While Americans fought Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, German soldiers in Kansas were celebrating Christmas with American farm families, singing Silent Night together around a barn table.

This is the story of 370,000 enemy soldiers who discovered America from the inside and why hundreds never wanted to leave.

September 14th, 1944.

A dirt road outside Concordia, Kansas.

Population 6,847.

The convoy of olive drab trucks kicked up clouds of dust as it rolled past endless fields of wheat stubble baking under the late summer sun.

In the back of the lead truck, 23 German soldiers sat in silence, their fieldg gray uniforms faded and patched, watching America pass by through the canvas flaps.

They had surrendered to American forces in Normandy just 11 weeks earlier.

Most expected to spend the war behind barbed wire, counting days until they could return to whatever remained of the Reich.

None of them expected to end up on a Kansas farm, sitting down to dinner with an American family.

Gwriter Hans Girtz pressed his face closer to the opening, staring at what looked like a mirage.

farm houses, dozens of them, each standing alone in vast acorage painted white or red with barns larger than anything he’d seen in his village near Müster.

Tractors gleaming in farmyards, automobiles, multiple automobiles parked beside homes.

Children playing in yards waving at the convoy as it passed.

“Does Cannine,” he whispered to the man beside him.

“This cannot be.

” But it was.

By September 1944, the United States faced an agricultural crisis of catastrophic proportions.

With over 12 million American men in uniform and another 18 million working in war industries, the nation’s farms were hemorrhaging labor.

The 1944 harvest season threatened to see millions of tons of crops rot in fields from Washington to Georgia.

Wheat, cotton, sugar beets, potatoes, corn, the very food that fed not just America but Allied armies across two oceans stood at risk.

The solution was as pragmatic as it was surreal.

Deployed German prisoners of war.

Between 1943 and 1946, approximately 425,000 Axis PWs were held in camps across the United States, 371,683 of them German.

While much has been written about the main camps, far less is known about the extraordinary labor detachment program that sent tens of thousands of these prisoners into the American heartland where they lived and worked alongside the very people whose sons and brothers they had been fighting weeks or months before.

This is the story of what happened when Hitler’s soldiers discovered small town America and why hundreds never wanted to leave.

The journey typically began in North Africa or Europe.

After capture by American forces, German PSWs were processed through temporary camps, then loaded onto Liberty ships for the Atlantic crossing.

Unlike their Yuboat counterparts who had hunted these same waters, they traveled safely, if not comfortably, in the holds of cargo vessels, Anteritzia Verer Burkhard, captured at Casarine Pass in Tunisia in February 1943.

later described his first glimpse of America in a letter preserved at the National Archives.

We docked at Norfolk on March 18th.

I had prepared myself for a land destroyed by war, rationed and desperate like our own.

Instead, the harbor was a forest of cranes and ships, mountains of supplies, soldiers who looked wellfed, even fat.

And the guards who processed us offered cigarettes, American cigarettes, as if they cost nothing.

The cigarettes were a small detail, but German PS mentioned them repeatedly in letters and postwar interviews.

In a Germany where tobacco had become a currency more valuable than Reich marks, American guards casually distributed lucky strikes and camels.

It was the first hint that these men had entered a different economic reality entirely.

From the ports, prisoners were distributed to over 500 base camps and 700 branch camps across 46 states.

The largest camps were in the south and southwest.

Texas alone hosted 78 camps holding over 50,000 PSWs, but the agricultural labor program eventually spread prisoners across the Midwest and plain states.

Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas Camp Concordia in Kansas, where Hans Girtz arrived that September day in 1944, was typical of medium-sized facilities.

Established in October 1943 on 280 acres of former farmland, it held approximately 4,000 German PSWs at its peak.

The compound consisted of tar paper barracks, messors, a canteen, recreation facilities, and a hospital, all surrounded by a single barbed wire fence with guard towers at the corners, security, veterans later admitted, was remarkably lax.

Where would they escape to? Recall James Henderson, who served as a guard at Concordia in 1944-45 in a 1989 oral history interview.

We were in the middle of Kansas.

Nearest city of any size was Manhattan, over a 100 miles away.

