German POWs See New York Intact | WW2 History Documentary

Name: German POWs See New York Intact | WW2 History Documentary
Uploaded: 2026-10-30T14:07:54+00:00
Duration: 52 min 34 s
Channel: WW2 Dossier

00:00May 9th, 1943. A dusty road south of Ferryville, in the far north of Tunisia, 11 o'clock in the

00:08morning. At that hour, a German major general named Fritz Krause, with five other German generals

00:16beside him, accepted the terms the American Second Corps had put to them. The terms were

00:22unconditional. Within hours, the roads of northern Tunisia were carrying something no American

00:28soldier in North Africa had seen before. Not a column of enemy tanks coming toward him.

00:34A column of enemy soldiers coming toward him on foot, with nothing in their hands.

00:41Around 25,000 Axis troops gave themselves up to Second Corps in that one sector. Across Tunisia,

00:48before the week was out, the total would run to roughly a quarter of a million.

00:54Ernie Pyle was there to see it. He watched the Germans pull off their shirts and sit in

00:59the sun. He noticed they were younger than the Americans guarding them, well-fed, in excellent

01:05health. Every time a GI lifted a camera for a souvenir picture, every prisoner nearby crowded

01:12into the frame like a kid. And they told Pyle something that surprised him. They thought the

01:18Americans were fine fighters. Now listen carefully to what came next, because it is the reason this

01:25video exists. Pyle kept talking to them. He rarely found one who doubted that Germany would win the war.

01:33They had lost Tunisia, they said, only because the Allies got more supplies across the water. They laughed at the

01:40idea of an invasion of Europe. One of them looked at an American soldier who had grown up in Brooklyn

01:46and told him, you Americans are saps. You're still in the war, and I'm out of it. And one of

01:53them had

01:54heard something else. He had heard that the Luftwaffe had bombed New York. The Americans told him that was

02:01ridiculous. He couldn't see how that could be. Picture it for a second. A young man from Brooklyn,

02:08standing in the North African dust, listening to a German explain that his home had been bombed.

02:15Here is what neither of them knew yet. Shipping in Africa was far too scarce to feed a quarter of

02:22a

02:22million prisoners there for the rest of the war. So the prisoners were going to America. Many of them

02:28would come in by sea, past the Statue of Liberty, into New York Harbor, the very place that man believed

02:36was burning. So what does a soldier say when the city he has been told is rubble, slides past the

02:42rail of his ship, whole, lit, and loud? That is the question we are going to answer. And the answer

02:52is not the one you would expect. If you want to see New York through those prisoners' eyes, and see

02:58what the

02:58American soldiers who guarded them saw in their faces, give this video a like and subscribe. It

03:04helps this story find the people it was meant for. That line in Pyle's column was not a one-off.

03:10By July

03:11of 1943, a wire story in a small Texas newspaper reported that German prisoners brought to this

03:17country steadfastly believed the big cities of the American East Coast had been bombed to ruins. And it

03:24added a detail that should stop you. Even officers from crack German units captured in Africa seemed to

03:31believe it. Officers. Men with maps, radios, staff training, and access to reports. Keep that word in your

03:40head, because it is coming back, and when it does, it will mean something very different. Before we go any

03:47further, it is worth understanding why this belief was not stupid, even though it was false. By the

03:54spring of 1943, almost every German soldier had a hometown he worried about. A year earlier, on the

04:01night of May 30, 1942, more than a thousand British bombers had come over Cologne in a single raid.

04:08Think about what that does to a man's picture of the world. A country at war is a country whose

04:14cities

04:15burn. The idea that America could be fighting on two oceans and not have a scratch on it did not

04:20fit

04:21anything he knew. So when a rumor arrived that the Luftwaffe had finally reached New York, it did not

04:27sound like propaganda. It sounded like fairness. It sounded like the war catching up with the one

04:34country that had not yet paid for it. And that is what makes the moment at the ship's rail so

04:40heavy.

04:41These men were not about to see a city. They were about to see the end of a belief that

04:46was holding

04:47up everything else they believed. If New York was standing, what else had they been told that was not

04:52true? The American soldiers who escorted them would watch that question arrive on their faces,

04:59convoy after convoy, for two years. Some of the prisoners went silent. Some decided that the long

05:06trains of goods rolling past them had been laid on for show. Some said things so revealing that

05:12local newspapers printed them. And near the very end, a group of them would land in New York on a

05:18day that turned everything upside down a second time. But first there is a puzzle to solve. And it is

05:24a strange one. There was one German who actually saw New York with his own eyes during the war,

05:30from the sea, at night, on January 14th, 1942. He was a U-boat commander. He wrote about it in

05:38a book

05:39published in Germany the following year, the same year these men were marched into captivity in Tunisia.

05:45And the words he chose for what he saw that night had nothing to do with ruins.

05:50So if the truth about New York was sitting in German bookshops in 1943,

05:55how did German soldiers, officers among them, end up believing the exact opposite?

06:00To solve that puzzle, we have to go back to the night that German officer saw New York.

06:06January 1942, five weeks after Pearl Harbor.

06:11Kapitän Leutnant Reinhard Haddegen brought his submarine U-123 toward the entrance of New York's

06:18lower bay. He was navigating partly with a New York tourist guidebook.

