German Women POWs Refused to Undress — Americans Built Private Changing Rooms in 48 Hours

November 3rd, 1944.
Camp Rustin, Louisiana.

The freight train hissed to a stop beneath a sky thick with heat. Metal screamed, brakes sighed, and a long line of cattle cars settled into silence like a verdict.

Then the doors opened.

Three hundred and twelve German women stepped down onto American soil for the first time, blinking against the sun, shoulders stiff from days packed into railcars that smelled of sweat, fear, and unwashed wool. Some carried small canvas bags. Some carried nothing at all. Most carried the same invisible weight:

They had been told what to expect.

Humiliation. Degradation. Public stripping in front of male soldiers. The kind of victory that proves itself by making the defeated smaller.

Greta Fiser—twenty-eight, former administrative clerk in a Wehrmacht communications office—kept her eyes down as they were marched toward the processing building. She had trained herself not to look at the guards, not to invite attention, not to give the enemy an opening.

American soldiers lined the path—young men with rifles slung casually, watching as the women passed. Greta braced for laughter, crude comments, the sudden shove that would announce the rules of this place.

Instead, she found only silence.

Not hostile silence—procedural silence. The quiet of people doing a job.

The processing building stood a hundred yards from the platform, a long white-painted structure that smelled, impossibly, of fresh paint and disinfectant. Inside, the first shock wasn’t the uniforms.

It was the tables.

 

 

American women in uniform sat behind them with clipboards—efficient, expressionless, focused. A translator stood beside an officer and began speaking in fluent German, the tone calm, clinical:

“Medical examination. Delousing. Showers. Clean clothing. Required for all prisoners of war.”

The word delousing moved through the room like a cold wind.

They understood what it meant.

Undressing. Chemicals. Exposure.

For women raised in conservative homes—women for whom modesty wasn’t a preference but a kind of identity—the idea of stripping in a communal facility, in front of strangers, in the custody of the enemy, felt like a final theft.

Greta felt the room tighten. Shoulders rose. Breaths shortened. Someone whispered a prayer and stopped mid-word, as if prayer itself could be overheard.

Then a voice cut through from the back—firm, accented English, translated quickly.

“No.”

A fifty-year-old schoolteacher from Berlin—Margaret Schultz—had stood up. Her spine was straight in a way that felt almost defiant, even in exhaustion.

“We will not undress in common rooms,” she said. “This violates our dignity.”

For a heartbeat, no one moved.

Then one woman stood.

Then another.

Then dozens.

Then—like a tide that had been waiting for a signal—all 312 rose into a silent wall of refusal.

Greta stood too, surprised by her own legs obeying before her mind finished deciding. It wasn’t ideology that lifted her. It wasn’t loyalty.

It was something older.

The fear of losing the last shred of control left to them.

The American officer in charge—a captain with short brown hair and a stern, tired face—looked genuinely surprised. She conferred quietly with her staff, then returned to the translator and asked careful questions.

Not threatening questions.

Clarifying questions.

What, exactly, were they refusing?

The answer came back in pieces, then as one clear demand:

They would submit to medical examinations by female doctors in private.
They would submit to delousing and showering.
But they would not undress in communal facilities or in view of others.

They wanted individual changing rooms. Privacy. Curtains. Something that acknowledged them as human beings instead of bodies to be processed.

The captain’s eyebrows rose.

“Individual changing rooms,” she repeated through the translator, as if testing the phrase for realism, “for more than three hundred women.”

“Yes,” the translator said, and his voice was careful now. “Ma’am.”

A long moment stretched.

This wasn’t in any manual.

In the world Greta knew, refusal meant punishment. Especially refusal in unison. Especially refusal from prisoners.

In Germany, a group of women standing together like this would have been treated as a threat.

Here, the captain simply looked at them, weighed the room, and did something Greta had not prepared for:

She nodded.

“Tell them we need time,” she said. “They will be taken to temporary quarters. We will address their concerns.”

The relief that flooded Greta’s chest was immediate—and immediately followed by confusion so sharp it felt like pain.

They weren’t forcing them.

They weren’t punishing them.

What kind of enemy negotiates?

Temporary holding quarters were a dormitory lined with bunks—thin mattresses, pillows, two gray wool blankets folded with military precision. Electric lights hung from the ceiling. Windows lined both sides. Basic, institutional, unmistakably a camp.