Most of these guys were farm boys themselves.

From Bavaria, Saxony, the Rhineland.

They looked at all that open farmland and saw, well, they saw home.

or at least what home used to be before the war.

The Geneva Convention of 1929 stipulated that PS could be employed in non-military labor, provided they were paid, adequately fed, and worked in reasonable conditions.

The United States, anxious to maintain the same protections for American PS held in Germany, scrupulously followed these rules and then summed.

The German PS earned 80 cents per day for their labor, paid in canteen coupons that could purchase toiletries, candy, beer, and other items.

They worked 8-hour days, 6 days a week.

They received the same rations as American soldiers, 4,000 calories daily, including meat at every meal.

Their camps featured soccer fields, theater groups, educational classes, and camp newspapers.

Some camps had swimming pools in Tennessee courts.

The contrast with conditions in Germany, especially by late seio.

1944 was staggering.

My brother was fighting on the Eastern Front.

Hans Girtz wrote in a letter intercepted by camp sensors in November 1944.

His last letter from August spoke of eating grass soup and the leather from boots.

Mother writes that the ration in Müster is now 1,600 calories, mostly turnips and black bread.

Here I eat bacon and eggs for breakfast.

White bread with butter.

Yesterday we had beef steak.

I have gained 8 kg in 2 months.

Sometimes I am ashamed.

But the real transformation began when the prisoners left the camps for the farms.

October 3rd, 1944.

The Hoffman farm 12 mi east of Concordia.

Robert Hoffman watched the truck pull into his farmyard with mixed feelings.

His son, Robert Jr.

, was with the first infantry division somewhere in Belgium, according to his last letter, and now the War Department was sending him Germans to help bring in his sugar beat crop.

The irony wasn’t lost on him.

Six prisoners climbed down from the truck, accompanied by a single American guard, a kid who looked maybe 19, holding his rifle like it was a broom handle.

The prisoners lined up and the guard consulting a clipboard read out names with painful pronunciation.

Girtz Hans Mueller Friedrich Zimmerman Otto Robert Hoffman was 58 years old, fourth generation Kansas farmer, built like a water tower and just as sturdy.

He’d learned some German from his own grandparents who’d immigrated from Hessa in the 1870s.

He stepped forward and in rough but intelligible German said, “Welcome.

You’re here to work.

Work hard, we’ll get along fine.

Anybody here know sugar beats? Three hands went up.

The farm labor program operated under strict regulations on paper.

P2Ws were to be supervised at all times, kept separate from civilians, returned to camps each evening, no fratonization, no entering farm homes, no sharing meals with American families.

In practice, these rules dissolved almost immediately.

How are you going to supervise six men working a 100 acre beet field? Robert Hoffman’s daughter, Martha Hoffman Klene, recalled in a 2003 interview for the Cloud County Historical Society.

Dad had one guard, and the guard was usually a boy who’d been for air or who’d just gotten back from overseas wounded.

After the first week, the guard would just park himself under a tree with a sandwich and a magazine while the Germans worked.

Everybody knew the rules were nonsense.

Sugarbeat harvesting was backbreaking work.

The beets had to be pulled, topped, and loaded into wagons, all by hand.

It required skill, stamina, and speed.

The Hoffman farm had 180 acres of beets that October, and Robert had worried he’d lose half the crop.

He’d lost his hired hands to the draft and war industries.

His wife, Elizabeth, helped when she could.

His daughter, Martha, 17, worked alongside him, but it wasn’t enough.

The German PS changed everything.

Those boys worked like demons, Martha remembered, especially Hans, Hans Girts.

He’d grown up on a farm in West Failure.

He knew beets, knew wheat, knew livestock.

By the third day, Dad was consulting with Hans about which fields to harvest first, asking his opinion about the weather.

My mother nearly had a fit the first time dad invited them onto the porch for water.

Then one day it rained, and they all came into the kitchen.

October 11th, 1944.

That was the day the Hoffmans shared their first meal with German soldiers.

Elizabeth Hoffman had made chicken and dumplings, depression era comfort food, cheap and filling.

When the skies opened up that afternoon, the men were soaked and shivering.

