Sweet Tea in the Belly of the Beast: A German Auxiliary’s Journey from Propaganda to Manhattan
June 27th, 1944
The ruins of Cherbourg, France
The air still feels like it’s shaking, even though the shelling has stopped.
For days, the American naval guns had hammered Cherbourg until the stone itself seemed to scream. Now the thunder has fallen silent. In its place come new sounds: the low, guttural rumble of Sherman tank engines, the clatter of unfamiliar boots on shattered streets, and above it all the clipped, foreign cadence of English.
Nineteen-year-old Annelise V. stares at the scuffed toes of her boots, at the dust ground into the creases of the leather. Her world has shrunk to the rhythm of her own ragged breathing and the crush of bodies around her.
She is in the cellar of what used to be the harbor commandant’s office. What remains of the ceiling is pocked and cracked by near misses; chunks of masonry litter the floor. Around her, two dozen women huddle together, a cluster of gray uniforms with pale faces.
They are the “gray mice” of the Wehrmacht—Germany’s female auxiliaries. Not front-line troops, but secretaries, switchboard operators, flak helpers. The quiet gears of the machine.
Ursula, a stout flak gunner from Hamburg, still bears smudges of soot on her cheeks from the 20 mm guns she’d manned. Her knuckles whiten around an empty ration tin she clutches like a weapon. Seventeen-year-old Ela, clerk from the quartermaster’s office, has tear tracks cutting clean lines down her dirty face.
They had been told to fight to the last.
They had been told that capture meant a fate worse than death.
The propaganda films had shown them in obscene detail what American “barbarians” did to German women. The whispers in the bunkers—fed by bulletins from the Führer’s headquarters—had painted pictures of unimaginable torment, a promised future of violation and slow destruction.
Those stories are all they have left.
A heavy boot scrapes on the stone steps above.
The women flinch as one. Breath catches. Fingers clench.
A shadow cuts across the cellar opening.
Two American soldiers appear, helmets low over young faces smeared with dirt and exhaustion. M1 Garands hang loose in their hands, not quite careless, but not tight with murderous intent either. The patch on their sleeves marks them as from the U.S. 9th Infantry Division.
One— a corporal, maybe twenty at most—scans the group. His eyes move over them, counting, assessing. He says something quick to his partner in nasal English that rolls past Annelise’s understanding.
There is no demonic leer.
No sadistic glint.
Only bone-deep weariness and an air of professional habit.
He jerks his rifle a few inches, pointing toward the stairs.
“Raus. Out. Schnell.”
The German word sounds odd in his mouth, flattened and foreign.
One by one, the women stand. Thin gray coats are pulled tight around shoulders, a reflex of modesty that feels absurd in the ruined heat of a Normandy summer.
They climb.
Above, the world has ended.
Cherbourg, the vital port they had been ordered to hold “at all costs,” is nothing more than a skeleton. The sky hangs flat and gray over a city of broken teeth—walls sheared off, windows shattered, streets clogged with rubble and twisted metal. Crushed equipment lies everywhere: helmets, spent shells, abandoned rifles.
This, Annelise thinks, is what defeat looks like.
This is what it smells like.
They march through the ruins, a ragged column of gray in a sea of American olive drab. GIs pause to look, elbows on their rifles. Some whistle; some just watch with the vague curiosity of men who have seen too much in too little time.
There is no snarling hatred.
No mob of jeering victors.
The horror is quieter, more mundane: the female MP who searches them with firm, impersonal hands—not gentle, not cruel, simply thorough. The soldier at a folding table who records their names in a ledger with methodical strokes: Annelise V., Ursula R., Ela Schmidt.
Ink on paper.
They are no longer Helferinnen of the Reich.
They are prisoners.
Numbers.
Processing takes hours. They receive hard biscuits and tins of oddly salty meat. Ursula spits hers out with a curse about “American pig slop,” then, when hunger digs its claws in deeper, picks the meat up from the dirt and eats it without looking anyone in the eye.
The day drags itself into a cold, damp evening.
