When German Women POWs Begged American Soldiers to Keep Them After WW2

1) Magnolia Blooms and Letters Home (Mississippi, May 1945)

Camp Ko, Mississippi. Three weeks after the war in Europe ended, 47 German women sat on wooden benches in a converted cotton warehouse, waiting for news of repatriation. Outside, magnolias bloomed white as surrender flags. Inside, Greta Müller folded and refolded the same letter, her hands shaking. She had written it in careful English: “Please let me stay.”

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Around her, other women clutched similar letters, similar pleas. They had expected liberation. Instead, they dreaded it. Home meant ruins, starvation, and something worse—the certainty that survival there would be harder than captivity here.

The news came on a Tuesday morning, delivered by Lieutenant Sarah Morrison, the Women’s Army Corps officer who supervised the camp. She stood in the doorway, clipboard in hand, her expression unreadable.

“Repatriation orders came through,” she said. “You’ll be shipping out in six weeks. Back to Germany.”

Silence filled the room. Then someone started crying, then another. Within seconds, the sound spread like fire through dry grass. Women wept into their hands, into their pillows, into the cotton-scented air of a Mississippi summer.

Lieutenant Morrison had expected relief, perhaps even celebration. Instead, she watched 47 German women collapse into grief at the prospect of going home.

2) The Rules and the Reality

Colonel James Whitaker, the camp commander, had overseen Camp Ko for eighteen months. The German women had arrived in various ways: some as nurses attached to military units, others as auxiliary personnel, a few as civilians caught in North Africa. All had ended up in rural Mississippi, working in local factories, eating three meals a day, living in conditions better than most civilians in Europe.

“They don’t want to go home,” Morrison said. “Several have asked me directly if there’s any way they can stay.”

“That’s not possible,” Whitaker replied. “Geneva Convention requires repatriation after hostilities cease.”

That evening, Greta sat on her bunk, staring at the letter she’d written and rewritten a dozen times. She was 28, born in Hamburg, trained as a secretary. Captured in Tunisia in 1943, she’d been transported to America, separated from the men, and sent to Camp Ko. Two years of regular meals. Two years of work. Two years without bombs, without air raid sirens, without the smell of burning. Two years of something dangerously close to peace. And now they wanted to send her back.

Beside her, Anelise Fischer, 32, a former nurse from Berlin, wrote in her diary: “Home? I cannot write that word without feeling sick. Berlin is rubble. My apartment building was destroyed. My mother and sister—I don’t know if they survived. I wrote to the Red Cross and received no answer. Home means searching through ruins for people who might be dead. Here I have a bed, meals, work that matters. The factory is hiring American women now that the war is over. Mrs. Patterson asked if I wanted to stay on. I said yes before thinking. Then I remembered I have no choice.”

3) Pleas and Petitions

The next morning, Greta approached Lieutenant Morrison during breakfast. The mess hall was quiet, the usual chatter replaced by heavy, waiting stillness.

“Lieutenant,” Greta said in careful English, “may I speak with you?”

They stepped outside into humidity so thick it felt like cloth against skin. Morning sun made the magnolia petals glow.

“I know the rules about repatriation,” Greta began, “but I need to ask, is there any way to stay? Any program? Any sponsorship?”

“I’m sorry,” Morrison said. “There isn’t. The Geneva Convention is clear.”

“Even for women who have no homes to return to, no family?”

Morrison’s expression softened. “Even then.”

Greta was quiet. “Do you know what’s happening in Germany now, Lieutenant? Cities destroyed, food scarce, everyone is guilty or starving or homeless. Probably all three.”

Here, Greta was a person who sewed uniforms and got paid and ate dinner. There, she would be a German woman in 1945, which meant she would be whatever people decided she was—probably nothing good.

Inside the barracks, the women began organizing. If they couldn’t stay officially, perhaps they could stay unofficially. Perhaps Americans could be convinced to sponsor them, to marry them, to find some loophole in the labyrinth of postwar regulations.

Anelise, who had worked as a translator for the camp administration, had the best English. She volunteered to draft a petition.

