Скачать или смотреть The Non Fraternization Policy Said No Contact -Thousands of Americans Married the Enemy

Discover how the strict non-fraternization policy forbidding American soldiers from any friendly contact with Germans—including $65 fines and court-martial for violations—collapsed within months as thousands of servicemen married German women despite official prohibition, and American women defied social stigma to marry German POWs held in camps across the United States. This meticulously researched account reveals how over 375,000 German prisoners worked on American farms and in communities between 1943-1946, how proximity and shared humanity eroded official enmity as locals saw individual men rather than abstract Nazi enemies, and how approximately 14,000 German war brides emigrated to America under the War Brides Act while American women who married German POWs faced the choice of following them to devastated Germany or losing them forever. From Eisenhower's September 1944 orders prohibiting soldiers from shaking hands, playing with children, or attending German churches, to troops openly mocking it as "the 65-dollar question," to the policy's official abandonment in October 1945 just months after implementation, this story illuminates how human connection defied military regulation and how former enemies became family through marriages that demonstrated love, pragmatism, and the messy human work of turning wartime enemies into peacetime allies one relationship at a time.

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