And then they march again—this time toward the harbor.
The uneven slap of waves against stone grows louder. The air changes, tinged more strongly with salt and oil.
When they see the ship, someone behind Annelise makes a choked sound.
Looming out of the twilight mist, the transport rises like a metal cliff. Its gray flanks carry scars from the sea. Painted on the bow: SS Edmund B. Alexander.
The vessel that will carry them away from everything they have ever known.
As the line shuffles toward the gangplank, dread pools heavy in Annelise’s stomach. The films, the whispered warnings, all converged on this moment: the voyage. The long, dark crossing where anything could happen and no one would ever know.
The gangplank sways under her boots—a narrow bridge between worlds. Behind her, the shattered continent. Ahead, a void filled by propaganda nightmares.
The steel wall of the ship rises beside her, blotting out the last of the sky. The groan of its hull and the deep hum of its engines make it feel alive, some huge animal inhaling them one by one.
American sailors, lean and sunburned, gesture with clipped movements, guiding them aboard. Their faces are unreadable, neither welcoming nor cruel. They are handling cargo. Human cargo.
Annelise fixes her gaze on the heels of the woman in front of her.
If she looks up, she will see how small she is against the immensity of this machine.
They descend steep metal ladders. The air grows warmer, heavier. The smell shifts to paint, hot steel, sweat, and stale air. Watertight doors, bundles of cable, low pipes. They go down and down into the ship’s belly, farther from light, farther from escape.
They are finally halted in a wide compartment with a ceiling so low the taller women could reach up and touch it. Steel bunks are welded into the walls in triple stacks, row after row, a hive of narrow rectangles.
Maybe a hundred women cram into this section.
For a moment they all just stand there, clutching their small bundles of possessions, staring like cattle in a new pen.
This, they think, is the cage.
Rumors bloom in the stale air like mold. They are below the waterline. If a U-boat attacks—and why wouldn’t it?—they’ll be the first to drown, trapped where bolts and steel stand between them and the surface. Others whisper about the guards, about what will happen when the lights go out and the engines drown out their screams.
Ela’s shoulders shake with quiet sobs. Ursula finds a lower bunk and drops onto it, face set in a hard mask.
Annelise climbs into a middle bunk. The thin canvas mattress barely softens the steel, but it is a defined space. A rectangle she can call “hers” in this new universe.
She lies on her back and stares at the maze of pipes and conduits inches above her nose. Every vibration echoes through the metal into her bones: the thrum of the engines, the distant calls of sailors, the creak of the hull against the sea.
This is the moment she had been trained to fear.
Goebbels’ voice, once so powerful through the Volksempfänger radio, rings in her memory: the Jewish-Bolshevik beasts from the East, the gangster-capitalists from the West, united in their lust to defile and destroy the German people. The Americans, he had said, were a mongrel nation, devoid of culture or honor, whose cruelty would make medieval torturers look kind.
A heavy door slams somewhere. Metal bolts grind into place with a clang that reverberates through the compartment.
Final.
The sobbing grows louder. A few more voices join Ela’s, high and shaky.
The ship shudders, then lurches. The floor begins to hum more intensely as the propellers bite into the water.
They are moving.
Away from France, away from everything familiar, deeper into the script of horror she has been handed.
Annelise presses her face into the rough canvas. The smell of dust and oil fills her nose. This, she tells herself, is the beginning of hell.
Hours blur.
The engine’s heartbeat never stops. The air thickens with breath, sweat, and the sour tang of seasickness. The slow, deep roll of the Atlantic begins—up and down, up and down—turning stomachs inside out.
No one undresses. They lie stiff in their uniforms, waiting.
Every footstep in the corridor outside is a gunshot of anxiety. Every clang of metal on metal tightens throats.
They are waiting for monsters.
They whisper in the dark, re-running the film strips in their heads: drunken soldiers, forced doors, knives, hands, the worst that men can do to women made flesh in the collective imagination.
Annelise lies frozen, muscles knotted. A rusted bolt, a shadow at the door, a laugh—these are the milestones in her nightmare.