06:22He picked out the radio tower at Coney Island. He picked out the lights along the south shore of

06:28Long Island. And then he saw the glow of Manhattan. The skyscrapers lit up behind it. A city at war

06:36that had not yet learned to turn its lights off. He later wrote that it was unbelievably beautiful

06:41and great. He wrote that for the first time in the war, a German soldier had looked upon the coast

06:47of

06:47the United States. That is the sentence that went into his book. Not a word about ruins. A lit city,

06:56intact, enormous. So what reached the ordinary German soldier? Here is the part almost nobody knows.

07:04The American historian Clay Blair found that still photographs and newsreel film claiming to show New

07:10York's lights as seen from U-123 were shown in German movie theaters. They were fakes. Blair called

07:17them amateurish. German audiences accepted them as genuine. Now think about what those audiences

07:24actually took home. Not Hardigan's awe. They took home a picture of a German weapon sitting at the

07:31front door of New York, with the city helpless in front of it. And the pictures were not entirely empty.

07:39Off Long Island that same week, Hardigan's torpedoes put tankers on the bottom close enough to the coast

07:45that the war was suddenly an American beach problem. Let me be careful here, because you deserve the

07:52honest version. No historian has ever produced the specific German broadcast that told soldiers

07:58New York had been bombed. What we can trace is the road the idea traveled. A real U-boat at

08:06the harbor

08:06mouth. Fake film in the cinemas. Burning ships off a real coastline. And a soldier in North Africa,

08:13a year later, who had heard the rest from someone who had heard it from someone else.

08:18By the time it reached Tunisia, a German weapon at the door of New York had become German bombs

08:24falling on it. Which brings us back to our question. Those men in Tunisia were about to

08:30sail into that harbor. And to get them there, the United States first had to do something it had not

08:36managed in 1942. It had to take that ocean back. May 22, 1943. The North Atlantic, south of Greenland.

08:47Thirteen days after the surrender in Tunisia, the escort carrier USS Bogue was covering a convoy

08:55designated ON-184. A radio direction finder had picked up a German transmission somewhere ahead.

09:03Lieutenant Junior Grade William Chamberlain, a Naval Reserve pilot of Composite Squadron 9,

09:09took off in a TBF Avenger, with two men behind him. Radio man James Stein and gunner Donald Clark.

09:1725 miles from the carrier, they found her. U-569, on the surface. Her commander, Hans Johansson,

09:26was transmitting by radio when the Avenger came in from astern. Here is the scale behind that single

09:33attack. For the first three years of the war, a U-boat on the surface in mid-ocean was nearly

09:39safe from aircraft, because the planes could not reach that far. Bogue brought the airfield with her.

09:46Chamberlain and a second Avenger from the same squadron went after U-569 with depth bombs.

09:52The boat was so badly damaged that her crew scuttled her. 21 Germans died. 25 were pulled out of the

10:01water. Two days later, on May 24th, Admiral Karl Donitz pulled his U-boats out of the North Atlantic

10:08convoy battle. Germany had lost around 40 submarines in a single month. The Germans themselves would call

10:16it Black May. Pay close attention to what happened next to those 25 survivors, because it is the first

10:24real clue in this story. A Canadian destroyer picked them up and landed them at St. John's, Newfoundland.

10:30One wounded man went to a Canadian hospital. The other 24 were brought to the United States for

10:36interrogation by the Office of Naval Intelligence. The report on them is dated June 19, 1943.

10:44Here is what the American interrogator wrote. Their morale was extremely low. They were thoroughly

10:50disinterested in the war in general, and in the U-boat arm in particular. They seemed relieved to have

10:56been taken prisoner. And most of them seemed convinced that Germany would lose the war.

11:02Now put that report next to Ernie Pyle's column from Tunisia. Same month. Two groups of German prisoners,

11:10both on their way to America. The soldiers in North Africa rarely doubted that Germany would win.

11:16They laughed at the idea of an invasion. The sailors from U-569 had already decided Germany was beaten.

11:24What was the difference between them? It was not courage. U-boatmen were volunteers in one of the

11:30most dangerous services of the war. It was not rank, either. The difference was geography.

11:37The sailors had been out on the American side of the Atlantic. They had seen what was coming at them.

11:42Escort carriers. Aircraft hundreds of miles from land. Convoys that kept arriving no matter how many

11:49ships went down. Before they ever saw an American city, they had already seen enough of American

11:55production to stop believing the story. The soldiers in Tunisia had seen none of it. They had fought on the

12:02edge of a continent, at the far end of a supply line. And what they knew of America came through

12:07newsreels

12:08and rumor. Remember that difference, because the rest of this story turns on it. A man's belief about

12:15New York had nothing to do with how brave or how smart he was. It depended on how close he

12:21had come to

12:21the real thing. And now, the confident ones were going to come as close as it is possible to come.

12:28Through the summer of 1943, ships loaded with Afrika Korps prisoners began crossing the ocean

12:34that Chamberlain and men like him had just pried open. So who was right about America? The cheerful

12:41soldiers from Tunisia? Or the beaten sailors from U-569? The soldiers were about to find out for themselves.

