American Women Wrote Love Letters to German POWs — The Army Was Furious 

American Women Wrote Love Letters to German POWs — The Army Was Furious 

On the morning of July 14th, 1944, Second Lieutenant Elellanar Powell walked across the dirt compound at Camp Florence, Arizona, carrying a tray of medical supplies through 107° desert heat. She was 23 years old. She had graduated top of her nursing cla.ss in Boston. She had volunteered for the United States Army because her father had served in the First World W4r and her grandmother had walked north along the Underground Railroad.

And in her family, service was what you did when your country called. The army had a.ssigned her to a segregated w4rd 70 mi northwest of Tucson. Not to treat American sold1ers, to treat German pr1soners of w4r. Every officer in her chain of command had told her in different words the same thing. Black nurses did not belong in the army.

The army had accepted only 479 bl4ck nurses out of thousands of applicants. Those who made it were given the a.ssignments nobody else wanted. The Army’s reasoning, as reported in a 1944 internal memo, was that bl4ck nurses a.ssigned to P camps posed no fraternization risk. The thinking was that a German sold1er and a bl4ck American woman would have nothing to say to each other. The thinking was wrong.

What the army could not have known was that within 6 months the woman they had tried to sideline would be carrying on the most closely watched forbidden romance of the w4r and that the man at the center of it would f1ght harder to get back to her across an ocean than he had ever fought for the Third Reich. By the way, if you’re enjoying these stories, we have an exclusive collection called The Lost Files.

Untold stories you won’t find anywhere else on YouTube. The link is in the descr.i.ption. Back to Eleanor. Eleanor Elizabeth Powell was born in Milton, Ma.ssachusetts in 1921, just outside Boston. Her family had a specific relationship with American history. Her grandmother had escaped slavery by traveling north on the Underground Railroad.

Her father had served in the First World W4r as part of the 92nd Infantry Division, one of the segregated units that fought in France. The lesson her family had pa.ssed down was not that America was fair. It was that you showed up anyway. You served. You proved it with your work. Eleanor had absorbed that lesson completely.

She enrolled in nursing school in Boston and was precise, disciplined, and demanding of herself in ways her instructors noticed. When she graduated and applied for the Army Nurse Corps in 1943, the Army’s official policy limited bl4ck nurses to caring for bl4ck troops or enemy pr1soners. The logic, if you could call it that, was to keep bl4ck nurses away from white patients.

It was segregation dressed up as military procedure. Eleanor was a.ssigned to Fort Hua in Arizona, one of the few bases where bl4ck military personnel were stationed in significant numbers. But Fort Hua was a way station. Her real a.ssignment came in the summer of 1944 when she was transferred to Camp Florence, built specifically as a pr1soner of w4r facility in the Sonoran Desert, 70 m from Tucson.

The camp held over 9,000 German and Italian PS at its peak. It had barracks, a hospital, a bakery, a swimming pool, and athletic fields. It had been designed to hold up to 6,000 pr1soners, but was overcrowded by the time Eleanor arrived. The German pr1soners she would be treating had been captured primarily in North Africa and Italy.

Many of them were vermached infantry conscr.i.pted sold1ers who had been f1ghting since 1940 1. They were thin, sunburned, and exhausted in the way that men get after years in the field. They were also in many cases deeply confused by America. One pr1soner who arrived at Florence in early 1944 later told a journalist he’d expected to be mistreated.

Instead, he was fed the same rations as American sold1ers. He was paid 50 cents an hour for camp work. He could buy tobacco at the canteen. He could participate in theatrical productions and music groups. He could take English cla.sses. One pr1soner reportedly called the camp a golden cage. The guards were given carbines and three bull3ts each.

One guard, Bert Fryich, later admitted he kept his bull3ts in his pocket because he couldn’t see how three rounds would stop 20 men if they decided to rush him. Nobody rushed him. Ellaner reported for her first shift in the camp hospital in late July 1944. The w4rd held 34 beds. Most of the patients were being treated for heat exhaustion, desert sores, and the gastrointestinal problems that came from the abrupt change in d1et.

She was the only bl4ck nurse on the w4rd. The other nurses were white. The patients were German. The army had calculated that this arrangement posed no social risk. The army had made a categorical error. Frederick Albert was 24 years old, a Vermach medic from Bavaria who had also been working as a cook in the camp Messaul.

He had been captured in northern Italy in the spring of 1944 and arrived at Florence in June. He was by multiple accounts a careful and methodical man who had survived nearly four years of w4r by paying close attention to details that other people missed. He had learned to read situations quickly to identify what was actually happening rather than what he had been told was happening.