“To whom it may concern,” she wrote, “we, the undersigned German women held at Camp Ko, Mississippi, respectfully request consideration for remaining in the United States following the end of hostilities. We understand this request is unusual and perhaps unprecedented. However, we believe our circumstances warrant special consideration. We have no homes to return to. Many of us have no surviving family. Germany, as we knew it, no longer exists. We do not ask for citizenship or special privilege. We ask only to remain where we have found safety, where we have worked honestly, where we have been treated with more humanity than we expected or perhaps deserved.”

Forty-seven women signed it.

Lieutenant Morrison delivered the petition to Colonel Whitaker. He read it twice, then set it on his desk and rubbed his eyes.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked. “Forward it to headquarters, and then what? They’ll send it back with a stamp that says ‘request denied.’ These women are prisoners of war. The war is over. They go home. That’s how it works.”

“Sir, with respect, these aren’t ordinary circumstances.”

“No circumstances in war are ordinary, Lieutenant. That doesn’t change the rules.”

But Morrison saw something in his expression—a hesitation, a recognition that the rules didn’t account for women who would rather stay prisoners than accept liberation.

4) Kindness and Connections

Over the following weeks, the women of Camp Ko tried everything. They wrote letters to congressmen, to church groups, to anyone they thought might intercede. They offered to work without pay, to accept any conditions, to renounce any claims to citizenship if only they could remain. The responses, when they came, were variations on the same theme: impossible, regulations, sorry.

Greta stopped eating, not from despair exactly, but from numb resignation. Food tasted like cardboard. Sleep came in fragments. She worked her shifts at the factory, sewing straight seams on uniform shirts, her hands moving automatically.

Mrs. Patterson, the factory supervisor, a widow whose son had died at Normandy, noticed Greta’s decline. She pulled her aside one afternoon.

“You’re not eating,” she said.

“I’m fine, ma’am.”

“No, you’re not. None of you are.”

Mrs. Patterson was quiet, her hands smoothing fabric on the cutting table. “I asked the company if they could sponsor you to stay. They said no. Immigration law, repatriation requirements, a dozen reasons.”

Greta nodded. She’d expected as much.

“But I want you to know,” Mrs. Patterson continued, “that if there was a way, I’d help. You’re the best seamstress I’ve had in fifteen years. You show up on time. You work clean. You don’t complain. That matters to me.”

“Thank you,” Greta whispered.

“I lost my son to Germans, to people like you, or at least to the forces you were part of. I should hate you, but instead I’m wishing there was a way to keep you safe. War makes no sense.”

Anelise, meanwhile, had befriended one of the camp guards, Corporal Thomas Webb, who had taught her American slang and brought her books from the local library. One evening, three weeks before departure, Webb said, “I could marry you.”

Anelise stared at him. “What?”

“If we were married, maybe you could stay. There must be provisions for that.”

“That’s very generous,” she said quietly. “But I can’t accept. You’d be doing it out of pity. Because it wouldn’t be real, and because even if we did marry, the army would probably still send me back. They’d say it was a marriage of convenience, which it would be.”

She touched his hand briefly. “But thank you for offering, for caring.”

Webb nodded, looking away. “It’s not right, what’s happening to you all.”

“Many things in war aren’t right,” Anelise said. “That’s what makes it war.”

5) The Last Days

As June approached, the mood in Camp Ko grew darker. Women who had been cheerful grew silent. Some stopped caring for themselves; others cleaned obsessively, organizing their meager possessions as if perfect order could prevent the inevitable.

Lieutenant Morrison watched and felt helpless. She tried explaining it to her husband, Captain David Morrison, who had seen combat in France.

“They’re scared,” she told him. “Terrified of going home.”

“What are they scared of?”

“Everything. Starvation, homelessness, violence, being blamed for things they had no control over, being German in 1945.”

David was quiet. “When we liberated towns in France, there were women who’d been with German soldiers. When liberation came, those women were shaved, paraded through the streets, beaten. Liberation for them was punishment. I imagine German women are facing something similar, except they get blamed for the whole war.”

“So, what do I do?” Morrison asked.