12:49They were already at sea. They came in through the narrows, past Staten Island, toward the most

12:54crowded harbor on earth. Over the course of the war, almost two out of every three German prisoners

13:00who entered the United States came through the New York Port of Embarkation. More than 235,000 men.

13:08Here is how one of them remembered the moment, in an account later gathered by the historian Ruth Beaumont Cook.

13:15It was foggy that morning, but as the sun rose and the skyline of the city came into view, we

13:21all spoke

13:22at once in surprise that the huge skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty were still standing.

13:27The propaganda ministry had told us that Luftwaffe air raids had leveled New York and other major

13:33American cities. Listen to the first part of that again. We all spoke at once. Not one man at the

13:42rail with a private thought. A whole deck of soldiers talking over each other, because every one of them

13:48had been carrying the same picture in his head and it had just been wiped away in a single sunrise.

13:54That is the first thing German prisoners said when they saw New York.

13:58Hold on to it. Because it is only the first layer, and it is not the one that matters most.

14:06Walter Schmidt had been drafted at 20. He had fought in North Africa for about five months before he was

14:11captured in Tunisia in May of 1943. His ship lay in New York Harbor after dark, and he wrote down

14:19what he saw.

14:20Everything was lit up as brightly as day, with neon advertising signs blinking on the skyscrapers before us.

14:27It was overwhelming to us, since we had been used to only darkness at night.

14:32None of us slept that night. We stayed on deck as long as the guards allowed.

14:38Think about what that night meant to a man like Schmidt. Every city he knew went black at sunset.

14:45Darkness was simply what war looked like, and here was the enemy's largest city burning electricity for advertising.

14:54Now here is a third voice, and pay close attention to it, because it changes everything we have heard so

15:00far.

15:01He was a German sergeant, an Unteroffizie of the Afrika Korps, and his name has never been published.

15:07We know only that he was captured by the United States Army on May 9, 1943, the same day those

15:14German

15:14generals surrendered on the road near Ferryville. He kept a diary. Coming into the harbor, he wrote this.

15:22The wharf, the city, everything is brilliantly lighted. Hundreds of lights are reflected in the water.

15:29These people here have no idea what war means. Back home, they may be sitting again in air raid shelters.

15:37Look at what happened inside that man's head. He saw exactly what Schmidt saw.

15:42He could no longer believe New York was in ruins. But the belief did not collapse. It changed shape.

15:50New York's rubble became Americans are soft because they have never suffered. The lights that should have told him the

15:56war was lost

15:56told him instead that the enemy did not understand war.

16:01That is the pattern we are going to follow from here, because it is the real mystery.

16:05The evidence arrived, and men found ways to make it fit. Watch it happen again on dry land.

16:13From the piers, the prisoners were taken across to the rail yards at Jersey City.

16:18A prisoner, later interviewed by the historian Alan Kent Powell, remembered being sure of what came next.

16:24They would be loaded into boxcars and shipped into the interior somewhere.

16:29Then, the first men shoved into the train started calling back.

16:33Back! Back! Those are upholstered coaches!

16:37To them, he said, it was the most unlikely thing possible. The American guard simply stood up and

16:44told them to go in. In each car, a German-speaking American read out the rules.

16:50Stay in your seat until we reach our destination. Raise your left hand to use the toilet. Raise your

16:57right hand for water. One man at a time. The windows opened only a hand's breadth.

17:02One prisoner said that through that gap, he soaked up the new world like a thirsty sponge.

17:08Another remembered how strange it was to see the sheer number of cars and trucks on the roads

17:13and parked outside factories. The journeys ran three, four, five days, and as the country kept

17:20unrolling past the glass, the prisoners found a new explanation. They told each other that the Americans

17:27were driving them in circles. No country could possibly be this big. Stop and appreciate that for a

17:35second. The truth was so large that the most reasonable thing a German soldier could think

17:41was that it had to be a trick. June 2nd, 1943. Aliceville, Alabama. A farm

17:50town in Pickens County. The townspeople had been asked to stay home. Almost none of them did.

17:57A boy named Pep Johnston was 12 years old, and he and his family were right out front.

18:03Folks lined the road from the depot. Others watched from porches, rooftops, the hoods of cars,

18:10and the beds of pickup trucks. A Frisco railroad train pulled in, and the first 500 German prisoners

18:16stepped out of Pullman cars. Many of them were from Rommel's Africa Corps. They were still wearing

18:23the dirty uniforms they had been captured in. They got off and formed platoons and marched toward the

18:30camp, Johnston remembered. I could tell they were well-disciplined despite their condition.

18:35So picture both sides of that road at once. On one side, a small southern town getting its first look

18:42at

18:42Rommel's army, and finding men who still marched in step. On the other, 500 Germans who had just

18:50crossed a country they could not believe was real, looking at Americans who had never heard an air raid

18:56siren. So far, we have heard three answers to our question. Surprise at the rail. Contempt in a diary.

19:06Suspicion on a train. None of them is the answer this story is really building toward.

