of parts?” She says, “Small components, metal fittings that had to be hammered and filed by hand.” Howell asks if she was working in a German military factory. Greta shakes her head. She says she was working in a converted textile mill near Essen in the rur industrial region.
The work was 12 hours a day, sometimes 14. The tools were heavy. The benches were hard. If you slowed down, the supervisors hit you. Howell writes this down carefully. He asks if Greta was a volunteer worker or if she was conscripted. Greta laughs. A short bitter sound. She says, “No one volunteers for that kind of work.
She was assigned to the factory in late 1943 when she turned 17. Her family needed the ration cards that came with factory employment. Her father had been killed on the Eastern Front. Her mother was sick. Her younger brother was too young to work. So, Greta went to the factory and she stayed there for 16 months until the British and American forces overran the Roar Pocket in March 1945.
Howell asks about the injury again. He needs to understand the timeline. Greta explains that she fell on the factory floor in October 1944. She landed hard on her left arm and the pain was immediate. She reported it to the factory nurse who gave her a bandage and told her to return to work. There was no X-ray, no rest, no treatment.
Within two weeks, the bruise turned into a hard lump. Within a month, the lump began to throb. By January 1945, the arm was swollen and leaking fluid, but the factory kept running and Greta kept working because stopping meant losing the ration cards, and losing the ration cards meant her family would starve.
We are now 45 minutes after the initial exam, and Captain Howell has ordered blood tests and a more detailed physical examination. What he discovers next is what truly shocks the medical staff at Camp Upton. The bone infection in Greta’s left arm is not the only injury she is carrying. When the nurses help her remove her shirt completely for the full examination, they see bruises up and down her ribs, some old and faded yellow, others newer and still purple.
Her back has a series of scars, thin and straight, the kind left by a belt or a rod. Her right hand has two fingers that do not bend properly, the result of an untreated fracture that healed crooked. Captain Howell asks Greta to explain each injury. She does so in the same flat tone, as if reciting a grocery list.
The rib bruises came from being shoved against the workbench by a supervisor who thought she was working too slowly. The scars on her back came from her stepfather who beat her when she was younger. The broken fingers came from a machine accident at the factory in December 1944. No one took her to a doctor for any of these injuries.
In wartime Germany, especially in the final chaotic year, medical care was reserved for soldiers and essential personnel. A 19-year-old factory girl with a broken bone was told to wrap it and keep working. Howell documents every injury with photographs and detailed notes. He knows this case will be reviewed by higher command, possibly even used in war crimes documentation.
The pattern of injuries on Greta Mueller’s body tells a story of systematic neglect and abuse, not just by the factory supervisors, but by a system that treated young women as expendable labor. Howell asks Greta if she knows how bad the infection in her arm has become. She nods. She says she thought it would kill her before the war ended.
She says part of her wished it would. Let us know in the comments where you are watching this from. Are you in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, or somewhere else? We would love to know who is keeping these stories alive. Captain Howell closes his notebook and makes a decision. This girl needs surgery and she needs it soon or she will lose the arm.
We are now 2 hours after Greta’s arrival at Camp Upton and Captain Howell is in the camp commander’s office explaining why he needs to perform major surgery on a German prisoner of war. The commander, Colonel Martin Shaw, is skeptical. He points out that resources are limited, that the war is still ongoing, and that German prisoners are supposed to receive basic care, not advanced surgical procedures.
Howell counters that the Geneva Conventions require prisoner of war medical care to meet the same standard as care for the capttor nation’s own troops. More importantly, he argues this is a humanitarian case. The girl is 19 years old and the infection will kill her if it is not treated. Colonel Shaw asks if the arm can be saved.
Howell admits he does not know. The X-ray shows extensive bone damage and the infection has been untreated for so long that it may have spread into the surrounding tissue. The best case scenario is that Howell can remove the infected bone, clean out the wound, and pack it with sulfa drugs to stop the infection from spreading. The worst case scenario is that the infection has already reached the bloodstream, in which case amputation may be the only option to save her life.
Shaw considers this for a long moment, then gives his approval. He tells Howell to proceed with the surgery, but to document everything. If questions are asked later, Shaw wants a full medical justification on record. Howell returns to the hospital and tells Greta what is going to happen.