“Nothing. There’s nothing you can do. You send them home and hope some of them make it.”

“That’s not enough.”

“No, but it’s all there is.”

Two weeks before departure, Greta received a letter forwarded through the Red Cross, delayed by months of chaos. Inside, a single page in her mother’s handwriting:

“Greta, I don’t know if this will reach you. Hamburg is gone. Not all of it, but enough that nothing looks familiar. The apartment is destroyed. I’m living with your aunt in the countryside. There’s no work, little food. We survived, but barely. If you’re alive, if you receive this, know that I love you and I’m glad you’re safe wherever you are. Don’t come home if you can avoid it. There’s nothing here for you now. Your mother, Clara.”

Greta read the letter three times, then folded it carefully and placed it in her pocket. That evening, she showed it to Anelise.

“My mother says not to come home,” she said, her voice hollow.

“Mine is probably dead,” Anelise replied. “I haven’t heard anything in over a year.”

They sat in silence, two women who had survived war and capture and two years in Mississippi, who had learned to speak English and sew uniforms and eat fried chicken without crying at the waste of meat, who had expected cruelty from their captors and found instead a kind of exhausted decency.

“We could run,” Greta said suddenly.

“What?”

“Run, escape, hide. America is enormous. We could disappear.”

Anelise considered it. For a moment, the idea felt possible. But reality reasserted itself. They had no money, no contacts, no way to live without being discovered. And if they were caught, they’d face punishment and still be deported.

“No,” she said finally. “We couldn’t.”

6) Departure and Memory

The night before departure, Colonel Whitaker called an assembly. All 47 women gathered in the mess hall. Lieutenant Morrison stood beside him, her expression neutral.

Whitaker cleared his throat. He had prepared formal remarks about duty and regulations and international law. But standing there, looking at these women about to be sent back to devastation, the prepared speech felt obscene.

“I know you don’t want to go home,” he said. “I know you’ve asked to stay. I know that if there was a legal way to grant your request, many people here would support it.” He paused. “But there isn’t. The Geneva Convention requires repatriation of prisoners after hostilities cease. America signed that convention, and we honor our commitments.”

Someone in the back started crying.

“However,” Whitaker continued, “I want you to know that your time here has not been wasted. You’ve worked hard. You’ve contributed to the war effort, ironically, by producing supplies for our forces. You’ve been model prisoners, and you’ve shown many Americans, myself included, that the enemy isn’t always what propaganda makes them out to be.”

“I can’t let you stay,” he said. “But I can tell you this. You will be given repatriation packages with food, clothing, and a small amount of currency. You will be transported as safely as possible. And you will carry letters of recommendation from this camp testifying to your character and work ethic. If you choose to apply for immigration in the future through proper channels, these letters might help.”

It wasn’t much. It was almost nothing. But it was something.

That night, Greta lay on her bunk, staring at the ceiling. Tomorrow they would board trains heading east, then ships heading across the Atlantic, then whatever transportation existed in the chaos of postwar Europe. Tomorrow they would return to being German women in 1945 with all that implied.

Anelise climbed down from the upper bunk and sat beside Greta. Neither spoke for a long time.

“Do you think we’ll survive?” Greta asked finally.

“We’ve survived this far,” Anelise said. “We’ll find a way.” But her voice carried no conviction.

7) Homecoming

The morning came too quickly. Breakfast was served early—the last American meal. The women ate mechanically, tasting nothing. Outside, two transport trucks waited. Lieutenant Morrison supervised the loading of bags, small duffel bags containing the meager possessions each woman had accumulated.

Greta boarded the first truck, found a seat near the back. Anelise climbed in beside her. Around them, other women settled into silence. The trucks pulled away at 8:30. Greta watched through the gap in the canvas as Camp Ko disappeared behind them—the converted warehouse, the mess hall, the factory, the magnolia trees now past blooming, their white petals scattered on the ground like surrender.

At the train station in Jackson, they transferred to passenger cars, better conditions than POWs usually received. The train headed northeast toward ports where ships waited to cross the Atlantic.

