“They’re Bigger Than We Expected” — German POW Women React to Their American Guards
1) The Platform at Camp Rustin (Louisiana, September 1944)
The train slowed under a sky rinsed with late-summer light, and nineteen German women pressed their faces to barred windows, trying to see what awaited. They had been fed a diet of images and lessons for years—Americans as soft, degenerate, weakened by luxury and racial chaos; a nation too pampered to be dangerous, propped up by machines because its people lacked discipline. They expected mean guards with cruel eyes, hunger as a policy, humiliation as a method.
.
.
.
Then the guards appeared on the platform.
They stood in neat formation—six men in pressed uniforms, boots shining, posture easy but authoritative. The first one, a red-haired sergeant, carried his clipboard like he meant it and moved like a man who knew his strength without needing to prove it. They were not just tall; they were broad-shouldered, thick-armed, solid through the chest and forearms, the kind of bodies labor builds and abundance sustains. Healthy. Confident. Calm.
“They’re bigger than we expected,” whispered Erica Schneider, twenty-four, a radio operator from Munich who had spent the past year transmitting weather codes from a concrete room that smelled of oil and fatigue.
A simple observation. And it cracked the shell of everything she thought she knew.
The Atlantic crossing had blurred into sickness and fear—three weeks from Casablanca to Norfolk aboard a converted troop transport that pitched through storms like a shaken toy. The nineteen women, all Luftwaffe auxiliaries captured when Allied forces overran communications stations across North Africa, spent most of the voyage in a converted storage hold below deck, breathing recycled air, listening to rumors. They had believed the films. They had believed their teachers. They had believed that America was a facade hiding decline.
But the train west contradicted every lesson. Cities with lights at night. Farms with full barns and fat cattle. Children in small towns playing under skies unmarked by sirens. Abundance spread across land like weather that never failed. No ruins. No ration lines. No visible strain. Erica pressed her forehead to the glass and felt her certainty begin to wobble. If Americans were soft and weak, how had they built all this? If they were starving and desperate, where was the evidence?
At Camp Rustin, the train stopped. Doors opened. Heat entered like an animal—humid and intimate. The red-haired sergeant stepped forward and spoke in accented but comprehensible German, deep voice careful, not harsh.
“Exit in single file,” he said. “Bring your belongings. No running, no talking. Follow instructions.”
The women descended gripping small bags that held everything they owned. On the platform, the sergeant’s physical presence was more than intimidation; it was proof. The difference between him and the malnourished German soldiers they remembered from the last months before capture made Erica feel small, almost childlike. Not because she was weak, but because he was strong in a way her world had stopped producing.
“Name?” he asked, eyes steady.
“Schneider. Erica Schneider.”
He marked a note, pointed to a dark-haired corporal. “Barracks assignment. Follow Corporal Henderson.”
They walked across the compound. Guard towers rose. Fences ran straight. Barracks stood in rows like an orderly thought. The men who moved in that space carried loose shoulders and unbothered faces; they weren’t performing cruelty, or even authority. They were simply doing a job in a place built to function. The casual confidence melted fear in odd ways. A uniform that did not threaten felt as shocking as mercy.
Inside Barracks 4—screens on windows, pot-bellied stove, twenty bunks along painted walls—Corporal Henderson made gestures and corrected his own German under his breath. Beds first come, first served. Bathroom shared. Lights out at twenty-two hundred; wakeup at zero six hundred. Mess hall opens at zero six thirty. He pointed, waited, and then left.
He did not lock the door.
“They aren’t even locking us in,” Greta Hoffman said, thirty-one, a communications officer from Tripoli, standing with her hand on the doorframe like she was trying to remember what doors meant. She stepped onto the small porch. A guard ten meters away glanced at her, said nothing, did nothing. She came back inside with astonishment carefully folded into her voice. “He just watched.”
“False security,” Lisel Braun muttered, twenty-eight, hard edges intact. “They’ll strike later.”
But Erica wasn’t sure. The red-haired sergeant’s calm felt like policy, not performance. These were men who had already won. Cruelty was unnecessary when victory had substance.
