The line of faded khaki stretched across the packed earth inside the barbed wire perimeter. These were not American soldiers waiting for mail call. They were veterans of Rommel’s Africa Corps, men who had marched out of the desert with nothing, now queuing for payday. At a rough table, a US Army clerk dipped his pen and entered credits into a thick ledger.
Every German prisoner of war was earning a wage: 80 cents a day, paid not in cash but in a small book of canteen script. The dull thud of a rubber stamp echoed through the open window of the nearby canteen, where rows of cigarettes, bars of chocolate, and bottles of soda sat on wooden shelves under the hot sun. What these German soldiers could buy inside these camps would soon become a national scandal, ignite fury in a nation at war, earn the camps an infamous nickname, and force Congress to demand answers. The United States was strictly adhering to the 1929 Geneva Convention, a treaty signed by both Washington and Berlin that meticulously governed the treatment of prisoners of war.
America honored its tenets, partly as a strategic move designed to protect its own soldiers held captive by Germany. Under these regulations, German enlisted prisoners could be compelled to work. For their labor, they earned script, a special currency that could only be spent within the camp canteens, preventing cash from financing escape attempts. Every enlisted man, working or not, also drew a small monthly allowance of a few dollars for necessities.
Officers operated under different rules: they could not be forced to work but received a significant monthly allowance based on rank. A lieutenant drew $20, a captain $30, and majors and higher-ranking officers $40. These funds, along with any unspent script, were logged in individual trust accounts held for each prisoner. Farmers, canneries, and lumber mills contracted for this labor and paid the government the prevailing local wage.
The critical difference between that local wage and the prisoners’ 80-cent script pay flowed directly to the US Treasury, offsetting much of the program’s cost. Across the nation, American families endured strict rationing, their grocery lists ruled by ration points. Yet inside these camps, the canteens often brimmed with goods: soap, toiletries, and low-point beer for enlisted men. The wider public and national press had not yet learned of the stark contrast.
Camp after camp, the scene repeated, and it appears again and again in prisoner memoirs. Men who had been starved and exhausted approached a counter laden with choices. On the shelves waited American cigarettes, chocolate bars, bottled soft drinks, luxuries previously unimaginable in wartime Germany. Gleaming razor blades and tubes of toothpaste lined the racks.
For enlisted men, there was the familiar clink of low-point beer bottles; for officers in some camps, an actual bottle of wine. The canteen buzzed with hushed German, the aroma of tobacco and sweet chocolate mixing with the clean scent of American soap. An 80-cent work day, perhaps stacking hay under the baking American sun, could buy a pack of cigarettes and leave change. This absurd arithmetic spread in whispered conversations.
Letters left the camps describing the wages and the canteen’s unbelievable bounty. German censors, according to post-war accounts, often read them with outright disbelief. Families in a war-ravaged Reich suspected staged propaganda and could not reconcile the stories with their own desperate reality. But inside the barracks, a quiet truth took hold: these soldiers of the Third Reich were being paid better by their American captors than the Reich paid its own fighting men.
It was a stark realization that spread through the camps. Years later, former prisoners would consistently recall this fair treatment as the ultimate refutation of Nazi propaganda’s bitter lies about America. The system compounded. Canteen profits flowed back into prisoner welfare funds, creating a vibrant camp economy that went well beyond cigarettes and chocolate.
The funds paid for orchestras and their instruments, theater groups performing in the barracks, camp newspapers edited and printed by prisoners, sports equipment from soccer goals to boxing gloves, seeds for camp gardens, books for classroom instruction, and even university-style classes for those eager to learn. For enlisted men, an extra work detail, like ten hours harvesting sugar beets or mending fences, meant another 80 cents in script. Many signed up for the additional labor. Officers’ monthly allowances, drawn without a day’s labor, dwarfed the few dollars a working private saw.
The convention’s arithmetic of rank applied even behind the wire. Unspent earnings accumulated. Month after month, individual trust accounts swelled, leaving prisoners of war with growing savings. Outside the wire, American housewives counted red ration points for a pound of meat.
Then the outside world noticed. Townspeople began calling the local camps the “Fritz Ritz,” the Ritz Hotel for Fritz. Local papers carried their outrage. Letters to editors flooded in, asking why the enemy could drink beer and access goods unavailable to American families.
Why did Americans queue with ration books while prisoners seemed coddled? In the spring of 1945, photographs of starved American prisoners liberated from brutal German camps hit the newsstands and ignited a firestorm. Anger boiled over. From communities across the nation, calls reached Washington, and congressmen demanded an immediate investigation into the alleged coddling.
The answer that came back went on the record: the treatment of prisoners was not a question of Army policy but a question of law, the 1929 Geneva Convention. Every deviation from its tenets on American soil risked handing Berlin an excuse to mistreat American soldiers still held in German hands. And the labor ledger, the Army argued, ran squarely in America’s favor. The program more than paid for itself.
But with Germany’s surrender in May, the argument for reciprocity died. Under considerable public pressure, rations and privileges within the camps were visibly cut back in 1945. The “Fritz Ritz” scandal was not that the system broke the rules, but that it followed them precisely. The system closed out as 1945 gave way to 1946.
German POWs were repatriated. At the gangplank, their individual trust accounts were settled, and each man’s unspent balance was paid out as he left American custody. They sailed for a ruined homeland, some carrying small bundles of soap, cigarettes, and coffee. They also carried the strangest souvenir of the war: American credits, money earned as a prisoner.
The program’s ledger closed quietly. It accounted for tens of millions of dollars in contracted labor and countless harvests saved across American farm states. It had exposed a generation of former enemies to the American economic system from inside its pay ledgers. The “Fritz Ritz” nickname faded into local history books, but surviving script books and camp chits are now museum pieces, tangible evidence of a peculiar wartime economy.
Former prisoners themselves offered a stark reversal in perspective: the country that jailed them was, for many, the first employer to ever pay them a fair wage.