The smell hits the American surgeon before he even touches the bandages. It is sweet and wrong. The kind of smell that tells a trained nose that tissue is dying. The girl sitting on the examination table is maybe 19 years old, wearing a torn auxiliary uniform, and her hands are shaking so hard she has to grip the edge of the metal surface just to stay upright.
She keeps whispering in broken English that she is fine, that the wounds are fine, that she just needs rest and food. But when the surgeon begins to unwrap the layers of fabric around her left forearm, the fabric sticks. And when he pulls gently, she gasps and her face goes white. What he finds underneath is not just an injury. It is an infection spreading so fast that without immediate intervention, she will lose the arm by morning.
We are in a forward American field hospital in western Germany in April of 1945. The war is nearly over, but the casualties are still flooding in, German and American alike. The hospital is housed in a converted factory building with concrete floors, hanging lights, and rows of metal CS that stretch into the shadows.
The nurses move fast, their boots echoing, and every surface smells like disinfectant and rust. Into this space, two American military police officers bring a young woman. She is German, captured 3 days earlier near a collapsed supply depot outside Castle. She wears the gray blue uniform of a Luftwafa auxiliary. The kind of role that put women on anti-aircraft gun crews and communication lines as Germany ran out of men.
Her uniform is torn at the shoulder, caked with mud, and her left arm is wrapped in makeshift bandages that look like they were applied with whatever fabric was available. She does not resist. She does not speak. She just walks where they tell her to walk and sits when they point to the examination table. The surgeon assigned to her is Captain William Brener, a 34year-old general surgeon from Pennsylvania who has been in Europe since Normandy.
He has seen infected wounds before, thousands of them. But he has learned that the worst cases are not always the most dramatic. Sometimes the worst cases are the quiet ones, the ones where the patient is too scared or too conditioned to complain. When he approaches the girl, she looks at him with wide eyes and says in halting English, “I am fine, just tired.
” But Brener has been doing this long enough to know that no one is fine when they are shaking that hard. He asks her name. She hesitates, then says, “Greta.” Greta Mer. He asks when she was wounded. She says 5 days ago, maybe six. She is not sure. He asks who treated her. She says no one really treated her, just another girl in her unit who wrapped it with cloth and told her to keep moving.
Brener nods and reaches for the scissors to cut away the bandages. That is when Greta starts to cry. The bandages come off in layers. The outermost layer is a piece of torn wool, probably from a coat. Underneath that is a strip of cotton fabric, and underneath that is gauze that has turned brown and yellow with dried fluid.
Brener works carefully, cutting through each layer and pulling gently so he does not tear the skin underneath. Greta is breathing fast, her chest rising and falling, and she keeps looking away toward the wall like she cannot bear to watch. When the final layer comes free, Brener sets the scissors down and just stares.
The wound runs from her wrist to halfway up her forearm. It is a shrapnel injury, jagged and deep. The kind of wound that happens when metal fragments punch through flesh and carry dirt and fabric with them. But the wound itself is not the problem. The problem is what has grown inside it. The entire length of the cut is swollen, the skin around it tight and shiny, and there are streaks of red running up toward her elbow.
In the center of the wound, there is pus, thick and greenish white. And when Brener touches the skin near the edge, it is hot. This is not just an infection. This is sepsis beginning to take hold. Brener looks at Greta and says in slow, clear English. Your wounds are spreading. If we do not clean this now, the infection will reach your blood.
Do you understand? Greta nods, but her lips are trembling. And she says, “Will you cut it off?” Brener pauses. He does not lie to patients, but he also knows that the truth right now would break her. So he says, “Not if we move fast.” Then he calls for a nurse, pulls on gloves, and begins gathering the instruments he will need for debreedment.
The nurse who assists him is Lieutenant Sarah Hayes, a surgical nurse from Ohio, who has been with Brener since France. She takes one look at the wound and knows what is coming. Deb breedment means cutting away dead tissue. And in a wound this infected, it means going deep. There is no anesthesia available for prisoners of war unless the surgery is life-threatening.
And technically, this does not qualify yet. That means Greta will be awake for the entire procedure. Hayes prepares a tray with scalpels, forceps, irrigation solution, and sulfa powder. She also brings a leather strap and tells Greta in German, which she learned from other prisoners, to bite down if the pain gets too bad.
