Why Every Captured German Soldier Said The Same Thing About Americans

It was a winter morning in 1944. Somewhere along the frozen fields of Belgium, a German sergeant, his uniform torn and blackened by stumbled out of a treeine with his hands raised his head. Behind him, the remnants of his company lay scattered across a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon. Craters from American artillery shells pockmarked the earth in every direction.

Burned out vehicles still smoldered in the gray light. The sergeant had survived the Battle of the Bulge barely. As American soldiers surrounded him, he muttered something in broken English that his captives had heard a hundred times before. Something about the shells, something about the sky, something that every German prisoner seemed compelled to say.

What he could not know, what no German prisoner would know for another 57 years, was that every word he had ever spoken in private about the men who had captured him had been recorded. Now we move forward to West London, November of 2001. The reading room at the National Archives in Q smelled of old paper and floor wax.

The fluorescent lights hummed. A German historian named Sonka Nitel sat at one of the long oak tables requesting a routine document for a book he was writing about submarines. The archavist returned with a cart. On the cart were brown cardboard boxes. Inside the boxes were transcripts, page after page of conversations between captured German officers and enlisted men during the Second World War.

Conversations the speakers had believed were private. Conversations that had been bugged, transcribed, and then forgotten for more than 50 years. Nitel began to read. By the end of the day, his hands were shaking. What he had stumbled upon would eventually fill nearly 150,000 pages. Generals discussing the murder of civilians, submarine commanders describing the sinking of merchant ships, tank crews speaking casually about things they had done in Russia, privates whispering about their families.

But woven through every transcript in nearly every conversation was the same observation. It came from generals and from boys, from hardened veterans who had survived the frozen steps of the Eastern Front, and from teenage conscripts who had barely fired a rifle. They all said the same thing about fighting Americans.

This is the story of what they said, of how it was recorded, and of why their words spoken in the belief that no one was listening revealed a truth about the American way of war that no German general would ever have admitted in public. To understand it, we have to go back not to the beaches of Normandy, not to the snow of the Arden.

We have to go back to a dusty mountain pass in North Africa where the Americans first met the Vermacht in battle and lost. In February of 1943, the war was barely a year old for the United States. The Americans had landed in North Africa the previous November, green and untested, marching into a theater the British had been fighting in for nearly 3 years.

The Germans had spent that time perfecting their craft. Their soldiers had conquered Poland in 5 weeks. They had broken France in six. They had bled the Soviets across 2,000 mi of step. To the German officer Corps, the arrival of the Americans was almost an insult. The propaganda ministry under Joseph Gobles had told them what to expect.

Americans were soft, decadent. A nation of jazz musicians and Hollywood actors corrupted by racial mixing dominated the propaganda claimed by Jewish financiers. Herman Guring, the heavy set commander of the Luftvafer, summed up the German view with a single contemptuous remark. The Americans, he said, only knew how to make razor blades.

On the 19th of February, a German force under the command of Field Marshal Irwin RML, the legendary desert fox attacked American positions at the Casarine Pass in Tunisia. It was a slaughter. The American line broke within hours. Units fled in panic. Officers lost control of their men. Tanks were abandoned, still running. Equipment was discarded along the roadsides.

Trucks were left smoking in ditches. Over 6,000 American soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured in less than a week. When General Omar Bradley arrived in the aftermath, he walked among the dead and saw something that would stay with him for the rest of his life. The local nomads, the desert tribes who watched empires rise and fall across their sands, had stripped the American corpses.

Boots taken, socks taken, jackets taken. The bodies of American boys lay under the African sun in nothing but their dog tags. RML surveyed the battlefield with quiet satisfaction. Among his staff that morning was a 44year-old Bavarian general named Fritz Bioline. Bioline had been RML’s chief of staff in the desert since the end of 1941.

He was still chief of staff now at Panza Army Africa, the senior staff officer at the field marshall’s side. He was professional, cold, a career officer who had fought in Poland, in France, in the desert, and who would later fight in Russia. He had seen everything the war had to show. That day at Casarine, watching American units disintegrate, Boline agreed with what every German officer was saying, the Americans would be easy.