19:12The deepest reckoning did not come at the rail at all. It came months later, behind barbed wire,

19:19as the truth piled up faster than any explanation could keep up with it. And the Germans were not

19:26the only ones who noticed. In Washington, a handful of American officers had been reading the same kind

19:31of reports the guards were sending in. They had worked out something about these prisoners that

19:36no one in the German army would ever have thought of. If the sight of America itself was this hard

19:43to

19:43explain away, what would happen if the army stopped simply guarding these men, and started showing them

19:50the country on purpose. November 4th, 1943. Camp Tonkoa, Oklahoma.

19:58Johannes Kunze was a Gefreiter, a Lance Corporal of the Africa Corps. He had come through the same

20:04pipeline as the men we met at the rail in New York Harbor. Captured in North Africa, shipped across the

20:10Atlantic, put on a train, unloaded on the plains. And somewhere along that road, Kunze had stopped

20:17believing. Other prisoners noticed. He made defeatist remarks. He said he did not care how the war came

20:25out. He had also been doing something far more dangerous. During sick call, he had been passing

20:31notes to the camp's American doctor. Then the doctor changed. The new one could not read German,

20:38so he handed a note back through another prisoner. That prisoner read it.

20:43That same night, a senior German sergeant named Walter Beyer convened what he called a court.

20:50Some 200 prisoners gathered. Kunze was found guilty of treason. Then they beat him to death.

20:56Now think back to that sunrise in the harbor, the deck where everyone spoke at once. Put it next to

21:03Tonkoa. On the ship, a man could say out loud that New York was still standing. In the camp, saying

21:10the next

21:11thing, that if New York was standing, Germany was going to lose, could get him killed.

21:17That changes what our question means. When we ask what German prisoners said when they saw America

21:24whole, we have to ask who was listening. The words men spoke in the barracks, in front of the hardliners,

21:31were one thing. What they wrote on a scrap of paper for an American doctor was something else.

21:38The United States did not let Tonkoa go. Military police questioned the 200 prisoners and arrested

21:46five men who still had blood on their uniforms. The prosecutor was a young army lawyer from Texas

21:52named Leon Jaworski, who would become famous three decades later as the Watergate special

21:58prosecutor. All five were convicted. In July of 1945, they were hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

22:07And Kunza was not the only one. Four months later, in Arizona, a U-boat sailor who had helped Navy

22:14interrogators was sent by mistake into a camp full of submarine men and was dead within hours of arriving.

22:21Word of these killings traveled. In early 1944, the newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson went to the

22:28White House and urged Eleanor Roosevelt to do something about the Nazi terror inside the camps.

22:34The First Lady acted on it. She invited an army officer to dinner, Major Maxwell McKnight,

22:40who ran the administrative section of prisoner of war camp operations. And she opened with a sentence

22:46he never forgot. I've been hearing the most horrible stories about all the killings that are going on in

22:52our camps. Here is what McKnight knew, and the First Lady, perhaps, did not. A plan to re-educate

23:00German prisoners had been sitting in the War Department for almost a year. Two things had stopped

23:05it. There were not enough qualified people to run it. And the Geneva Convention forbade indoctrinating

23:11prisoners of war. Pay attention to how the Americans solved that second problem,

23:16because it is the cleverest move in this whole story. They did not try to out-argue Goebbels.

23:22Secretary of War Henry Stimson set the goal in a single line. It was, in his words,

23:29imbuing them with respect for the quality and potency of American institutions.

23:34A War Department memo put it even more simply. The prisoners would be given,

23:39the facts, objectively presented. Think about what that means after everything we have seen.

23:47The Americans did not need to invent a story. The prisoners had already seen the story with their

23:52own eyes. The skyline. The lights. The upholstered coaches. The roads full of trucks. The country that

24:00went on for five days. The problem was never that the evidence was missing. The problem was that in the

24:07camps, men like Walter Beyer decided who was allowed to talk about it. So the program was

24:12built to take the evidence out of the hardliners' hands. It launched in the summer of 1944 under a

24:18deliberately dull cover name, the Intellectual Diversion Program. It was run by the Special

24:24Projects Division of the Provost Marshal General's Office. Its director was Lieutenant Colonel Edward

24:29Davison, a Scottish-born poet and university professor. McKnight was his deputy. The first move

24:36was to separate. The most fanatical Nazis were identified and shipped off to a maximum security

24:42camp at Alva, Oklahoma. Take the Walter Byers out of the barracks and the other men could finally say

24:48what they had been thinking. The second move was stranger. On October 31, 1944, at a former

24:56Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Van Etten, New York, the army set up what its own staff called

25:02The Factory. It was staffed by German prisoners, 85 of them in the end, chosen because they were

25:07editors, professors, writers, and linguists who hated Hitler. Their job was to write for their

25:13fellow prisoners. Out of the factory came a newspaper called Der Huf, The Call. And here is a detail that

25:21tells you exactly how carefully the Americans thought about this. Der Huf was not given away. Prisoners paid a

25:29nickel an issue. The planners believed that anything handed out free would be dismissed as propaganda.

25:35Something a man paid for, he might actually read. By late 1945, its circulation passed 75,000.

25:44Do you see what the Americans had worked out? The belief that New York lay in ruins was never really

25:50about New York. It survived because every camp had men in it who policed what could be said.

