“They’re Bigger Than We Expected” — German POW Women React to Their American Guards

Louisiana, September 1944.

The train carrying German prisoners slowed to a crawl, brakes whining, steel wheels screeching like a warning. Inside one barred compartment, nineteen women pressed their faces to the window slats, straining to see the name on the platform, the shape of the fences, the kind of men waiting for them.

They had been told stories—lessons repeated until they felt like physics.

America was soft. America was decadent. America was weak. A people corrupted by luxury, too comfortable to be dangerous. A nation that only looked powerful because it was loud.

Then the guards stepped into view, and the story immediately began to collapse.

They weren’t thin. They weren’t pale. They weren’t strained the way every German soldier looked by 1944—hollow-cheeked, tight-eyed, running on cigarettes, ideology, and whatever calories could be stolen from a failing supply line.

These men looked like they had eaten properly—yesterday, and the day before that, and every day for as long as they could remember.

They stood in neat formation: six American soldiers in pressed uniforms, boots polished, posture easy. Not the rigid stiffness of men trying to prove strength. The relaxed certainty of men who didn’t need to prove anything.

Most of them were tall—over six feet—but height wasn’t what struck the women first.

It was mass. Broad shoulders. Thick forearms. The dense, un-panicked weight of healthy bodies in a world that had been starving for years.

Erica Schneider, twenty-four, a radio operator from Munich, leaned closer to the bars and whispered to the woman beside her, almost against her will:

“They’re bigger than we expected.”

It was a small sentence. Almost childish.

And it cracked something open.

Three weeks earlier, the women had been loaded onto a converted troop transport in Casablanca. The Atlantic crossing had been a slow punishment of rolling decks and salt air and storm-swollen waves. They spent most of the voyage below deck in a storage hold refitted with bunks—metal frames, thin blankets, and the constant damp smell of rust and vomit.

They had been captured when Allied forces overran communications sites across North Africa. They weren’t frontline fighters—Luftwaffe auxiliaries, clerks, signal operators, cipher staff. But war did not care about nuance. A uniform made you an enemy. An enemy made you disposable.

During the voyage, they whispered to one another about what waited on the other side.

Not freedom. Not fair treatment.

Punishment.

They had been fed propaganda for years—films, posters, classroom lectures. Americans depicted as inferior, undisciplined, cowardly. Stories of prisoners beaten for sport. Starved. Humiliated. Especially women—because the unspoken threat always hovered there, thick as smoke.

Erica believed most of it. She had no reason not to. She’d grown up in a system that controlled information the way it controlled air: quietly, constantly, so you didn’t notice until you tried to breathe independently.

Her father had been a teacher. A loyal man. Not a monster in the cinematic sense—just a man who repeated what the state told him to repeat, because in those times, repeating was safer than questioning.

When the ship docked in Norfolk, Virginia, the women were marched through processing: photographs, fingerprints, medical exams conducted by military physicians who were professional and distant. No shouting, no slaps, no spectacle—just procedures that treated them like paperwork with pulse.

That professionalism unsettled them more than cruelty would have. Cruelty would have matched the script. Procedure didn’t.

After two days, they were put on a train heading west.

And that was where the propaganda started dying in plain view.

They expected ruins. A nation at war should look wounded, rationed, dimmed. Germany had been dimmed for years—blackout curtains, empty shops, the permanent taste of shortage.

But America rolled past their windows like an accusation.

Cities at night with lights still blazing. Farms with full barns and fat cattle. Towns untouched by bombs. Children playing in streets without scanning the sky for aircraft. They watched people on platforms eating fruit as if fruit were normal.

The abundance didn’t look like sacrifice.

It looked like capacity.

“It can’t be real,” Greta Hoffman, thirty-one, whispered. She’d worked communications in Tripoli. She was older, harder, less willing to let the world rearrange her beliefs. “They’re showing us only the good parts.”

But the train rolled for days—Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas—and the “good parts” never ended.

If this was a staged performance, it was a performance spanning half a continent.

Erica pressed her forehead against the glass, trying to reconcile what she saw with what she’d been taught.

If Americans were weak, how had they built this?

If they were desperate, where was the evidence?

The questions didn’t comfort her. They did something worse.

They destabilized her.

Camp Rustin, Louisiana. September 15th, 1944.

The train slowed. Pines appeared. Guard towers. Barbed wire. Wooden barracks stretching into the trees. The geometry of captivity finally looked familiar.

Then the doors opened.

The guards were close enough now for detail. One had red hair and a square jaw. Another was dark-haired with a calm face and hands that looked too large for any clipboard.

The women filed out in single file, clutching small bags that held everything the war hadn’t already taken.

Anna, the youngest, began to cry silently.

“They’re going to hurt us,” she whispered, staring at the guards’ arms as if size itself were proof of intent. “Look how big they are.”