But RML, who had just inflicted the defeat, was not so sure. In a private assessment that would soon make its way back to Berlin, the desert fox wrote a sentence that would be ignored for the rest of the war. The Americans, he wrote, had paid a heavy price for their inexperience, but it had brought them rich dividends. He warned that their generals were already showing tactical sophistication.

He warned that they were learning at a speed he had not seen in any other army. He warned that they were dangerous. The warning was filed away and forgotten. Gerbles kept printing his pamphlets. Guring kept making his razor blade jokes. And the German army marched on, certain that Casarine was a glimpse of the war to come. It was not.

It was the last time the Americans would lose a major engagement against the Vemuck. Now we move from the desert to a quiet stretch of land along the PTOAC River in Virginia about 15 mi south of Washington. The land had once belonged to George Washington himself, part of an estate called River Farm. By the summer of 1942, it had become something else.

87 buildings rose behind barbed wire. Armed guards patrolled the perimeter. There was no sign at the gate. The facility had no name. Its only identifier was a mailing address. Post Office Box 1142, Fort Hunt, Virginia. Officers stationed at Fort Hunt were forbidden from telling anyone what they did there.

Not their parents, not their wives, not their children. The male leaving the base was censored. The telephone calls were monitored. Some of the men who worked there would carry the secret to their graves. What happened inside the barbed wire would remain classified until the 1990s. The full story would not emerge until the 2000s.

Between the middle of 1942 and July of 1945, 3,451 prisoners passed through Fort Hunt. 15 of them were Nazi generals. Others were Yubot captains who had hunted Allied convoys in the Atlantic, rocket scientists who had built the V2 missiles falling on London. Intelligence officers who knew where Germany hid its uranium. They were interrogated, but the interrogations were only the surface.

The real intelligence came from the microphones. Every room at Fort Hunt was bugged. The listening devices were the size of watermelons, hidden in overhead light fixtures, behind walls, inside furniture. In a concrete bunker outside the compound, monitors worked in shifts around the clock, wearing headphones, transcribing every word in real time.

They captured 5,000 intelligence reports. They captured chess games. They captured arguments. They captured a Nazi general weeping quietly in the dark when he thought he was alone. The British were running a parallel operation on a grander scale. North of London on the grounds of an enormous country estate called Trent Park.

59 captured German generals lived in something approaching luxury. There was a billiard’s room, a library, table tennis, beer and whiskey rations, manicured gardens where the prisoners could walk and discuss the war. The comfort was a weapon. The German officers, accustomed to harsh treatment from the Soviets, were disarmed by the elegance of their surroundings. They lowered their guard.

They spoke freely. They mocked their captives as fools. One prisoner, looking around the splendid drawing rooms, concluded with confidence that the British were too stupid to bug the conversations of generals. He was entirely wrong. The microphones were in the light fittings, in the fireplaces, in the plant pots, in the skirting boards, in the floorboards, in the trees outside in the garden.

The billiard table itself was bugged. More than 1,300 transcripts would eventually be produced from the recordings at Trent Park alone. And here is the part of the story almost no one knows. The men listening to the German prisoners, the linguists, and the interrogators who heard every whispered confession, every casual cruelty, every chess move, and every joke were often not Americans by birth.

They were Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. They had fled in the 1930s as children, watching their parents pack hurriedly, watching their houses sold for nothing, watching their relatives swallowed by camps whose names they would not learn for years. They had crossed the Atlantic with cardboard suitcases.

They had been granted emergency American citizenship at a federal courthouse near Fort Hunt. And now, in the silence of their listening posts, they wore headphones and copied down the words of the men who had ordered their families destroyed. One of them was a young man named Henry Colm. Colem was about 21 years old. He had been born in Vienna.

He had escaped before the worst of it. He had family who had not escaped. He played chess with Nazi generals. He played pingpong with yubot commanders. He offered them coffee and cigarettes and the kind of decent conversation they had not had in years. He asked about their wives. He laughed at their jokes.