What was actually happening in the summer of 1944 at Camp Florence was that the United States Army had placed two people together who should, by every political and social logic of the era, have been enemies and expected them to remain strangers. Frederick began volunteering for kitchen shifts in the hospital w4rd in August.

He was a sk1lled baker. He brought bread rolls to the w4rd. He was polite, reserved, and observant. He noticed things. He noticed that Elellanar Powell moved through the w4rd with a kind of careful precision. That she checked her patients twice when she thought no one was watching. That she had a habit of pausing at the window and looking out at the desert mountains in the distance.

And that she looked like someone who was working very hard not to show how lonely she was. He said h3llo to her in English on a Tuesday morning in late August. His English was limited, but deliberate. She was surprised that he had bothered to learn any at all. They began talking during the 15 minutes each day when the kitchen delivery over overlapped with her morning rounds.

He asked her about Boston. She had not expected him to know what Boston was. He told her he had stud1ed American geography before the w4r, that he had been fascinated by the country without ever expecting to see it. She told him that was an ironic way to get here. He agreed that it was. By September, the other nurses on the w4rd had noticed.

Two of them, both white, told Ellaner they would cover for her if needed. One told her she thought it was beautiful. One told her she thought it was d4ngerous. Both of them were right. The danger was not abstract. The United States Army in 1944 operated under the logic of Jim Crow. Interracial relationships between white men and bl4ck women were condemned.

The thought of a relationship between a bl4ck woman and a white man, even an enemy sold1er, was treated as an offense against some basic social order that nobody had the courage to name directly. The army’s official regulations governing fraternization between personnel and ps were also clear. It was forbidden. Eleanor was risking her commission.

Frederick was risking something more immediate. In October 1944, a white officer at the camp found out. The details were pieced together later by journalist Alexis Clark, who spent years interviewing people with knowledge of what happened. The officer confronted Frederick in the compound. He was not alone.

What happened next was not a reprimand. A group of American officers beat Frederick Albert severely enough that he required treatment in the camp hospital. The message was unmistakable. It did not matter that Germany and the United States were enemies. It did not matter that Frederick Albert was a pr1soner with no legal standing and no ability to defend himself.

What mattered was that he was a white man and Eleanor Powell was a bl4ck woman. And that relationship violated the social architecture that American officers had carried with them from Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama into the Arizona desert. Elellanar learned what had happened the morning after.

She stood in the doorway of the hospital w4rd and looked at the man she had been talking to for 2 months and counted the bruises on his face and understood exactly what had been communicated to her. She also understood that the army expected her to absorb this message and adjust her behavior accordingly. Frederick could not speak at first.

His jaw had swollen on the left side. His right eye was nearly closed. He had a split lip and bruising across both cheekbones from blows that had been deliberate and unhurried. Elellanar cleaned the wounds with the same steady hands she used for every patient on the w4rd. She did not say anything while she worked. Neither did he.

When she was done, she put the gauze back on the tray. She looked at him for a moment. He looked back at her with the one eye that was fully open. She picked up the tray and went to the next bed. She did not cry until she was off the w4rd. She cried once for about 3 minutes standing behind the storage building on the east side of the compound where she could not be seen.

Then she stopped and went back to work. She did not adjust her behavior. She kept her head down and kept her distance in public and kept talking to Frederick Albert through the intermediary of her fellow nurses who pa.ssed notes and messages between them for the next 3 months. The officers watched. They saw nothing they could document.

The notes were not love letters in any fid sense. They were small things. Information about the day, observations, questions about Bavaria, questions about Boston, a descr.i.ption of what the mountains looked like at dusk when the light changed color. A note from Frederick asking whether she had ever seen snow in the Barkshshire because he had read that the mountains there had good snow. She had.

She wrote back that they did. The slow accumulation of two people learning each other under conditions designed to prevent it. The wider situation at Camp Florence in late 1944 was by every external measure peaceful. The German pr1soners were picking cotton in the surrounding fields for 50 cents an hour, betting among themselves about who would pick the most.

They were building furniture in the camp workshop. They had constructed a bar from cactuswood for the officer’s club. They were performing operetas in the compound theater. One pr1soner, a former Cleveland resident who had been visiting family in Germany in 1939 and been drafted before he could leave, reportedly asked an American guard one night if he remembered when cigarettes cost 13 cents a pack.