Greta takes the strap with both hands and starts to shake harder. We are still in the field hospital examination room. Outside, artillery rumbles in the distance, but inside the only sound is the clink of metal instruments and Greta’s shallow breathing. Brener explains what he is about to do. He will cut away the infected tissue, flush the wound with saline, pack it with sulfa powder to fight the bacteria, and then rebandage it tightly.
If the infection stops spreading, she keeps the arm. If it does not stop, they will have to amputate within 24 hours. He asks if she understands. She nods. He asks if she is ready. She does not answer. Brener starts with irrigation, flushing the wound with saline to wash out the pus and debris. Greta flinches, but does not scream. Then he switches to the scalpel.
The first cut is shallow, just trimming the edges of the wound where the skin has started to necretize. Greta’s hands grip the edge of the table, her knuckles white, and she bites down hard on the leather strap. Brener works quickly, his hands steady, cutting away the gray black tissue and exposing the healthier red flesh underneath.
Blood wells up, which is actually a good sign because it means the tissue is still alive. But the deeper he goes, the worse it gets. There are pockets of infection buried in the muscle, places where the bacteria have tunnneled in and created abscesses. Brener has to open each one, drain it, and scrape out the dead material.
Every time he does, Greta jerks, her whole body going rigid and tears stream down her face. Hayes keeps one hand on Greta’s shoulder, not restraining her, just grounding her, reminding her she is not alone. At one point, Greta starts to hyperventilate, and Hayes has to talk her through it, telling her to breathe slow, breathe deep.
You are doing so well, just a little more. The procedure takes 40 minutes. When Brener finally steps back, the wound is clean. The edges are raw and bleeding, but there is no more pus, no more gray tissue, and the swelling has already started to go down. He packs the wound with sulfa powder, layers on fresh gauze, and wraps it tightly with clean bandages.
Then he tells Greta, “You did it. The worst part is over.” Greta does not respond. She just sits there, her face pale and wet with tears, staring at her bandaged arm like she cannot believe it is still attached to her body. Greta is moved to a recovery cot in the prisoner ward, a section of the hospital separated by a canvas curtain and guarded by a single military police officer.
There are six other prisoners in the ward, all men, all German soldiers with injuries ranging from broken bones to gunshot wounds. They do not speak to Greta and she does not speak to them. She just lies on the cot, her bandaged arm resting on her chest and stares at the ceiling. Hayes checks on her every 2 hours, changing the bandages and looking for signs that the infection is coming back.
For the first 12 hours, everything looks stable. But then late that night, Greta develops a fever. The fever spikes fast. By midnight, Greta is burning up, her skin slick with sweat, and she is mumbling in German, half-conscious. Hayes wakes Brener, and he comes to the ward still in his undershirt, his hair sticking up. He checks the wound.
The bandages are clean, no new drainage, but the skin around the wound is warm again, and the red streaks that had started to fade are now darker and longer. This is not the original infection. This is something new, something that got into her bloodstream during the procedure or was already there and is now spreading faster than the sulfa can stop it.
Brener has a decision to make. If the infection is in her blood, the only way to stop it is amputation. Cut off the arm, cut off the source, and hope the sepsis does not kill her anyway. But there is no guarantee that amputation will save her. and if he is wrong, he will have taken her arm for nothing. On the other hand, if he waits and the infection spreads, she will die within days. He asks Hayes what she thinks.
Hayes looks at Greta, who is barely conscious, and says, “If it were my arm, I would want you to try everything else first.” So, Brener tries everything else. He starts Greta on intravenous fluids to keep her hydrated and flush her system. He doubles the sulfa dosage, packing the wound again and giving her oral tablets.
He keeps her on her back with her arm elevated to reduce swelling. And he watches every hour. He checks her temperature, her pulse, her wound. For the next 6 hours, nothing changes. The fever stays high. The infection stays active. And Greta drifts in and out of consciousness. Sometimes mumbling her mother’s name, sometimes crying without sound.
Then just before dawn, something shifts. Greta’s fever breaks. Her temperature drops 2° in an hour, and by the time the sun comes up, she is awake and asking for water. Brener unwraps the bandages, and the wound looks better. The redness has stopped spreading, and the skin feels cooler. The infection has not disappeared, but it has stopped advancing.