He let them feel like men again. And he wrote down everything they said. Decades later, at a reunion of the surviving Fort Hunt interrogators in the year 2007, Colm by then a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would summarize his work in a single sentence. “We got more information out of a German general,” he said, with a game of chess or pingpong than they do today with their torture.

Across the ocean in the same months that Henry Colm was first learning his trade, a 19-year-old farm boy named Ga Gra was being conscripted into the Vermacht. Ga was tall, blonde, polite, the son of a small landowner. He had grown up listening to the Hitler youth songs on the radio.

He had been told what the propaganda ministry wanted him to know about the world. The Slavs were animals. The British were exhausted. The Americans were a nation of jazz musicians and Hollywood actors corrupted by racial mixing. He believed it. Most of his friends believed it. There was no reason not to. Gagra boarded a train in 1943 to begin his military service.

He did not know he would survive the war. He did not know that he would end it in a camp in the state of Washington. standing in front of a shop counter holding American currency in his hand, unable to decide whether to buy his first ice cream in years or the strange dark drink in a glass bottle called Coca-Cola.

He did not know that at the age of 91 he would return to that same camp simply to say thank you. But all of that lay ahead of him. For now he was 19 years old. He had a uniform. He had a rifle. He had a head full of lies. And somewhere in the desert behind him, the desert fox had already written the warning that no one in Berlin wanted to hear. The Americans were learning.

The first warning that something had changed came not from the front lines, but from a letter. It was the 10th of June, 1944, 4 days after the Allied landings at Normandy. The desert fox, who only 16 months earlier had been the conqueror at Katherine Pass, now commanded Army Group B in northern France. He sat down to write to his wife Lucy back in Germany.

He did not write about strategy. He wrote about the sky. The enemy’s air superiority, RML told her, had a very grave effect on their movements. And then a line that no German field marshall had ever written to his wife before. There is simply no answer to it. The man who had outmaneuvered the British across 2,000 mi of desert, who had built his legend on speed and surprise, and the brilliance of the lightning maneuver, was telling his wife that the basic act of moving an army from one place to another, had become impossible.

The summer that the Americans came back was the summer that broke Fritz by airline. He had survived everything. He had ridden the panzas across Poland in 1939. He had watched France collapse in 6 weeks in 1940. He had stood beside RML in the desert when the Africa corpse was the most feared armored force on earth.

He had served on the Eastern front where the war had no bottom and no rules and he had come back alive. By the spring of 1944, Boline was 45 years old. He had been given command of the Panza Division, one of the elite armored formations in the entire German army. His men were the best of the best, veteran officers, handpicked crews, tanks fresh from the factories.

The division was so well equipped that other German commanders looked at it with envy. It would not survive the summer. On the 25th of July 1944, Boline and his division were dug into hedgeros southwest of a Norman town called Sant Low. The Americans had been stuck for weeks, grinding forward at the cost of dozens of lives for each French farmhouse the German line was holding.

Bioline had every reason to believe it would continue to hold. At 9:40 in the morning, he heard them. They came from the northwest from across the channel in waves so long that the first formations were already passing overhead when the last formations were still leaving their airfields in England.

Heavy bombers, medium bombers, fighter bombers. Approximately 2500 American aircraft converging on a single piece of ground. That ground was 7,000 yd wide and 2500 yd deep. Boline’s division was inside it. The bombs fell for hours. 4,000 tons of high explosive on an area smaller than many American towns. The earth shook so violently that men who survived the first wave were thrown into the air by the second.

Tanks weighing 40 tons were lifted and flipped onto their backs like overturned beetles. The forest disappeared. The hedros disappeared. The roads disappeared. What remained looked, in Biolin’s own words, like the surface of the moon. When the bombing stopped, Bioline walked through the wreckage of his elite division.

His staff officers were dead in their command posts. His tank crews were dead inside their machines. The infantry who had dug in carefully who had built deep dugouts and reinforced foxholes were killed by blast and buried in the dirt thrown by the explosions. Soldiers who had survived the initial waves came out of cover and could not function. They wandered. They sat down.