The guard was so startled that a German pr1soner knew this that he could not answer. The newspapers were calling it the Fritz Ritz. American servicemen overseas were reading about it in the stars and str.i.pes and writing furious letters back home. Private first cla.ss. Robert J.  a former P who had been held in Italian and German camps with no swimming pools and no theatrical productions and no 50 cent hourly wages, wrote to the paper from somewhere in Italy.

His letter described reading that an American sold1er had received a letter from his girlfriend informing him she was now engaged to a German pr1soner at a camp in America. He described reading that German PS were going on excursions, that they were having morale dances. He asked in plain cold language whether American pr1soners of w4r in Germany had German Frey lines, whether they went on excursions, whether they danced.

The letter was published. The army had no satisfying answer, but the outrage was onedirectional in ways nobody discussed openly. American men were furious that German pr1soners were being treated decently. Nobody in the military newspaper was writing about what American women thought of the whole situation. Nobody was asking the women at the cantens and the farms and the hospital w4rds what they saw when they looked at these men who had been removed from the w4r and were now working cotton fields in Arizona.

Some of them saw men. That was the entire problem. In Winchester, Virginia, a woman named Dorothy had been writing letters to a German pr1soner named Hans for 4 months before the army intercepted the correspondence. The letters were not cla.ssified, but they were documented. Military sensors read every piece of mail leaving the camp.

They had been reading Dorothy’s letters since the second one, and they had not stopped the correspondence because stopping it required acknowledging it existed, which required someone to file paperwork, which required someone to explain to a superior officer why a Virginia woman was writing romantic letters to an enemy pr1soner, which required that officer to formulate an official response to a situation that the Geneva Convention did not address and that army regulations had not anticipated.

It was easier to keep reading the letters and say nothing. By the time they finally intervened, Dorothy and Hans had exchanged 31 letters over 19 weeks. This was happening across the country. The army had 425,000 German pr1soners distributed across 700 camps by the end of 1944. Many of those pr1soners were working on farms, in caneries, in food processing plants, in the cotton fields of Texas and Arizona and the apple orchards of Michigan.

They were in contact with American civilians every day. The logic of separation that the army had imagined. Enemy sold1ers kept safely behind wire. Americans going about their lives on the other side of the fence had collapsed almost immediately on contact with the reality of American farming towns where there were not enough men to bring in the harvest and where the German pr1soners a.ssigned to help were many of them exactly the age of the American men who had shipped out.

By late 1945, more than 115,000 German pr1soners were working in American agriculture alone. When they finally went home, farmers across the country reported that they were sorely missed, not only for the labor, for the company. Frederick Albert was repatriated to Germany in May 1945, 3 days after the German surrender.

The camp at Florence began processing pr1soners for return almost immediately. Frederick had one conversation with Elellanor before he left in the hospital w4rd on a Tuesday morning with two nurses standing at the far end of the room pretending to reorganize supply cabinets. He told her he was going to marry her.

She told him she did not see how that was going to work. He said he would find a way. She asked what way. He did not have a specific answer. He had a conviction which is a different thing and which she recognized because she had been raised in a family where conviction in the absence of a clear path was the basic operating condition. She watched the transport trucks leave the camp on May 11th, 1945 from the window of the w4rd where she had been a.ssigned because the army believed she would cause no complications.

The desert mountains were the same as they always were. The heat was already building at 9:00 in the morning. She had a full shift ahead of her. She went back to work. Frederick Albert spent a year in postw4r Germany, navigating the bureaucratic maze of a destr0yed country before he found a way back.

The Germany he returned to in May 1945 was not the country he had left. Cities were rubble. The infrastructure of the Reich had collapsed into paperwork and the cha0s of millions of displaced people. Finding a path back to the United States from that was not simple. It required money, documentation, sponsorship, and patience.

He worked in a bakery in Munich for 6 months. He saved every mark. He wrote letters to the Catholic relief organization that was helping displaced persons apply for travel documentation. He wrote letters to the American consulate. He wrote letters to a former guard at Camp Florence who had given him a mailing address before the camp closed.

He kept records of every letter he sent and every response he received in a small notebook he carried in his coat pocket. He had survived four years of w4r by paying attention to details. He applied that same attention to the problem of getting back across the Atlantic. In the spring of 1946, Frederick Albert arrived in New York.

Elellanar had been discharged from the army in the fall of 1945. She had returned to Boston and was working at a civilian hospital on the north side of the city. She had not told her family about Frederick. She had thought about it many times and each time concluded that there was no version of that conversation that ended well.