25:56Remove them, put the facts on a page men chose to buy, and the evidence the prisoners had already

26:02seen could finally do its work. But the factory had barely opened when a new problem appeared,

26:08and it came off the ships. Through the summer and fall of 1944, a new wave of German prisoners was

26:16pouring into New York Harbor, men captured in Normandy and France. Unlike the Afrika Korps men,

26:22many of them had been inside Germany only months before. They came out of a country whose radio

26:28talked constantly about vengeance weapons, new rockets and flying bombs that had already started

26:34falling on London. And in the winter of 1945, the United States Navy would act as if one of those

26:41weapons might be on its way to New York. January 8th, 1945, Washington.

26:47Admiral Jonas Ingram had just taken command of the United States Atlantic Fleet. At a press conference

26:54that day, he told reporters something no American admiral had said out loud in the entire war.

26:59A German attack on New York or Washington, he said, was possible and probable within 30 to 60 days.

27:09Robot bombs launched from the sea. The Navy Department put out a statement the same day to calm things

27:15down. It was too late. Reservations on trains and planes out of New York and Washington suddenly filled up.

27:23Stop and take in how strange this moment is. For almost two years, German prisoners had been sailing into

27:30New York Harbor expecting to find it in ruins. Now, for the first time in the war, the people of

27:37New York

27:37were asking themselves whether it might actually happen. And the Americans had reasons to take it seriously.

27:43In September of 1944, a German agent named Oscar Mantel, captured when his U-boat was sunk, had told the

27:51FBI that missile-carrying submarines were being prepared. In December, two more captured spies,

27:58William Colpaw and Eric Gimple, told interrogators the same thing. On December 10th, Mayor Fiorello

28:05LaGuardia publicly warned New Yorkers about rocket attack. Germany had spent three years telling its

28:12soldiers that its weapons could reach this city. Now the claim had crossed the ocean and lodged inside

28:19the American High Command. And the United States was about to answer it the way it had answered

28:25everything else in this war, with ships. In March of 1945, nine large German submarines slipped out of

28:33Norway. Seven of them were formed into a group called Zeewulf and ordered toward the American coast,

28:40from New York southward. American codebreakers were reading the German signals. They watched the boats

28:47go. Ingram and the analysts of the 10th Fleet concluded the boats might be carrying flying bombs.

28:55The Navy's answer was called Operation Teardrop. Remember the escort carrier Bogue, whose pilot sank

29:02U-569 in the opening weeks of this story? Here she is again. The Americans built two barriers across the

29:10North Atlantic. In the first, the escort carriers Mission Bay and Croatan, with 20 destroyer escorts.

29:18In the second, Bogue and Corps, with 22 more. Two lines of ships stretched across hundreds of miles of ocean

29:27in some of the worst spring weather the crews had ever seen, with one job. Nothing gets through to New

29:34York.

29:35Shortly before midnight on April 15th, the destroyer escort Stanton picked up U-1235 and went in with

29:43her hedgehog mortars. The submarine went down with all hands. A few hours later, guided by gunfire and

29:50sonar from USS Frost, Stanton found U-880 and sank her too. On the night of April 21st, USS Carter

30:00sank U-518.

30:02Three boats gone in a week. No survivors from any of them. Then the barrier paid.

30:10April 24th, 1945. Morning in the North Atlantic.

30:15Philip Lundeberg was 22, a Navy ensign aboard the destroyer escort Frederick C. Davis.

30:22At 8.35, a German acoustic torpedo, fired by U-546 from about 650 yards, hit the ship's forward engine

30:31room. The torpedo's sudden impact was quite a shock, he remembered. Within about five minutes,

30:38the Frederick C. Davis broke in two and went under. Lundeberg said the survivors had to walk into the

30:44water from a deck that was already submerged. Then came hours in the freezing North Atlantic.

30:50The men in the water tried to keep each other going. They could hear depth charges thudding

30:55through the sea as the other escorts went after the submarine. I think I was in shock, he said.

31:02Of a crew of 192, more than 110 men died. Lundeberg was one of only three officers who survived.

31:10The other escorts hunted U-546 for nearly 10 hours and sank her. 33 Germans, including her commander,

31:19Paul Just, were pulled out of the water and taken aboard none other than the Bogue.

31:25Now here comes a part of this story that Americans have to tell honestly,

31:29because one of the survivors insisted on it. The Navy was desperate to know one thing.

31:34Were there flying bombs aboard those boats? Eight of the German specialists were separated,

31:42kept in solitary confinement, and subjected to brutal interrogation, including beatings.

31:48Paul Just collapsed unconscious during questioning on April 30th. Years later, Philip Lundeberg,

31:56the young ensign who had watched his own ship break apart under that man's torpedo,

32:00became a naval historian. And he called that treatment what it was. A singular atrocity.

32:08Keep that in mind, because it tells you something about the kind of country these prisoners had been sent to.

32:13The man with the most reason to hate Paul just wrote the judgment against his own side.

32:19And in the years after the war, Lundeberg organized survivor reunions and became close with Just himself.

32:26There is a brotherhood among survivors at sea, he said.

32:30As for the flying bombs, there were none. Post-war interrogations of the Sea Wolf crews confirmed it.