Greta is going to keep her arm. When Brener tells her, she does not smile or thank him. She just closes her eyes and whispers, “I thought I was going to die.” Let us know in the comments where you are watching this from. Are you in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, or somewhere else? We would love to know who is keeping these stories alive.
Over the next 3 days, Greta recovers slowly. The fever does not come back, and the wound begins to heal from the inside out, the way clean wounds are supposed to heal. She is still weak, still in pain, but she can sit up, eat solid food, and speak without her voice shaking. On the fourth day, Hayes sits with her during a bandage change and asks the question that has been on everyone’s mind.
How did you end up with a wound that bad? Why did no one treat it properly? Greta does not answer right away. She just looks at her arm at the layers of fresh white gauze and then she starts talking. She says she was part of a Luftwafa anti-aircraft unit stationed near Castle. Her job was radio communication, relaying target coordinates to the gun crews.
When the Americans broke through the defense line in early April, her unit was ordered to retreat. But the convoy they were supposed to join never arrived, so they walked. 23 women, three officers, and no medical supplies because the truck that carried them got hit by a Thunderbolt fighter two days before the retreat.
They walked for 3 days through the Hessen countryside, staying off roads and hiding during the day. On the third day, an American patrol spotted them near a farmhouse. The officers told the women to scatter, and Greta ran into a barn. That is when a mortar shell hit the barn’s exterior wall. She does not remember the explosion, just waking up on the ground with her ears ringing and blood running down her arm.
A piece of shrapnel had gone through her forearm all the way to the bone. One of the other girls, a radar operator named Ils, found her in the barn. Ils tore up her own undershirt and wrapped the wound as tightly as she could. Then they kept walking. They walked for two more days, staying in the woods, drinking from streams, eating nothing because there was nothing to eat.
Greta’s arm hurt, but she did not look at it. She was too afraid of what she would see. When they were finally captured by American troops near a river crossing, Greta had not changed the bandage once. She had just kept it wrapped and kept walking because stopping meant dying. Hayes listens to the whole story without interrupting.
When Greta finishes, Hayes asks, “What happened to Ils?” Greta’s face goes still. She says, “I do not know. They separated us when we were captured. I have not seen her since.” Hayes nods and finishes wrapping the bandage. She does not say anything comforting because there is nothing comforting to say. The war is almost over.
But for girls like Greta and Ils, the war ended the moment they started walking through the woods with no food, no medicine, and no idea if they would survive the next hour. If you are enjoying this story and want more untold accounts from World War II prisoners of war, make sure to subscribe to the channel.
We are bringing you stories that most history books never covered. Greta is not the only prisoner in the ward and her presence creates tension. The German soldiers, all vermocked, do not understand why the Americans are spending time and resources on a girl who was not even a soldier. One of them, a corporal named Stall, who has a broken leg from a jeep accident, starts complaining loudly in German every time Hayes comes to check on Greta.
He says things like, “Why does she get clean bandages every day when mine are changed once a week? And if we lose the war, it is because we let women pretend to be soldiers.” Hayes does not speak enough German to understand the words, but she understands the tone. She reports it to Brener, and Brener decides to address it directly.
He walks into the prisoner ward, stands in the middle of the room, and speaks in slow, clear English, which one of the prisoners translates. He says, “I do not care what rank you held, what unit you served in, or what you think about women in uniform. In this hospital, every patient gets the same standard of care.
If her wound is worse, she gets more attention. If your wound is worse, you get more attention. That is how medicine works. Stal does not respond, but his expression makes it clear that he does not agree. Brener does not care. He turns to leave, but then Greta does something unexpected. She sits up, looks directly at Stal and says in German, “You think I wanted to be there? You think any of us wanted to be there? They sent us because you were all dead or captured and there was no one left.
” The room goes silent. Stall stares at her, his face red, but he does not say anything back. Greta lies back down and closes her eyes. Hayes, who caught enough of the exchange to understand the tone, hides a smile. The tension in the ward eases after that. Stal stops complaining and the other prisoners start treating Greta like one of them instead of an outsider.