And also cleaner than anywhere Greta had slept in months.

She claimed a lower bunk and sat down carefully, as if even sitting might trigger a correction. Around her, other women moved with the same cautious slowness, as though any moment now someone would shout, Enough. This was the trick. Here is the cruelty.

That evening, food arrived: bread, butter, canned vegetables, stew with meat.

Not a feast by American standards, perhaps. But to women who had lived through rationing and bombing, it felt like a violation of natural law. The bread was soft—real bread, not the sawdust mixture that had become normal in Germany. The butter was yellow and rich.

Greta ate slowly, almost reverently, then watched the young American soldiers who delivered the trays.

They were professional. Distant. Uninterested.

No leering.

No jokes.

No hovering.

They did their job and left.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Greta whispered to Helga Brandt, a thirty-five-year-old nurse from Hamburg. “None of this makes sense.”

Helga chewed thoughtfully, eyes narrowed in a way that wasn’t suspicion anymore—more like reluctant evaluation.

“We were told Americans were savages,” Helga said. “Savages don’t build camps with clean beds and electric lights. Savages don’t negotiate when prisoners refuse.”

That night Greta lay staring at the ceiling, replaying the moment the captain nodded.

They had refused a direct order.

And instead of punishment, they had been given time.

Time to arrange accommodations.

Time to preserve dignity.

It contradicted everything.

Not just propaganda.

Everything she believed about how power behaves.

Forty-eight hours later, the captain returned with the translator.

All 312 women assembled in the dormitory, standing in loose rows, silent and tense. The captain looked exhausted, like she hadn’t slept since the train arrived.

“We have modified one of our warehouse buildings,” she announced through the translator. “We have created individual changing stalls with curtains for privacy. Each stall has a bench and hooks. After you change, you will proceed individually to delousing, then to showers.”

A ripple moved through the room—whispers rising like wind through dry grass.

It couldn’t be true.

It was too fast.

Too much effort.

Too… expensive.

“All facilities will be operated by female staff only,” the captain continued. “No male soldiers will be present in the building.”

Greta felt something crack in her chest—not cleanly, not neatly.

Relief, gratitude, suspicion, and a strange grief for the world she’d believed in, all at once.

The enemy had built privacy for them.

Not because the women had earned it. Not because they were valuable.

Because the Americans believed the women had a right to it.

The first group went that afternoon.

Greta was in the third group, scheduled the next morning. She walked across the camp toward the warehouse and saw American soldiers working on other projects—repairing fencing, unloading supplies, building with the confident urgency of a country that had wood to spare.

Inside the warehouse, the transformation was blunt and almost beautiful in its practicality.

Wooden frames divided the space into small stalls, each roughly four by six feet. Heavy canvas curtains hung from rods. Inside each stall: a bench, hooks, nothing more.

Simple. Temporary. Clearly built in a hurry.

But it worked.

An American female sergeant explained the procedure in careful German:

“Enter your stall. Remove clothing. Place old clothes in the bag. Wrap yourself in the sheet provided. Keep it wrapped. Proceed to delousing. Then showers. Individual shower stalls with curtains.”

Greta stepped into her assigned stall and pulled the curtain closed.

For the first time in weeks, she was alone.

Truly alone—with privacy.

The relief hit so hard her knees nearly gave. She sat on the bench and breathed, just once, like the world had finally stopped pressing its face into hers.

Then she undressed.

A filthy uniform dress. Undergarments stiff with dirt. Everything into the bag marked with her prisoner number. The sheet they provided was white and clean and soft—an ordinary object that felt suddenly like proof of something she had never been taught to believe: that dignity could exist without permission.

She wrapped the sheet tightly and stepped out.

The delousing station was staffed by American women in protective gear. They worked quickly—spraying powder that smelled sharp and medicinal. Uncomfortable, embarrassing, but handled with as much care as procedure allows.

Then the showers.

Individual stalls. Curtains. A bar of soap on a small shelf.

Real soap—white, clean, faintly lavender.

Greta closed the curtain and turned on the water.

Hot water.

Not lukewarm. Not rationed. Hot.

She stood under it and began to cry.

Not because she was weak.