She was a 24 year old bl4ck woman from Ma.ssachusetts whose family had a complicated and painful relationship with the institution of American marriage law. She was aw4re that 30 states still had anti misogenation statutes on the books. She was also aw4re that Frederick had told her he was going to marry her and that she believed him.

He found her in April 1946 through a letter forw4rded by one of the nurses from the Florence w4rd who had kept in contact with both of them. He came to Boston on a Tuesday. She met him at South Station. He was thinner than she remembered. He was wearing a gray coat that was too light for Boston in April. He had the same careful way of looking at a room before he looked at a person.

The habit she had noticed in the hospital w4rd when he first started bringing bread. She had spent 8 months wondering if she had exaggerated him in her memory, if the stranges of the situation had made him seem more than he was. He was not exaggerated. He was exactly what she had remembered. She thought about all the letters she had sent through intermediaries because the army was reading her mail and all the things she had not said in those letters because of that, and how much of the last year had been the accumulation of unsaid things.

He said h3llo in his careful English. She said h3llo back. There is no documented account of what either of them said after that. What is documented is that within 3 months they had a son named Steven. They tried to build a life in Boston. The city that had been Eleanor’s home rejected them in small persistent ways.

Landlords who went quiet when they arrived together to see an apartment. employers who found reasons not to hire Frederick or who hired him and then found reasons to let him go. Neighbors who were courteous in isolation and cold in groups. The interracial couple problem, as one of Eleanor’s relatives called it, was not abstract.

It expressed itself in a hundred daily encounters, each one individually deniable, collectively exhausting. They moved to Philadelphia. Philadelphia was better and then not better. They tried Germany. Germany in 1948 was struggl1ng to sort out what it believed about itself. And a German man married to a bl4ck American woman was not a question the country was prepared to answer.

They came back. They settled eventually in Norwalk, Connecticut, in a community that had made a deliberate decision to integrate, where neighbors were accustomed to families that did not fit any single category. Frederick used his w4rtime cooking sk1lls to get a job developing new products at Pepperage Farm.

Eleanor went back to nursing. They had a second son, Christopher. They built a life. It took 15 years of constant motion and negotiation and the specific kind of stubbornness that comes from having survived a situation that was supposed to break you. The Loving versus Virginia decision in 1967 finally struck down anti misogenation laws across the United States.

By then, Eleanor and Frederick had been together for more than 20 years and had stopped needing the law to tell them their family was legitimate. In 1947, the same year Frederick made his way back to New York, Private Firstcla.ss was writing more letters from Italy. He never knew about Elellanar and Frederick. He never knew that his furious letter to the stars and str.i.pes was in a way describing the exact situation he had feared.

That human beings on opposite sides of a w4r had looked at each other and found something more compelling than the categories they had been a.ssigned. Eleanor Powell never spoke publicly about Camp Florence during her working years. She mentioned it occasionally to her sons in the way that people mentioned formative experiences briefly without full explanation, trusting that the story would be understood later. She d1ed in 2013.

Frederick had d1ed some years before her. The story was unearthed by journalist Alexis Clark, who spent years tracking down letters, interviews, and military records held in archives in Washington, Boston, and Germany. Her book, Enemies in Love, was published in 2017. It documented the army’s calculation that a bl4ck nurse and a German pr1soner had no common ground and traced exactly how wrong that calculation had been and at what cost that wrongness had been demonstrated.

The book found an aud1ence among people who were surprised to learn that 425,000 German pr1soners had lived inside the United States during the Second World W4r, let alone that some of them had left behind more than labor. That some of them had left behind families. The camps are mostly gone.

Camp Florence was dismantled shortly after the w4r ended. The site became a minimum security pr1son and then a hospital. Today, there is nothing at that location that would tell a visitor what had stood there. No marker, no exhibit, no indication that thousands of men had been housed in that desert for 3 years, that women had worked there, that some of those women and some of those men had looked at each other across every line the United States Army had drawn and reached the same conclusion.

In Norwok, Connecticut, Steven and Christopher Albert grew up in a house where jazz played on the radio and their parents did not explain to them in explicit terms what they had survived. They figured it out the way children do by watching their parents move through the world and noting where the resistance came from and understanding eventually that the resistance had been present from the very beginning and that their parents had decided separately and then together to outlast it.

Stories like this one are exactly why we built the lost files. The ones the textbooks skip over. The ones that don’t fit the clean narrative of what the w4r was or what America was or what people on opposite sides of a conflict were supposed to feel about each other. Eleanor and Frederick’s story was buried in military archives and private letters for 70 years.

