Скачать или смотреть German POWs Shocked by American Generosity — Received Food Packages Their Families Never Saw

January 17, 1945. Camp Blanding, Florida.

A German prisoner stood trembling before a wooden table. Not from cold—but from disbelief. Before him lay a Red Cross parcel: chocolate, soap, cigarettes, condensed milk. Luxuries his own family in Hamburg hadn't seen in two years. He had been told America would starve him. Instead, they fed him better than the Reich ever had.

Between 1943 and 1946, over 370,000 German POWs were held in American camps. They arrived expecting brutality—starvation, forced labor, death. Nazi propaganda had painted the U.S. as decadent and cruel. What they found instead shattered everything: 4,000 calories a day, hot showers, medical care, libraries, and weekly Red Cross parcels filled with goods even Nazi officers couldn't obtain. They wept at their first meals. Some refused to eat, convinced it was poison. Others ate until they vomited.

But the cruelest truth was this: while they received chocolate and soap in Florida, their families starved in bombed-out cellars back home. The guilt was crushing. The cognitive dissonance was worse.

This is the story of how abundance became a weapon no strategist planned—how generosity broke the grip of fascism more effectively than any bullet. It's about a Wehrmacht corporal named Heinrich Müller, who wrote home: "What kind of people are these?" It's about his mother, who saved an American chocolate bar in a drawer until her death in 1963. And it's about the unexpected truth that shaped postwar Germany: the side that fed them was the side they chose.

Historical Sources: • U.S. National Archives (NARA) — POW Camp Records, 1943–1946
• International Red Cross Archives — Parcel Distribution Reports
• Library of Congress — Otto Becker Diary, Camp Como, Mississippi
• U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — Heinrich Müller Diary Collection
• Geneva Convention Compliance Reports — U.S. Army, 1944–1945

In the end, the most profound victory was not won on battlefields—but in mess halls. Not with bullets, but with bread.