32:37No launching equipment had ever been fitted to those submarines. The weapon German soldiers had been

32:43promised for years, the one that would finally carry the war to New York, did not exist in the form

32:49the Americans feared.

32:51On May 5th, USS Farquhar sank U-881, the last German submarine the United States Navy would sink in the

32:59war.

33:00So by the spring of 1945, the question in this story had come full circle. The Germans had believed New

33:07York could be destroyed. For a few months, some Americans had feared it too. And when Germany finally sent

33:14its submarines toward that city, they never came close. Which brings us back to the harbor,

33:20and to the prisoners who were still coming in. On April 11, 1945, two weeks before the Frederick

33:27C. Davis went down, a transport named Hermitage tied up at Pier 84 on Manhattan's west side,

33:33full of German prisoners from the camps around Le Havre.

33:37The next day, hundreds of them were put on a train heading west from Jersey City.

33:42And as that train pulled into North Philadelphia, a railroad man walked up to the locomotive with

33:47news that nobody aboard, German or American, was ready to hear.

33:52April 12, 1945. Harsimus Cove, Jersey City. A little after four in the afternoon.

33:59Eugene Steffi was 29, a fireman on the Pennsylvania Railroad from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

34:06He and his engineer, Harold Duncan, had been handed a simple job. Take locomotive number 8373,

34:13couple her to thirteen coaches, and run the train to Harrisburg. Nobody told them what was in the

34:20coaches. We didn't realize that they were POWs, Steffi said later, until we saw those poor fellas

34:26coming from the boat. Almost 850 German prisoners from the Hermitage and the other ships of their convoy

34:33climbed aboard. Around 430, the train pulled out. Through Newark. Through Rahway. Scooping water from

34:41the trackpans at speed. Steffi remembered the stretch past Hunter as the place where we really

34:46started to railroad. At about six o'clock, the train made an unscheduled stop at North Philadelphia

34:52to let a local train cross. Armed guards stepped out onto the platform, and a car inspector walked

34:59up to the locomotive cab and gave the two engine men the news. The president is dead. Franklin

35:06Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, Georgia, at 435 that afternoon. The White House had announced it at

35:13548, minutes before the train rolled in. Now, I want to be straight with you about what we do not

35:20know.

35:21Nobody wrote down what the prisoners in those coaches heard that evening. The windows were open

35:26for air. Some of the Germans spoke English. The historian who reconstructed this journey believes

35:33the news could easily have run down the length of that train. But it is his inference, not a record.

35:39What we do know is this. The train went on through the evening, past Paoli, past the farms of Lancaster

35:46County. Commuters on the platforms had no idea who was going by. At Harrisburg, a little after eight,

35:54the crews changed. A last coach of 50 men, selected by Army Intelligence, was taken off and driven to an

36:01interrogation camp at Pine Grove Furnace. The rest, by the best reconstruction, rolled on west toward Texas.

36:10Yes, Steffi said, those POWs were getting quite a ride. Think about where those men were at that

36:17moment. 24 hours earlier, they had been sitting in New York Harbor, looking at the skyline. They had

36:23crossed the whole state of New Jersey in upholstered coaches. And the country they were crossing had just

36:28lost the only president most of its young soldiers could remember. And it kept running. Trains on time,

36:35crews changing at Harrisburg. Nothing stopped. So what did German prisoners say about Roosevelt?

36:43In Arizona, at a camp that had been known as a pro-Nazi stronghold, the prisoners got together and

36:49sent a sincere letter of condolence to the army. In Idaho, the German-language newsletter at the

36:55Farragut camp announced the president's death to its readers. Hold that next to everything we have heard.

37:01Two years earlier, men in these same camps had beaten a fellow prisoner to death for saying

37:07Germany would lose. Now, German prisoners were writing condolences for the American commander-in-chief.

37:15Something had shifted. And four weeks later, the ground went out from under them entirely.

37:21On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered. And within weeks, the United States Army did something that

37:29pushed the question in this story to its limit. On June 3, a German-language camp newspaper told its

37:37readers that the army considered it very important that all 343,000 German prisoners in America see

37:45films of the concentration camps, with German commentary. The footage came from places like

37:52Buchenwald, liberated by American troops in April. The reactions were not all what you would hope.

37:59At a screening on Staten Island that June, a reporter watched about 150 prisoners. Some laughed or smiled.

38:06Others covered their faces or turned away. But listen to what happened in Iowa.

38:12At Camp Clarinda, the commander was Lieutenant Colonel George Ball. After his prisoners saw the film,

38:20225 of them sent him a letter. In it, they dissociated themselves from the National Socialist

38:25treatment of prisoners in Buchenwald, and they called it completely in conflict with the thinking

38:30of every German front soldier. Ball later explained how the letter came to him. At first, it bore only the

38:38signature of the camp spokesman. Then every man who had seen the film signed it. Ball sent it up to

38:457th Service Command headquarters in Omaha. And then he did one more thing. He gave the prisoners illustrated

38:52books of the atrocities, so the horror would be, in his words, indelibly preserved in their memory.

38:59The German newspaper at Camp Algona, the big camp to the north, printed a statement of its own that July.

