Why German POWs Begged America to Keep Them After WW2

The Captivity of Freedom: Camp Concordia, 1946

The wind, a furious, invisible entity, had ruled the Kansas prairie all day. It scraped across the corrugated iron roofs of Camp Concordia, a sound like a thousand distant sighs. Inside the mess hall, the heat from the kitchen struggled against the pervasive, bone-deep cold of February. But on this Tuesday, February 12th, 1946, the air was colder still, suspended in a silence far more unnatural than any noise.

Six hundred German prisoners of war sat at the long wooden tables. Their tin plates, heaped with steaming, fragrant food—succulent roast beef, creamed potatoes, and buttered peas—were utterly untouched. The steam rose, a visual manifestation of a wasted opportunity, a mockery of the hunger they had known just three years prior. This was no ordinary refusal. This was a calculated, profound act of defiance against a reality they had been taught to desire. These were men rebelling against freedom.

American guards, young men from Iowa and Missouri who had been promised a quiet garrison duty once the fighting stopped, shuffled nervously, their movements loud in the echoing hall. They had seen escapes, fights, and minor thefts, but never this universal, motionless refusal. It didn’t fit the manual.

Then, a chair scraped. Oberschreiber Hans Schmidt, a former Africa Corps corporal who had spent three years sweating out his Nazi dogma picking sugar beets alongside American farmers, rose slowly. He was thinner than the average prisoner, his face sharp, but his eyes held a clarity born of long, quiet thought. He had seen America not through the lens of propaganda, but from the seat of a dusty tractor. His English, learned from farmhands and radio broadcasts, was unnervingly precise.

“We will not eat,” he announced, his voice carrying an icy conviction that quieted the last nervous coughs. “Until we receive guarantee we will not be sent back to Germany. We prefer American captivity to German ruin.”

The declaration, simple and absolute, hung in the air.

In the doorway, framed by the pale Kansas light, stood Colonel Francis Howard, the camp commander. In his fist, a telegram, crumpled from repeated, disbelieving scrutiny. It was an order from Washington: all German POWs were to be repatriated immediately per the Geneva Convention. Howard had envisioned the scene a hundred times: cheering, relief, perhaps a few solemn handshakes. He had envisioned closure. Instead, he faced this bewildering, tragic protest—prisoners who would rather starve than go home.

It was the ultimate expression of the American captivity paradox.

The Shock of Abundance

To understand the protest, one had to grasp the bizarre nature of their imprisonment. When Leutnant Werner Kritzinger was captured in Tunisia in May 1943, he fully expected the torture and starvation promised by Nazi propaganda. He sailed across the Atlantic with his comrades, convinced they were heading for a slow, ignominious doom.

What Kritzinger found was Camp Hearn, Texas.

“I could not believe my eyes,” Kritzinger later wrote in his preserved letter. “The American guards handed us Coca-Cola. Not water, not a meager ration, but a sweet, cold drink, like we were guests, not enemies.”

This initial shock quickly became routine. The United States ended up holding over 425,000 German POWs in a vast network of over 700 camps. These weren’t dungeons. Bound by the Geneva Convention, but also driven by American labor needs and a tradition of humane treatment, the camps became sites of unintentional comfort.

The daily calorie count for German POWs was set at 4,000 calories, a figure higher than the civilian ration for Americans and nearly double what their families were getting in the bombed-out cities of Germany. They were paid 80 cents per day in camp script for their labor, and they had access to libraries, sports, and self-organized culture. At Camp Mexia, Texas, they painstakingly built a miniature German village. At Camp Trinidad, Colorado, a 50-piece symphony orchestra performed Beethoven and Mozart.

Grenadier Otto Wagner, captured in Normandy in 1944, recalled in a 1983 interview, “I had lost 40 pounds fighting in France. Within four months at Camp Shelby, I gained it back. But I felt guilty. My mother wrote me she lived on turnip peels. I ate roast beef and ice cream.”

The greatest transformation, however, happened outside the wire.

Crossing the Wire: The Cultural Exchange

The desperate American farm labor shortage meant that starting in 1943, German POWs were contracted out to farms, canneries, and lumber camps across the nation. This was where the propaganda truly dissolved.

Every morning at Concordia, trucks arrived to take the men to local farms. They ate lunch at the farmers’ tables, learned English from children, and celebrated American holidays. Fraternization was strictly forbidden, but reality proved more complex than regulation.

