They had been told to expect brutality, starvation, and the cold hand of vengeance. As the train rattled through the alien, untouched greenery of the Louisiana countryside in December 1945, the 312 German women inside gripped their meager belongings. These were the Blitzmädel—the “Lightning Girls”—radio operators and clerks of the Wehrmacht. To the world, they were the enemy. To themselves, they were survivors of a bombed-out Europe, waiting for the American “monsters” to begin their punishment.
But when they stepped off the train at Camp Rustin, the first thing that hit them wasn’t a blow—it was a scent. Pine trees, damp earth, and the agonizingly sweet aroma of baking bread and roasting meat.
A Mysterious Offering
The processing began not with shouts, but with a small, white box. An American nurse, speaking broken German, handed the packages to the bewildered women.
“For your monthly cycle,” she explained.
The women stared. These weren’t the rough newspapers or the blood-stained rags they had been forced to wash and reuse for years. Inside were sanitary napkins: individually wrapped, snowy white, and—most shockingly—disposable.
“You throw them away?” whispered 19-year-old Anna. The concept of “disposable” was a language she didn’t speak. In a world of total war, nothing was thrown away. This small gesture of hygiene was the first crack in a wall of propaganda that had been built over a decade.
The Abundance of the “Enemy”
As the days turned into weeks, the cognitive dissonance grew unbearable. The women had been raised on stories of American decadence and cruelty. Yet, at Camp Rustin, they found a reality that made their own “Superior Reich” look like a hollow shell.
The Food: While their families in Berlin lived in basements eating watery soup, these prisoners were served fried chicken, mashed potatoes with real butter, and apple pie.
The Care: Nurses treated their skin rashes and vitamin deficiencies with professional kindness. When Freda, an older administrator, asked why they cared for an enemy, the nurse replied simply: “Because you’re a person.”
The Infrastructure: The camp had electricity, hot running water, and private showers. To many, these “prison” barracks were more comfortable than their own homes had been during the height of the war.
The Breaking of the Mind
The real war didn’t happen on the battlefield; it happened in the mess hall and the barracks at night. The women wrestled with a crushing sense of guilt. Margaret, a 28-year-old radio operator, wrote in her diary:
“I am healthier now as a prisoner than I have been in four years. How is it right that I am better off as a captive in America than I was as a free citizen in Germany?”
They realized that the “strength” they had been taught to pride themselves on—the ability to suffer without complaint—was merely a tool used by their government to exploit them. The Americans didn’t need them to suffer because the Americans had true strength: the economic and moral power to afford mercy.
The Lessons of Camp Rustin
By the time the women were repatriated in 1946, they were no longer the same people. They returned to a Germany in ruins, carrying six-month supplies of sanitary napkins and a dangerous new perspective.
They had learned that:
Propaganda survives on isolation. Once they saw an alternative, the lies crumbled.
Dignity is a right, not a luxury. A society that denies basic hygiene to women while demanding their total loyalty is a society built on weakness.
Kindness cuts deeper than cruelty. Violence would have justified their hatred; mercy forced them to confront their own complicity.
Margaret kept her English dictionary and a single faded wrapper from that first white box for forty years. She used them to teach her daughter a final, vital lesson: “Never believe what they tell you about ‘the enemy’ until you see how they treat the people they have the power to destroy.”