One of them, a young private named Vogel, who has shrapnel wounds in his chest, even starts sharing his bread ration with her because she is still too weak to eat the full meal portions. It is a small gesture, but it matters. In a place where everyone is a prisoner, where everyone is wounded, and where everyone knows the war is lost, the old divisions start to matter less.
We are still in the American Field Hospital in Western Germany in April 1945. And it is time to talk about the numbers because they matter. By the spring of 1945, there were more than 400,000 German prisoners of war in American custody in Europe alone. That number does not include prisoners held by the British, the Soviets, or the French.
It only counts the ones held by the United States. And it was growing every day as the Vermacht collapsed and entire units surrendered without a fight. Of those 400,000 prisoners, roughly 12% required immediate medical treatment for wounds, malnutrition, or disease, that is nearly 50,000 men and women who needed surgery, antibiotics, or long-term care.
The American Medical Corps was not prepared for that volume. Field hospitals like the one where Greta was treated were designed to handle combat casualties, not mass prisoner care. But the Geneva Convention required that prisoners receive the same medical treatment as American soldiers. So the hospitals did their best with limited supplies, exhausted staff and facilities that were never meant to operate at that scale.
Infection was the biggest killer. Even with sulfa drugs and penicellin which were in short supply, infected wounds killed thousands of prisoners in the final months of the war. The mortality rate for infected limb wounds treated in the field was around 8%. Which sounds low until you realize that 8% of 50,000 is 4,000 people.
4,000 prisoners who survived the fighting survived the capture and died anyway because bacteria spread faster than medicine could stop it. Women prisoners were a small fraction of the total, maybe 2%, around 8,000 total in American custody by the end of the war. Most were auxiliaries like Greta Luftwafa communication staff, anti-aircraft crews, or supply and logistics personnel.
They were not supposed to be combat troops, but by 1945, the distinction did not matter. If you wore a uniform and you were captured, you were a prisoner. And if you were wounded, you got the same gamble as everyone else. Clean the wound, hope the infection stops, and pray that your body is strong enough to fight back.
Greta stays in the hospital for three more weeks. The wound heals slowly but cleanly, the infection completely gone, and the muscle function in her arm starts to come back. Brener is cautiously optimistic. He tells her that she will have a scar, that the arm will always be a little weaker, but that she will be able to use it normally.
Greta nods when he tells her this, but she does not look happy. She looks like someone who has been given something she does not deserve. Hayes notices it first. Every time Greta’s bandages are changed and the wound looks better, Greta gets quieter. She stops asking questions. She stops talking to the other prisoners.
She just lies on her cot and stares at the wall. One afternoon, Hayes sits down next to her and asks what is wrong. Greta does not answer for a long time. Then she says, “Ils did not get this. None of the others got this. Why did I?” Hayes does not have a good answer. She could say something about luck or timing, but that would be a lie.
The truth is that Greta survived because she was captured by Americans who had the resources and the willingness to treat her. If she had been captured a week earlier, or by a different unit, or if Brener had decided the infection was too far gone, she would have lost the arm or died. And none of that had anything to do with who she was or what she deserved.
It was just chance. But Hayes does not say that. Instead, she says, “You survived because someone helped you when you needed it. That is not something to feel guilty about. That is something to remember.” Greta looks at her, and for the first time, there is something other than fear in her eyes. It is not quite hope, but it is close.
She asks Hayes, “What happens to me now?” Hayes tells her the truth. She will be transferred to a prisoner of war camp in France where she will stay until the war officially ends and repatriation begins. After that, she will go home. Where home is and what home looks like, no one knows yet. On Greta’s last day in the hospital, Brener comes to say goodbye.
He checks her arm one final time, unwrapping the bandages and examining the scar. It is a thick pinkish white line that runs from her wrist to her mid forearm, still tender but fully closed. He presses gently on the muscle, asking her to flex her fingers, rotate her wrist, make a fist. She does all of it without wincing.
Brener nods and says, “You are going to be fine.” Greta asks him a question she has been holding back for weeks. She asks, “Why did you do this? I am the enemy. You could have let me die.” Brener looks at her for a long moment and then he says something that Hayes who is standing nearby will remember for the rest of her life.