At dinner formation, an older guard with gray hair marched them to the mess hall. Inside, long tables held a mix of uniforms: American soldiers on one side, German male prisoners on another, and the nineteen women guided to a section near the kitchen. The serving line delivered mashed potatoes with gravy, roast beef, green beans, bread with butter, hot coffee, and a crisp apple. Steam carried smells that made Erica’s knees feel unreliable.
She stared at her tray. Her lips shaped silent disbelief. In Germany, rationing had become hunger disguised as policy—watery soup and black bread, meat once a week if luck helped. Here, enemy women stood with plates that looked like holiday meals from better years.
Greta took a bite of potato. Tears slid down before she could stop them. “It’s real,” she whispered.
Erica ate methodically, trying not to cry for reasons she didn’t fully understand. Each bite did more than feed her; it dismantled a narrative. Across the room, American soldiers ate the same food, laughed at small jokes, ignored prisoners in the way people ignore coworkers during lunch—without hostility, without theatrical indifference. Normality exuded power more effectively than threat.
“How did we lose to these people?” Anna Ko murmured, nineteen, voice trembling.
The answer arrived before anyone spoke. They had been fighting an opponent with vast industrial capacity, transportation that worked, farms that produced, and citizens who ate. Germany had been starving since 1943. America was serving roast beef to enemy captives.
Disparity could be measured in plates as well as maps.
2) Discipline Without Cruelty
Routine settled in three days. Wake at six. Breakfast at six-thirty. Work assignments after roll. The women were slotted into kitchens, laundry, grounds, administration. Erica went to administration under the red-haired sergeant, now identified as Sergeant Marcus Riley—Nebraska-born, thirty-two, languages competent, rules memorized, patient enough to explain twice, strict enough to stop mistakes once.
“You’ll organize personnel files,” he said on her first morning, gesturing toward cabinets lined by alphabet. “Check for completeness. Identification, capture report, medical exam, work assignment. Flag anything missing.”
He demonstrated, no wasted movement, no warmed-over condescension. Then he left her to work.
Erica learned what defeat looked like on paper. Files of men captured across North Africa and Italy. Reports written by Americans in precise, unremarkable tones that revealed fact without lacing it with humiliation. Notes that made her wince: “Prisoner expressed shock at food quality; stated American rations exceeded German provisions even in peacetime.” “Prisoner asked if fresh fruit marked a special occasion; informed it was standard.”
Over and over, paper spoke the same sentence: propaganda had lied; reality contradicted.
At lunch, Riley ate at his desk, a sandwich disappearing in hands that made objects look small. He moved easily despite his size; confidence lived in his posture without turning into arrogance.
“You have questions,” he said, not looking up.
Erica paused mid-file, startled at being read so cleanly. “Sir… How are you all… so healthy? You’re at war. Shouldn’t your country be rationing? Shouldn’t you be thin?”
“America produces more food than we can eat,” Riley replied, meeting her eyes directly. “Our farms cover areas larger than many European nations. Even at war, we have surplus.”
“But the propaganda said—”
“Propaganda exists to make you feel superior,” he interrupted. “If you’d known the truth—that America can field millions of well-fed, well-equipped soldiers while feeding prisoners roast beef—you might have doubted victory before you started marching.”
Erica felt something inside her crack along a seam she hadn’t known existed. “We never had a chance, did we?”
Riley didn’t rush his answer. “No,” he said at last, gesturing vaguely toward the window, toward the continent that underwrote everything. “Not against this. But that doesn’t make you less human. It doesn’t mean you don’t deserve decent treatment. You’re people caught up in something bigger than yourselves.”
Kindness from a victorious soldier had a way of warming and wounding at the same time.
Letters began to arrive in December, four months old, opened and resealed, carrying hunger in ink.
Dearest Erica, Hamburg was bombed again. We lost the house. We live with Aunt Gerta outside the city. Food is potatoes and cabbage. I have lost fifteen kilos. Your father looks like a skeleton. We are alive. We thank God.
Erica folded the letter and placed it in the wooden box under her bunk. She walked out into cold air and stood under a sky thick with stars that felt too generous for the sorrow on earth. Somewhere beyond the trees, American jazz floated in the night—melody layered like a kind of mathematics that made room for feeling.
