At first, locals weren’t just resentful, but also feared the prospect of Nazi prisoners of war in their towns. Former prisoners of war remember Americans searching their faces, “looking for horns,” expecting the moral menace of the German soldiers to even manifest physically. Americans who gathered to gawk at the prisoners as they were transported across the country also expected to see a race of superhero-like men, blonde, muscular, tanned, and fearsome examples of men Hitler described as a “master race.” They were disappointed. “To our curiosity and surprise, they looked no different than other young men in the neighborhood,” a 14-year-old boy observed at the time.

The resentment passed quickly when the federal government decided, in 1943, that it would be safe to put the Nazi soldiers to work. Farmers had been complaining they couldn’t find anyone to work their fields. Most men were expected to fight in the war and for those who were left behind, the war-related industries paid far better than farm work. Farmers were thrilled to hire the prisoners to hoe and pick cotton. For the most part, the walls between the locals and the prisoners dissolved as soon as the Germans picked up hoes. Grateful farmers invited POWs to lunch and showered them with small gifts of candy and cigarettes. “They were just the best bunch of boys,” one Texan recalled.

German POWs tend to local crops in Fort Bend County, Texas. (University of North Texas Libraries)

American officials were frustrated by their inability to stop their citizens from fraternizing with the enemy after the walls between the prisoners and the townspeople came down (albeit metaphorically). Women lined up against the chain link fences to watch the POWs play soccer. People piled into train stations when a transport was scheduled to arrive, hoping for a glimpse of the prisoners. Edouard Patte, a Swiss delegate of the International YMCA who worked as a Red Cross monitor, put it this way: “it’s difficult to imagine that these nice blond lads with rosy cheeks had been war baiters and murderers a short while ago.”

The POWs also found friends in the most unlikely of places, as they worked alongside African Americans hoeing and picking cotton, talking away long days in the hot sun. African American field hands were painfully aware that white Americans treated Nazi prisoners far better than they did people of color. African Americans waited on POWs when they were transported in Pullman cars to their camps, and prisoners were also allowed to eat in whites-only cafeterias. At the camp, they were dealt the most menial jobs, including spraying the prisoners with delousing foam. The slights hurt all the more because African-American soldiers fought diligently during WWII in all-black units such as the renowned Tuskegee airmen.

Yet, on an individual level, they got along with the Germans. And Germans were fond of them, in part because African American soldiers had protected them from the mobs of people who wanted to kill the POWs.

Surprisingly, given the blatant racism of the Nazi party, some of the German soldiers were also shocked by the shoddy treatment of their fellow farmworkers. “The blacks…didn’t do much better than us,” remarked one POW. “They were just in front of the wire, and we were behind the wire.” Another German soldier, who was a farmer in his civilian life, noted that African American were expected to pick two to three more times the cotton required of the POWs. “You have to see how they lived,” he said after the war. “These people were so exploited.”

At the time, Huntsville was conducting a re-education program for German prisoners, and the status of African Americans made Germans look askance at their classes on the land of the free. “They were being taught the meaning of ‘democracy,’” explained historian Matthias Reiss, “while outside the southern camps no black citizen dared to step on the sidewalk alongside white Americans.”

Re-education material at Camp Huntsville: “The Growth of Democracy in Early America.” (U.S. Army)

As part of their re-education, prisoners were also showed films of Allied soldiers liberating the concentration camps. “We saw the emaciated bodies and empty eyes of the survivors,” said POW Gerhard Hennes. “We saw the piles of naked bodies, starved to death. We saw the mass graves. We saw the ovens where tens of thousands had been cremated. We saw and stared in silence, struggling but unable to believe what we Germans had done to Jews, gypsies, prisoners of war and many others deemed inferior or expendable.”

They watched them in disbelief, and many refused to accept the truth of what they saw. “This just doesn’t happen,” former POW Herman Daumling recalled thinking as he watched the films. “Nobody does that.” The fact of concentration camps was an open secret, but German soldiers claimed that no one knew about the genocide that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews and 5 million others that the Nazis deemed undesirable. Listening to American radio news reports eventually convinced Daumling that the films weren’t propaganda, but unvarnished truth, but he was the exception. Fewer than half believed that the Holocaust was real by the end of the war, according to a poll conducted by the U.S. government.

Accepting the fact of the death camps had profound consequences for German soldiers. Hennes was one of the believers. “I turned in one profound transformation from being a hero to being a villain,” he said.

Thousands of German POWs moved back to the United States after the war, including Hennes. Historian Arnold Krammer estimates that 8,000 POWs eventually returned to the U.S. Some married American women, but most were sponsored by a resident to be eligible for residency, including former farmers supporting their former farm hands. POWs who didn’t immigrate to the States still visited Texas regularly for reunions with the farmers they once worked for. “Without exception, they recall their years as POWs in Texas as ‘the greatest times of their lives,’” Krammer observed.

Erichsen also moved to the United States after the war, eventually becoming a citizen and settling in Texas. He’s lived here most of his life. Yet he can’t shake what he learned as a young person. He still remembers the songs he had to memorize as a young man in Nazi Germany. He offered a few lines to a reporter reluctantly, at his wife’s urging: “Sharpen the long knives on the lantern post. See the Jewish blood flow.” He doesn’t want to think about what he learned as a child, but he has acknowledged it is a part of him, and he can never relax his vigilance against the hateful indoctrination of his youth.