Martha Mueller, a German-American farm wife in Kansas, found herself in a deeply personal conflict. Her husband was fighting overseas, and yet, in 1944, she was feeding three German boys who worked her wheat harvest. “They weren’t the monsters from the newsreels,” she later recalled. “They were homesick boys. They showed me pictures of their mothers. They asked if my husband was safe.”

For the German soldiers, raised on narratives of American degeneracy and Jewish-controlled capitalism, they discovered a nation of stunning abundance and casual, unforced kindness. By mid-1945, over 200,000 POWs were working outside the camps, harvesting cotton in Texas, cutting timber in Minnesota, and picking fruit in California. They sent letters home, filled not with complaints of mistreatment, but with descriptions of prosperity.

Oberleutnant Eric Seybold, a Luftwaffe officer held at Camp McCain, Mississippi, wrote in his diary on June 15th, 1945: “Today, I learned the war in Europe has ended. I expected to feel joy. Instead, I feel dread. What happens to us now? My city, Dresden, no longer exists. My parents are dead. What is there to return to?”

This was the question that haunted them. This was the silent truth that stood between them and the untouched food on their plates.

The Inevitable Doom: Repatriation

On January 4th, 1946, the War Department issued the order: General Order Number 12. All German POWs were to be repatriated with the utmost speed. The goal was to return them all by July.

The announcement hit the camp system like an electric shock. The atmosphere at Camp Ruston, Louisiana, went immediately quiet. “There was no singing in the evenings,” Commandant Oberleutnant Klaus Mittenorf reported. “Many stopped eating properly. Several asked to speak with the camp chaplain, which they had never done before.”

The statistics of home painted a picture of pure horror. By early 1946, 20% of Berlin was rubble. In Hamburg, 50% of all housing was destroyed. The daily calorie ration in the British zone had fallen to 1,040 calories, near starvation. In the Soviet zone, things were even worse; of the three million German POWs captured by the Soviets, an estimated one million would die in captivity.

But it wasn’t just physical destruction; it was the psychological burden. They had no control over which of the four occupation zones—American, British, French, or Soviet—they would be sent to. Many knew their families were dead or displaced.

And finally, the deep, profound realization: they had changed. The men who had left three years ago, full of the Führer’s rhetoric, were gone. They had tasted a different life, one of individual liberty and democratic promise, and the Germany they had left behind no longer existed anyway.

At Camp Concordia on January 18th, 1946, they drafted a petition, written in careful, respectful English to President Harry Truman. The language of the document, now preserved in the National Archives, was a desperate plea: “We have worked honestly for American farmers who will testify to our character. We have learned to respect American democracy and wish to become citizens. Germany is destroyed and holds nothing for us. We prefer to remain as prisoners if necessary rather than return to certain starvation and possibly death.”

It was signed by 347 men. Similar petitions followed—412 at Camp Hearn, 289 at Camp Trinidad, over 500 at Camp Clark.

The answer from Washington was stark and final: No. The Geneva Convention, a treaty designed for their protection, now sealed their fate.

The Logic of Desperation

The first hunger strike began at Concordia on February 12th. Within a week, it spread.

Colonel Howard, at his wit’s end, wrote a report to the War Department on February 18th that captured the absurdity of the situation: “How do I discipline men for not wanting to leave prison? They are simply refusing to cooperate with their own liberation.”

The resistance was multifaceted. At Camp Dermott, Arkansas, prisoners staged coordinated work slowdowns, frustrating the local farmers who had become their advocates. “These boys have worked hard for us for two years,” one farmer wrote to his congressman. “Now you’re sending them back to starvation. Where’s the humanity in that?”

At Camp Ko, Mississippi, a group of prisoners pooled their work wages to hire a local lawyer, Robert Hutchinson, to explore legal avenues. Hutchinson’s brief argued that their essential civilian labor should qualify them for special immigration status. The State Department, in a swift and uncompromising refusal on March 3rd, countered that granting such a request would violate international law and create an impossible precedent. The human cost was secondary to the legal framework.

The most tragic acts were born of love. At Camp Hearn, Unteroffizier Josef Kramer had fallen in love with a German-American woman, Anna Schneider, on whose dairy farm he had worked. He proposed, hoping marriage would provide legal sanctuary. Anna applied for permission, which the Army swiftly denied. On March 15th, 1946, Kramer attempted suicide by cutting his wrists. He survived, but the incident sent a tremor through the camps, forcing Military Intelligence to monitor for similar acts of despair.

The prisoners at Camp Clinton, Mississippi, abandoned their traditional German songs. Instead, they sang American melodies they’d learned—“Home on the Range,” “You Are My Sunshine,” even the “Star-Spangled Banner”. It was a quiet, mournful protest, a declaration of a new identity that was now being violently stripped away.