“Quiet,” Erica hissed, though her own heart beat too hard. She told herself it was fear. But something else pulsed beneath it—confusion.

The red-haired sergeant stepped forward and spoke German. His accent was rough but understandable.

“Exit the train in single file. Bring your belongings. No running. No talking. Follow instructions.”

No insults. No threats. No laughter.

Just an order, delivered like work.

Erica descended the steps, legs shaky. When she reached the platform, the sergeant looked down at her. She was average height—about 165 centimeters—but beside him she felt like a schoolgirl.

“Name?” he asked.

“Schneider. Erica Schneider.”

He marked something on a clipboard. “Barracks assignment. Follow Corporal Henderson.”

A different guard—Henderson—gestured for five women to follow him. Erica was among them.

They walked across the compound in silence. Americans moved around them with an ease that felt almost careless—men talking casually, laughing, carrying equipment without the brittle desperation Erica associated with soldiers.

Every German soldier she’d seen in the past year had looked hungry. Even officers. Even the men still pretending to be strong.

These Americans looked like they could fight a war and sleep eight hours afterward.

“How?” Greta whispered behind her. “How are they so…?”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but Erica understood.

How could an inferior people look so strong?

How could a nation at war show so little strain?

And if the propaganda was wrong about this—wrong in a way you could measure with your eyes—what else was wrong?

Barracks 4 was a wooden building with screened windows and a pot-bellied stove. Twenty bunks. Thin mattresses, clean sheets, wool blankets. A small bathroom with sinks and a shower.

Henderson explained the rules in clumsy German and hand gestures.

“Beds first come. Lights out 2200. Wake 0600. Mess hall 0630.”

He stood by the door while the women chose bunks, unpacking the few items they owned like people arranging a life in a shoebox.

Erica chose a bunk by the window and watched Henderson through lowered lashes. He looked young—twenty-five, maybe—but his posture was relaxed, expression neutral. Not predatory. Not pleased. Not even particularly interested.

After thirty minutes he spoke again.

“Dinner one hour. Formation outside.”

Then he left.

Just walked out. Closed the door behind him.

No lock turned.

No bar slid into place.

They weren’t locked in.

The realization landed in the room like a dropped plate.

Greta went to the door and opened it slowly. Outside, a guard stood about ten meters away. He glanced at her, then looked away again, bored in the way bored men are when they don’t expect trouble.

“Nothing,” Greta reported, returning inside. “He just looked at me.”

Lisel Braun, twenty-eight, the hardest among them, narrowed her eyes. “They’re waiting. Building false security. Then they strike.”

Erica wanted to believe that. A trap would restore logic. A trap would mean the world still followed a familiar cruelty.

But Henderson’s bored expression didn’t look like a man preparing to strike.

It looked like a man who had already won and didn’t need to prove it.

Dinner formation came at 1800.

They were marched to the mess hall. Inside, long tables split the space: American soldiers at one half, German male prisoners at the other—hundreds of them, thin faces and hollow cheeks.

The women were directed to a separate section near the kitchen.

Erica took a metal tray and moved past steam tables where American cooks—not prisoners—served food.

Mashed potatoes. Gravy. Roast beef. Green beans. Bread with butter. Coffee. An apple.

Her tray was heavy with calories—more than she had seen in a single meal in years.

In Germany, rationing had been strict since 1939. In the later months, she’d lived on watery soup and black bread, lucky to see meat once a week.

Now an enemy cook was placing roast beef on her plate like it was ordinary.

The women sat in silence, staring at their trays as if the food might vanish if they blinked.

Greta lifted her fork and took one bite of potato.

Her eyes closed.

Tears fell.

“It’s real,” she whispered. “God help us. It’s real.”

Erica ate slowly, methodically, trying not to cry. The beef was tender, seasoned. The butter tasted fresh. The apple was crisp and sweet.

Each bite confirmed what her eyes had been telling her since Norfolk:

America wasn’t starving.

America wasn’t weak.

America was feeding its soldiers—and feeding its prisoners—with food that exceeded what Germany could provide its own people.

Across the room, German male prisoners ate as if in a trance. One thin man turned his bread over and over in his hands like it was holy.

American soldiers ate the same food while talking and laughing, paying no attention to the prisoners. To them, this was just dinner. Normal. Unremarkable.

“How did we lose to these people?” Anna asked quietly.

It was the question nobody wanted to speak, because the answer was becoming unbearable:

They hadn’t lost because the enemy was evil.

They had lost because the enemy was enormous—in land, in production, in resources, in capacity.

They had lost to a country that could fight a global war and still treat captives with procedure, calories, and—most destabilizing of all—restraint.

And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

Because propaganda can survive arguments.

It can’t survive a full tray of food.