In the fall of 1943, a German corporal stood in line outside a wooden building at a prisoner-of-war camp on the plains of Kansas. Six months earlier, he had been a soldier in the Afrika Korps, fighting in the desert until he was captured during the collapse in Tunisia. He had spent weeks in a holding cage in North Africa, crossed the Atlantic in a ship’s hold, and traveled by train across half the United States. Now he lived in a wooden barracks behind barbed wire in the middle of a country he had been told was weak and degenerate.
All week, he and the other prisoners had been trucked each morning to a farm, where they spent the day harvesting sugar beets under the watch of an American guard. It was hard work, but he did not mind it. It was better than sitting in the camp, and the farmer’s wife had brought them lunch. When he reached the window, an American clerk matched his name against a list, counted out a small bundle of printed paper, and pushed it across the counter.
It was not money in the literal sense. It was a booklet of coupons printed with cent values. The man ahead of him had already gone to the camp canteen and come out with a bottle of beer and a pack of cigarettes. The corporal asked the prisoner behind him what it was.
The other man laughed and said it was his pay, for a week’s work in the fields. Pay? He was a prisoner of war, captured by the enemy, and the enemy was paying him for his labor. He went into the canteen and stood there for a long time looking at the shelves: cigarettes, candy, soap, razor blades, writing paper, beer.
He was trying to decide whether this was a trick. It was not a trick. It was the law. The starting point was the Geneva Convention of 1929.
In the wake of the First World War, a large number of states, including the United States and Germany, signed an international agreement setting rules for the treatment of prisoners of war. It covered food, housing, clothing, medical care, correspondence, discipline, and punishment. It also covered labor. Under the agreement, a state holding prisoners could compel captured soldiers to work, but only under certain conditions.
The work could not be directly related to the war effort, such as manufacturing weapons or moving ammunition to the front. It could not be excessively dangerous. Officers could not be forced to work at all, and non-commissioned officers could only be required to supervise. Prisoners who worked had to be paid.
The United States took these rules seriously for two reasons. The first was principle. American law and military regulations incorporated the agreement, and the office of the provost marshal general, the branch responsible for prisoners, ran the camps according to it. The second was reciprocity.
Tens of thousands of American soldiers and airmen were held in German prison camps. The U. S. government understood that its treatment of German prisoners might affect how Germany treated American prisoners.
International inspectors visited camps on both sides and reported on their conditions. Treating German prisoners properly was, among other things, a way of protecting Americans behind German wire. There was also the simple matter of numbers. Before 1943, the United States held relatively few enemy prisoners.
Then, after the Axis collapse in Tunisia in May 1943, it suddenly had tens of thousands of them. After the invasion of Normandy, the number grew by hundreds of thousands more. Britain, short on food and space, could not absorb them all. Shipping them across the Atlantic in the empty holds of returning supply ships was the practical solution.
Camps were built across the country, hundreds of them, from Texas and Louisiana to Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan, and beyond. Many were placed in rural areas precisely because those were the places where labor was most needed. The pay system that grew up around the prisoners was simple. Every enlisted prisoner received a small monthly allowance, whether they worked or not, to cover incidental expenses.
Prisoners who worked earned an additional daily wage, most commonly 80 cents a day, a rate set based on what an American private was paid. Officers, who did not have to work, received monthly allowances based on rank. The money was not paid in dollars. Cash would have been a security risk, since a prisoner with real money could buy help in escaping.
Instead, prisoners were paid in coupons that could only be spent in the camp canteen, with any remaining amount credited to an account in their name. The canteens sold things that amazed men who had come from the German army in 1943: cigarettes, candy and chocolate, soft drinks, beer, toothpaste, soap, razor blades, and writing paper and pens for letters home. Sometimes there were clothing items, books, and sports equipment. In some camps, prisoners pooled their money to buy musical instruments for camp bands, materials for theatrical productions, or art supplies.
The canteens were run inside the camps, and in some, prisoners helped run them. Any profits went to a fund used for the benefit of the prisoners as a group. It is worth understanding what this looked like to a German soldier. By 1943, civilians in Germany were living under severe rationing.
Real coffee had been nearly impossible to obtain for years. Soldiers themselves, especially those who had fought in North Africa, had often lacked food, water, and everything else. Now, behind barbed wire in an enemy country, they could buy chocolate and beer with money the enemy had paid them. Some could not believe it.
Some suspected it was propaganda, a scheme designed to soften their attitudes. The most committed Nazis insisted it was a sign of American weakness, arguing that a strong nation would not pamper its enemies. But most simply took the coupons, went to the canteen, and bought cigarettes. The reason there was so much paid work for prisoners was simple: America had a labor shortage.
By 1943, millions of American men were in uniform, and millions more men and women had moved to war industries in the cities. Farms were especially desperate for workers. Crops were ripening in the fields with no one to harvest them. Canning and food-processing plants were short-handed.
