The train moved through the American heartland at 40 mph, and the German prisoner pressed his face against the window like a child seeing the ocean for the first time.
He could not believe what he was seeing.
Outside, Kansas farmland rolled past in endless waves of green and gold wheat fields stretching toward horizons that seemed impossibly distant.
But it was not the land that held him frozen.
It was what sat in front of the farmhouses.
Automobiles.
Personal automobiles.
Not one or two, but dozens of them scattered across the landscape like toys left behind by careless giants.
Black sedans and green trucks and even a bright red coupe that gleamed in the afternoon sun, parked in driveways, sitting beside barns, waiting at crossroads as the train thundered past.
Farmers owned cars.
The prisoner, his name was Verer Coleman, a 23-year-old corporal from the outskirts of Hamburgg, turned to the man beside him and spoke in rapid German.
That is the third farm in 10 minutes.
The third with its own automobile.
His companion, an older sergeant named Hinrich Mau, shook his head slowly.
There must be some mistake.
Perhaps they are government vehicles, fleet cars for agricultural officials.
But they were not government vehicles.
The cars bore no official markings.
Some had family belongings visible through windows.
Others showed the casual wear of daily use mud on fenders, dust on hoods, the evidence of lives lived behind the wheel.
It was July 1943.
The train carrying 287 German prisoners of war from the processing center at Camp Shanks, New York, was bound for Camp Concordia in Kansas, where the men would spend the remainder of the war working on American farms.
They had been captured in Tunisia, transported across an ocean their yubot supposedly controlled, and now they were seeing things that contradicted everything they had been taught about their enemy.
The rhythmic clatter of wheels on rails provided a constant backdrop to their disbelief.
The train cars were not luxurious wooden seats, barred windows, armed guards at each door, but the view through those bars revealed a world that should not exist.
Every farmhouse had electricity.
Merner could see the wires strung between poles that marched across the landscape in endless procession.
power lines reaching into the most remote corners of rural Kansas, bringing light and refrigeration and radio to people who by German standards should have been living like medieval peasants.
In Germany, rural electrification remained incomplete, even in 1943.
Many villages still relied on kerosene lamps.
Some regions had only recently received electrical service.
The cities had power of course, but the countryside here it seemed everyone had electricity.
A photograph exists in the National Archives taken sometime in 1943 by an army signal course photographer documenting the prisoner transport program.
It shows the interior of a train carrying German PSWs, their faces turned toward windows that filter Kansas sunlight.
The image quality is mediocre.
The photographer was apparently more interested in documenting the transport process than capturing expressions, but several prisoners are clearly visible, pressing against the bars, staring at something beyond the camera’s view.
The official caption reads simply, “German PWS on route to Camp Concordia, Kansas, July 1943.” What the caption cannot convey is what those men were seeing and thinking and feeling as everything they believed about America crumbled past them at 40 mph.
Nazi propaganda had painted a specific picture of the United States.
Americans were decadent, corrupted by capitalism, suffering under the yoke of Jewish financiers who hoarded wealth while ordinary people starved.
The economic crash of 1929 had supposedly crippled the nation permanently.
American workers lived in poverty, exploited by a system that concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny elite.
The farms of Kansas told a different story.
These were not the estates of wealthy land owners.
They were working farms, modest houses, practical barns, the accumulated infrastructure of families who had worked this land for generations.
And yet every one of them seemed to possess what would have marked someone as wealthy in Germany, an automobile, electrical power, and visible through windows as the train passed close to crossings, refrigerators, and radios and other appliances that remained luxuries in much of Europe.
Verer Coleman watched a woman emerge from a farmhouse and walked to a car parked in the driveway.
She wore a simple cotton dress and practical shoes, not the clothing of the wealthy.
She opened the car door, slid behind the wheel, and drove away down a dirt road, raising a small plume of dust that caught the afternoon light.
A farm wife driving her own car to run errands, perhaps to visit neighbors.
to live a life of casual mobility that would have been unthinkable for her German counterpart.
The train continued west.
The prisoners watched small towns pass water towers painted with town names, main streets lined with shops, churches with white steeples rising above the plains.
At one crossing, they saw a line of cars waiting for the train to pass.
A baker’s delivery truck, a farmer’s pickup, a family sedan with children visible in the back seat, waving at the train.