They stared at nothing. Bioline in his official report to the United States Army Historical Division after the war would describe what he saw on that day in language that no German officer of his rank had ever used about combat. The long duration of the bombing without any possibility for opposition, he wrote, created depression and a feeling of helplessness, weakness, and inferiority.

The whole bombed area was transformed into fields covered with craters in which no human being was alive. And then he wrote the sentence that more than any other captured what fighting Americans had come to mean. For me, who during this war was in every theater committed at the points of the main effort, this was the worst I ever saw.

The worst he ever saw. Not Poland, not France, not the desert, not the Eastern Front, not the Russian counteroffensives that swallowed entire German armies whole, the carpet bombing at Sanlow. Within 48 hours of the bombardment, American forces had broken through what remained of the German line.

Within a week, Boline’s division existed only on paper. Within a month, the entire German front in Normandy had collapsed. The Americans poured into open country and did not stop until they reached the German border itself. Field marshal Hans Guna von Klug who had taken over command of Army Group B after Raml was wounded by a strafing fighter on a French country road wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler in the middle of August.

The letter was an admission that until that moment no German field marshal had said out loud. In the face of total enemy air superiority, Vonlug wrote, “We can adopt no tactics to compensate for the annihilating power of air except to retire from the battlefield.” The day after he sent that letter, Vonlug swallowed cyanide on the road back to Germany.

He left behind a note begging Hitler to end the war. Hitler ignored it. But for the German soldiers in France that summer, there was no ignoring what had happened. The whole language of war was changing. The old skills, the things their fathers had taught them and the things they had been taught in their officer schools were becoming meaningless.

Tactical brilliance did not matter when the sky belonged to the enemy. The Germans had a name for the death that came from above. They called the aircraft jag bomber, fighter bomber, shortened in barracks slang to jabo. And in the cellars of Normandy farmhouses, in the bunkers of the Westwall, in the snowy trees of the Arden, German soldiers came to fear one specific sound more than any other.

It was the sound of static, the crackle of an American radio, because where there was an American radio, there was an American forward observer. And where there was an American forward observer, there was American artillery. And the artillery was unlike anything they had ever experienced. The Germans had been famous for their artillery since the days of the Kaiser.

Their gunners were trained at some of the best artillery schools in Europe. The guns themselves, when they were German-made, were among the finest in the world. But by 1944, German artillery was a sad caricature of itself. Whole batteries still relied on horses to move from one position to the next. The ammunition was a chaos of mismatched calibers.

German gunners fired captured French shells from captured French guns. They fired captured Czech shells from captured Czech guns. They fired Soviet, Polish, Yuguslav, and Italian rounds, each with different ballistic properties from a Frankenstein collection of weapons looted across the continent. When a battery ran low on ammunition, it could take days for resupply.

American artillery was a different animal entirely. It was standardized. It was motorized. It was supplied by a logistics network that could push fresh ammunition forward by the train load. And it had something the German artillery had never possessed. It had time on target. Time on target was a technique developed and refined by American gunners during the war. The idea was simple.

The mathematics were not. Multiple batteries scattered across the battlefield, each at different distances from the same target, would calculate the precise flight time of their shells. Then they would fire at staggered intervals. A battery farther away would fire first. A battery closer would fire later. The calculations had to account for temperature, for wind, for the wear on each gun barrel, for the specific batch of ammunition, for the distance to within a few yards.

And when it worked, every shell from every battery arrived at the target within plus or minus 3 seconds of every other shell. The Germans had no concept of this. They had nothing like it. The effect on the receiving end is difficult to describe. There was no warning, no ranging shot. No incoming whistle followed by a single explosion and then a few more.

One moment there was silence, the next moment the world turned to fire. Men who had survived years of artillery on the Eastern front, who knew how to count seconds and dive for cover, had no defense against time on target. By the time they understood they were being shelled, the shelling was already over.