He explains that the surgery will be painful, that the recovery will take weeks, and that there is no guarantee her arm can be saved. Greta listens without expression. Then she asks a question that catches Howell offguard. She asks if she will be sent back to Germany after the surgery. Howell tells her honestly that he does not know.
The war is almost over and prisoner repatriation is being planned, but the details are still unclear. Greta nods slowly. She says that is good enough. She says she would rather lose the arm in an American hospital than die of infection in a German factory. That answer tells Howell everything he needs to know about what this girl has survived.
We are now in the camp hospital operating room, a converted storage room with a surgical table, overhead lights, and basic equipment. The surgery is scheduled for the following morning, April 12th, 1945. Captain Howell has recruited a second doctor from the nearby civilian hospital to assist along with two experienced surgical nurses.
Greta is brought in at 8 in the morning, her left arm freshly bandaged. She is given a spinal anesthetic because the camp does not have enough general anesthesia supplies for a non-critical case. She will be awake during the surgery, but she will not feel pain below the shoulder. Howell makes the first incision along the length of Greta’s forearm, following the line of the radius.
The skin parts cleanly, but underneath the tissue is a mess. The muscle is discolored, stre with yellow and gray, soaked with infection. The smell is overwhelming, and one of the nurses has to step outside for a moment to breathe. Howell uses forceps to pull back the muscle and expose the bone. What he sees confirms his worst fears.
The radius is not just infected, it is crumbling. When he touches it with a probe, small fragments of bone break away and float in the infected fluid. Howell begins the process of debriding the bone, cutting away all the dead and infected tissue. He removes nearly 4 in of the radius, leaving only the healthy bone at either end.
The wound is now a gaping trench in Greta’s arm, exposing tendons and blood vessels. Howell irrigates the wound with saline solution, then packs it with sulfa powder, an early antibiotic that can sometimes stop bone infections if used aggressively. He cannot close the wound completely because the infection needs to drain.
Instead, he stitches the skin loosely and places drainage tubes to carry away the fluid. The surgery takes 3 hours. When it is finished, Greta’s arm is wrapped in thick bandages and she is moved to a recovery bed in the hospital ward. If you are enjoying this story and want more untold accounts from World War II prisoners of war, make sure to subscribe to the channel.
We are bringing you stories that most history books never covered. Greta wakes from the spinal anesthetic 2 hours later. The first thing she does is try to move her left hand. The fingers twitch slightly. Howell watching from the foot of the bed allows himself a small moment of hope. If the hand still moves, the nerves are intact.
That means the arm might be saved. We are now one week after the surgery and Greta is still in the camp hospital. The infection has not spread, which is the first good sign. Her temperature, which was elevated before the surgery, has dropped to near normal. The drainage tubes are pulling thick yellow fluid from the wound, which means the infection is being flushed out.
Howell changes the dressings every day, inspecting the wound for signs of necrosis or sepsis. So far, the tissue is healing cleanly. The sulfa powder is working, but the recovery is not just physical. Greta is withdrawn, speaking only when spoken to, staring at the ceiling for hours at a time. The other patients in the hospital ward, all male German prisoners with various injuries and illnesses, avoid her.
Some of them whisper that she must have been a collaborator or a spy to be treated so well by the Americans. Greta ignores them. The nurses, especially the two borrowed from the civilian hospital, take a protective interest in her. They bring her extra food, books in German, and a radio so she can listen to music. Slowly over the course of two weeks, Greta begins to talk.
She tells the nurses about her family, about her father who died at Stalingrad, about her mother who succumbed to pneumonia in the winter of 1944, about her younger brother who was conscripted into the Vogerm, the last ditch German militia in the final weeks of the war. She does not know if he is alive.
She tells them about the factory, about the girls she worked with, some as young as 15, all of them exhausted and hungry and afraid. She tells them about the air raids, the nights spent in the basement shelter while Allied bombers pounded the roar, the mornings when they emerged to find whole streets gone. She tells them she thought the war would never end, that she would die in that factory with a hammer in her hand.
We are now 3 weeks after the surgery and Captain Howell is writing his final report on Greta Mueller’s case. As he compiles the medical data, he realizes that her story is not unique. It is part of a much larger pattern. By the end of World War II, more than 11 million people were working as forced laborers in Nazi Germany, including women and teenagers.