Riley passed by, paused when he saw her.
“You all right, Schneider?”
“My parents are starving,” she said. “My city is ruins. And I am warm, fed, safe.” She met his eyes. “How is that fair?”
“It isn’t,” he said. “War’s ledger doesn’t balance. You’re living the consequences of decisions made by men you never voted for. Your parents are living them too. It’s all profoundly unfair.”
“You treat us well,” Erica said. “Why?”
“Because your government was wrong doesn’t mean we have to be,” Riley answered simply. “Because we’re trying to build a world where wars end, people go home, and life rebuilds. You can’t do that if you dehumanize the people you fought. You can’t build peace out of vengeance.”
He hesitated, then said the thing he did not owe her: “My brother died at Normandy. Your country did that. You didn’t. Should I hate you? Starve you? Would that bring him back or make me a better man?”
Erica had no answer that improved the conversation. Riley nodded toward the barracks. “It’s cold. Get some sleep.”
She went inside, lay awake, and counted facts like stars.
Christmas arrived with paper chains and a pine tree cut from the forest. The Red Cross delivered packages—chocolate, good soap, playing cards, writing paper, a small German book. Poetry. Rilke. Erica ran her fingers over the cover and felt like a person with a present rather than a problem on a list. A service was held—hymns in German, prayers for peace from a Lutheran chaplain with Wisconsin vowels. American soldiers stood with rifles at rest, faces neutral. When Silent Night began, three hundred voices rose at once, stitches in the same cloth.
Afterward, Riley spoke quietly as the women filed out. “My mother cries whenever she sings that,” he said. “Says it reminds her there’s light even when you can’t see it.”
“Does she know you’re here?” Erica asked. “With us?”
“She knows I’m doing my duty. That’s enough for her.”
“What is your duty?” she pressed. “To follow orders?”
“My duty is to remember you’re human,” he said. “To remember you have mothers who worry and homes you want. To remember that treating you decently isn’t weakness; it’s strength.”
He walked away before she could thank him or argue with him or tell him how his words had become a new kind of law in her life.
3) The Admission No One Wants to Make
January brought news that felt like weather and fate combined—the Ardennes failed, the Soviets advanced, cities fell. A system that had claimed eternity began to look mortal. Erica filed documents, the same careful motions across new names, and tried not to wonder where each man’s mother thought he was.
One afternoon, Riley called her in. He looked tired in a way that was not anger. Paper rimmed his desk like small walls.
“I’ve reviewed your file,” he said. “Radio operator. Meteorology. Low-level classification. No evidence of direct participation in combat planning or… other activities.”
They both knew what he meant by other activities—the camps, the photographs, the reports that drifted into the compound like poison in water. Erica felt panic climb up her throat.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I swear.”
“I believe you,” Riley replied, not to comfort but because it was true. “Most people didn’t know or didn’t want to know. There’s a difference, but it’s smaller than we wish.”
He folded his hands. “When repatriation begins—and it will—you’ll likely be cleared quickly. Low threat. No evidence of crimes. You’ll go home.”
“Home,” Erica said, the word hollow enough to echo. “To rubble and hunger. To an occupied Germany where everything we knew has been replaced.”
“Yes,” he said. “Because that’s what rebuilding looks like. It isn’t glorious. It’s work.”
“I don’t want to leave,” she admitted suddenly, the sentence escaping before she could manage it. “Here I’m safe. I have food. I have work. I don’t have to see what Germany has become. I don’t have to face what we did.”
Riley’s expression hardened—not cruel, but indignant in a way that honored truth.
“You don’t get to hide,” he said. “You don’t get to stay comfortable in an American camp while your country rebuilds without you. You were part of what Germany was. Now you need to be part of what it becomes.”
“I’m just one person,” Erica protested. “What difference can I make?”
“The same difference anyone makes,” Riley said. “You can choose decency. You can treat people well. You can refuse the ideology that brought you to this. Countries change one person at a time.”
He stood. “Back to work, Schneider. And start preparing yourself. You won’t be here forever.”
