The Wrong Country: How 847 German Women Prisoners Found Their “Enemy” Spoke Perfect German and Killed Them with Kindness

In the spring of 1943, under the blistering sun of Tunisia, the war was ending for Greta Hoffman. As a radio operator for the Luftwaffe, she had spent months transmitting coded messages about a crumbling front line, living on dry bread and the terrifying warnings of her commanders. “Fight to the death,” they had been told. “The enemy is barbaric. Surrender means slavery, or worse.”

When the British tanks finally rolled into their camp near Bizerte, Greta and 846 other German women raised white sheets in surrender, trembling with the expectation of horror. They were about to be shipped across the Atlantic, into the belly of the beast. But as they stood in a dusty interrogation tent, a British officer walked by and spoke a few words to a colleague. Greta grabbed the arm of the woman next to her, her heart skipping a beat.

The officer hadn’t spoken English. He had spoken German. Not broken, accented German, but perfect, fluid German—the kind Greta heard on the streets of her hometown in Hamburg.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered, her world tilting slightly on its axis. “Are we in the wrong country?”

It was the first crack in a dam of lies that would eventually burst, flooding their lives not with water, but with a truth so disorienting it would force them to question their sanity, their loyalty, and the very nature of the war they were fighting.

The Voyage of Disbelief

The 847 women were loaded onto the HMS Empress of Canada, a massive passenger liner converted for war transport. Nazi propaganda had painted a picture of the Allied nations as starving, desperate, and cruel, crippled by the glorious German U-boat blockade. The women expected cargo holds, darkness, and rats.

Instead, they were led to passenger cabins with real mattresses, clean white sheets that smelled of soap, and sinks with running water. Leisel Bauer, a 19-year-old farm girl from Bavaria who had been sleeping on the desert floor for six months, touched the bed as if it were a mirage.

But the real psychological blow came at dinner. They were marched into a dining hall that smelled of baking bread—a scent that had become a distant memory in a Germany surviving on sawdust-filled loaves. They were served trays laden with roast beef, boiled potatoes, canned peaches, and coffee that smelled like actual beans.

Greta stared at the butter on her tray. It was yellow. It was soft. It was real. In Germany, butter was a luxury; here, it was a condiment. As they ate in stunned silence, Leisel whispered, “This is better than what we ate in Tunisia.”

It was better than what German soldiers were eating anywhere. On the deck the next day, Greta wrote in her diary: “They give us more food than our own army gave us. Why?”

The cognitive dissonance was deafening. If the British were starving, where did this abundance come from? If they were barbarians, why did the ship’s doctor give them vitamin pills—something the Wehrmacht couldn’t even provide for dying soldiers on the Eastern Front?

Welcome to Kitchener

The ship docked in Halifax in June 1943, and the women were loaded onto trains heading west. For days, they watched a landscape that defied everything they had been told. There were no bombed-out cities. No craters. No blackouts. Just endless forests, massive farms, and towns glowing with electric light.

“They are not even afraid,” Leisel whispered, watching people walk the streets in calm safety. “The war has not touched them.”

On June 22, the train hissed to a halt in a town in southern Ontario. The sign on the platform read KITCHENER. As the women stepped down, blinking in the summer sun, a station master approached them. He didn’t shout in English. He smiled and said, “Willkommen in Kitchener.”

He spoke with a Bavarian accent.

The 847 women froze. Was this a trick? A test? But then they looked around. Two women on a bench were chatting in German. An old man pushing a cart was humming a folk song from the Rhine Valley. The newspaper stand sold Der Canadische Bauernfreund (The Canadian Farmer’s Friend). Street signs read “Frederick Street” and “Wilhelm Street.”

They were in Canada, yet they were surrounded by Germany.

This was Kitchener, formerly known as Berlin, Ontario. It was a city built by German immigrants who had maintained their language and culture for generations. And it was here, in the heart of “enemy” territory, that the prisoners would be housed at St. Jerome’s College.

The Weapon of Abundance

The Canadian authorities had a unique strategy for these prisoners: kill them with kindness. Or rather, let the reality of democracy destroy the fantasy of fascism.

The women were assigned work details, and the contrast between their new lives and their old ones became a daily assault on their beliefs. Greta was sent to Schneider Meats, a massive processing plant. She had worked in factories in Hamburg where machines broke down constantly due to a lack of parts. Here, the equipment was futuristic, gleaming, and efficient.

But it was the meat that broke her. The plant processed 2,000 hogs a week. Mountains of pork moved through the facility. During breaks, workers—including the prisoners—could eat sausages freely. Greta watched Canadian workers snack on meat that would have cost a German family a month’s wages, treating it as nothing special.

Meanwhile, Leisel was sent to work on a farm owned by the Bauer family. It was a cruel coincidence of naming, but a fortunate one for her soul. The Canadian Bauers owned 160 acres, two automobiles, a telephone, and electric milking machines. Leisel’s family in Bavaria had 40 acres and no electricity in the barn.