On the 22nd of December 1944, in a small village called Domkenbach in Belgium, American artillerymen of the First Infantry Division fired more than 10,000 rounds in a single day to break up German armored attacks. 10,000 rounds from one division’s guns in 24 hours. When the 9th American Army crossed the Ryan River in March of 1945, 270 American guns opened the assault.

They fired at a peak rate of 1,000 rounds per minute. The opening bombardment alone expended 65,000 shells. A captured German artillery officer sitting in a Trent Park drawing room with a glass of whiskey he did not deserve. Said it plainly into a microphone he could not see. The Americans, he said, do not shoot at us.

They drown us. But artillery and air power, terrible as they were, were not the worst that came that autumn. The worst came in the trees. The Herkin forest sat along the border between Belgium and Germany, just east of the Belgian town of Akan. It was a dense pine forest, dark even at midday, threaded with steep ravines and broken by patches of open ground that were perfectly registered for German mortar fire.

From September of 1944 until the middle of December, the Americans fed division after division into that forest in the longest battle the United States Army had ever fought. By the end they had taken 33,000 casualties. The forest had not given. It was in this place on the 12th of November 1944 that a young German officer named Frederick Langfeld made a decision that would 50 years later place his name on the only known monument an American unit has ever raised to a German enemy. Langfeld was 23 years old.

He commanded a company in the 275th Infantry Division. His sector of the forest was thick with mines. The mines had been laid by the Germans, by the Americans, and by both armies layered over each other in places where the lines had shifted back and forth across the same ground for weeks. No one knew anymore where every mine was.

On the morning of November 12th, an American soldier wandered into the minefield in front of Langfeld’s position. There was an explosion. The American went down, badly wounded. Somewhere in the no man’s land between the lines, he began to scream. He screamed for help. He screamed for his mother. He screamed in the way that men scream when they understand they are dying alone in a cold forest far from home. The screams went on for hours.

American medics tried to reach him. Langfeld, hearing the cries from the German side of the minefield, gave a quiet order to his men. Do not fire on the medics. They are doing what we would do. The American medics could not get through. The minefields too thick. They were beaten back one after another by the impossibility of finding a path through that much buried steel.

The wounded American kept screaming, and after the hours of listening, Friedrich Langfeld did something that German officers were not supposed to do. He gathered his own medics. He had them carry a stretcher. He had them raise the white flag with the red cross on it, and then he walked personally into the minefield in front of his own position to bring back a wounded enemy soldier whose screams he could not bear to hear any longer. He stepped on a mine.

His own men pulled him out, what was left of him, and he died of his wounds within hours. The American he had tried to save also died. The story passed into the regimental records where it was filed away. The war ended. Langfeld was buried in the German military cemetery at Herken, a place where the graves go on in rows that you cannot count from any single vantage point.

For 50 years, the world forgot. Then on the 7th of October 1994, a group of aging American veterans returned to the Herkin forest. They were men of the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Infantry Division. They had fought through those trees as boys, and most of their friends had not come home. They were old men now.

They had come back one last time to walk the ground where they had buried their youth. They had brought a stone with them. They walked into the German cemetery, past the rows of crosses until they came to the grave of Friedrich Langfeld, and they set the stone in place. The inscription on it in English and in German reads as follows.

No man hath greater love than he who layeth down his life for his enemy. It is the only known memorial placed by American soldiers in a German military cemetery to honor a German officer. The old men of the 22nd Infantry Regiment then walked back to their bus and went home to their lives in places like Ohio and Texas and Florida and the stone remains in the forest to this day.

5 weeks after Lenfeld died trying to save an American boy in the Herken, Adolf Hitler launched the last great offensive of the German army in the West. It was called on the German side the watch on the Rine. It is known today as the Battle of the Bulge. The plan was desperate. More than 200,000 German soldiers and a thousand tanks would attack through the Arden Forest in Belgium.

On the same route Germany had used to outflank the French in 1940. They would punch a hole in the thinly held American line. They would race to the Belgian port of Antwerp. They would split the British forces in the north from the American forces in the south. And they would force the western allies, Hitler believed, to negotiate.