April brought warmer air and sunsets that painted pine needles with amber edges. Erica sat under a live oak and watched the sky do its old tricks. Riley arrived with two mugs of coffee, handed one over, joined her on a bench.
“War’s almost over,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’ll go home soon.”
“Yes.”
Silence did its useful work. Then Erica asked the question that had grown inside her like a thorn.
“Did you hate us when we arrived?” she said. “Did you look at us and think, ‘Enemy. My brother is dead because of them’?”
“No,” he said after a beat. “I looked at you and saw scared women far from home who probably didn’t want this war any more than I did.”
“But we took part,” she insisted. “We served. We enabled.”
“So did millions of ordinary Germans,” he said. “Paying taxes, obeying orders, keeping their heads down. You are not unique in your guilt. That’s almost the worst part—how ordinary it was.”
“How do I live with that?” she whispered.
“You admit it,” he said. “You do better. You build institutions that prevent repetition. That’s all any of us can do.”
He finished his coffee, stood, looked down at her with a steadiness that felt like a gift. “When you go home—and you will—remember this place. Remember that your enemies fed you and treated you fairly and sent you back to rebuild. Remember that we believed strength didn’t require cruelty. Carry that.”
4) Surrender and Waiting
May 8th, 1945. The radio crackled with words that had waited too long. Germany surrendered. American soldiers smiled and clasped hands and shouted in a restrained way, joy moderated by awareness of the grief in other hearts. The women in Barracks 4 sat in small groups and tried not to break.
Erica thought about the propaganda posters. Weak Americans. Inferior Americans. Decadent Americans. She thought about the red-haired sergeant who towered in ways that were physical and moral at once. She thought about plates of food and paperwork not laced with ridicule. She thought about losing not because Germans were fated to fail, but because Germany had built an unsustainable ideology while America had built a sustainable logistics.
That evening, there was no celebration in the mess hall. Dinner was dinner. Roll call was roll call. Lights-out was lights-out. The guards held their joy like men who could carry joy without dropping respect.
“Are you okay?” Riley asked Erica near the cabinet where she filed end-of-day reports.
“I don’t know,” she said. “My country lost everything. I am relieved it’s over. Does that make me a traitor?”
“It makes you human,” he said. “Tired of war. Ready for work.”
“When will we go home?”
“Couple months,” he said. “Transportation, coordination, processing. Soon.”
“One more thing,” he added. “When you see how bad it is, when it feels impossible, remember that ruin is not permanent. We rebuilt after our civil war. So can you.”
“Did this war change you?” she asked.
He smiled in a way that did not dismiss the question. “I learned enemies are just people in different uniforms. I learned strength without compassion is brutality. I learned winning means nothing if you become what you fought. So… yes.”
5) The Goodbye Handshake
Repatriation orders arrived in July. The women packed their small belongings—a poetry book, letters, a photograph given by an American guard “so you remember we were just people,” a bar of soap worn to a thin oval from careful use. The night before departure, they gathered in Barracks 4 and talked about home in sentences that felt like bridge planks laid across water they hoped would hold.
Erica walked outside into humid darkness. Cicadas sang. A cloud pulsed with distant lightning. Riley stood near the barracks smoking a cigarette that glowed at its tip like a tiny beacon.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.
“No.”
He offered the cigarette. She took it, coughed, tried again.
“I want to thank you,” she said. “For treating us like people. For being…”
She searched for a phrase larger than the one she had. Bigger than necessary.
Riley smiled. “We’re all bigger than we need to be. The point is how we use our size—cruelty or kindness.”
“You chose kindness.”
“We chose to act like decent people,” he corrected gently. “Even toward enemies. That’s not mercy. That’s civilization.”
They listened to the frogs and the wind and the small sounds that make night a place rather than a time.
“What will you remember about us?” Erica asked.
“That you were brave,” he said. “That you survived the collapse of your certainty without breaking. That you faced the truth and still stood up.”
“And what should I remember about you?”
“That we were just soldiers doing a job,” he said. “That we tried to do it honorably. That we believed treating prisoners well was a form of strength.”
He paused, then added a sentence she would carry like a coin she touched for reassurance. “And that we were bigger than you expected. In all the ways that mattered.”