We’ve collected the best of these forgotten stories in one place exclusively for the people who actually care about finding them. If that’s you, the link is in the descr.i.ption.

On the morning of July 14th, 1944, Second Lieutenant Elellanar Powell walked across the dirt compound at Camp Florence, Arizona, carrying a tray of medical supplies through 107° desert heat. She was 23 years old. She had graduated top of her nursing cla.ss in Boston. She had volunteered for the United States Army because her father had served in the First World W4r and her grandmother had walked north along the Underground Railroad.

And in her family, service was what you did when your country called. The army had a.ssigned her to a segregated w4rd 70 mi northwest of Tucson. Not to treat American sold1ers, to treat German pr1soners of w4r. Every officer in her chain of command had told her in different words the same thing. Black nurses did not belong in the army.

The army had accepted only 479 bl4ck nurses out of thousands of applicants. Those who made it were given the a.ssignments nobody else wanted. The Army’s reasoning, as reported in a 1944 internal memo, was that bl4ck nurses a.ssigned to P camps posed no fraternization risk. The thinking was that a German sold1er and a bl4ck American woman would have nothing to say to each other. The thinking was wrong.

What the army could not have known was that within 6 months the woman they had tried to sideline would be carrying on the most closely watched forbidden romance of the w4r and that the man at the center of it would f1ght harder to get back to her across an ocean than he had ever fought for the Third Reich. By the way, if you’re enjoying these stories, we have an exclusive collection called The Lost Files.

Untold stories you won’t find anywhere else on YouTube. The link is in the descr.i.ption. Back to Eleanor. Eleanor Elizabeth Powell was born in Milton, Ma.ssachusetts in 1921, just outside Boston. Her family had a specific relationship with American history. Her grandmother had escaped slavery by traveling north on the Underground Railroad.

Her father had served in the First World W4r as part of the 92nd Infantry Division, one of the segregated units that fought in France. The lesson her family had pa.ssed down was not that America was fair. It was that you showed up anyway. You served. You proved it with your work. Eleanor had absorbed that lesson completely.

She enrolled in nursing school in Boston and was precise, disciplined, and demanding of herself in ways her instructors noticed. When she graduated and applied for the Army Nurse Corps in 1943, the Army’s official policy limited bl4ck nurses to caring for bl4ck troops or enemy pr1soners. The logic, if you could call it that, was to keep bl4ck nurses away from white patients.

It was segregation dressed up as military procedure. Eleanor was a.ssigned to Fort Hua in Arizona, one of the few bases where bl4ck military personnel were stationed in significant numbers. But Fort Hua was a way station. Her real a.ssignment came in the summer of 1944 when she was transferred to Camp Florence, built specifically as a pr1soner of w4r facility in the Sonoran Desert, 70 m from Tucson.

The camp held over 9,000 German and Italian PS at its peak. It had barracks, a hospital, a bakery, a swimming pool, and athletic fields. It had been designed to hold up to 6,000 pr1soners, but was overcrowded by the time Eleanor arrived. The German pr1soners she would be treating had been captured primarily in North Africa and Italy.

Many of them were vermached infantry conscr.i.pted sold1ers who had been f1ghting since 1940 1. They were thin, sunburned, and exhausted in the way that men get after years in the field. They were also in many cases deeply confused by America. One pr1soner who arrived at Florence in early 1944 later told a journalist he’d expected to be mistreated.

Instead, he was fed the same rations as American sold1ers. He was paid 50 cents an hour for camp work. He could buy tobacco at the canteen. He could participate in theatrical productions and music groups. He could take English cla.sses. One pr1soner reportedly called the camp a golden cage. The guards were given carbines and three bull3ts each.

One guard, Bert Fryich, later admitted he kept his bull3ts in his pocket because he couldn’t see how three rounds would stop 20 men if they decided to rush him. Nobody rushed him. Ellaner reported for her first shift in the camp hospital in late July 1944. The w4rd held 34 beds. Most of the patients were being treated for heat exhaustion, desert sores, and the gastrointestinal problems that came from the abrupt change in d1et.

She was the only bl4ck nurse on the w4rd. The other nurses were white. The patients were German. The army had calculated that this arrangement posed no social risk. The army had made a categorical error. Frederick Albert was 24 years old, a Vermach medic from Bavaria who had also been working as a cook in the camp Messaul.

He had been captured in northern Italy in the spring of 1944 and arrived at Florence in June. He was by multiple accounts a careful and methodical man who had survived nearly four years of w4r by paying close attention to details that other people missed. He had learned to read situations quickly to identify what was actually happening rather than what he had been told was happening.

