Hidden Wounds: A Boy’s Fear in an American Camp

In the sweltering heat of June 1944, at Camp Ellis in Illinois, 16-year-old Andreas Keller sliced his leg deep on a rusty harvesting machine while picking corn for the American war effort. Blood poured out, soaking his worn pants. He bit down hard to stifle the scream, his mind racing with terror. If the Americans discovered the wound, they would kill him—euthanasia, just like the Reich’s T4 program that had gassed the weak and disabled. Propaganda had taught him mercy was weakness, efficiency demanded elimination. Andreas tore a strip from his dirty undershirt, wrapped it tight around the gash, and kept working, limping through the rows. The other prisoners watched silently; they believed the same lies.

Andreas had grown up on a farm near Leipzig, a Hitler Youth conscript after his father’s death on the Eastern Front in 1942. Two weeks of training, a rifle fired thrice, and he was sent to France with a Panzerfaust. Captured on his second day, he expected torture, but a GI handed him a cigarette and water. That small act cracked his certainty, yet fear clung like the camp’s dust.

Over 370,000 Axis POWs, including boys as young as 15, toiled in U.S. camps across the heartland—cotton in Texas, timber in Minnesota, wheat in Kansas. They arrived gaunt, expecting slave labor or death. Instead, they found humane conditions: three meals, heated barracks, 80 cents daily pay, mail, religious services, even orchestras. The Geneva Conventions were enforced meticulously. But Nazi indoctrination persisted. Veterans whispered about T4, which had killed 70,000 Germans deemed unfit. If their regime culled the weak, why spare enemies?

Andreas’s wound festered—a red line crept up his leg, swelling with pus. He chewed stolen aspirin, drank water, but fever spiked. By the third day, he collapsed, vision doubling. Prisoners called Corporal Eddie Harmon, a flat-footed Ohioan. Harmon summoned medics. Andreas thrashed, screaming in broken English: “Bitte nicht töten!”—Please don’t kill me. He believed the needle was poison.

Waking hours later, fever broken, leg bandaged, IV dripping, Andreas stared in disbelief. A nurse smiled, patted his hand, brought broth. Tears came—his first since capture. Penicillin, produced at 600 billion units monthly, saved him. Given by law, not choice. Nine days in the infirmary, he healed. An officer asked why he hid it. “I thought you’d finish me off,” Andreas said. The officer shook his head.

Similar fears haunted others. In Mississippi, a boy refused appendicitis surgery, nearly dying before a chaplain intervened. In Kentucky, another attempted suicide over a broken arm. Doctors noted “paranoia from conditioning.”

Routine eroded fear: meals at 7, work at 8, checks daily. Boys realized they wouldn’t die. Andreas worked in the kitchen, learned English, read about Berlin’s fall, Nuremberg trials, Auschwitz photos. Propaganda shattered; he wept with fellow prisoners.

Repatriated in 1946, Andreas wrote his mother: “I was wrong. They saved me.” The letter reached her, preserved. He became a teacher in Bavaria, warning against cruelty’s lessons. Died in 1998, his story a testament to mercy.

Fewer than 1% of POWs died in U.S. custody—illness or accidents, no executions. Institutions restrained barbarism. Andreas’s wound healed, but the scar taught: rules protect life, even enemies’.