These laborers were assigned to factories, farms, construction sites, and mines, often under brutal conditions. Medical care for these workers was minimal or non-existent. Injuries were common, and infections like the one Greta suffered, were a leading cause of death among factory workers in the final year of the war. Howell notes in his report that osteomiolitis, the bone infection Greta developed, has a mortality rate of 30 to 40% if untreated in wartime conditions.
The fact that Greta survived for 6 months with an active bone infection is evidence of either extraordinary physical resilience or sheer luck. He also notes that the pattern of injuries on her body, the broken fingers, the rib bruises, the scars, suggests a level of workplace violence that would be considered criminal in any peacetime setting.
But in wartime Germany, especially in the chaos of 1944 and 1945, such violence was routine. The report also includes a section on the broader context of female prisoners of war in American camps. Greta is one of fewer than 200 female German prisoners held in the United States during World War II. Most of them were nurses, clerks, or auxiliary personnel captured in North Africa or Italy.
Very few were factory workers captured on German soil. Greta’s case is unusual, not just because of her injuries, but because of how she ended up in American custody. Most German women captured in the Roar Pocket were released quickly or transferred to British custody. Greta was sent to the United States because her injuries required medical care that could not be provided in the field.
We are now in late May 1945, and the war in Europe has officially ended. Germany has surrendered and the Allied powers are beginning the massive task of repatriating millions of prisoners of war. Greta is still at Camp Upton, her arm healing slowly but steadily. The bone infection is gone and the wound has closed.
She has regained most of the movement in her left hand, though her grip strength is weak and the arm tires easily. Captain Howell considers the surgery a success. Greta will never have full use of the arm, but she will keep it, and it will not kill her. But now a new question arises. Where will Greta go? The standard procedure is to repatriate prisoners of war to their home countries as quickly as possible.
But Greta has no home to return to. Her apartment in Essen was destroyed in an air raid. Her mother is dead. Her brother is missing and presumed dead. She has no other family. Returning to Germany means being released into a country that is shattered, occupied, and starving. Greta tells Captain Howell she does not want to go back.
She asks if there is any way she can stay in the United States. Howell brings the question to Colonel Shaw, who brings it to higher command. The answer comes back after two weeks of bureaucratic wrangling. Greta can apply for refugee status under a special program being set up for displaced persons, but the process will take months, possibly years.
In the meantime, she will be transferred to a civilian internment camp in Pennsylvania, where she will be held with other German nationals awaiting repatriation or resettlement. Howell delivers this news to Greta personally. She listens, nods, and thanks him. She says Pennsylvania is better than a factory in Essen. She says anything is better than that.
We are now in early June 1945 and Greta is preparing to leave Camp Upton. Her arm is strong enough for travel, though she still wears a brace to protect the healing bone. Captain Howell has written her a detailed medical file to accompany her, including X-rays, surgery notes, and a letter explaining that she will need follow-up care for at least another 6 months.
He also includes a personal note recommending that Greta be given priority consideration for refugee status based on her medical history and the circumstances of her injuries. Howell does not know if the note will make any difference, but he writes it anyway. On the day of her transfer, Greta says goodbye to the nurses who cared for her.
They have become something like friends, or at least familiar faces in a foreign world. One of the nurses gives Greta a small package wrapped in brown paper. Inside is a wool sweater, a bar of soap, and a photograph of the hospital staff standing in front of the building. Greta holds the photograph for a long time, staring at the faces, then tucks it into her pocket. She does not cry.
She has not cried once since arriving at Camp Upton, at least not where anyone could see. The transport truck takes Greta to the train station in the nearby town. From there, she will travel by rail to Pennsylvania, a journey of several hours. Howell watches the truck disappear down the camp road, then returns to the hospital.
He has other patients to see, other cases to document, but he will remember Greta Mueller for the rest of his life. Years later, when he writes his memoirs, he will devote an entire chapter to her case, calling it one of the most challenging and heartbreaking surgeries he performed during the war. He will wonder what happened to her, whether she made it back to Germany or found a new life in America.
He will never know the answer. We are now moving forward in time into the uncertain months and years after the war. The historical record on Greta Mueller becomes sparse after her transfer from Camp Upton. The civilian internment camp in Pennsylvania kept poor records, and many of those records were lost or destroyed in the decades that followed.
