“They’re Bigger Than We Expected” — German POW Women React to Their American Guards
Bigger Than Expected
Louisiana, September 1944.
The train carrying German prisoners slowed at Camp Rustin, and nineteen women pressed their faces against barred windows, straining to see what awaited them. They had been told stories—propaganda lessons about American degeneracy, about a soft and weakened people corrupted by luxury, about a land of cowards and brutes.
.
.
.
Then the guards appeared on the platform, six feet tall, broader than any man they’d seen in years of wartime rationing, moving with casual confidence that felt almost alien. Erica Schneider, twenty-four, a radio operator from Munich, whispered to the woman beside her, “They’re bigger than we expected.”
That simple observation would crack open everything they thought they knew.
The Atlantic crossing had taken three weeks, from Casablanca to Norfolk, Virginia, aboard a converted troop transport that rolled and pitched through autumn storms. The nineteen women, all Luftwaffe auxiliaries captured when Allied forces overran communication stations across North Africa, spent most of the voyage in a converted storage hold below deck, sick and frightened, certain they were sailing toward punishment.
They had been fed propaganda for years—images of Americans as racially inferior, physically weak, morally corrupt. Cartoons showing small, cowardly soldiers dependent on technology because they lacked German strength and discipline. Stories of American brutality toward prisoners: beatings, starvation, humiliation designed to break the spirit.
Erica believed most of it. She had no reason not to. She was twenty-four, educated in a system that had controlled information since she was twelve. Her father had been a schoolteacher before the war, loyal to the regime, teaching his daughter that Germany represented civilization’s peak and that enemies were inferior by definition.
When the ship docked at Norfolk, the women were transferred to a processing facility—concrete buildings, chain-link fences, guards with rifles who spoke no German. They were photographed, fingerprinted, examined by military physicians who were professional but distant. The process took two days. Then they were loaded onto a train heading west.
The journey across America stunned them into silence. They had expected ruins. Surely a nation at war would show signs of sacrifice, of struggle. Instead, they saw cities with lights blazing at night, farms with full barns and fat cattle, towns where children played in streets without fear of air raids. The abundance felt obscene, impossible, like a staged performance designed to deceive them.
“It can’t be real,” whispered Greta Hoffman, thirty-one, a communications officer who had worked in Tripoli. “They must be showing us only the good parts.”
But the train rolled for days, and the good parts never ended. Through Virginia and Tennessee and Arkansas, past fields heavy with crops, past towns that showed no bomb damage, past people who looked well-fed and unafraid.
Erica pressed her forehead against the window, trying to reconcile what she saw with what she’d been taught. If Americans were soft and weak, how had they built this? If they were starving and desperate, where was the evidence? The questions unsettled her more than any answer could have.
Camp Rustin, Louisiana, September 15th, 1944.
Through windows clouded with dust and condensation, the women glimpsed guard towers, barbed wire fences, rows of wooden barracks stretching toward pine forests. It looked like every prisoner-of-war camp they’d imagined: austere, functional, designed for containment.
But when the train stopped and the doors opened, what they saw defied expectation.
The guards stood on the platform in neat formation. There were six of them, all male, all wearing American army uniforms with pressed creases and polished boots. But it was their physical presence that struck first and hardest. They were enormous—not just tall, though they were that, most over six feet—but broad-shouldered, thick-armed, carrying weight that looked like strength rather than fat. Their faces were tanned and healthy. Their movements were confident, relaxed, showing none of the tension or hunger that marked every German soldier the women had seen in the final months before capture.
“Jesus Christ,” Greta whispered in German. “Look at them.”
Erica couldn’t look away. The guard nearest the train, a sergeant with red hair and a square jaw, had to weigh ninety kilograms at least. His forearms were thick as fence posts. His hands looked capable of crushing stone.
Beside her, Anna Ko started crying quietly. “They’re going to hurt us,” she whispered. “Look how big they are. They’re going to—”
“Quiet,” Erica hissed, though her own heart hammered against her ribs.
The sergeant stepped forward, spoke in accented but comprehensible German. “Exit the train in single file. Bring your belongings. No running, no talking. Follow instructions.”
His voice was deep but not unkind. He didn’t shout, didn’t threaten, simply gave orders and waited. The women filed out slowly, clutching small bags that held everything they owned. Erica descended the steps carefully, legs shaky from days of travel. When she reached the platform, she found herself standing five feet from the red-haired sergeant. She was 165 centimeters tall, average for a German woman, and the difference in their heights made her feel like a child.
“Name?” he asked in German.
“Schneider. Erica Schneider.”
He marked something on a clipboard. “Barracks assignment four. Follow Corporal Henderson.”