39:05It's men, it said, had turned away from the films with the utmost revulsion. And they declared complete

39:13and total solidarity with the prisoners at Clarinda. Now line up the sentences we have collected in this

39:20story, in order. May, 1943. The Luftwaffe has bombed New York. Summer, 1943. The propaganda ministry had told

39:32us New York was leveled. The same summer, in a diary. These people have no idea what war means.

39:42July, 1945. We dissociate ourselves. Do you see what you are looking at? It is the same discovery,

39:51made in stages. The first lie to break was a lie about the enemy's city. You could see it from

39:57the deck of a ship.

39:58The last thing to break was what they had been told about their own country. And the skyline came

40:04first, because it was the one piece of evidence no camp leader could argue with. Every prisoner who

40:11came through New York had seen it with his own eyes. But there was still one more site waiting for

40:16them.

40:17The one that would finally reverse everything. When the prisoners went home, an American captain named

40:23Robert Kunzig sailed with the first shipload. He was standing near them when the door opened onto

40:28Germany, and he wrote down what he saw in their faces. It is the mirror image of the moment in

40:34New

40:34York Harbor. And it is the real answer to the question in this story. January 4, 1946. Fort Eustis,

40:42Virginia. Two thousand German prisoners filed into the first cycle of a course the United States Army had

40:50compressed from eight weeks into six days. The prisoners had their own name for it. They called

40:56it the six-day bicycle race, because everyone knew the fastest way home ran through it. The commandant

41:03was Colonel Alpheus Smith, and the first thing he did surprised them. He told them American democracy was

41:10not perfect. One prisoner remembered that Smith did not pull his punches. Another remembered a sentence one of

41:17the teachers left them with, and carried it for the rest of his life. It is a sin against the

41:23Holy Ghost

41:23to let others think and decide for you. Stop on that sentence for a moment. Think about the men we

41:30met in

41:31this story. The sergeant in Tunisia who had heard New York was bombed. The prisoners in the harbor who said

41:38the propaganda ministry had told them it was level. Johannes Kunze, beaten to death because two hundred men

41:45let one sergeant let one sergeant decide for them. That sentence was written for every one of them.

41:51And now, remember the word I asked you to hold onto at the very beginning? Officers.

41:57In the summer of 1943, that Texas Wire story said even officers from crack German units believed

42:04America's cities were in ruins. Men with maps and staff training and access to reports. If anyone should have

42:12known better, it was them. At Fort Getty, Rhode Island, one of the earlier schools, a German lieutenant

42:20named Wolf Dieter Zander sat down in a classroom expecting, in his words, stiff, impersonal military

42:27instructors. Instead, he found lively professors from Harvard, Brown, and other universities.

42:34One of them was Henry Ehrman, a German-Jewish refugee who had fled Hitler and was now teaching at the

42:40New

42:40School in New York. Ehrman treated the German officers in front of him with respect.

42:46Zander wrote to him for years after the war. So here is what the officers prove.

42:51The belief about New York was never a failure of information. The men with the best information

42:58believed it too. It survived because, in the world they came from, nobody was allowed to look at the

43:05evidence and say out loud what it meant. Put a German officer in a room where he was allowed to

43:12say it,

43:13and in front of a teacher whose own country had driven him out, and the picture started to come apart.

43:20But even that is not the end. The answer to our question was still waiting,

43:25on the other side of the Atlantic. Captain Robert Kunzig, of the Special Projects Division,

43:31had commanded at Fort Kearney, the camp where the factory wrote Der Hof. In 1946, he went with the

43:39first shipload of Fort Eustis graduates on the journey home. Now picture it with me, because this

43:45is the moment the whole story has been building toward. The ship crossed the same ocean Chamberlain's

43:51Avenger had cleared in 1943, and Lindeberg's barrier had held in 1945.

43:57The men went ashore and boarded a train. And as that train crossed into Germany,

44:03Kunzig noticed something. He wrote that he was conscious of a tenseness in the men.

44:08I could see it in their eyes. They crowded to the doors for their first glimpse of home.

44:14And Kunzig wrote this,

44:23Now go back to the beginning, to the fog in New York Harbor, and the sun coming up,

44:28and a whole deck of German soldiers talking at once, because the skyscrapers and the Statue of

44:33Liberty were still standing. They had crossed the ocean, expecting to see a ruined city.

44:40They had been told it was ruined. They had believed it so completely, that some of them refused to

44:46accept the evidence even with the lights shining in their faces. And three years later, they finally

44:52saw the ruins they had been promised. They were in Germany. That is the answer. When German prisoners

44:59saw New York standing, the first thing they said was surprise, and then contempt, and then suspicion,

45:07and then for a long time, nothing at all, because it was not safe to say it. But what the

45:13skyline was

45:14really telling them, from the very first morning, was that the destruction in this war was only going

45:20one way. The picture of a burning city they had carried across the Atlantic was a true picture.

45:26It was just a picture of their own country. And Robert Kunzig, the American who stood at that door,

45:32would not take credit for what happened next. Physical destruction, not a new enlightenment,

45:38he concluded, had wiped out the conditions that had fed National Socialism. An American officer,

45:46refusing to claim that his own program had done more than it had. The numbers are worth knowing,

45:51because they are honest numbers. The 12th and final cycle at Fort Eustis ended on April 5th, 1946.