Mrs. Bauer, who spoke German with the same accent as Leisel’s mother, treated the prisoner not as an enemy, but as a lost child. Sunday dinners involved roast chicken, fresh vegetables, and apple cake made with real sugar and eggs.

“Eat, child,” Mrs. Bauer would say. “You are too thin. We have plenty.”

Plenty. The word rang in Leisel’s head like a bell. Her brother was fighting in Russia, freezing and starving, while she, a prisoner of the enemy, was gaining weight on roast chicken.

The Oktoberfest Revelation

If the food started the cracks in their ideology, the culture shattered it completely. In Nazi Germany, culture and politics were fused. To be a good German meant to be a Nazi. You could not love Beethoven and hate Hitler; the party demanded ownership of the identity.

But in Kitchener, the women saw something impossible.

In September 1943, the local German-Canadian community decided to invite the prisoners to a private Oktoberfest celebration at the Concordia Club. The women were trucked to the hall, expecting a trap. Instead, they walked into a room smelling of schnitzel, sauerkraut, and bacon. A band played the folk songs of their childhoods.

Greta stood paralyzed as an elderly man approached her. He spoke Plattdeutsch, the specific low-German dialect of her grandmother in Hamburg. He was crying. “You remind me of my granddaughter,” he told her. “She is in Hamburg. Is she safe?”

Greta wept with him. They were enemies on paper, but in that room, they were just two people terrified for the families they loved.

Magda Schneider, the intellectual of the group, watched from the wall. She saw Canadians of German descent celebrating their heritage openly, singing German songs, and eating German food—while their sons fought overseas for Canada. They proved that you could love your roots without loving a dictator. You could be German and free.

“In Germany, you could not pick and choose,” Magda realized. “Here, they picked. They kept the culture and threw away the hate.”

The War of Letters

By late 1943, the group had split. About 340 women, the “Transformers,” had accepted the truth: they had been lied to. About 250 “Resistors,” led by hardline Nazi party members like Hilda Krauss, insisted it was all an elaborate trick. They refused to be friendly, refused to believe the abundance was real, and clung to their loyalty to the Führer.

The rest were stuck in the agonizing middle.

The letters from home made it harder to deny reality. While Canadian civilians complained about “rationing” that allowed them 450 grams of meat a week, letters from Germany described cities in rubble, families living in basements, and a starvation diet of 250 grams.

Greta wrote to her mother, careful to bypass the censors: “The work is not hard. The food is good.” But in her secret diary, hidden under her mattress, she poured out her anguish: “I was so proud to serve the Fatherland. Now I see I was helping Germany destroy itself. We were tools, used and discarded.”

The Choice

When the war finally ended in May 1945, the relief was mixed with a terrifying question: What now?

The Canadian government offered the women a choice unprecedented in the history of warfare. They could return to a shattered Germany, or they could apply to stay in Canada if they had a sponsor.

It tore the group apart. Greta, desperate to find her mother in the ruins of Hamburg, chose to return. Leisel, looking at the future offered by the Bauer family versus the poverty of Bavaria, chose to stay. Magda, knowing that her past as a Nazi officer would make life in a divided Berlin dangerous, also stayed, dedicating herself to helping refugees.

In October 1945, a farewell ceremony was held at the Concordia Club. There were no guards this time, just tears. The Canadian guard commander told them, “You were never our enemies. Just people caught in a terrible war.”

The Return

When Greta arrived in Hamburg in January 1946, the scale of the deception was laid bare. Her city was gone, replaced by miles of jagged rubble. She found her mother living in two standing rooms of a destroyed building, weighing only 43 kilograms.

Greta opened the Red Cross parcel she had brought from Canada. As cans of food rolled across the floor—food given to her by the “enemy”—her mother fell to her knees weeping.

“They lied to us about everything,” Greta told her mother. And in that moment, everyone knew it was true.

The Legacy

The 300 women who stayed in Canada became citizens. They married, often to German-Canadian men, and raised families who grew up speaking German at home and English at school. Leisel Bauer married the son of the family that sponsored her. Magda Schneider became a celebrated humanitarian, eventually receiving the Order of Canada—the nation’s highest civilian honor—for her work resettling refugees.

Greta, who returned to Europe, eventually married a British soldier and moved to England, crossing the battle lines once again. In 1961, she published her diary, The Enemy Who Fed Us, exposing the reality of her captivity to a German public still grappling with its past.

In 1983, forty years after they first stepped onto the platform in Kitchener, the survivors gathered for a reunion. They were gray-haired grandmothers now, but the bond was unbreakable. They stood in the Concordia Club and testified to a simple, powerful truth.

“We came as soldiers for a lie,” Magda said in her final interview years later. “We left as witnesses to what humanity could be.”

The story of the 847 women is a footnote in the vast history of World War II, but it remains a profound lesson on the fragility of propaganda. It proved that while governments fight wars, people live them. And sometimes, the most effective way to defeat an enemy is not to destroy them, but to show them a world where they don’t have to be enemies at all.

As Magda concluded, looking out over the city that had adopted her: “The real question is not why German Canadians spoke German. It is why we did not know that Germans could be free, prosperous, and good without a Führer.”