Private First Class James Morrison, a guard at Trinidad, captured the internal conflict of the Americans in a letter home on March 22nd: “We’re packing up boys who’ve worked beside us, eaten with us, played baseball with us. Some are crying, others just look dead inside. I joined up to fight Germans, but these don’t feel like the enemy anymore.”

The Heartbreak of Certainty

The individual stories were layers of heartbreaking complexity. Werner Lent, a carpenter captured at Salerno, learned his entire family had perished in the Dresden firebombing. He wrote to the camp chaplain, Father William O’Connor, in a preserved letter dated April 3rd, 1946: “Here in Texas, I have friends. I have purpose. The family I work for treats me like a son. Why must I leave life to return to death?” Father O’Connor’s polite request for an exception was denied.

Helmuth Friedrich, a former teacher from Hamburg held at Camp Mexia, had bonded with the camp’s education officer, Lieutenant Thomas Bradley, over literature and anti-Nazi sentiments. Bradley wrote a formal letter of recommendation, arguing that Friedrich was the “best of what Germany could become,” a man who had completely rejected the Nazi creed and would be an asset to the nation. The letter was filed and, like all the others, forgotten.

In Missouri, a farmer named Mr. Wilson drove to Camp Clark to plead for the prisoner who worked his land, Carl Becker. Wilson’s own son had been killed at Normandy. “My boy died fighting Germans, but Carl isn’t who killed him,” Wilson told the camp commander. “Carl wants to stay. We want him to stay. Why isn’t that possible?” The commander had no answer that could satisfy a grieving father’s moral plea.

The Implacable March of Law

Despite the tears, the petitions, and the hunger strikes—which only ended when authorities threatened force-feeding and solitary confinement—repatriation proceeded. The final transports left between April and July 1946.

At Camp Hearn, a crowd of local townsfolk, an unprecedented gesture, gathered at the fence to say goodbye, bringing food and addresses for letters they knew might never be answered.

On May 23rd, 1946, the last group left Camp Concordia. Hans Schmidt, the man who started the strike, was among them. As the truck pulled away, he looked back at the Kansas prairie, the land that had been his only home since the war’s beginning. An American guard watching the procession later recounted, “They looked like men going to execution, not men going home.”

Their fates varied. Most returned to the Western zones and faced years of extreme hardship. Those sent to the Soviet zone were often immediately rearrested or disappeared.

A handful, the absolute exception, eventually returned. Werner Lent immigrated in 1952, settling near the camp where he was imprisoned in Texas. Helmuth Friedrich returned in 1954 and taught German in Missouri. Carl Becker was sponsored by the Wilson family in 1953, worked their farm for two decades, and was eventually buried in the Wilson family plot.

Josef Kramer was deported. Anna Schneider waited three years, then traveled to Germany to find him in 1949. They married in Munich, and she gave up her American citizenship to stay with him—the bitter reverse of their original hope.

The Forgotten Truth

The story was quickly and thoroughly forgotten because it complicated the neat narratives required by both sides. For America, the reality that German POWs had better facilities than many nearby African-American neighborhoods under Jim Crow was a truth too toxic to publicize. For Germany, the story of soldiers who preferred the enemy’s custody to the fatherland challenged the post-war narrative of universal suffering.

The military files on the scale of the protest were classified for decades. When finally opened, they revealed that at least 15,000 German POWs across more than 30 camps had participated in some form of resistance. None of it mattered. The logic of international treaties and political necessity trumped the logic of human transformation.

The final documented plea, dated June 30th, 1946, came from Hinrich Mueller at Camp Shanks in New York: “I do not ask to avoid punishment for my country’s crimes. I ask only to be allowed to stay and build something better than what we destroyed. Is that not justice too?” He was shipped out on July 5th.

This rebellion, though failed, stands as a testament to the fact that ordinary human contact—eating at a farmer’s table, working a common field—could shatter the most deeply ingrained ideology. These men had been raised in a totalitarian vacuum, taught to hate. In captivity, they found a democracy that, despite its own flaws, offered them a future.

In February 1946, 600 men at Concordia refused to eat. They had come to America as enemies and found something they hadn’t expected: a possibility of becoming someone different. Being forced to give it up felt not like liberation, but like a final, absolute capture by fate, by law, by history. They lost their rebellion, but the fight remains a profound and tragic testament to the human capacity for change and connection in the darkest chapter of history. Sometimes, the hardest prison to escape is the one waiting at home.