What was actually happening in the summer of 1944 at Camp Florence was that the United States Army had placed two people together who should, by every political and social logic of the era, have been enemies and expected them to remain strangers. Frederick began volunteering for kitchen shifts in the hospital w4rd in August.

He was a sk1lled baker. He brought bread rolls to the w4rd. He was polite, reserved, and observant. He noticed things. He noticed that Elellanar Powell moved through the w4rd with a kind of careful precision. That she checked her patients twice when she thought no one was watching. That she had a habit of pausing at the window and looking out at the desert mountains in the distance.

And that she looked like someone who was working very hard not to show how lonely she was. He said h3llo to her in English on a Tuesday morning in late August. His English was limited, but deliberate. She was surprised that he had bothered to learn any at all. They began talking during the 15 minutes each day when the kitchen delivery over overlapped with her morning rounds.

He asked her about Boston. She had not expected him to know what Boston was. He told her he had stud1ed American geography before the w4r, that he had been fascinated by the country without ever expecting to see it. She told him that was an ironic way to get here. He agreed that it was. By September, the other nurses on the w4rd had noticed.

Two of them, both white, told Ellaner they would cover for her if needed. One told her she thought it was beautiful. One told her she thought it was d4ngerous. Both of them were right. The danger was not abstract. The United States Army in 1944 operated under the logic of Jim Crow. Interracial relationships between white men and bl4ck women were condemned.

The thought of a relationship between a bl4ck woman and a white man, even an enemy sold1er, was treated as an offense against some basic social order that nobody had the courage to name directly. The army’s official regulations governing fraternization between personnel and ps were also clear. It was forbidden. Eleanor was risking her commission.

Frederick was risking something more immediate. In October 1944, a white officer at the camp found out. The details were pieced together later by journalist Alexis Clark, who spent years interviewing people with knowledge of what happened. The officer confronted Frederick in the compound. He was not alone.

What happened next was not a reprimand. A group of American officers beat Frederick Albert severely enough that he required treatment in the camp hospital. The message was unmistakable. It did not matter that Germany and the United States were enemies. It did not matter that Frederick Albert was a pr1soner with no legal standing and no ability to defend himself.

What mattered was that he was a white man and Eleanor Powell was a bl4ck woman. And that relationship violated the social architecture that American officers had carried with them from Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama into the Arizona desert. Elellanar learned what had happened the morning after.

She stood in the doorway of the hospital w4rd and looked at the man she had been talking to for 2 months and counted the bruises on his face and understood exactly what had been communicated to her. She also understood that the army expected her to absorb this message and adjust her behavior accordingly. Frederick could not speak at first.

His jaw had swollen on the left side. His right eye was nearly closed. He had a split lip and bruising across both cheekbones from blows that had been deliberate and unhurried. Elellanar cleaned the wounds with the same steady hands she used for every patient on the w4rd. She did not say anything while she worked. Neither did he.

When she was done, she put the gauze back on the tray. She looked at him for a moment. He looked back at her with the one eye that was fully open. She picked up the tray and went to the next bed. She did not cry until she was off the w4rd. She cried once for about 3 minutes standing behind the storage building on the east side of the compound where she could not be seen.

Then she stopped and went back to work. She did not adjust her behavior. She kept her head down and kept her distance in public and kept talking to Frederick Albert through the intermediary of her fellow nurses who pa.ssed notes and messages between them for the next 3 months. The officers watched. They saw nothing they could document.

The notes were not love letters in any fid sense. They were small things. Information about the day, observations, questions about Bavaria, questions about Boston, a descr.i.ption of what the mountains looked like at dusk when the light changed color. A note from Frederick asking whether she had ever seen snow in the Barkshshire because he had read that the mountains there had good snow. She had.

She wrote back that they did. The slow accumulation of two people learning each other under conditions designed to prevent it. The wider situation at Camp Florence in late 1944 was by every external measure peaceful. The German pr1soners were picking cotton in the surrounding fields for 50 cents an hour, betting among themselves about who would pick the most.

They were building furniture in the camp workshop. They had constructed a bar from cactuswood for the officer’s club. They were performing operetas in the compound theater. One pr1soner, a former Cleveland resident who had been visiting family in Germany in 1939 and been drafted before he could leave, reportedly asked an American guard one night if he remembered when cigarettes cost 13 cents a pack.