Then, suddenly, the bolt actually scrapes.
It slides back with a metallic shriek that silences even the sobs.
The door opens.
Brighter light floods in from the corridor. Two figures stand silhouetted: an angular young private, barely older than Ela, and a stocky sergeant with a square jaw. Rifles in hand.
Ursula sits up sharply, fists clenched, jaw set for a fight she cannot possibly win.
The sergeant steps inside. His eyes move across the room, across the faces pressed into shadows, pausing here and there, assessing.
He says nothing.
He turns to the private, murmurs something low. The private nods and disappears.
The silence stretches. The sergeant remains, just inside the door, rifle held in a relaxed ready position. He doesn’t move toward them. He doesn’t bark orders.
He just stands guard.
Annelise can hear her own pulse, loud in her ears.
The private returns.
He is not armed.
He, and two other men behind him, are carrying stacks of rough, folded wool blankets.
They file down the aisle between the bunks, placing one blanket at the foot of each bed space. No comments. No gloating. Just the efficient repetition of a simple task.
The women stare at the blankets.
No one moves to pick them up.
This is not torture. It’s not what they were told to brace for.
It is something unnervingly normal.
Before they can absorb it, the private reappears again, this time pushing a small trolley. Two large metal urns sit atop it, steam curling from their spouts. A stack of thick white ceramic mugs rattles with each bump.
A new smell fills the compartment.
Sweet. Strong. Comforting in a way that bypasses politics and goes straight to some deep, pre-war memory.
Hot tea.
He starts at the first bunk—pour, set, pour, set—leaving a mug by each woman’s reach. The liquid is dark and steaming.
When he reaches Annelise’s bunk, he glances up.
For a moment, their eyes meet.
He is just a boy. Freckles faintly visible under grime. The same exhausted, uncertain look she’s seen mirrored in German faces after endless shifts on duty.
He pours, sets the mug down on the deck beside her, and moves on.
The heat radiates up in soft waves.
Annelise hesitates, then reaches down. Her fingers wrap around the ceramic. It is solid, smooth, real. She lifts it to her lips.
The tea is sweet, heavy with milk.
The taste is shocking.
For a second she is back at a café in Cologne before the war, when foreign tea and sugar were luxuries, not impossibilities. For a second, she is not a prisoner in the belly of an enemy ship.
Around her, other women are lifting mugs. Their faces, lit from below by the dim bulbs, look softer, less gaunt. No one speaks. But something enormous is happening regardless.
In the warmth of a blanket and a cup of sweet tea, the foundations of their world crack.
The monsters have brought blankets. The barbarians have served tea.
The edifice of Nazi propaganda—carefully built over years of radio broadcasts, classroom lessons, films, posters, slogans—splinters.
They have been lied to.
The Atlantic crossing becomes a limbo suspended between old lies and new realities.
The days fall into a routine that is both mind-numbingly ordinary and profoundly disorienting. Three meals a day. Stew. Bread. Coffee. More food than they had seen in one place in months.
A U.S. Army doctor—a slight man with glasses and a gentle manner—walks the rows, checking fevers, handing out aspirin, patting shoulders in an absent, kindly way.
The guards change in predictable shifts. They are not drunk. They are not prowling. They are, mostly, bored young men doing their job.
The women watch them.
They catch glimpses of them leaning against bulkheads, sharing cigarettes, reading letters with brows furrowed. They see a sergeant softly laugh at something in a note, then wipe his eyes quickly as if embarrassed. They begin to recognize familiar gestures—shrugs, yawns, the way someone rubs their neck when tired.
You cannot hate an enemy who looks too much like your cousin, your brother, the boy from school who used to sit two rows over.
Argument ripples through the bunks.
“It’s a trick,” Ursula insists. “A trick to make us soft. To make us talk. Comfort is a weapon too.” Her voice is low and fierce, clinging to suspicion like a lifeline.
Some nod. It is less terrifying to believe in a clever trap than in a shattered worldview.
Others aren’t so sure.
