Shattered Loyalty: Why German Women POWs Chose American Captors Over Their Own Fleeing Officers

By March 28th, 1945, the world of the Third Reich had narrowed to the damp, lightless confines of a cellar near Wesel. For twenty-one-year-old Nachrichtenhelferin (signals auxiliary) Gretel Weber, the sound of the apocalypse was the rhythmic, incessant thump of American artillery—a heartbeat of steel that grew louder with every passing hour.

Inside the cellar, the air was a putrid mix of wet concrete, stale sweat, and the bitter tang of acorn coffee. Gretel’s unit was a fragment of a retreating army, a collection of hollow-eyed boys and haggard old men. Their commanding officer, Oberleutnant Vogel, was a man consumed by paranoia and Pervitin tablets. Just the day before, he had ordered a teenage runner shot for questioning an order to hold a bridge that had already been blown to dust. As Vogel paced the dark room, his hand trembling on his Walther P38, Gretel realized the terrifying truth: the “thousand-year” discipline of her homeland had devolved into a madman in a hole, promising them a meaningless death.

I. The Fall of the Cellar

The end came with the grinding of Sherman tank treads on cobblestone. A voice amplified by a megaphone offered a simple ultimatum: “You are surrounded. Come out with your hands up.” Vogel screamed for them to die for the Führer, but before he could pull the trigger on his own people, the cellar door burst inward. Silhouetted against the gray light were the “monsters” of Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda. They were large, well-fed men in olive drab. They didn’t roar; they moved with a terrifying, practiced efficiency. Gretel was herded into the street, expecting violation. Instead, she found a vision of inexhaustible power—endless columns of trucks, tanks, and soldiers who carried chocolate bars in their helmet webbing while her own unit fought over scraps of mystery meat.

II. Crossing the Purgatory

The journey west was a blur. First, the crossing of the Rhine—no longer a sacred German artery, but an American highway. Then, the Liberty ship across the Atlantic, a two-week purgatory of seasickness. Throughout it all, the guards remained distant and correct. A medic treated a prisoner’s infected leg with penicillin—a wonder drug Gretel had only heard of in whispers.

When they finally docked and the blacked-out train ride ended, a blast of crisp, pine-scented air filled the car. A sign on the platform read: Camp McCoy, Wisconsin.

III. The Discipline of the Blue Fatigues

Stepping onto the soil of Wisconsin was like entering another dimension. There was no rubble. There was no smoke. There were only neat rows of brown wooden barracks and gravel paths laid out in perfect geometric lines.

The process of becoming a prisoner was an assault on Gretel’s senses. She braced for humiliation during delousing, but found only American WACs (Women’s Army Corps) directing them with clinical, almost bored efficiency. They were given hot showers and new clothes—US Army fatigues dyed a deep blue with the letters “PW” on the back.

Gretel stared at her new socks and sturdy work shoes. Back home, civilians were mending threadbare rags. Here, the enemy gave their prisoners better equipment than the German army gave its frontline troops.

Category
Third Reich (Final Months)
American POW Camp (McCoy)

Discipline
Enforced by fear, execution, and paranoia.
Enforced by schedule, law, and logistics.

Diet
800–1,200 calories (Turnips, sawdust bread).
2,500–3,000 calories (Meat stew, white bread).

Hygiene
Lice-infested cellars, no running water.
Hot showers, delousing powder, flush toilets.

Medical
Triage only; “unfit” abandoned.
Full exams, antiseptic, penicillin.

IV. The Revelation of the Mess Hall

The most profound shock came in the mess hall. The smell was not of rot, but of baked bread and real coffee. Gretel sat at a wooden table and stared at a tray of beef stew, carrots, margarine, and a baked apple.

Beside her, Ilse, a former plotter from France, took a bite of the fluffy white bread and began to weep. No one spoke. They all understood. This meal was a betrayal of their suffering and a silent, crushing indictment of the leaders who had starved them while promising glory.

“They treat us better than our officers did,” Ilse whispered.

The words were a physical ache in Gretel’s chest. The discipline she had been raised to admire was brittle and hysterical, enforced by Vogel’s pistol. American discipline was systemic. it was in the supply chains, the clean linens, and the fact that a guard who dropped a chocolate bar would tell a prisoner to keep it rather than beating her for touching it.

V. The Shadow of the Concentration Camps

In May 1945, the news of the surrender arrived. The women were now citizens of a nation that no longer existed. But the “re-education” that followed was the darkest part of their journey.

In a makeshift theater, the American authorities showed films of the liberation of Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. Gretel sat in horrified silence, watching skeletal figures and piles of bodies being moved by bulldozers. Some prisoners claimed it was propaganda, but Gretel saw the raw, visceral truth.

She realized that the system she had served—the one that had abandoned her in a cellar—was the same one that had perpetrated this unimaginable evil. The “orderly” world of Fort McCoy wasn’t just about food; it was a bastion of sanity against the organized madness of the Reich.

VI. Statistics of the Great Captivity

The scale of the American POW operation was a testament to the industrial power that had defeated Germany.

Total German POWs in the US: Approximately 425,000 men and women.

Number of Camps: Over 500 base camps and branch camps across 46 states.

Racial Demographics of Guards: While the US Army was segregated, roughly 1,000,000 African American soldiers served in WWII. In some Southern camps, German POWs noted with shock that they (as white prisoners) were treated with more legal protections and social amenities than the Black GIs who guarded them or lived nearby—a paradoxical flaw in the American “discipline.”

Labor: Prisoners performed roughly $230 million worth of labor for the US economy, mostly in agriculture and canning.

Conclusion: The Return to the Ruins

Gretel spent over a year at Fort McCoy. She watched the Wisconsin seasons change, her past a nightmare and her future a void. When the time for repatriation finally came, she was no longer a signals auxiliary. She was a survivor, haunted by what had been done in her name.

She returned to a Germany of rubble and ash, but she carried something with her that the Reich could never have provided: the memory of a discipline rooted not in fanaticism, but in simple, predictable, and utterly shocking humanity. The clean barracks and white sheets of Fort McCoy remained in her mind not as a hardship of war, but as a strange, paradoxical sanctuary—the place where she first learned that truth doesn’t always speak in anthems; sometimes, it speaks in the quiet, orderly serving of a meal.