The children waved at them, at German soldiers, at the enemy.
Hinrich Mau, the older sergeant, spoke quietly.
We were told these people were starving.
We were told their economy had collapsed, that their society was falling apart.
Look at them.
He gestured toward the window, toward the endless evidence of prosperity rolling past.
They have more than we ever had, even before the war, even during the good years.
These farmers, ordinary farmers, live better than our officers families lived in Munich.
Verer did not respond.
There was nothing to say.
The propaganda had been comprehensive.
It had been consistent.
It had been delivered by voices.
They trusted teachers and officers and the state media that shaped their understanding of the world.
And it had been, they were now beginning to understand, completely and deliberately false.
The Kansas sun began its long descent toward the western horizon.
The wheat fields turned gold, then amber, then deep orange.
As shadows lengthened across the land, the prisoners watched the sunset paint this impossibly prosperous landscape in colors that seemed almost too beautiful to be real.
Somewhere ahead, Camp Concordia awaited fences and barracks and the routines of captivity.
But the real prison, the prison of lies they had carried in their minds, was already beginning to crack.
To understand what those prisoners saw through train windows in Kansas, one must first understand the world they had left behind and the systematic deception that had shaped their expectations of what they would find.
Germany in the early 1940s was a nation at war, which meant a nation under severe economic strain.
Rationing had become a way of life.
Consumer goods that had once been common coffee, butter, textiles, gasoline were now scarce luxuries allocated by coupon and connection.
The average German family had learned to do without to substitute to make things last far beyond their intended lifespan.
Automobiles, in particular, had become rare outside military and official use.
Private vehicle ownership, never as widespread in Germany as in America, had effectively ceased for ordinary citizens.
Gasoline was reserved for the war effort.
Families who had owned cars before the war watched them sit unused in garages, their fuel tanks empty, their batteries dead.
This context shaped what the prisoners expected to find in America.
Nazi propaganda exploited the memory of the Great Depression, presenting images of American breadlines and foreclosed farms as evidence of capitalism’s failure.
The message was consistent.
While Germany had recovered under national socialist leadership, America remained mired in economic chaos.
The war production that was now pouring from American factories was portrayed as a temporary, desperate effort that could not be sustained.
The underlying economy, Germans were told, was hollow.
The prisoners who traveled by train through Kansas in July 1943, had been captured during the Tunisian campaign, where the Africa Corps had finally met its end.
They had experienced the humiliation of surrender, the disorientation of transport across the Atlantic, and the processing procedures at Camp Shanks in New York.
Now, they were being distributed to permanent camps throughout the American interior.
Camp Concordia sat in Cloud County, Kansas, approximately 150 mi northwest of Kansas City.
Constructed in early 1943, it eventually housed over 4,000 German prisoners at its peak, making it one of the larger P facilities in the United States.
The camp compound covered several hundred acres of Kansas prairie, its wooden barracks arranged in military rows behind chainlink fencing.
The Geneva Convention of 1929 governed prisoner treatment at Concordia and camps like it.
Its provisions required adequate food, shelter, medical care, and protection from exploitation.
The daily ration at American P camps documented in War Department records approached 3,600 calories more than many German soldiers had received even during the Vermach’s best supplied campaigns.
A typical daily menu at Camp Concordia preserved in administrative records included breakfast, oatmeal or eggs, bread with butter, coffee with sugar and cream.
Lunch, meat, beef, pork or chicken, vegetables, bread, fruit.
Dinner, soup, meat or fish, potatoes, vegetables, dessert, coffee.
The prisoners noticed the abundance immediately.
Many of them had been hungry for months.
The Tunisian campaign had been marked by supply shortages as Allied forces cut German supply lines.
Now they found themselves eating better than they had since the war began.
Letters home filtered through military sensors frequently mentioned the food.
A letter from a prisoner at Camp Concordia preserved in the National Archives offers a characteristic example.
Dear mother, I am writing to tell you that we are being well treated.
The food is more than sufficient meat every day.
Real coffee, butter, and eggs.
I know this is difficult to believe given what we have been told about America, but it is the truth.
Please share this with the neighbors so they will not worry about their sons.
The sensors allowed such letters to pass.
They understood that these reports reaching German families served American interests by undermining the Nazi propaganda machine.
But the train journey through Kansas offered something the camps could not.
a window on ordinary American life.
