“We Are Unclean”: Why German POW Girls Refused New Clothes Until American Nurses Helped Them
The Washing of the Ghosts: How American Nurses Dismantled Nazi Brainwashing with a Basin of Warm Water
In August 1944, the air at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York, was a mix of sterile disinfectant and the fresh, bracing scent of Lake Ontario. For the staff at the processing center, it was supposed to be a day of routine intake. Among the sea of displaced persons were eighteen German girls, aged twelve to seventeen, who had been transported from the wreckage of Europe to American shores under emergency humanitarian provisions. However, as Army nurses approached them with bundles of fresh cotton dresses, clean undergarments, and fitted shoes, they encountered a psychological barrier that no military manual could have prepared them for.
The girls stood in a silent, rigid line, their hands pressed tightly to their sides. They didn’t reach for the clean clothes. Instead, they stared at the floor and whispered a phrase in halting, broken English that sent a chill through the room: “We are unclean. We cannot wear clean things.”
This was not a statement about the dust of travel or the grime of the camps. It was the manifestation of a comprehensive ideological poison that had been injected into their young minds for years. These girls believed, with a terrifying and absolute certainty, that their very existence was a source of pollution.
The Anatomy of Internalized Contamination
Nurse Sarah Mitchell, a 32-year-old veteran of field hospitals in North Africa and Italy, watched the girls with a mixture of confusion and profound concern. She had seen the physical carnage of war, but this was a different kind of injury—a moral and psychological amputation.
The translator, Helen Weber, a German-American Red Cross volunteer who had fled the Reich in 1937, understood the gravity of the situation immediately. The regime’s youth education systems—the Bund Deutscher Mädel—had placed a fanatical emphasis on “purity.” This purity was defined as racial, ideological, and physical. Those who were detained by the enemy, those who were “defeated,” or those who fell outside the system’s grace were taught that they were “contaminated.” Contamination was the ultimate social and spiritual death sentence.
“They believe they are fundamentally impure,” Sarah Mitchell realized during a quick conference with her fellow nurses. “Logic won’t work here. They’ve been taught that they pollute whatever they touch. We can’t tell them they’re clean; we have to show them they are worth the effort of becoming clean.”
A Circle of Lavender and Care
Sarah Mitchell’s plan was as simple as it was revolutionary. Instead of ordering the girls to bathe or demanding they change, she decided to turn hair care into a communal act of human connection. The nurses prepared a side room, arranging chairs in a circle. They brought in basins of warm water, towels, and soap that smelled of lavender—a scent intentionally chosen to counteract the harsh, industrial smell of the processing center.
Greta Hoffman, the oldest of the group at seventeen, was the first to sit in the chair. Her dark blonde hair was a matted, neglected mass that had not seen a brush in months. As Sarah began to wet the hair with a pitcher of warm water, she felt Greta’s entire frame tense. The girl was waiting for the “purification” to be painful or humiliating—a punishment for her supposed impurity.
“I’m Sarah,” the nurse said softly, her voice steady and unhurried. “I’ve been a nurse for ten years. This might take a while, but we’re not in a hurry.”
As Sarah methodically worked through the tangles, she spoke about her own sisters and the simple joys of childhood. She didn’t use the language of the regime; she used the language of the home. When she told Greta, “Once we get this clean, it will look beautiful again,” the word beautiful seemed to strike the girl like a physical blow. To be beautiful was to be worthy. To be worthy was a status Greta believed she had forfeited forever.
The First Crack in the Indoctrination
For over an hour, the room was filled with the sound of pouring water and the quiet, rhythmic clicking of combs. Around the circle, other nurses—Patricia O’Brien, Mary Chun, and others—worked with equal patience. They weren’t just washing hair; they were performing a laying on of hands. They were demonstrating that physical contact could be gentle rather than violent, and that attention to one’s appearance was a matter of dignity, not vanity.
As the gray water in the basins was replaced with clear, and the lavender scent filled the room, the atmosphere shifted. The girls, who had arrived as rigid “administrative problems,” began to look like children again.
When Sarah finally brought Greta to a mirror, the transformation was staggering. Her hair fell in clean, blonde waves past her shoulders. For the first time in two years, Greta saw herself not as a category of “contamination,” but as a young woman.
“Do you feel clean?” Sarah asked.
“Yes,” Greta whispered. “But clean hair does not make us worthy of clean clothes. The teachings…”
“The teachings were meant to control you,” Sarah interrupted gently but firmly. “They were meant to make you believe you had no value outside the system. But look in the mirror. You have value because you are human. Not because of an ideology.”
The Ripple Effect of Critical Thinking
Greta’s decision to try on the dark blue cotton dress with small white flowers was the turning point. She approached the mirror with visible anxiety, expecting—perhaps—to see the fabric turn gray or to feel a bolt of lightning for her “arrogance.” When nothing happened, and the dress simply felt comfortable and fit properly, the wall of indoctrination suffered a structural failure.
One by one, the other seventeen girls followed her lead. By midafternoon, they were sitting in the common area, eating sandwiches and laughing. The “unclean” had been restored to themselves.
But the story didn’t end at Fort Ontario. The interaction sparked an intellectual awakening in Greta that would define the rest of her life. She realized that if the regime could be wrong about something as fundamental as her own purity, it could be wrong about everything—victory, the “enemy,” and the morality of the war itself.
A Legacy Across Continents
When the war ended, Greta returned to a shattered Vienna. She discovered that while her father had survived, her mother and younger sister had perished in the machinery of the war. Carrying the heavy weight of that grief, she turned toward the work she had identified while still in America. She trained as a teacher, specializing in elementary education.
For decades, Greta Hoffman taught children to do the very thing the regime had tried to prevent: to question authority, to recognize manipulation, and to test claims against reality. Her classroom was a sanctuary for independent thought. She used the “Fort Ontario Model,” focusing on relationships and care as the foundation for dismantling prejudice.
She corresponded with Nurse Sarah Mitchell for over twenty years, sharing her breakthroughs and her struggles. In 1952, Greta wrote about a student who had been raised by former regime loyalists to believe that certain groups were “pollutants.” Greta spent months working with the boy, using the same patient attention Sarah had shown her. When the boy finally asked, “If what I was taught is wrong, how do I know what is true?” Greta gave him the same answer Sarah had given her: You learn to think for yourself. You test reality. You realize that human dignity transcends politics.
The Final Salute
Sarah Mitchell died in 1978, a quiet nurse in Massachusetts who rarely discussed her time at Fort Ontario. But her influence was global. At her funeral, the family was surprised to see an elderly woman they didn’t recognize—a retired schoolteacher from Austria named Greta.
Greta spoke briefly at the service, telling the confused relatives that Sarah Mitchell hadn’t just washed her hair; she had washed away the contamination of a thousand lies. She had saved a soul by refusing to believe a child was “unclean.”
The archive of Fort Ontario contains only a brief, clinical report about eighteen German girls requiring “special attention” during processing. But history is made of more than clinical reports. It is made of ripples. A basin of warm water, a comb, and the refusal to see an enemy where there is only a child—that was the simplest and most effective revolution of World War II. It proved that while propaganda requires isolation and fear to survive, the truth only requires a moment of genuine human care to begin the long process of reclamation.