Three days later, they arrived in New York Harbor. The city rose before them, buildings intact, lights bright, people moving with purpose through streets that weren’t rubble. It looked like a fantasy, a place where war happened somewhere else to someone else.

Another truck ride to a staging area. Processing took hours. Greta received a boarding pass for a ship called the Marine Falcon. Departure tomorrow evening, destination Bremerhaven. After that, she had no idea.

That final night on American soil, Greta couldn’t sleep. She lay in her bunk, listening to the sounds of New York beyond the wire—traffic, voices, life continuing. She thought about the letter she’d written to Lieutenant Morrison, left on her bunk at Camp Ko. “Thank you for treating us like human beings. Thank you for showing us that enemies can be decent to each other. Thank you for making these two years bearable. I’m sorry we asked for something impossible. We know you would have helped if you could.”

She wondered if Morrison had found it. Wondered if it mattered.

The Marine Falcon departed on schedule, carrying 3,000 German prisoners back across the Atlantic. Greta spent most of the voyage on deck, staring at the water, watching America disappear behind them.

Anelise found her there on the sixth day. “I’m going to try to come back,” she said. “Legally, through proper channels. It might take years, but I’m going to try.”

Greta wanted to believe her. But mostly she felt tired—tired of hoping, tired of trying, tired of believing things could be better when evidence suggested otherwise.

The Marine Falcon docked in Bremerhaven on a gray morning. Rain fell steady and cold. The city was rubble. Buildings stood like broken teeth, walls missing, roofs collapsed, windows empty as eye sockets. People moved through the ruins—thin people, hollow-eyed people, people who looked like they’d forgotten what safety felt like. This was home.

A Red Cross worker approached Greta. “Do you have family to contact?”

“My mother in the countryside near Hamburg.”

“We can help arrange transportation. It might take a few days.”

“Thank you,” Greta said automatically.

She picked up her duffel bag and walked toward the temporary shelter. Other women from Camp Ko walked beside her, silent, separate. Some were crying, others expressionless, their faces blank.

That night, in a converted school building, Greta wrote a letter she would never send:

Dear America,
You sent us home. You had to. I understand that. Regulations, conventions, international law. But I want you to know what that means. Home is ruins. Home is hunger. Home is being German in 1945, which means being guilty of everything, even when you’re guilty of nothing.
You fed us for two years. You gave us work, safety, something close to peace. Then you sent us back to this. I don’t blame you. I understand. But I want you to know what your mercy cost in the end.

She folded the letter and placed it in her diary where it would stay for decades.

8) Aftermath: Lives Rebuilt, Lessons Remembered

Some of the women from Camp Ko survived. Anelise made it back to America in 1952, sponsored by a church group in Ohio. She became a citizen, worked as a translator, married an engineer named Robert Chen. She never forgot the years in Mississippi, the factory where she sewed uniforms, the moment she realized that captivity felt safer than freedom.

Others weren’t as fortunate. Helga Schmidt died of tuberculosis in a displaced person’s camp in 1946. Erna Fogle never found her family and disappeared into the chaos of postwar Germany. Margot Klene married a British soldier and moved to Manchester, where she refused to speak German for the rest of her life.

Greta survived. She made it to her mother’s location, lived in a single room in her aunt’s farmhouse, found work eventually in a factory making textiles. She married in 1948, had two children, built a life from the ruins, but she never forgot the letter she wrote: “Please let me stay.” And she never forgot the answer: No.

Years later, in the 1960s, when her daughter asked about the war years, Greta told her about Mississippi, about Camp Ko, about magnolias blooming white, about factories and meals and American guards who treated prisoners like people.

“It sounds nice,” her daughter said.

“It was,” Greta replied. “That’s why we begged to stay. And they said no. They had to. Rules are rules.” But even saying it decades later, the words tasted bitter—because rules didn’t account for women who had nowhere to go home to. Rules didn’t account for the difference between liberation and devastation. Rules didn’t account for 47 women who understood that sometimes prison was safer than freedom.

The Geneva Convention required repatriation after hostilities ceased. America honored that commitment. The women of Camp Ko went home, but home was gone, and they had known it would be.