What we do know is that thousands of German nationals, including former prisoners of war, were held in internment camps across the United States while the government decided what to do with them. Some were repatriated to Germany. Others were allowed to stay and eventually became American citizens. A few simply disappeared into the post-war chaos, their fates unknown.
Greta’s case was complicated by her medical history. She could not return to manual labor which made her less useful in the reconstruction of Germany. But her refugee application was also not a priority because she was not Jewish, not a political dissident and not a scientist or intellectual whose skills the allies wanted to recruit.
She fell into a bureaucratic gray zone, neither urgent nor expendable. The best guess based on similar cases from the same period is that Greta spent at least a year in the Pennsylvania internment camp before being released, possibly with the help of a church sponsorship program that helped displaced persons find housing and work in American cities.
There is one tantalizing clue to Greta’s fate. In the archives of the hospital where Captain Howell worked after the war, there is a letter dated December 1947, written in careful English with a German accent evident in the phrasing. The letter thanks Howell for saving the writer’s arm and mentions that the writer is now working as a seamstress in a small town in upstate New York, not far from where Camp Upton once stood.
The letter is signed only with the initials G. M. The letter does not ask for anything, does not request help or money. It simply says thank you. Howell kept the letter in his files until his death, but he never replied. He said later he was not sure it was really from Greta, and he did not want to intrude on whatever life she had built for herself.
We are now stepping back to understand the significance of Greta Mueller’s story in the larger history of World War II. Female prisoners of war were a rarity in the European theater, especially on the Allied side. Most nations did not send women into combat roles, and the few women who were captured were usually nurses or civilian auxiliaries.
The Geneva Conventions required that female prisoners be held separately from male prisoners and be treated with special consideration. In practice, this meant that female prisoners of war often received better medical care and living conditions than their male counterparts. Not out of kindness, but out of a desire to avoid accusations of mistreatment.
Greta’s case highlights a different aspect of the war, the blurred line between combatants, forced laborers, and civilians. By 1945, millions of people in Germany were working in war related industries under compulsory labor laws. Were they soldiers? Were they civilians? Were they victims? The answer depended on who was asking and why.
When Greta was captured, she was classified as a prisoner of war because she was wearing a vermocked auxiliary uniform, even though she had never fired a weapon or served in a military unit. This classification probably saved her life because it meant she was entitled to medical care under the Geneva Conventions. If she had been classified as a civilian, she might have been left to die in a field hospital or simply released into the chaos of occupied Germany.
The story also raises questions about the ethics of wartime medical care. Captain Howell had limited resources and dozens of patients. Why did he choose to spend so much time and effort on one 19-year-old German girl? His own writings suggest he saw Greta as a victim rather than an enemy. Her injuries told a story of abuse and neglect that transcended national loyalty.
Treating her was not just a medical duty, but a moral one. Howell believed that if the allies claimed to be fighting for a better world, that world had to start with basic human decency, even toward those on the other side. We are now in the final section of this story, reflecting on what Greta Mueller’s experience teaches us about World War II and the human cost of total war.
The first lesson is that the war did not discriminate. It consumed soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old. Greta was 19 when her arm began to rot from the inside. She was 17 when she was sent to the factory. She was 15 when her father died on the Eastern Front. Her entire adolescence was shaped by violence, loss, and survival.
She is one story among millions, but her story is no less important for being common. The second lesson is that medical care is a form of power. Captain Howell had the power to save Greta’s arm or let it kill her. He chose to save it, and in doing so, he gave her a chance at a future beyond the war.
But thousands of other people in similar situations did not receive that care. They died of infections, of starvation, of neglect. The difference between life and death was often arbitrary, a matter of which camp you ended up in, which doctor saw you, which day you arrived. Greta was lucky. She knew it and it haunted her. The third lesson is that recovery from war is not just physical.
Greta’s arm healed, but the scars on her back, the broken fingers, the memories of the factory, those did not heal. She carried them for the rest of her life, however long that life was. The same is true for millions of survivors. The war ended in 1945, but its consequences echoed for decades. Some of those echoes are still audible today in the stories that get told and retold.
In the archives that get opened and closed, in the questions that never quite get answered. What happened to Greta Mueller? Did she build a new life? Did she find peace? We do not know. Maybe that is the point. Maybe the lesson is that some stories do not have endings, only interruptions.