46:0123,147 graduates went home. The War Department polled more than 22,000 departing prisoners.

46:08About 74% said they left appreciating the value of democracy. About a third called themselves anti-Nazi

46:17and pro-democratic. Around 10% were still militant Nazis. One historian called the program a

46:25bold experiment conducted against heavy odds. Other writers called it well-meaning incompetence.

46:33Both may be true. But notice what the critics and the defenders both leave out.

46:39Long before any of these men sat in a classroom, the United States had already taught them the most

46:45important lesson of all, without a single lecture. It taught it with a harbor full of ships,

46:52with lights left on at night, with upholstered coaches and roads full of trucks, and a country

46:59that took five days to cross. And with the train that kept running on the evening the president died.

47:05There is one man in this story who never learned how it ended. He was the one who wrote down

47:10its very

47:11first sentence, in the dust of Tunisia, standing next to a boy from Brooklyn. He did not live to see

47:18the last German prisoners sail out past the skyline they had once believed was gone.

47:24And the place where his own story stopped tells you what the American side of this war really cost.

47:30April 18, 1945. Ieshima, a small island off Okinawa. Ernie Pyle had gone to the Pacific.

47:39He was with the men of the 77th Infantry Division when a Japanese machine gunner opened fire from a

47:45coral slope beside the road. Pyle dropped into a ditch. When he raised his head to look, a bullet hit

47:51him in the left temple. He died instantly. It was six days after that train stopped at North Philadelphia,

47:58three weeks before Germany surrendered. In his shirt pocket, they found a rough draft of a column.

48:04He had written it ahead of time, for the day the war in Europe ended. And it was not about

48:10victory.

48:11It was about the dead. Dead men by mass production, he wrote, in one country after another, month after

48:17month, and year after year. That is where the man who wrote down the first line of this story ended

48:23up.

48:24Two years earlier, in the dust of Tunisia, he had listened to a German prisoner explain that

48:29New York had been bombed. Now he lay in a ditch on the other side of the world.

48:35The men of the 77th put up a marker where he fell. It says,

48:39On this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle. April 18, 1945.

48:49Remember that marker, because it is the cost behind everything you have heard.

48:54The skyline the prisoners saw from the rail did not stay lit by accident. It stayed lit because men

49:00like Pyle's buddies went to places like Iyashima and Tunisia and the North Atlantic and kept the war on

49:07the far side of the ocean. So what became of the others? Reinhardt Hartigan, the U-boat commander who

49:15saw Manhattan glowing in January of 1942, survived the war. He went home to Bremen, started an oil trading

49:23company, and sat in the city's parliament for 32 years. He died in 2018 at 105. Walter Schmidt,

49:32the young soldier who could not sleep because the neon signs were blinking on the skyscrapers,

49:36spent nearly three years in American captivity, and then worked in England before he finally reached

49:42Germany in 1947. He married the girl he had been writing to the whole time. Wolf Dieter Zander,

49:49the German lieutenant at Fort Getty, kept writing to Henry Ehrman, the refugee professor, for years.

49:56The last German prisoner left Camp Shanks on the Hudson River on July 22, 1946. The last of them

50:04sailed out the way they had come in, past the same skyline. And that is where the German side of

50:10this story closes. Now the Americans. Leon Jaworski, the young army lawyer who prosecuted the killers of

50:18Johannes Kunze, became the Watergate special prosecutor three decades later. Philip Lundeberg,

50:24the 22-year-old ensign who walked off a sinking deck into the North Atlantic, earned a doctorate at

50:30Harvard, taught at the Naval Academy, and became a curator at the Smithsonian. He organized reunions of

50:38the survivors of the Frederick C. Davis. And he never stopped telling the truth about his own side.

50:45Pep Johnston, the 12-year-old on the road in Aliceville, grew up. Several of those German

50:52prisoners later worked at his father's sawmill, and one of them drew a sketch of him. He was still

50:58telling the story in his 90s. And Eugene Steffi, the fireman who took 850 prisoners west on the night

51:05the president died, ended his memories of that run with a question. Where were those fellas headed?

51:14Here is the honest answer. They were headed home, eventually. Back to the ruins they had once been

51:21promised they would find in New York. So what did German prisoners say when they saw New York was not

51:29destroyed? They said it was still standing. What they could not yet bring themselves to say was that

51:34it never would be destroyed, because the people who had built it had already won.

51:40But the last word in this story does not belong to the prisoners. It belongs to a young American

51:45soldier who grew up in Brooklyn, standing in the North African sun in May of 1943, while a German told

51:52him his hometown had been bombed. He never got his name in the paper. He did not need to argue.

52:00He

52:00knew what was standing at the end of his street. And he was right. Thank you for staying with this

52:06story all the way to the end. If it gave you something you didn't know about the American

52:10soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Second World War, please give it a like. It genuinely helps the

52:16video reach people who will value it. Subscribe and turn on the bell so you don't miss the next one.

52:21And tell me in the comments where you're watching from. If your father, grandfather, or uncle served

52:28in the Second World War, I'd be honored if you wrote his name and his unit below, so he's remembered

52:33here too.

German POWs See New York Intact | WW2 History Documentary

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