Because she had forgotten what it felt like to be clean without being watched.

Around her, through the thin walls and running water, she heard other women crying too—quiet sobs, muffled breaths, the sound of an entire belief system collapsing without a single gunshot.

When Greta emerged, wrapped in a clean towel, she was led to a dressing area where simple gray cotton dresses waited—nothing fancy, but clean and reasonably fitted.

She looked down at herself—clean dress, wet hair, scrubbed skin—and realized with a jolt:

She looked human again.

The women beside her looked the same: relieved, cleaned, and profoundly confused.

“They built rooms for us,” Elsa Hoffman, barely twenty, whispered like it was a forbidden sentence. “The Americans built private rooms because we asked.”

Why?

The question hung in the air and refused to land.

Camp life developed a rhythm that felt surreal in its ordinariness.

Wake at six. Breakfast at 6:30—oatmeal or cornmeal porridge, sometimes sugar and milk, toast with margarine, coffee, occasionally eggs, orange juice when available.

Work assignments followed. But not the work Greta had feared—no factories, no weapons production, no punishment labor.

Laundry. Kitchen duty. Sewing repairs. Cleaning.

Greta worked in the laundry with thirty other women, operating large machines, folding uniforms, sorting linens. The American supervisors treated them like workers rather than prisoners.

The most shocking part was the pay.

Each Friday, the women received camp scrip—paper money usable only within the compound. The amount was small, but the symbolism was enormous: their labor had recognized value.

They could buy from the canteen: chocolate, chewing gum, cigarettes, mirrors, combs, perfume, magazines.

Greta stood before the shelves her first visit, transfixed by a chocolate bar like it was a miracle made solid. In Germany, chocolate had vanished years ago. Here, prisoners could buy it with wages earned doing laundry.

The American woman at the counter smiled—not mocking, not pitying. Just a human smile.

That night Greta broke the bar into tiny squares and let each one dissolve slowly, tasting not freedom but something almost more destabilizing:

Normality.

Then letters from home began arriving.

Greta’s first from Munich made her hands shake. Her mother wrote of hunger, of people packed into basements, of children crying from starvation.

Greta read it three times, tears blurring the ink.

Her mother was starving in ruins.

And Greta was eating oatmeal with milk and sugar.

Some women stopped eating for days, crushed by guilt. A camp doctor tried reason:

“Starving here doesn’t feed your family. When you return, they’ll need you strong.”

The logic made sense.

It didn’t ease the shame.

And then came smaller moments—ones that cut deeper because they were unplanned.

One morning Greta slipped, sending clean sheets into mud. She looked up expecting punishment.

A young American guard knelt to help her gather them.

“Sorry,” he said—kindly, awkwardly—then handed her a sheet, smiled, and walked away whistling.

Greta stood frozen.

An enemy soldier had knelt in the mud for her.

Not to dominate.

To help.

By February 1945, three months of contradictions had done their slow work.

Clean beds. Decent food. private curtains. Paid labor. No mocking. No forced exposure.

Everything Greta had been taught about the enemy unraveled thread by thread.

In Germany, dignity had meant obedience—something granted by the state and revoked when convenient.

Here, dignity seemed treated as inherent—something you had simply by being human.

Greta couldn’t reconcile it without admitting something terrifying:

If the enemy could respect her humanity…

then her own leaders had been lying about more than America.

They had been lying about what humanity even was.

When news of surrender came in May, the women gathered in stunned quiet. Germany defeated. Hitler dead. The old teacher Margaret’s voice trembled:

“We’ll go home,” she said, “but who will we be?”

Greta surprised herself by answering.

“I looked at my reflection yesterday,” she said, “and realized I was healthier as a prisoner than I ever was as a ‘free’ German.”

Someone muttered “traitor.”

Greta shook her head.

“Real loyalty means facing truth. Our ideology failed. We rebuild from honesty, not lies.”

Helga added softly, almost to herself:

“Those changing rooms… they meant we had the right to dignity.”

Margaret hesitated, then nodded once, slowly.

“That’s the lesson,” she said. “Dignity isn’t granted. It’s protected.”

And it wasn’t guns, or speeches, or interrogations that broke the lie for them.

It was wood.

And canvas.

And a curtain that closed—because the enemy believed they deserved privacy.