“They gave me medicine,” Ela murmurs. “For my stomach. The doctor asked my name.”
She says it with astonishment, as if that small courtesy is an act of revolution.
Annelise drifts between them, caught in the riptide of doubt.
When they are led up to a small caged-off section of the fantail for air, the sky above is a blue so wide and clean that it hurts to look at. The sea is an endless churn of whitecaps in all directions. There is no land. No Germany. No Europe. Just water and steel.
She watches the sailors swab the deck. One glances up, catches her watching. For half a second, he smiles—brief, shy, unplanned—before an officer barks at him and he looks away.
That fleeting, unguarded smile does more damage to her old certainty than any interrogation ever could.
After nine days, the rhythm of the engines changes.
They slow.
From somewhere distant comes the cry of gulls.
“Land,” someone whispers.
The word passes from mouth to mouth, gathering both hope and fear.
The guards are more alert now. People move with purpose. The suspended time of the voyage is ending. Something else is about to begin.
Dawn, early July 1944.
The women are brought back up to the main deck. The light is almost too bright after days below. The air carries not just salt, but other smells—earth, factory smoke, exhaust.
Annelise blinks, eyes watering, then looks up.
The breath leaves her.
Beyond the railing, rising out of the morning haze, is a sight no poster, no film, no radio broadcast had prepared her for—a forest of stone and steel, skyscrapers spearing the sky.
Manhattan.
The propaganda had shown American cities as filthy slums, collapsing under the weight of capitalism and race-mixing. Disorder, decay, poverty—that was the picture painted.
This is none of those things.
This is vertical power. Lines of windows stretching higher than anything in Berlin or Hamburg. Bridges, cranes, docks filled with ships. Tugboats push the Edmund B. Alexander into her berth, weaving through a harbor crammed with freighters, troopships, ferries, warships.
Everywhere is movement.
Everywhere is abundance.
Cars stream along distant roads in orderly lines. There is no rubble, no bomb damage. The scale of it staggers her.
Beside her, Ursula stands stiff, face pale, lips pressed so tight they are white. Denial fights in every muscle against the undeniable reality in front of them.
Ela is crying again.
Not from terror this time.
From something closer to grief and awe.
This is not a crumbling empire.
This is a nation whose true strength they had never been allowed to see.
They disembark. Boots hit American soil. It feels at once momentous and unreal, like stepping into someone else’s dream.
They are loaded onto a train. The windows are painted over, but sound sneaks in. The whistle of other locomotives. The laughter of children somewhere beyond the tracks. Snatches of a popular song on a radio—bright, swinging, careless.
The processing center—Fort Hunt, maybe, or another like it—is a tangle of forms, medical exams, delousing showers, the scratch of pens on paper. They are measured, photographed, fingerprinted. Their gray uniforms are taken and replaced with plain dresses and sensible shoes.
The people handling them are not kind, exactly. But they are not cruel.
They are… efficient. Confident. Part of a system that expects to win.
That evening, in a clean, sparse barracks, Annelise sits on a cot that is softer than anything she has slept on in months. In her hand is a postcard the Americans have allowed her to write.
A few lines.
To tell her family she is alive. That she is being treated well.
The words refuse to arrange themselves. How can she write about sweet tea in the belly of an American ship? About a shy smile on a sunny deck? About a skyline that made her knees weak?
How can she explain that the world she knew ended, not under the shells of Cherbourg, but under the quiet weight of a warm blanket and a ceramic mug?
One sentence circles in her head, over and over, in the language of her childhood:
Wir sind belogen worden.
We have been lied to.
Not just about the enemy.
About themselves.
About their strength, their cause, their place in the world.
Sitting on the bare mattress in a land she was taught to hate, Annelise realizes that the war has taken more than her home and her freedom.
It has taken her certainty.
Her identity.
Her past.
All that remains is an unknown future and the crushing weight of a truth she never chose: that the “beast” had brought blankets, that the “barbarians” poured tea, and that the real battle now would be learning how to live with that knowledge.