Dawn arrived gray and damp. The women assembled with their bags. Guards formed a loose perimeter that guided without coercion. As each woman climbed into the truck, Riley shook their hands—formal, right, the way decent endings should begin. When Erica reached him, he held her hand a moment longer.
“Good luck, Schneider,” he said. “Rebuild well.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. For everything.”
She took a seat by the window. The engine started. The truck moved. Camp Rustin receded—barracks, mess hall, administration building, guard tower. Pine trees. Sky. The abundance that had dismantled lies with simple presence.
“I don’t want to go back,” Greta whispered beside her, crying quietly. “I don’t want to see what Germany is.”
“Neither do I,” Erica said. “But we’ll go. We’ll fix what we can. We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
She looked out at farms with full barns and fat cattle, at towns with lights even in daytime, at a landscape that proved a point without speaking. Propaganda had promised weakness. Reality had delivered strength with room for mercy.
6) Rubble, Work, Letters
Erica returned to Germany in August 1945. Hamburg was worse than imagination: blocks of ruins, cellars repurposed as homes, hunger reshaped as routine. Her parents were alive, skeletal, aged past their calendars. She worked: shovel and wheelbarrow, salvage and repair, the kind of labor that remakes both streets and souls. She also worked on herself—guilt faced, shame acknowledged, complicity named without drowning.
She married in 1948, a man named Thomas who had been a prisoner in England and had learned similar lessons about kindness from enemies. They had three children. They told them about the war without glory, as warning, as education. “We were wrong,” she said plainly. “And our enemies chose decency. That matters.”
In 1965, a letter arrived from America. Marcus Riley, now retired, had found her through the Red Cross. Dear Mrs. Schneider, I hope you are well in rebuilt Germany. I think often of the women from Camp Rustin and hope you carried forward what we tried to show: that even enemies can be decent, that mercy matters, that we are all just people trying to survive circumstances beyond our control. Best wishes, Marcus.
She wrote back. They exchanged letters for years—holiday greetings, family photographs, short paragraphs that made a bridge between two lives.
In 1988, she visited America as a free woman. Nebraska welcomed with big sky and straight horizons. On a porch, over coffee, Riley sat across from her with grandchildren’s pictures on the table like proof of a future.
“You were bigger than we expected,” she said, smiling.
“And you were stronger than you knew,” he replied. “You rebuilt. You raised children who won’t repeat what was done. That’s everything.”
7) What Outlasts War
Erica Schneider died in 2003 at eighty-three. Among her possessions, her children found the Rilke volume stamped Camp Rustin, 1944, a stack of letters from Marcus Riley spanning five decades, and a photograph taken in July 1945: nineteen German women flanked by six American guards. The disparity was visible even in a still frame—guards broader, taller, healthier; women thinner, faces worn. Yet the expressions mattered more than bone and muscle. The guards looked professional, serious, not cruel. The women looked not terrified, but resigned, accepting, almost peaceful.
At her funeral, her daughter read from a letter Erica had written in 1990.
I think often about the first moment we saw your guards on the platform. You were larger than propaganda had prepared us for—physically, morally, psychologically. You had the power to hurt us and chose kindness. You had victory and chose mercy. That lesson shaped everything that came after. Germany rebuilt because people like me carried home the knowledge that strength does not require cruelty. Thank you for being bigger than you needed to be.
Historians later studied preserved records from Camp Rustin—guard logs, prisoner files, photographs. They noted what Erica had realized intuitively: the physical disparity was undeniable proof that propaganda had lied about American weakness. But the deeper force wasn’t size. It was choice. In camp after camp, across a continent, American soldiers made daily decisions to treat prisoners fairly, feed them well, enforce rules without humiliation, and send them home to rebuild.
That policy did more than reflect a nation’s strength. It multiplied it.
Because strength that can afford mercy becomes a story. And stories travel farther than armies ever did, carried in letters and memories and children’s bedtime conversations. They become the fiber that holds two nations together after a defeat so complete it could have poisoned both.
They were bigger than expected—at first literally, then in every way that mattered.
And that made all the difference.