The prisoners who traveled by rail saw the same evidence that had astonished Verer Coleman.
They saw automobiles and electrical lines and prosperous farms.
They saw small towns with well stocked shops and churches and schools.
They saw a civilian population that showed no signs of the deprivation their leaders had promised.
The contrast with their own experience was stark.
In Germany, even the most favored citizens had begun to feel the war’s strain.
By 1943, bombing raids disrupted daily life in the cities.
Consumer goods grew increasingly scarce.
The Eastern Front demanded ever more resources, drawing material and manpower away from civilian needs.
The sense of abundance that had marked the late 1930s real or perceived had given way to austerity and sacrifice.
Here, sacrifice seemed optional.
The farms had tractors alongside their automobiles.
The towns had movie theaters and soda fountains.
The people dressed in clean, new-looking clothes, and carried themselves with the casual confidence of those who had never known real want.
This was not decadence.
This was wealth so widespread it had become invisible to those who possessed it.
The train continued west through the afternoon.
The prisoners watched and counted and tried to reconcile what they were seeing with what they had been taught.
The numbers refused to cooperate with their expectations.
At one small town, the train slowed to pass through a crossing.
The prisoners could see directly into a hardware store’s front window, where displays of tools and appliances suggested inventory levels that would have been inconceivable in wartime Germany.
A woman walked past carrying shopping bags, multiple shopping bags, as though acquiring goods were a casual activity rather than a struggle.
Heinrich Mau, the older sergeant who had dismissed the automobiles as government vehicles, sat silently by his window.
His face had taken on an expression that his fellow prisoners would come to recognize the look of a man whose entire understanding of the world was being systematically dismantled.
The wheels clattered.
The Kansas landscape rolled past and 287 German prisoners began the long, difficult process of learning that everything they knew was wrong.
They had been told America was weak.
They had been told Americans were suffering.
They had been told the war was being won.
The evidence outside their windows told a different story.
Camp Concordia operated an extensive labor program, contracting prisoner work crews to local agricultural operations.
The Geneva Convention permitted such labor indeed encouraged it as beneficial to prisoner morale, provided it was non-military, fairly compensated, and performed under conditions comparable to those of civilian workers.
The prisoners who worked on Kansas farms discovered something their train window glimpses had suggested.
American agricultural prosperity was not an illusion.
Friedrich Bergman was a 26-year-old from Bavaria who had grown up on a small farm before being conscripted into the Vermacht.
His account recorded in a 1989 oral history collected by the Kansas Historical Society describes his first day on an American farm.
The farmer met us with a truck, his own truck, a Ford.
He drove us to his farm, which was perhaps 40 hectares, what you would call 100 acres.
Not a large farm by German standards.
And on this modest farm, I counted two tractors, a truck, an automobile for the family, and machinery I did not even recognize.
He paused in the recording, and the interviewer noted that his voice changed, becoming softer.
On my father’s farm in Bavaria, we had one horse, one horse for everything.
We thought ourselves fortunate to have such a fine animal.
This American farmer with his modest 100 acres had more mechanical power than our entire village.
Every farmhouse seemed to have one.
Every kitchen, every living room, sometimes multiple units in a single home.
The prisoners heard music and news broadcasts drifting through windows as they worked in nearby fields.
At first, they assumed these must be special households.
Perhaps the farmers they worked for were unusually wealthy.
A camp intelligence report from September 1943 preserved in National Archives record group 389 documented the prisoners confusion.
Several prisoners have inquired about radio ownership among the civilian population.
They expressed disbelief that ordinary farmers possess such equipment.
When informed that radio ownership approaches 90% of American households, they responded with visible skepticism.
One prisoner stated that only party officials and the very wealthy owned radios in Germany.
The statistic was accurate.
By 1943, approximately 28 million American households owned radio sets, a penetration rate unmatched anywhere in the world.
What the prisoners had considered a luxury was here regarded as a basic household item.
The third reversal came through an unexpected source, the farmer’s wives.
The women who fed the work crews during lunch breaks showed no fear of the German prisoners.
They treated them with a matter-of-fact hospitality that confounded expectations.
Sandwiches and lemonade were served on farmhouse porches.
Conversations limited by language barriers but supplemented by gestures touched on families and farms and the universal concerns of agricultural life.