Another guard, dark-haired, just as large, gestured for a group of five women to follow him. Erica was among them.
They walked across the compound in silence, surrounded by Americans who moved with an ease that felt almost careless. No tension, no fear, just men doing jobs, confident in their strength and their authority. The contrast was staggering. Every German soldier Erica had seen in the past year had looked thin, exhausted, running on adrenaline and ideology. These Americans looked like they’d just eaten full meals and slept eight hours and could fight a war without breaking stride.
“How?” Greta whispered behind her. “How are they so—” She didn’t finish, but Erica understood the question. How could a supposedly inferior people look so strong? How could a nation at war for three years show no signs of strain? The propaganda had been wrong. Catastrophically, fundamentally wrong. And if it was wrong about this, what else was wrong?
Barracks four was a wooden structure with screens on the windows and a pot-bellied stove in the center. Twenty bunks lined the walls, ten per side, with thin mattresses and wool blankets. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. At the far end was a small bathroom with three sinks, two toilets, and a shower.
Corporal Henderson, the dark-haired guard, showed them around with efficient gestures. “Beds are first come, first served. Bathroom is shared. Lights out at 2200. Wake up at 0600. Mess hall opens at 0630.”
His German was worse than the sergeant’s, but he supplemented with hand gestures and pointing. When he finished, he positioned himself near the door and simply waited while the women claimed bunks and unpacked their meager belongings.
Erica chose a bunk near the window. She sat on the edge, testing the mattress—thin but clean—and watched Henderson through lowered lashes. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with broad shoulders and hands that dwarfed the clipboard he held. But what struck her most was his posture. He stood relaxed, weight on one leg, expression neutral, not menacing, not even particularly interested, just present, doing a job.
She had expected cruelty, leering looks, comments, threats. But Henderson simply stood there, occasionally making notes, waiting for the women to settle.
“Why aren’t they hurting us?” Anna whispered from the next bunk.
Erica had no answer.
After thirty minutes, Henderson spoke again. “Dinner in one hour. Formation outside the barracks. Someone will escort you.” Then he left. Just walked out, closing the door behind him. No lock turned. No bar dropped into place. They weren’t locked in.
The women sat in stunned silence for several moments. Finally, Greta stood and walked to the door, opened it slowly, looked outside. “There’s a guard,” she reported, “about ten meters away, but he’s just standing there, not even looking at us.”
“Test it,” said Lisel Braun, twenty-eight, a cipher specialist who had maintained the hardest edge of any of them. “Walk out, see what happens.”
Greta hesitated, then stepped onto the small porch that fronted the barracks. The guard, yet another large American, glanced at her but didn’t move, didn’t speak, just watched. Greta stood there for a moment, then came back inside.
“Nothing,” she said. “He just looked at me, didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything.”
“They’re waiting,” Lisel said darkly. “Building false security, then they’ll strike.”
But Erica wasn’t sure. She thought about Henderson’s bored expression, the sergeant’s professional efficiency, the casual confidence all the guards displayed. These weren’t men preparing to abuse prisoners. These were men who had already won and knew it.
Dinner formation happened at 1800 hours. A different guard, older, gray-haired, just as physically imposing, lined them up outside the barracks and marched them to the mess hall with no words and no drama. The mess hall was a large wooden building with long tables and benches. American soldiers ate at half the tables. German prisoners, all male, maybe two hundred of them, occupied the other half. The women were directed to a separate section near the kitchen.
Erica joined the serving line, took a metal tray, moved past steam tables where American cooks—not prisoners—loaded her plate with food: mashed potatoes, gravy, roast beef, green beans, bread with butter, coffee, and apple. She stared at the tray, unable to process what she was seeing. This was more food than she’d seen in a single meal in years. In Germany, they’d been on strict rationing since 1939. Toward the end, before capture, she’d been eating watery soup and black bread, lucky to get meat once a week. This was abundance on a scale that seemed criminal.
She sat at a table with Greta and Anna and four other women. They all stared at their trays, silent, overwhelmed. Finally, Greta picked up her fork and took a bite of potato. Her eyes closed. Tears started falling.
“It’s real,” she whispered. “God help us. It’s real.”
Erica ate slowly, methodically, trying not to cry. The beef was tender, seasoned with salt and pepper and something else she couldn’t identify. The potatoes were creamy, the butter fresh, the apple crisp and sweet. Each bite confirmed what her eyes had been telling her since Norfolk. America wasn’t suffering. America wasn’t starving. America had been feeding its citizens and its soldiers and now even its enemies with food that surpassed anything Germany had managed even in peacetime.