The whole operation was designed around one piece of weather information. It had to be launched under heavy cloud cover because if the sky was clear, the Jabos would come. And if the Jabos came, the offensive would die on the roads before it ever reached its objectives. Among the men preparing for this attack was a 37-year-old paratroop colonel named Frederick Vunderhe was a Bavarian aristocrat, a devout Catholic and a veteran of the legendary German airborne assault on Cree in 1941.

He had fought at Elalam. He had fought against the Americans in Normandy. He was one of the most decorated paratroop officers still alive in the German military. He was given command of what would become the very last German airborne operation of the entire war. It was called operation stusser the hawk. His men would jump at night behind American lines in the Arden to seize a key road junction and create chaos in the American rear.

When Vonda Hetti saw the men he had been given, his heart sank. They were not paratroopers. They were a scraped together collection of replacements from depots all across Germany. boys mostly boys who had never made a single parachute jump in their lives. Boys who had never seen combat. Their transport pilots were equally green with little experience in night navigation in winter weather.

Vonda hate went to his superior field marshal Wilder Model the commander of the entire offensive and protested. He asked for better men. He asked for better pilots. He asked for more time. model, an iron disciplined Prussian who had earned a reputation as Hitler’s fireman by salvaging hopeless situations on the Eastern Front, looked at the colonel and gave him an answer that he was never supposed to give.

“This offensive,” Model said, has less than a 10% chance of succeeding. He let that sentence sit in the room. “But [snorts] it must be done,” he continued. “Because this offensive is our last chance to conclude the war favorably, Vonda Hate left the meeting and went back to his men. The German high command knew before the first soldier crossed the start line that they were almost certainly going to lose.

They launched the offensive anyway. They sent boys into the snow knowing the odds and they did it because there were no other options left. The attack began on the 16th of December 1944. The weather cooperated exactly as Hitler had hoped. The sky was overcast. The Jabos stayed on the ground. Vond’s paratroopers jumped on the night of the 17th into winds far stronger than the forecast, scattered across miles of forest, most of them landing alone in the dark.

By dawn, he had perhaps 300 men of the 800 to,200 he needed. His radios were lost. His heavy weapons were lost. The mission was over before it had begun. He went into hiding in the woods. He watched American reinforcements stream past him toward the front. He released the few American prisoners he had taken so they could carry his wounded men to medical care.

On the 23rd of December, suffering from frostbite, he walked out of the forest with his hands up and surrendered. But by then, something worse than the failure of his mission had happened to the rest of the German offensive. The skies had cleared, and the Americans had introduced a new weapon that the Germans did not know existed.

It was called the variable time fuse. the proximity fuse, the VT. It was a tiny radar set built into the nose of each artillery shell. When the shell got close to a target, the radar detected it and triggered detonation in midair, 10 to 20 ft above the ground. The fragment sprayed downward in a cone. For 4 years, German soldiers had survived enemy bombardment by digging deep. The foxhole was sacred.

A man in a good hole could ride out almost anything the British or the Soviets could throw at him. The Earth was the last sanctuary, the one place where the war could not reach. The VT fuse ended that. A shell that exploded 10 ft above the ground did not care how deep the hole was. The fragments came down from the sky. There was no defense.

General George Patton, the commander of the American Third Army, wrote a letter not long after to the head of army ordinance that captured what the new shells were doing to the Germans. He described a German battalion trying to cross a river, the sour. We caught a German battalion, Patton wrote, with a battalion concentration and killed by actual count 702.

702 men, one bombardment, one river crossing. In the bugged conversations later analyzed by Sanka Nitel, German artillerymen described the VT fuse with a kind of awe. There was no warning, they said. There was no defense. The shells found them no matter how they hid. By the end of January, the offensive that Walter Mod had given a less than 10% chance was over.

