7 Meals That Shocked Nazi POWs in American Camps

Tunisia, May 1943. The largest Axis surrender of the war. A few weeks later, Afrika Korps veterans are standing in American mess halls holding a tray, and the first thing on it is soft white bread that nobody is telling them to finish. That tray was not a reward and it was not propaganda. It was the rule. Article 11 of the 1929 Geneva Convention said prisoners got the same rations as the detaining power's own depot troops, and American depot troops ate about 3,500 calories a day. So the prisoners did too. The Army cook was not trying to make a point. The point was what the standard tray held. Back in Germany, bread was being stretched with wood pulp, coffee was roasted barley and acorns, and sugar had been rationed since the month the war began. When the prisoners wrote home about it, many of their families simply did not believe them. Arnold Krammer, whose research into POW letters and postwar testimony is the main scholarly source on this, found that several families could not accept the letters as true. The men were describing facts. Their families were living a different set of facts. What we go through: White bread, and why the letters home about it were met with disbelief Real brewed coffee against Ersatzkaffee, and the Brazil and Colombia supply line German naval power could never reach Max Keith, Coca-Cola's German operations, and how the same war created Fanta on one side of the wire and put Coke in the camp canteen on the other Ice cream as an American morale item, and the Navy's concrete barge in the Pacific making ten gallons an hour Beef and pork twice a week or more, while Wehrmacht meat rations kept shrinking at the front Florida orange juice at breakfast while Germany lost its citrus and saw vitamin C deficiency Refined sugar in cake, pie and pudding, against Kunsthonig made from sugar beet syrup The scale behind the tray: 12 million troops, 7 billion pounds of Lend-Lease food, and up to 425,000 German prisoners in more than 500 camps Why the camps sat in Texas, Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, right at the center of American farming Two opposite readings of the same meal: industrial strength, or decadent excess Said plainly: nobody arranged the irony. A prisoner in Texas eating beef was getting more protein than soldiers still fighting under German command in France or on the Eastern Front. It was just two supply systems meeting the same war from opposite ends of their capacity, and American geography had never been bombed. Seven items. Bread, coffee, Coca-Cola, ice cream, meat, citrus, sugar. Put them together and they measure the distance between two economies at the moment one of them was running out of room. Tell me in the comments if anyone in your family ever worked at, guarded, or lived near a POW camp in the States. And tell me this: which of the seven would have hit you hardest after two years on German rations? #WW2 #WorldWarII #GermanPOW #AfrikaKorps #POWCamps #Wehrmacht #MilitaryHistory #GenevaConvention #Rationing #Fanta #CocaCola #HomeFront #WW2History #History #1943