At the next table, a group of male German prisoners ate in similar stunned silence. One of them, a thin man with hollow cheeks, held his piece of bread like it was holy, turning it over and over, unable to believe it was his. Across the mess hall, American soldiers ate the same food, talking and laughing, paying no attention to the prisoners. To them, this meal was normal, unremarkable, just dinner.
“How did we lose to these people?” Anna asked quietly.
It was the question everyone was thinking, but no one wanted to speak aloud because the answer was becoming horrifyingly clear. They’d lost because they’d been fighting an enemy with unlimited resources, vast industrial capacity, and enough food to feed armies and prisoners alike without strain. Germany had been starving since 1943. America was serving roast beef to enemy captives.
The disparity was so enormous it redefined everything.
Three days passed. The routine established itself. Wake at six, breakfast at six-thirty, work assignments after morning roll call. The women were split into groups for different tasks: kitchen duty, laundry service, groundskeeping, administrative filing. Erica was assigned to the camp administration building, filing documents and organizing records under the supervision of Sergeant Marcus Riley, the red-haired giant from the train platform.
Riley was thirty-two, from Nebraska, with a face that looked carved from granite and a voice that carried authority without needing volume. He stood over six foot three and weighed at least ninety-five kilograms of what appeared to be pure muscle. But what unnerved Erica most wasn’t his size. It was his competence. He spoke three languages fluently, English, German, and French. He knew the Geneva Convention by heart and enforced its provisions meticulously. He managed paperwork with the efficiency of a born bureaucrat. He was patient when explaining tasks, strict when enforcing rules, and utterly immune to any attempt at manipulation.
“You’ll be organizing personnel files,” he told Erica on her first day, gesturing to a wall of filing cabinets alphabetically by last name. “Each file needs to be checked for completeness—identification, capture report, medical examination, work assignment. If anything is missing, flag it with this form.” He demonstrated once, efficiently, then left her to work.
Erica spent the morning surrounded by files of German prisoners, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all captured across North Africa and Italy, all now held in camps scattered across America. Reading through them was like witnessing the collapse of everything she’d believed. These weren’t soldiers defeated by superior tactics. These were men who had been overwhelmed by sheer material abundance.
One file noted: “Prisoner reported extreme surprise at food quality and quantity, stated that American rations exceeded anything available to German forces even in peace time.” Another subject expressed disbelief at seeing fresh fruit in mess hall. Asked if it was a special occasion, informed it was standard daily provision.
Over and over, the same theme. German prisoners confronting the reality that everything they’d been told about American weakness was propaganda, and America was strong in ways they couldn’t have imagined.
At lunch, Riley ate at his desk while Erica filed documents. She watched him covertly, the easy way he moved despite his size, the unconscious confidence in every gesture. He ate a sandwich that looked small in his enormous hands, drank coffee from a mug that could have held half a liter.
“You have questions?” he said without looking up.
Erica froze. “Sir—”
“I’ve been doing this for two years. I know when prisoners have questions. Ask them.”
She hesitated. “Then how are you so—” she struggled for the right word, “so healthy? You’re at war. Your country should be rationing. Should be thin. But your—all of you are big.”
“Riley finished. He looked at her directly. “Because America produces more food than we can eat. Because our farms cover areas larger than most European countries. Because even at war, we have surplus.”
“But the propaganda said—”
“Propaganda is lies designed to make you feel superior,” Riley interrupted. “Your government told you Americans were weak because they needed you to believe it. If you’d known the truth, that America can field millions of well-fed, well-equipped soldiers while still feeding prisoners roast beef, you might have questioned whether winning was possible.”
Erica felt something crack inside her.
“We never had a chance, did we?”
Riley was silent for a moment. “No, you didn’t. Not against this.” He gestured vaguely toward the window, toward America beyond. “But that doesn’t make you less human. Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve decent treatment. You’re just people who got caught up in something bigger than yourselves.”
It was the kindest thing anyone had said to her in months, and it came from a man who had every reason to hate her.
Weeks turned into months. October gave way to November. The women adapted to camp life with the resigned efficiency of people who had no other choice. Work, meals, sleep, occasional letters from home—heavily censored, months delayed, often bearing terrible news.
Erica received a letter from her mother in early December. The envelope had been opened and resealed multiple times, covered in stamps from various military postal services. The letter inside was four months old, written in August.
Dearest Erica, I pray this reaches you. Hamburg was bombed again in July. We lost the house. Your father and I are living with Aunt Gerta outside the city. Food is scarce. We eat potatoes and cabbage, sometimes bread if we’re lucky. I’ve lost fifteen kilos. Your father looks like a skeleton, but we are alive and we thank God for that. I hope you are being treated well. I hope you are safe. I hope you come home to us when this nightmare ends. Your loving Mooty.