Robert made a decision.

He brought them into the mudroom, gave them towels, and told his wife to set six more places.

The prisoners sat at the kitchen table, stunned into silence.

The guard, a kid from Topeka named Eddie Ree, shrugged and sat down, too.

They didn’t talk much at first, Martha recalled.

Just stared at the food.

When mother brought out the chicken, a whole chicken roasted, plus dumplings, green beans from the garden.

Biscuits, butter, coffee, apple pie, one of them actually had tears in his eyes.

Hans told us later that it was the first time he’d sat at a family table in 3 years, that it reminded him of home before the war, before everything went crazy.

This scene, or variations of it, played out across thousands of American farms between 1943 and 1946.

In Nebraska, farmer John Kraich wrote to the War Department in November 1944, praising his P workers, “These men are diligent, skilled, and respectful.

They have saved my corn crop.

I would hire them permanently if allowed.

In Wisconsin, dairy farmer Helen Mueller requested the same crew of German PWs return for three consecutive seasons.

In Texas, cotton farmers pulled resources to throw Christmas parties for their P workers.

The transformation worked both ways.

For the farmers, desperate for labor, the prisoners became essential partners.

For the prisoners, American farm life offered something they hadn’t experienced in years.

Normaly Friedrich Müller, who worked on the Hoffman farm alongside Hans Girtz, kept a diary throughout his captivity, later donated to the Eisenhower presidential library.

His entry from October 22nd, 1944 reads, “Today I milked cows for the first time since leaving my father’s farm in 1939 to join the Vermacht.

The Hoffman dairy has 40 head, more than any farm in my village.

The barn has electric lights, a radio playing music, machines for everything.

After evening milking, Mr.

Hoffman showed me his tractor, a 1938 John Deere model B.

I sat in the seat, and he explained the controls.

For a moment, I forgot I was a prisoner.

I forgot there was a war.

I was simply a farmer again, talking with another farmer about soil and weather and the hope of good harvest.

The P labor program expanded dramatically through late 1944 and 1945.

By war’s end, German PSWs had harvested crops in virtually every agricultural region of the United States.

They picked cotton in Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas.

Over 23 million pounds in Texas alone during 1944.

They harvested potatoes in Idaho and Maine.

They cut timber in Minnesota and Oregon.

Approximately 140 million board feet processed by P labor.

They worked in caneries, sugar refineries, and food processing plants.

The economic impact was profound.

A 1946 war department report calculated that P labor contributed approximately $230 million to the American agricultural economy, roughly 3.

6 6 billion in 2024.

In some states, PS constituted over 10% of agricultural workers during peak seasons.

Without them, military historians estimate American food production would have declined by 15 to 20% in 1944 1945, potentially affecting military operations overseas.

But the numbers tell only part of the story.

The real transformation was cultural and psychological.

Camp Concordia like many P camps developed an elaborate internal society prisoners organized classes in English history, mathematics and agriculture.

They formed orchestras, theater companies and sports leagues.

The camp newspaper D roof the call published poems, essays and news.

Educational officers part of the army’s intellectual diversion program screened carefully selected films and facilitated discussions about democracy, individual rights and post-Nazi Germany.

But the real re-education happened on the farms.

You can show a man propaganda films about American democracy, explained Dr.

Ron Robin, author of the barbedwire college, re-educating German PSWs in the United States during World War II, in a 2015 interview.

But when he sits at a farmer’s table, eats meals with the family, sees how they treat each other, how they talk about their government, some with respect, some with criticism, all without fear.

That’s when abstract concepts become reality.

These men were living democracy, not studying it.

Hans Girtz’s letters home, preserved because they were intercepted by German sensors and later captured by Allied forces, document his evolving perspective.

In September 1944, newly arrived, he wrote, “We are treated correctly according to the Geneva rules.

The guards are not brutal by November.

The Americans have much, but they also work hard.

The farmer here rises at 4:30 each morning.

His wife manages the household and keeps financial records.

They respect labor.

By February 1945, I begin to understand why we lost.

It is not only their machines and factories.

It is something else.

They believe a man can rise through work, can improve his station.