The Germans had failed to reach their objectives. They had lost their last strategic reserve of armor. They had lost tens of thousands of irreplaceable men. The road to Germany itself now lay open. In the prison camps and on the listening posts on both sides of the Atlantic, the German officers and enlisted men kept saying the same things. They said it in private.

They said it in their reports. They said it when they thought no one was listening. They said it about the artillery that came from beyond the horizon. They said it about the planes that owned the sky. They said it about the shells that detonated above their foxholes. And they said something else too. Something that came out only in the small hours of the morning in the dark rooms of Trent Park when the microphones were running and the prisoners did not know.

It was the part of the story that would in the end hurt the most. By the spring of 1945, every German soldier still alive understood that he faced one of two futures. If the war ended for him in the east, in the path of the Soviet armies grinding toward Berlin, his odds of ever seeing his family again were terrible. Soviet captivity was not captivity in the western sense.

It was hard labor in coal mines and timber camps east of the eurals. It was rations below survival level. It was untreated wounds and disease in temperatures that fell to 40° below zero. According to post-war investigations conducted by the West German government, more than 1 million German prisoners would die in Soviet hands. If the war ended for him in the West, where the Americans were now pouring across the Rine, his odds were entirely different.

The Americans, whom Gerbals had said were soft and decadent, whom Guring had said only knew how to make razor blades, fed their prisoners three meals a day. They obeyed the Geneva conventions. They sent their prisoners home, eventually alive. By April of 1945, the German army was making the calculation in real time by the hundreds of thousands.

Entire formations were abandoning their positions in the east and marching west across Germany to surrender to the Americans. Vermacht units that had fought for years against the Soviets now had only one mission. Get to the Americans before the Russians got to them. Tanks were driven west until they ran out of fuel and then abandoned.

Officers walked at the head of their men with white sheets tied to bayonets. Whole divisions simply dissolved on the autob barns heading toward the nearest sound of American voices. The enemy they had been told was weak had become the only door out alive. Among them, somewhere in that vast westward tide was the 19-year-old farm boy we left at the train station in part one. the one called Gagra.

He had survived two years in the Vermacht. He had survived because he had been lucky and because he was young and because the Americans had captured him before the war could finish what it had started in so many of his friends. He was processed at a holding camp in France. He was loaded onto a transport ship.

He crossed an ocean he had only seen on school room maps. And then he was put on an American passenger train, not a cattle car, not a freight wagon, a Pullman passenger car with seats, with a porter with windows that opened. The train carried him across the United States west for days. He watched the country go past those windows in a kind of stunned silence.

The cities were not burning. The cities were not even damaged. The lights came on at night. The farms stretched to the horizon, plowed and planted and untouched by any war he had ever heard of. The freight trains they passed were so long he could not count the cars from one end to the other. He had been told since he was a boy that America was weak.

The country going past his window did not look weak. He arrived at a camp called Fort Lewis in the state of Washington on the far side of the continent from where he had landed. Inside the camp there was a shop where prisoners could spend the small wages they earned doing agricultural work for American farmers. Gunter walked into that shop one afternoon and stood in front of the counter holding American money in his hand and could not decide what to buy.

He had two choices in mind. The first was ice cream. He had not tasted ice cream since before the war began when such things had still existed in Germany. He was 20 years old. the boy in him remembered. The second was a small dark drink in a glass bottle that he had heard of all his life but had never tasted.

The Americans called it Coca-Cola. He stood there for a long time. Then he bought both. 70 years later, at the age of 91, Gagrao boarded a flight from Germany back to the state of Washington, walked through the gates of what had once been Fort Lewis, and went looking for the place where the shop had been. He had come, he said, simply to say thank you.

The American firepower, the artillery, the jabos, the proximity fuses, the endless supply trains, the Pullman cars, and the ice cream and the Coca-Cola. All of it added up to something that Germany could never have matched. The German soldiers who survived the war understood this. They said so in their interrogation reports. They said so in their letters.

They said so when they thought no one was listening. But there was one more thing they said and it came from the highest of them. In August of 1944, as the Americans approached Paris, Adolf Hitler gave a direct order to the military governor of the city. The order was simple. The Allies were never to take Paris intact.

