The German prisoner sat at the lunch counter in a small Kansas town, a plate of eggs in front of him, coffee already poured. He was still dressed in the clothes of a prisoner of war. The waitress smiled. The cook asked if he wanted more toast.
At the door stood a group of American soldiers in uniform, and they had just been told to leave. The prisoner did not know where to look. He will be called Ernst here, though he is not one man. He is drawn from the experiences of the German prisoners who were brought to work in the American heartland during the Second World War.
But the lunch counter was real. The soldiers at the door were real, and one of them never forgot it. Ernst had fought with the Afrika Korps. When the German and Italian armies surrendered in Tunisia in May 1943, more than 200,000 men laid down their weapons.
Ernst was among them. He was shipped across the Atlantic, put on a train, and sent to a camp in the middle of the country. In time, he found himself in a place he could never have imagined: Kansas. He had been raised on a very clear picture of the world.
The Nazi state divided humanity into ranks, with the so-called master race at the top and the people they called Untermenschen beneath them. Jews, Slavs, and anyone with dark skin were placed there by law and by propaganda. The same propaganda mocked America as a mongrel nation, a country of mixed races with nothing holding it up. So Ernst expected to be treated the way Germany treated its enemies, with contempt, perhaps with a bullet.
He did not expect a hot shower. He did not expect clean clothes, three meals a day, and wages for his work. And he certainly did not expect what he saw in that small Kansas town. Salina sat in the middle of wheat country, a railroad town with a long main street, grain elevators on the horizon, and an army air base and camp nearby.
German prisoners were held in the area and sent out to work on farms and in fields, wherever American men had gone off to fight. The Geneva Convention required that they be fed and treated decently, and in a farm town short of hands, many locals came to see them simply as workers. Some prisoners were taken into town under guard. Some ate where the locals ate.
To many people in Salina, a hungry German farmhand at the counter did not seem strange at all. But there was another group of men in Salina in those years, men in American uniforms. Ernst’s first job was on a wheat farm outside town. A truck picked up the prisoners every morning at the camp gate, with a guard riding in the back, his rifle across his knees, more bored than watchful.
By the second week, he was dozing off before they reached the fields. The farmer was a tall, quiet man whose son was somewhere in the Pacific. He spoke no German. Ernst spoke little English.
They worked side by side, managing with pointing and nodding. At noon, the farmer’s wife carried out a basket: sandwiches, a jug of cold milk, a pie still warm. She set it on the tailgate and went back to the house without a word. Ernst stood there for a long moment.
In Germany, he had been told that these people hated his country, that they would spit on him. Instead, a woman whose son was fighting his army had baked him a pie. That evening, back at the camp, the men talked about it in low voices. Some said it was a trick.
Some said the Americans were soft. A few said nothing at all. Lloyd Brown was a black American soldier. In the fall of 1942, his all-black unit arrived in Salina.
He and his fellow soldiers soon learned the rules of the town. They could not be served in the restaurants, not at the lunch counters, not anywhere. They wore the same uniform as every other American soldier and had sworn the same oath, but in Salina, they were turned away at the door. One day, Brown and some men from his squadron walked into a lunchroom on Santa Fe Avenue, the town’s main street.
The counterman looked up and said the words they already expected: “You boys know we don’t serve colored here. ” And there at the counter, eating their lunch, sat German prisoners of war. On the stools sat men who had worn the uniform of Hitler’s army, some of whom may have believed every word the Nazis taught them about race. They were eating American food, served by American hands, with American guards waiting outside.
In the doorway stood American soldiers, volunteers and draftees preparing to fight that very army. They were told to go. From the other side of the counter, Ernst watched the black soldiers turn and walk out into the street. He had been told America was weak and divided, and here, in a single lunchroom, he saw a piece of that.
But he also saw the men who were turned away put their caps back on and return to the war. Lloyd Brown carried that moment for the rest of his life. Many years later, he found the words for it: “If we were untermenschen in Nazi Germany, they would break our bones. As colored men in Salina, they only break our hearts.
” In 1973, he told the story on the opinion page of the New York Times, the story of Salina, where restaurants would serve German prisoners of war but would not admit black American soldiers. Brown went on to become a writer and lived until 2003. Of all the things he saw in the war, it was a lunch counter in Kansas that he chose to tell the country about. Salina was not the only place.
Lena Horne, one of the most famous Black singers and actresses in America, traveled to army camps during the war to perform for the troops with the USO. According to accounts of one show at Camp Robinson in Arkansas, she walked onto the stage and looked out at the audience. In the front rows sat German prisoners of war. Behind them, at the back of the hall, sat the Black American soldiers she had come to sing for.
She stopped. Then, the story goes, she stepped down from the stage, walked past the Germans, and stood in front of the Black soldiers. She sang to them with her back turned to the prisoners. Horne later left the USO tour because of the way audiences were separated by race and paid for her own trips to the camps.
How could this happen? Part of the answer is the law. The Geneva Convention spelled out exactly how prisoners of war had to be treated: food equal to that of troops at base camps, decent housing, medical care, pay for work. America followed those rules closely, partly because it wanted its own captured soldiers in Germany treated the same way.
No such rules protected Black Americans at home. In much of the country, segregation was the law, and in the rest it was custom. The army itself was divided by race. About a million Black Americans served in uniform during the war, most of them in separate units, often under white officers, often in support jobs far from the front.
So a German prisoner had rights written in an international treaty, while a Black American soldier in many towns had only the mood of the man behind the counter. Black Americans saw this clearly and said so. In 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest Black newspapers in the country, launched a campaign called Double V: victory against fascism abroad and victory against racism at home. The symbol spread across the country, printed on posters, pinned to dresses, painted on signs.
For millions of Black Americans, the war was not one fight but two, and stories like the lunchroom in Salina showed why. What did the German prisoners make of it? Some, no doubt, took it as proof that the Nazis had been right, that America was as divided as they had been told. But many others noticed something the propaganda never mentioned: in America, people argued about the injustice.
Black newspapers attacked it openly. Singers like Lena Horne could walk off a stage in protest and remain stars. Soldiers like Lloyd Brown could write about it in the most famous newspaper in the country. In Germany, no one could say a word against the regime and stay free.
In America, the injustice was real, but so was the fight against it. For Ernst, the lunch counter was a lesson he had not expected. America was not the perfect country of its own posters, but it was not the broken country of Goebbels’ speeches either. It was a country that could see its own wrongs and was beginning, slowly, to fight them.
The war ended in 1945. The German prisoners went home to ruins. Some later came back to America and stayed. The Black soldiers came home too, many to the same segregated towns they had left.
But something had changed. They had fought for freedom overseas, and they were not willing to wait much longer for it at home. In 1948, President Harry Truman signed an order to end segregation in the American armed forces. It took years to carry out, but the door that had been shut in Salina was finally beginning to open.
Many historians see the Second World War as one of the roots of the civil rights movement that followed, and men like Lloyd Brown were part of it. Today, it is hard to imagine that lunchroom, enemy soldiers on the stools and American soldiers at the door. But it happened, and it is part of the story of how America won the war, and of what it still had to win at home.