Verer Coleman, the young corporal from Hamburg, worked on a farm near Clyde, Kansas during the 1943 harvest season.
His experience was recorded in a letter to his sister, portions of which were preserved when she donated her correspondence to a German archive in 1978.
The farmer’s wife brings us food at midday, not camp food, her own cooking.
There is always more than we can eat.
She speaks to us as though we are her own workers, not prisoners.
Yesterday, she showed me a photograph of her son who is serving in the Pacific.
She knows we are the enemy.
She feeds us anyway.
I do not understand these people.
Prisoners on work details occasionally passed through communities like Concordia, Clyde, and Belleville.
They saw shop windows filled with goods.
They saw children walking to school in new clothes.
They saw automobiles parked along main streets in numbers that suggested every family might own one.
A prisoner named Curt Shriber, whose diary was later donated to the Eisenhower Presidential Library, recorded his observations during a work detail that passed through Concordia in October 1943.
We stopped for the guards to purchase supplies.
I counted the automobiles on the main street while we waited.
47 cars in a town of perhaps 3,000 people.
At home, such a number would belong to an entire region.
Here it is, one street in one small town in the middle of nowhere.
He added with characteristic German precision.
I have calculated that if this ratio holds true across America, they have more automobiles than Germany has functioning vehicles of all types.
This cannot be correct, but I have counted carefully.
The calculation was in fact roughly accurate.
In 1943, the United States had approximately 30 million registered automobiles, while Germany’s civilian vehicle fleet had shrunk to perhaps 2 million functional units.
Some camp libraries stocked American newspapers and magazines and prisoners with English skills translated for their companions.
What they read astonished them almost as much as what they had seen through train windows.
The advertisements revealed a consumer economy operating at full capacity even during the wartime.
Department stores promoted new clothing lines.
Automobile manufacturers, their factories converted to war production, ran campaigns promising better cars after victory.
Food companies advertised products that would have been unimaginable luxuries in Germany.
canned fruits, processed cheese, packaged cereals.
An intelligence report from Camp Concordia dated November 1943 noted the prisoners response.
Prisoners with access to American periodicals have expressed particular interest in advertisements.
Several have questioned whether such goods are actually available or whether the advertisements are propaganda.
When informed that consumer goods remain generally available despite rationing, they appeared skeptical.
One prisoner stated that in Germany we have advertisements for products that have not existed for 3 years.
The skepticism faded with time.
The evidence was too consistent, too pervasive, too impossible to dismiss.
Heinrich Mau, the older sergeant who had initially suggested the automobiles were government vehicles, underwent a visible transformation during his first months at Camp Concordia.
Fellow prisoners later recalled that he stopped defending the German position in political discussions.
When younger prisoners pared propaganda about American weakness, he would simply shake his head.
“I have seen their farms,” he reportedly said.
“I have eaten their food.
I have watched their farmers drive to town and back as though gasoline grew on trees.
Whatever we were told, it was not the truth.
The statement was dangerous German prisoner compounds contained committed Nazis who monitored their fellows for signs of defeatism.
But by late 1943, such observations were becoming common enough that enforcement grew difficult.
The train windows had opened onto a world that propaganda could not explain away.
And once opened, they could never be closed again.
Spring came to Kansas in April 1945 with the particular beauty that prairie dwellers know.
Wild flowers emerging from the brown winter grass.
Meetarks returning to sing from fence post perches.
The land itself awakening after months of cold dormcancy.
The prisoners at Camp Concordia watched the transformation with the attention of men who had learned to notice land.
Many of them had spent two years now working Kansas farms, learning American agricultural methods, developing relationships with the farmers who employed them.
The hostility and suspicion of early captivity had given way for most to a strange liinal existence, enemies in name, but neighbors in practice.
On May 8th, the war in Europe ended.
The announcement came by radio, the same technology that had once seemed so impossibly ubiquitous.
Guards informed the prisoner compounds during morning assembly.
Germany had surrendered unconditionally.
The Vermacht was finished.
The thousand-year Reich had lasted 12 years and 4 months.
Verer Coleman, now 25, received the news with a complicated emotions that all prisoners felt.
Relief that the killing had stopped, grief for a Germany that lay in ruins, shame for what was now emerging about his nation’s crimes, and somewhere beneath it all, a strange gratitude for the years in Kansas that had prepared him for this moment.