If the city could not be held, it was to be destroyed. The bridges over the sane were to be blown. The cathedrals and museums were to be wired with explosives. The Eiffel Tower was to fall. Paris, Hitler said, must not fall into enemy hands except as a field of ruins. The man who received that order was named Dietrich Voncholtitz.

He was 49 years old. He was a career officer of the old Prussian school, a man who had served his country since before the rise of national socialism and who would, by the standards of his own oath, have been expected to obey. He did not obey. He did not destroy Paris. He let the city fall almost intact.

He surrendered it to French and American forces in the last week of August and then he too became a prisoner. In October of 1944, Dietrich vonchitz arrived at Trent Park north of London. He moved through the elegant rooms, the polished floors and the fireplaces and the well tended gardens, and he had no reason to suspect that any of it was listening to him.

He met the other captured generals. He spoke freely with them about the war. He spoke freely with them about the men they had served. He spoke freely with them about themselves. And one night in a room with a hidden recorder running, von Schultitz said the words that when Sanka Nitel found them in his cardboard boxes more than half a century later made it clear that the story of what German prisoners said about Americans was not really only about Americans at all.

We all share the guilt, Voncholtit said. We went along with everything. We half took the Nazis seriously instead of saying to hell with you and your stupid nonsense. I misled my soldiers into believing this rubbish. I feel utterly ashamed of myself. There it was. Beneath all the talk of artillery and aircraft and the endless tide of American supplies, beneath the awe and the fear and the bitter respect, was a confession.

The thing that German prisoners kept circling back to, the thing they could not stop saying when they thought no one was listening, was not only about American firepower, it was about themselves. They had fought, they were beginning to understand, for a cause that deserved to lose.

And they had been beaten by a country that, for all its tactical clumsiness, and all its reliance on machines, still believed in the things their own country had set itself the task of destroying. the rule of law, the dignity of the individual, the right of a soldier to surrender and live. The war in Europe ended on the 8th of May 1945. Fritz Bioline surrendered to American forces in the rur pocket.

He spent the next several years writing reports for the United States Army Historical Division, recording what he had seen in 5 years of war for the men who had defeated him. His account of Santlow would become the most quoted German description of American firepower ever written. He died in his hometown of Verzburg in 1970.

An old man in a Germany that no longer recognized the country he had fought for. Friedrich von hate was repatriated. He returned to civilian life and became a professor of international law at the University of Verdsburg where he taught for almost three decades. He wrote about the laws of war. He defended the conduct of soldiers under impossible orders.

He died in the summer of 1994. 3 months later, in October of that same year, the American veterans of the 22nd Infantry Regiment placed their stone in the Herken Forest in honor of his fellow officer Friedri Lenfeld. Henry Colm, the young Jewish refugee who had played chess with Nazi generals, returned to civilian life and earned a doctorate in physics.

He [snorts] went on to a long career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he helped invent the magnetic levitation systems that would one day be used to carry passenger trains in countries around the world. He kept the secret of Fort Hunt until the 1990s. Sanka Nitel, the historian who opened the cardboard boxes at Q, would spend the next decade analyzing the transcripts.

In 2011, working with the social psychologist Harold Welsza, he published a book called Satan, it was the first time the secret recordings had ever been made public. Every word in it had been said by German soldiers who believed they were alone. And Ga Gra lived a long and quiet life in Germany and remembered until the day he died the taste of his first Coca-Cola.

The sergeant who walked out of the woods in the snow of December 1944, the one who muttered something about the shells in the sky, was never named in any record. He was one of 370,000 German prisoners who would eventually pass through American custody. He was repatriated in 1946. He went home to a Germany that lay in rubble.

But he, like all the others, carried home a single sentence. It was the sentence they had all been saying in one form or another for the entire war. It came out in their reports. It came out in their letters. It came out in the dark rooms of Trent Park when the microphones were running and the prisoners did not know. We did not lose to American soldiers.

We lost to America.