“‘Is This Really Food?’: The Surprising Reaction of German Women POWs to American Hot Dogs!”
March 28th, 1945. The world outside Marburg, Germany, is a bleak tableau painted in shades of cold steel and churned earth. Inside the canvas-covered rear of an Opel Blitz truck, the air is thick with the smell of wet wool, diesel fumes, and an all-consuming fear. Nineteen-year-old Clara Heler huddles between two other female auxiliaries, her fingers numb and her stomach twisted into a tight, aching knot. For three days, the hunger has been a living thing inside her—a creature gnawing at her insides, sharpening her senses to a painful, useless edge.
The rhythmic jolting of the truck over the rutted road is the only constant in a universe that is rapidly disintegrating. The booming of distant artillery, once a terrifying symphony, is now just a dull, percussive backdrop to their retreat. Anelise, her friend from the communications bunker, shivers beside her, her face pale and smudged with dirt. “They say the Americans are across the land,” she whispers, her voice barely audible above the groan of the engine. “That they have tanks that move faster than our cars.”
Clara says nothing. She pulls her thin Luftwaffe-issued greatcoat tighter around her, the worn fabric doing little to stop the damp chill from seeping into her bones. She remembers the last meal they were given before the evacuation order came down—a ladle of watery turnip soup and a slice of bread so dark and dense it felt like a stone in her gut. That was yesterday. Or was it the day before? Time has begun to blur, marked only by the rising and falling intensity of hunger.
Her thoughts drift to her mother’s kitchen in Dresden, a memory that brings a physical pain, a phantom limb of warmth and safety. She can almost smell the Sunday roast, the rich gravy, the sharp sweetness of red cabbage. She squeezes her eyes shut, trying to force the image away. To remember such things now is a form of torture.
Suddenly, the truck lurches to a violent, screeching halt. The women are thrown against each other. Shouts erupt from the driver’s cabin—sharp and panicked. Outside, the world changes. The dull thunder of artillery is replaced by a sound that is immediate, terrifying, and mechanical. A clanking, grinding roar that seems to shake the very soil beneath them. Clara risks a peek through a slit in the canvas. Her breath catches in her throat.
Not fifty meters away, nosing through a break in the skeletal trees, is a monster: an American M4 Sherman tank. Its olive drab hull is plastered with mud, its long 75 mm gun traversing slowly, deliberately, like the head of some prehistoric reptile. The white star on its turret is a stark, alien symbol. More shapes emerge from the woods behind it—figures in unfamiliar helmets, crouching low, carrying rifles that look short and brutal. American GIs.
The back flap of the truck is ripped open. A grizzled Feldwebel, a man with the face of a cornered badger, screams at them, “Rouse! Rouse! Schnell! Out! Out!” Quickly, they tumble out into the cold, muddy air, their hands instinctively flying into the air. The American soldiers are shouting in English—a language that sounds harsh and barking to Clara’s ears.
One of them, a tall officer with a cold pistol in his hand, points toward a ditch by the side of the road. The surrender is a blur of humiliation. They are surged, their meager personal belongings tossed into the mud. Clara watches as a young GI empties Anelise’s pockets, finding only a worn photograph and a half-eaten, frozen apple core. He looks at the apple, then at Anelise’s gaunt face, and with a small, almost imperceptible shake of his head, he tosses it into the ditch. The waste of it—the casual disposal of food—sends a pang of despair through Clara that is sharper than her fear.
They are herded together, a pathetic collection of female auxiliaries, aging Volkssturm men, and a few exhausted Wehrmacht soldiers. They are prisoners. The war for them is over, but a new struggle is just beginning. As they are marched away from the smoldering truck, Clara’s eyes are fixed on the ground, watching the thick, churning mud. The hunger is still there, a cold, hard stone in the pit of her stomach. It is the only thing that feels real.
April 2nd, 1945.
A temporary POW enclosure near Reinberg. The sky is a sheet of lead, endlessly weeping a cold, miserable drizzle. The world has shrunk to a rectangle of mud and barbed wire. For five days, this has been Clara’s reality. The prisoner of war camp is not a camp at all. It’s a vast open field sectioned off by wire—a place the Americans call a temporary enclosure. There are no barracks, no beds, only the damp earth and a few swatches of scavenged canvas stretched between posts offering pathetic shelter to thousands of captured Germans.