Logging camps, railroads, and other industries suffered similarly. The German prisoners, hundreds of thousands of healthy young men, many from agricultural backgrounds, were an obvious solution. They harvested sugar beets in the Midwest, cotton and peanuts in the South, fruits and vegetables across the country, and corn and wheat on the plains. They worked in canning plants, logging camps, and food factories, and on maintenance projects at military bases, within the convention’s prohibition on war-related work.
Farmers and companies who used prisoner labor paid the government the going rate. The prisoners received their 80 cents a day, and the fees helped cover the cost of running the camps. Estimates of the total value of the work performed by German prisoners in the United States during the war run into enormous sums. The work itself changed the experience of captivity.
Instead of sitting behind wire month after month, many prisoners spent their days outdoors, on farms, among ordinary Americans. Guards were often light, sometimes one guard for a whole work crew, because escaping from the middle of the American continent was pointless. There was nowhere to go. The number of prisoners who escaped was small, and nearly all were recaptured within days, often after turning themselves in because they were hungry and lost.
On the farms, relationships formed that no one had planned. Farm families shared meals with prisoners. Prisoners and farmers who spoke the same language, since many Midwestern communities were of German descent, talked about crops, weather, and families. Some prisoners stayed in touch with the families they had worked for long after the war.
A number of them later returned to live in the United States. Behind the wire, the money helped build something else: a life. Prisoners used their earnings and camp resources to organize education. Camps held classes taught by prisoners who had been teachers, engineers, or university students before the war.
Some prisoners took correspondence courses offered by American universities, and some camps arranged for courses to count toward their qualifications at home after the war. They ran camp newspapers. They formed bands, choirs, and theater groups, building stages and sets from scrap lumber. They played soccer on dirt fields behind the barbed wire.
They painted and carved and made furniture. The combination of work, wages, and organized activity made captivity for most German prisoners in the United States bearable. For many, it gave them skills and ideas they took home with them. It would be dishonest to tell this story as a simple tale of kindness and transformation, because it was not that.
Inside the camps, there was a war of its own. Among the prisoners were committed Nazis who continued to enforce the regime’s ideology behind the wire. In some camps, they dominated daily life, intimidating prisoners who were not loyal enough, controlling the prisoner leadership, and in the worst cases holding secret trials. Several prisoners were killed in American camps by their own comrades on suspicion of disloyalty or collaboration.
Some of the killers were later tried before American military courts and executed. The American authorities were slow to recognize the problem and slow to separate the hardliners from the rest. Eventually they did so, moving the most committed Nazis to separate camps. But for many prisoners who were not Nazis, the early months of captivity were spent under the watchful eyes of men who reported every word and action.
Outside the camps, there was controversy as well. Some Americans were angry that enemy soldiers were getting good food, wages, beer, and cigarettes while American families lived under rationing. Newspapers accused the government of coddling prisoners. Complaints sharpened in the spring of 1945, when the full horror of the concentration camps was revealed to the world.
Rations in prisoner camps were cut, and some canteen privileges were restricted. American officials were determined not to let prisoners appear to be living in comfort while the world absorbed what had been done in Germany’s name. There is another dark aspect worth remembering. The wages prisoners saved were deposited into accounts for settlement upon their return home.
For many, getting that money after the war proved slow and complicated, and many prisoners did not return home directly when the war ended. Large numbers were transferred to Britain and France and required to work there rebuilding countries their army had destroyed for months or years before they were finally released. So what did the pay actually accomplish? For the United States, the practical benefits were clear.
Crops that would otherwise have rotted in the fields were harvested. Labor-starved industries got workers. The cost of holding hundreds of thousands of prisoners was partly offset by the value of their work. And the decent treatment of German prisoners helped support a system of mutual inspection and reciprocity that protected, however imperfectly, American prisoners in German camps.
For the prisoners, the effect was harder to measure but in many ways more lasting. Many had been told that America was a weak, corrupt, and divided country. What they actually saw was a nation rich enough to feed its enemies well, pay them for their work, and sell them beer and chocolate, and confident enough to guard them lightly in the middle of the country without fear they would escape. They saw endless farmland, huge factories, cities untouched by bombing, and ordinary people who, whatever their opinions of Germany, treated prisoners with kindness.
Many former prisoners, interviewed decades later, said their time in American camps changed the way they thought about their own country and about the war. Some returned home as quiet advocates for democracy. Some returned to live in the United States. Some simply remembered, for the rest of their lives, that strange moment when their enemy counted out their wages.
The German corporal in Kansas stood in the canteen line looking at a booklet of coupons worth a few dollars. It seemed like a small thing. It was not. It was the product of an international agreement signed by his country and his captors, and the captors had decided to honor it.
It was a calculation of reciprocity and of protecting Americans held behind German wire. It was a solution to a severe labor shortage on American farms. And it was, whether anyone intended it or not, one of the most effective pieces of persuasion of the entire war.
Because nothing the propaganda ministry could say about America was as convincing as a week’s wages and a bottle of beer handed over by the enemy.