In the final months of World War II, as the Third Reich crumbled, millions faced starvation. In Berlin, mothers boiled wallpaper paste for soup. In the countryside, children scavenged potato peels. Nazi propaganda had promised victory in plenty, but reality delivered hunger. Across the Atlantic, however, a different story unfolded, one so unbelievable that even hardened German soldiers dismissed it as Yankee lies until they saw it with their own eyes.
This is the story of how German prisoners of war, men who had fought for a regime built on conquest and scarcity, arrived in America and encountered something they could scarcely comprehend. Abundance, endless food, markets overflowing, a land where shelves never emptied. They scoffed at first.
Then came the silence, the awe, and for many, the quiet unraveling of everything they had been taught to believe. Between 1942 and 1945, the United States held nearly 400,000 Axis prisoners of war on its soil. Over 370,000 of them German. They came from North Africa after Raml’s defeat at Alamagne and Tunisia from the Italian campaign and later from the beaches of Normandy.
Transported in the same convoys that carried American troops and supplies, many expected the worst. revenge for Dresden, for the Blitz, for the horrors of the Eastern Front. Instead, they found something else entirely. The first shock hit on the ships. According to oral histories preserved in the Library of Congress, German PS boarding merchant vessels or troop transports were served meals that left them stunned.
Fresh steak, eggs, vegetables, white bread, and unthinkable in wartime Europe, ice cream, and Coca-Cola. One former Africa Corpse soldier later recalled in a 1980s interview archived by the Minnesota Historical Society, “We thought it was a trick. In the desert, we had camel meat if we were lucky. Here they fed us like kings before we even reached land.
But the real disbelief began when they arrived at the camps. Over 500 scattered across the American heartland, from the cotton fields of Texas to the wheat plains of Kansas, the forests of Minnesota, and the orchards of California. Camps like Concordia in Kansas, Mallester in Oklahoma, and Aliceville in Alabama were built to Geneva Convention standards.
Food rations equal to those of US Army garrison troops, around 3,3,200 calories per day, often more than German civilians received back home by 1944. 45 at Camp Concordia, Kansas, one of the largest holding up to 4,000 Germans. The first arrivals in July 1943 had endured six days of watery cabbage soup on their journey from North Africa.
They stepped off the trains gaunt and suspicious. Then the mess line opened. According to camp records and survivor accounts cited in Lewis Carlson’s We were each other’s prisoners. Men stared at the portions. Thick slices of meat. Real coffee. Unlimited bread. One P. A former Panzer grenadier reportedly muttered to his comrade, “This can’t be real.
They are fattening us for slaughter.” But night after night, the food kept coming. No tricks, no shortages. Many gained weight, some 40 to 50 lbs in the first year, according to medical logs and post-war interviews. They worked the fields, picking cotton in the south, harvesting beets in Montana, cutting timber in the Northwest.
under the watchful but generally fair eye of American guards. Pay 80 cents a day in campscript and food always plentiful. The US government prepared 10% extra to ensure full rations leading to visible waste that horrified the prisoners. One German wrote home letters censored but preserved in archives.
Here they throw away what we would fight over. Yet, the deepest impact came not just from camp kitchens, but from glimpses of civilian America. In some camps, trusted PS, those who had proven non-Nazi, were allowed supervised work details in nearby towns or even brief excursions. By 1945, as the war ended and repatriation loomed, many were taken on organized tours or passed through American communities.
What they saw shattered the last illusions. Imagine a group of German PS on a work release or a post armistice outing stepping into a small town grocery store or market in rural Kansas or Texas. Shelves stretched endlessly, pyramids of oranges, bananas shipped from distant tropics, butter in abundance, meat cuts they hadn’t seen since before.
According to accounts compiled in historical studies like those on academia.edu and veteran interviews, the reaction was universal. Initial scoffing. Propaganda, they whispered. This is staged for our benefit. Then silence, eyes widening, hands hesitating before touching a loaf of white bread or a carton of milk. One former Luftwafa pilot in a postwar memoir fragment described it this way.
We laughed at first. America starving. Impossible, they said. Then we saw the stalls row after row, fruit without blemish, meat without bone. We stopped laughing. The abundance wasn’t limited to markets. Drive-in theaters showed Hollywood films with scenes of plenty.Radio broadcasts advertised ice cream sodas.
Roadside stands sold Coca-Cola by the case. For men raised on wartime scarcity, Ersat’s coffee, bread stretched with sawdust, vegetables rationed to the ounce. This was psychological warfare without a shot fired. As one P told an American interrogator in 1945, declassified MS reports, “We were told your people were decadent, weak from luxury, but this luxury, it wins wars.
” Meanwhile, back in Germany, the contrast grew unbearable. Letters from home spoke of air raids, bombed factories, children dying of malnutrition, PS who once boasted of the Reich’s invincibility now fell quiet. Some requested to stay in America after the war. Others returned home carrying seeds of doubt that helped plant the postwar Atlantic alliance.
The Marshall plan would later rebuild Europe, but the first cracks in Nazi ideology for many came not from bombs, but from butter and beef. The story of German PSWs and American abundance is more than a footnote to the war. It reveals the true power of a nation. Not just its armies, but its farms, its factories, its ability to feed not only itself, but its enemies with dignity.
In the end, the endless stalls of food did what no propaganda could. They convinced men who had scoffed that another way was possible. But what happened when these same men returned to a shattered homeland? How did the memory of American plenty shape their views of democracy, of the Marshall Plan, of the new Germany? The transformation was only beginning.
By summer 1945, the war in Europe was over. Hitler was dead, Berlin in ruins, and the first repatriation ships prepared to sail. For many German PS in America, freedom was coming. But not before one final lifealtering encounter. As trust built in camps like those in Kansas, Texas, and Pennsylvania, select prisoners, often non-Nazis or those who had worked honorably, were granted supervised town passes or work details in nearby communities.
Some camps even allowed honor system outings. No guards, just a promise to return. What awaited them wasn’t barbed wire or suspicion. It was ordinary American life in full swing, and nothing hit harder than the grocery stores and markets. Accounts from former PWs preserved in oral histories, camp memoirs, and post-war interviews described the moment vividly.
They entered scoffing. This must be staged. One Luftwaffa mechanic reportedly said, “Propaganda to break us.” But as they walked the aisles, the scoffing faded. Pyramids of oranges from California, apples without bruises, butter in blocks, not rationed slivers. Meat counters displayed steaks, chickens, sausages, fresh, plentiful.
No lines, no coupons, just open shelves and quiet abundance. One German soldier in a letter home, later archived, wrote, “The stalls go on forever. Fruit from places we’ve never heard of. They don’t guard the food. They just sell it.