The women are segregated in their own smaller compound, but the conditions are the same: mud is everywhere. It cakes their boots, stains the hems of their coats, and seems to work its way into everything—a constant gritty reminder of their debasement. Identity has been stripped away. Clara signals that she is no longer an auxiliary; she is just a number, a face in a sea of gray, hungry faces.
The days have fallen into a brutal, monotonous rhythm governed entirely by the stomach. In the morning, a lukewarm, bitter liquid the Americans call coffee is distributed. It is made from roasted barley or acorns—thin and foul—but it is hot, and for a few precious moments, the warmth in their hands is a comfort. The main meal arrives midday: a single ladle of soup, usually thin broth with a few floating pieces of turnip or potato peel. It’s never enough. It only serves to awaken the beast of hunger, to remind the body of what it is missing.
By evening, the gnawing emptiness is a physical pain that makes sleep nearly impossible. The women talk of little else but food. They trade memories like precious jewels. Anelise describes in painstaking detail the Linzer torte her grandmother used to bake for Christmas, her voice growing distant and dreamy. Another woman, a former Luftwaffe administrative clerk named Helga, speaks of bratwurst sizzling in a pan with fried onions, her listeners closing their eyes as if to inhale the phantom aroma. These stories are a dangerous comfort—a form of self-flagellation that leaves them feeling emptier than before. Clara remains mostly silent. Her memories of food are too sharp, too painful to share. They are a private treasure, a secret garden she fears will wither if exposed to this bleak reality.
The American guards are a remote presence. They patrol the perimeter, their faces impassive, their M1 Garand rifles held loosely but ready. They seem impossibly large and well-fed, their uniforms clean, their movements full of a casual energy that feels like an insult. You see them eating from cans, opening packages of crackers, smoking cigarettes down to the filter. They are inhabitants of a different universe—a universe of plenty that exists just on the other side of the wire. There is no overt cruelty, just a vast bureaucratic indifference. They are a problem to be managed, a logistical challenge of mouths to feed with the bare minimum required to keep them alive.
On the fifth day, something changes. A different kind of vehicle rumbles up to the gate of their enclosure. Not the usual water tanker or the truck with the soup cauldrons. This one is a GMC Deuce and a Half, its canvas cover rolled up. In the back, several GIs are moving around with a brisk, purposeful air. They are setting up folding tables, lifting large, steaming metal containers onto them. A strange, unfamiliar smell begins to drift on the damp air. It’s savory, slightly spicy—a scent that doesn’t belong in this world of mud and watery broth.
The women begin to stir, rising from their hunches, their conversations dying down. They watch, their eyes wide with a mixture of suspicion and desperate, flickering hope. What is this? What new ritual is about to unfold? The guards order them to form a line. The shuffling begins—a slow, tired procession of gray figures moving toward the gate, drawn by a scent they cannot name and a possibility they dare not believe in.
The line shuffles forward, a ragged column of gray-green wool and weary limbs. Each step is a small effort, the thick mud sucking at their worn boots with a wet, slopping sound. Clara finds herself pushed forward by the silent pressure of the women behind her, her heart beginning to beat a little faster. The smell is stronger now—a meaty, slightly salty aroma, completely alien. It isn’t the familiar smell of boiling potatoes or turnips. It’s something else—something processed and foreign.
From her place in the line, she can see the American soldiers working with an easy, practiced efficiency. They don’t shout. They don’t hurry the prisoners. They just perform their task. One GI, a young man with freckles and reddish hair, uses a pair of long metal tongs to lift something from a vat of steaming water. He places it into a soft, pale bread roll split down the middle. A second soldier, a burly corporal with a cigar clenched in his teeth, stands beside a large jar of yellow paste. With a quick flick of a knife, he smears some of the paste onto the object in the roll. Then he hands it to the woman at the front of the line.
She takes it with trembling hands, staring at it as if it were a religious artifact. She looks back at the soldier, then at the food, her expression a mask of pure confusion. She shuffles away, holding it carefully with both hands. Clara watches this exchange repeat a dozen times as she draws closer. A sausage in a bread roll—that is the only way her mind can categorize it. But it’s not like any sausage she has ever seen. German wurst is dense, thick, made of pork and veal and spices she can name. This is thinner, pinker, unnaturally uniform in shape.
The bread isn’t the dark, heavy rye she is used to, but something pale and fluffy, almost like cake. And the yellow paste? Mustard, perhaps, but it is a vibrant chemical yellow, not the earthy brown of German mustard. Everything about it is strange, manufactured, unreal.