The train journey had begun his education.
The farms had continued it.
Two years of seeing American prosperity real, tangible, democratically distributed had made him understand that the war could never have been won.
The nation that produced 47 automobiles for one small town’s main street, that gave electricity to its remotest farms, that fed its prisoners better than Germany had fed its soldiers, that nation could not be defeated by propaganda and will alone.
Repatriation proceeded slowly through 1945 and 1946.
The logistics were staggering.
Hundreds of thousands of prisoners scattered across camps in 46 states, shipping capacity limited.
Germany itself divided into occupation zones with different policies and priorities.
The prisoners at Camp Concordia were not among the first to go home.
They waited through the summer and fall of 1945, then through the winter and into 1946.
Some volunteered for continued agricultural work, preferring the known routines of Kansas farms to the unknown chaos of occupied Germany.
Heinrich Mau, the older sergeant, was repatriated in March 1946.
He returned to a Munich.
He barely recognized the city had been heavily bombed, its streets filled with rubble, its surviving population struggling with shortages that made wartime rationing seem generous.
He found work in reconstruction, helping to clear debris and rebuild infrastructure.
In a letter to a Kansas farmer with whom he had worked correspondence facilitated by a church organization connecting former prisoners with their employers, Mau described his homecoming.
I cannot explain to people here what I saw in America.
They do not believe me when I tell them about the farms, the automobiles, the electricity in every house.
They think I am exaggerating or that I have been fooled by American propaganda.
But I saw it with my own eyes.
I worked those farms.
I ate that food.
It was real, he added.
Sometimes I think the most important thing that happened to me in the war was looking out that train window.
It changed everything I believed.
Verern Coleman remained in America longer than most.
He was among the prisoners selected for extended agricultural work programs which continued into 1946 as American farms still faced labor shortages.
He returned to Germany in September 1946, settling eventually in Hamburg, where he found work in the shipping industry.
His later life, documented in German immigration records when he applied for a visa to visit America in 1972, included a successful career in maritime logistics and a family that eventually grew to include four grandchildren.
He made three trips back to Kansas, visiting the farms where he had worked and the landscape that had first shown him the truth about American prosperity.
Camp Concordia closed in 1945, its facilities converted to other uses and eventually demolished.
Today, the site is marked by a small museum and memorial operated by volunteers who preserve the history of what happened there.
Visitors can see photographs of the camp, artifacts from prisoner life, and documentation of the relationships that sometimes developed between captives and captives.
The train routes that carried prisoners across Kansas in 1943 still carry freight and passengers today.
The landscape has changed fewer small farms, more industrial agriculture, but the essential character remains.
The fields still stretch toward distant horizons.
The small towns still cluster around main streets.
And if there are fewer individual automobiles parked beside farmhouses, it is only because modern prosperity has multiplied them beyond counting.
The lessons of those train windows outlived the men who looked through them.
The German prisoners who saw American prosperity in 1943 carried their observations home to a Germany struggling to rebuild.
Many of them became advocates for the Americanstyle economic development that eventually transformed West Germany into an industrial powerhouse.
They had seen what was possible.
They had eaten its food and worked its farms and counted its automobiles.
They knew that the poverty and restriction of the Nazi years had not been inevitable.
That ordinary people could live with abundance if societies were organized to permit it.
Some historians argue that this prisoner experience contributed in small but measurable ways to the democratization of post-war Germany.
The men who returned from American camps knew that the propaganda had been false.
They had seen the evidence with their own eyes through the bars of train windows and across the fields of Kansas farms.
That knowledge inoculated them against future lies.
The metal arcs still sing from Kansas fence posts in spring.
The wheat still turns gold in July, then amber, then the deep orange of harvest.
The land continues its cycles indifferent to the human dramas that have played out across its surface.
But the truth that passed through those train windows in 1943, the simple truth of American prosperity, visible and undeniable, helped shape the world that emerged from the war’s ashes.
It taught enemy soldiers that their leaders had lied to them.
It showed them what was possible beyond ideology and restriction.
It planted seeds that eventually grew into understanding.
The prisoners are gone now.
The trains run on different schedules.
The farms have changed hands and changed again.
But the lesson endures.
Propaganda can control what people believe, but it cannot control what they see.
And once they see the truth, the lies never work quite as well again.
The window on the world had opened and through it the light of reality poured