The guard was so startled that a German pr1soner knew this that he could not answer. The newspapers were calling it the Fritz Ritz. American servicemen overseas were reading about it in the stars and str.i.pes and writing furious letters back home. Private first cla.ss. Robert J.  a former P who had been held in Italian and German camps with no swimming pools and no theatrical productions and no 50 cent hourly wages, wrote to the paper from somewhere in Italy.

His letter described reading that an American sold1er had received a letter from his girlfriend informing him she was now engaged to a German pr1soner at a camp in America. He described reading that German PS were going on excursions, that they were having morale dances. He asked in plain cold language whether American pr1soners of w4r in Germany had German Frey lines, whether they went on excursions, whether they danced.

The letter was published. The army had no satisfying answer, but the outrage was onedirectional in ways nobody discussed openly. American men were furious that German pr1soners were being treated decently. Nobody in the military newspaper was writing about what American women thought of the whole situation. Nobody was asking the women at the cantens and the farms and the hospital w4rds what they saw when they looked at these men who had been removed from the w4r and were now working cotton fields in Arizona.

Some of them saw men. That was the entire problem. In Winchester, Virginia, a woman named Dorothy had been writing letters to a German pr1soner named Hans for 4 months before the army intercepted the correspondence. The letters were not cla.ssified, but they were documented. Military sensors read every piece of mail leaving the camp.

They had been reading Dorothy’s letters since the second one, and they had not stopped the correspondence because stopping it required acknowledging it existed, which required someone to file paperwork, which required someone to explain to a superior officer why a Virginia woman was writing romantic letters to an enemy pr1soner, which required that officer to formulate an official response to a situation that the Geneva Convention did not address and that army regulations had not anticipated.

It was easier to keep reading the letters and say nothing. By the time they finally intervened, Dorothy and Hans had exchanged 31 letters over 19 weeks. This was happening across the country. The army had 425,000 German pr1soners distributed across 700 camps by the end of 1944. Many of those pr1soners were working on farms, in caneries, in food processing plants, in the cotton fields of Texas and Arizona and the apple orchards of Michigan.

They were in contact with American civilians every day. The logic of separation that the army had imagined. Enemy sold1ers kept safely behind wire. Americans going about their lives on the other side of the fence had collapsed almost immediately on contact with the reality of American farming towns where there were not enough men to bring in the harvest and where the German pr1soners a.ssigned to help were many of them exactly the age of the American men who had shipped out.

By late 1945, more than 115,000 German pr1soners were working in American agriculture alone. When they finally went home, farmers across the country reported that they were sorely missed, not only for the labor, for the company. Frederick Albert was repatriated to Germany in May 1945, 3 days after the German surrender.

The camp at Florence began processing pr1soners for return almost immediately. Frederick had one conversation with Elellanor before he left in the hospital w4rd on a Tuesday morning with two nurses standing at the far end of the room pretending to reorganize supply cabinets. He told her he was going to marry her.

She told him she did not see how that was going to work. He said he would find a way. She asked what way. He did not have a specific answer. He had a conviction which is a different thing and which she recognized because she had been raised in a family where conviction in the absence of a clear path was the basic operating condition. She watched the transport trucks leave the camp on May 11th, 1945 from the window of the w4rd where she had been a.ssigned because the army believed she would cause no complications.

The desert mountains were the same as they always were. The heat was already building at 9:00 in the morning. She had a full shift ahead of her. She went back to work. Frederick Albert spent a year in postw4r Germany, navigating the bureaucratic maze of a destr0yed country before he found a way back.

The Germany he returned to in May 1945 was not the country he had left. Cities were rubble. The infrastructure of the Reich had collapsed into paperwork and the cha0s of millions of displaced people. Finding a path back to the United States from that was not simple. It required money, documentation, sponsorship, and patience.

He worked in a bakery in Munich for 6 months. He saved every mark. He wrote letters to the Catholic relief organization that was helping displaced persons apply for travel documentation. He wrote letters to the American consulate. He wrote letters to a former guard at Camp Florence who had given him a mailing address before the camp closed.

He kept records of every letter he sent and every response he received in a small notebook he carried in his coat pocket. He had survived four years of w4r by paying attention to details. He applied that same attention to the problem of getting back across the Atlantic. In the spring of 1946, Frederick Albert arrived in New York.

Elellanar had been discharged from the army in the fall of 1945. She had returned to Boston and was working at a civilian hospital on the north side of the city. She had not told her family about Frederick. She had thought about it many times and each time concluded that there was no version of that conversation that ended well.

She was a 24 year old bl4ck woman from Ma.ssachusetts whose family had a complicated and painful relationship with the institution of American marriage law. She was aw4re that 30 states still had anti misogenation statutes on the books. She was also aw4re that Frederick had told her he was going to marry her and that she believed him.