He says, “You are not my enemy. You are a patient.” That is the only thing that matters in this room. It is a simple answer, but it is also the only answer that makes sense. Brener is not a politician or a general. He is a surgeon. His job is to save lives. And he does that job regardless of the uniform the patient is wearing.
It is not heroism. It is not even kindness. It is just discipline. The discipline to see a wound and treat it. To see a person in pain and help them even when the war says you do not have to. Greta does not thank him. But she does not need to. She just holds up her arm, the one she thought she was going to lose, and looks at it like she is seeing it for the first time.
Then she is escorted out of the hospital by two military police officers loaded onto a truck with other prisoners and driven west toward the transit camp. Hayes watches her go from the hospital entrance. She never sees Greta again and she never learns what happens to her after repatriation, but she thinks about her often, especially when she is changing bandages on other patients and they ask why she is being so careful.
She thinks about Greta and she remembers that sometimes the smallest act, the decision to treat a wound instead of ignoring it, is the thing that keeps someone alive. We are now past the end of the war in the summer of 1945 and the prisoner of war camps across Europe are slowly emptying. Repatriation has begun and prisoners are being sent home in waves sorted by nationality, condition, and sometimes politics.
Greta Mer, if that was even her real name, which many prisoners changed or hid during processing, would have been part of the German repatriation that sent hundreds of thousands of former soldiers and auxiliaries back to a country that no longer existed in the form they remembered. What happened to her after that is unknown.
Records from this period are incomplete, especially for women auxiliaries who were often not tracked as thoroughly as male combat soldiers. Some returned to families. Some found their homes destroyed and had to start over in refugee camps. Some never made it home at all, dying from malnutrition or disease during the chaotic months after surrender.
There is no record of a Greta Mer in the American medical files beyond her treatment at the field hospital near Castle, which means either her name was changed during transit or her story ends where the hospital records end. But what we do know is this. Thousands of prisoners, men and women, survived the war because American, British, and even Soviet medical staff made the decision to treat them. It was not always done well.
It was not always done fairly, but it was done and that mattered. In a war that killed more than 60 million people, the decision to save even one life, even the life of an enemy, was a statement. It said that medicine does not take sides. It said that suffering is suffering no matter what uniform it wears.
Captain William Brener returned to the United States in December of 1945 and resumed his practice as a civilian surgeon in Pennsylvania. He never spoke publicly about his time in Europe. And when interviewed years later for a local newspaper, he refused to talk about individual cases, saying only that he did his job and that many others did the same.
Lieutenant Sarah Hayes stayed in the Army Nurse Corps after the war and served in Korea. She died in 1998 and in her personal papers donated to a military archive there is a single photograph of a field hospital in Germany with a handwritten note on the back that says the girl with the infected arm. I hope she made it. The story of Greta Mer or whatever her real name was is not unique.
There were thousands of moments like hers. Moments where a prisoner arrived at a hospital with a wound that should have killed them and left alive because someone made the decision to help. What makes her story worth remembering is not that it was extraordinary. It is that it was ordinary. It was the default. The system, even in wartime, even with enemies, even when resources were scarce, defaulted to treatment.
That default did not come from kindness. It came from training, from the Geneva Convention, from medical ethics that said a patient is a patient. And it worked. The survival rate for prisoners in American custody during World War II was higher than the survival rate for prisoners in almost any other combatant nation.
That is not because Americans were better people. It is because the system, for all its flaws, was designed to keep people alive. But there is a darker side to this story. and it would be dishonest not to mention it. While Greta was being treated by an American surgeon, other prisoners in other places were dying from neglect, starvation, and deliberate cruelty.
Soviet prisoners in German camps had a mortality rate above 50%. German prisoners in Soviet camps fared almost as badly. Japanese prisoners in Allied custody faced brutal conditions in the Pacific. The decision to treat prisoners well was not universal. It was a choice and not everyone made it. What Brener did, what Hayes did was not heroism.
It was the bare minimum of human decency applied consistently. And in a war where the bare minimum was often too much to ask, that consistency saved lives. The infected arm, the spreading wound, the girl who thought she was going to die and did not, that is the story. Not because it ended well, but because it almost did not.
And the difference between those two outcomes was a surgeon who said, “You are not my enemy. You are a patient.