Here the farmer’s daughter attends university.

She will study agriculture and return to manage the farm.

This would be impossible in the Reich where everything is controlled from above.

Not every prisoner underwent such transformation.

Some remained committed Nazis, viewing their captivity as a temporary setback before eventual German victory.

The camps had internal conflicts between diehard national socialists and those who’d grown disillusioned with Hitler’s regime.

There were incidents of violence.

At Camp Concordia in November 1944, a suspected anti-Nazi prisoner was beaten by fellow PS.

American authorities increasingly segregated the camps, separating hardcore Nazis from what they termed cooperative prisoners.

But for many farm workers, especially those placed with families for extended periods, the ideological grip loosened.

December 25th, 1944, the Hoffman farm.

The War Department regulations were clear.

No celebration of Christmas with PS, no gifts, no religious services with American civilians, strictly prohibited, Robert Hoffman ignored them.

It was Christmas, Martha Hoffman Klein recalled.

We’d had these boys working with us for 3 months.

Hans had helped dad fix the tractor when it broke down.

Fritz taught me some German songs.

Otto carved a wooden horse for my little nephew.

They were kids, most of them 20, 22 years old, far from home during Christmas.

What were we supposed to do? The Hoffman’s invited the P work crew to Christmas dinner.

They decorated a small tree in the barn.

Elizabeth cooked a ham, made her grandmother’s stolen recipe, prepared more food than they could possibly eat.

Robert carved the ham while Hans led the group in singing Stillin, Silent Night in German.

The Americans joined in English.

The guard, Eddie Ree, contributed a bottle of whiskey he’d been saving.

“It was the strangest, most wonderful Christmas of my life,” Martha said.

Here we were, Americans and Germans sitting together while American boys were dying in the Battle of the Bulge.

We knew it was happening.

We’d heard it on the radio that morning.

But in that moment, in that barn, we were just people, just human beings sharing a meal and remembering that we were all children of God.

Similar scenes occurred across the country that Christmas.

At Camp Hearn in Texas, local churches provided Christmas packages for PS.

In Wisconsin, the town of Baron invited PS to a community Christmas service.

In Nebraska, farmer families pulled ration coupons to bake cookies for their German workers.

The military authorities mostly looked the other way.

They had bigger concerns.

By late 1944, it was clear Germany would lose the war.

The question became, what kind of Germany would emerge? The intellectual diversion program intensified, trying to create a cohort of Germans who’d experienced democracy firsthand and might help rebuild a democratic Germany.

No one planned it this way, but the farm labor program became the most effective re-education tool America had.

May 8th, 1945, VE Day.

Germany surrendered.

For the PS in America, the news produced complex reactions.

Joy that the killing had stopped, relief that they’d survived, anxiety about what they’d find when they returned home, grief for the Germany they knew, now destroyed, and for some a strange reluctance to leave.

Hans Gerts heard the news while working in the Hoffman wheat fields.

Robert Hoffman came out in his truck, climbed down, and simply said in German, “It’s over.

Germany surrendered this morning.

” They stood in silence for several minutes.

the wheat rippling around them in the May breeze.

I should feel joy, Hans finally said.

But I feel only sadness.

My country is destroyed.

My family, I don’t know if they survived the bombing.

My city is rubble.

And here, here is beautiful.

The war’s end didn’t mean immediate repatriation.

Under the Geneva Convention, PS could be retained for labor until a formal peace treaty.

Labour starved American agriculture lobbied hard to keep the German workers.

Through 1945 and 1946, most PS remained in the camps, continuing their farm work.

This period between Germany’s surrender and actual repatriation saw the deepest integration between prisoners and communities.

With the war over, restrictions loosened further.

PS attended county fairs, baseball games, and church services.

Some farms effectively adopted their workers.

The Hoffman family tried to sponsor Hans Girtz for permanent immigration.

Dad went to every authority he could find, Martha recalled.

He wrote to our congressman, to the War Department, to the State Department.

He argued that Hans was a skilled farmer, exactly the kind of immigrant American needed, that he’d proven his character and work ethic, that he wanted to stay, wanted to become American.

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