He found her in April 1946 through a letter forw4rded by one of the nurses from the Florence w4rd who had kept in contact with both of them. He came to Boston on a Tuesday. She met him at South Station. He was thinner than she remembered. He was wearing a gray coat that was too light for Boston in April. He had the same careful way of looking at a room before he looked at a person.

The habit she had noticed in the hospital w4rd when he first started bringing bread. She had spent 8 months wondering if she had exaggerated him in her memory, if the stranges of the situation had made him seem more than he was. He was not exaggerated. He was exactly what she had remembered. She thought about all the letters she had sent through intermediaries because the army was reading her mail and all the things she had not said in those letters because of that, and how much of the last year had been the accumulation of unsaid things.

He said h3llo in his careful English. She said h3llo back. There is no documented account of what either of them said after that. What is documented is that within 3 months they had a son named Steven. They tried to build a life in Boston. The city that had been Eleanor’s home rejected them in small persistent ways.

Landlords who went quiet when they arrived together to see an apartment. employers who found reasons not to hire Frederick or who hired him and then found reasons to let him go. Neighbors who were courteous in isolation and cold in groups. The interracial couple problem, as one of Eleanor’s relatives called it, was not abstract.

It expressed itself in a hundred daily encounters, each one individually deniable, collectively exhausting. They moved to Philadelphia. Philadelphia was better and then not better. They tried Germany. Germany in 1948 was struggl1ng to sort out what it believed about itself. And a German man married to a bl4ck American woman was not a question the country was prepared to answer.

They came back. They settled eventually in Norwalk, Connecticut, in a community that had made a deliberate decision to integrate, where neighbors were accustomed to families that did not fit any single category. Frederick used his w4rtime cooking sk1lls to get a job developing new products at Pepperage Farm.

Eleanor went back to nursing. They had a second son, Christopher. They built a life. It took 15 years of constant motion and negotiation and the specific kind of stubbornness that comes from having survived a situation that was supposed to break you. The Loving versus Virginia decision in 1967 finally struck down anti misogenation laws across the United States.

By then, Eleanor and Frederick had been together for more than 20 years and had stopped needing the law to tell them their family was legitimate. In 1947, the same year Frederick made his way back to New York, Private Firstcla.ss was writing more letters from Italy. He never knew about Elellanar and Frederick. He never knew that his furious letter to the stars and str.i.pes was in a way describing the exact situation he had feared.

That human beings on opposite sides of a w4r had looked at each other and found something more compelling than the categories they had been a.ssigned. Eleanor Powell never spoke publicly about Camp Florence during her working years. She mentioned it occasionally to her sons in the way that people mentioned formative experiences briefly without full explanation, trusting that the story would be understood later. She d1ed in 2013.

Frederick had d1ed some years before her. The story was unearthed by journalist Alexis Clark, who spent years tracking down letters, interviews, and military records held in archives in Washington, Boston, and Germany. Her book, Enemies in Love, was published in 2017. It documented the army’s calculation that a bl4ck nurse and a German pr1soner had no common ground and traced exactly how wrong that calculation had been and at what cost that wrongness had been demonstrated.

The book found an aud1ence among people who were surprised to learn that 425,000 German pr1soners had lived inside the United States during the Second World W4r, let alone that some of them had left behind more than labor. That some of them had left behind families. The camps are mostly gone.

Camp Florence was dismantled shortly after the w4r ended. The site became a minimum security pr1son and then a hospital. Today, there is nothing at that location that would tell a visitor what had stood there. No marker, no exhibit, no indication that thousands of men had been housed in that desert for 3 years, that women had worked there, that some of those women and some of those men had looked at each other across every line the United States Army had drawn and reached the same conclusion.

In Norwok, Connecticut, Steven and Christopher Albert grew up in a house where jazz played on the radio and their parents did not explain to them in explicit terms what they had survived. They figured it out the way children do by watching their parents move through the world and noting where the resistance came from and understanding eventually that the resistance had been present from the very beginning and that their parents had decided separately and then together to outlast it.

Stories like this one are exactly why we built the lost files. The ones the textbooks skip over. The ones that don’t fit the clean narrative of what the w4r was or what America was or what people on opposite sides of a conflict were supposed to feel about each other. Eleanor and Frederick’s story was buried in military archives and private letters for 70 years.

We’ve collected the best of these forgotten stories in one place exclusively for the people who actually care about finding them. If that’s you, the link is in the descr.i.ption.