What happens when hundreds of hardened German prisoners—straight from the blood‑soaked fields of Normandy—step off a train in rural America and discover that the very first Americans they meet are pregnant women working the fields?
June 28, 1944. Aliceville, Alabama.
Camp Aliceville, one of the largest POW camps in the United States. In the space of a single afternoon, some of the most feared soldiers of the Third Reich would stand speechless, helmets in hand, confronted not by rifles, but by the quiet defiance of American civilian life.
By mid‑1944, the Western Front had collapsed for Germany. After the D‑Day invasion, entire divisions of the Wehrmacht were encircled and forced to surrender. Among the 425,000 German prisoners eventually held on American soil, the first large contingent from the 352nd Infantry Division and elements of the 709th Static Division arrived in the American South during the scorching summer of 1944.
Propaganda Meets Reality
These were not wide‑eyed conscripts. Many belonged to veteran formations that had fought from Poland to France—men who had been told for years that American society was decadent, weak, and on the verge of collapse.
Propaganda newsreels had painted the United States as a nation of gangsters, Jews, and Black people, a racial and moral chaos that could never stand against German steel.
Their destination: Camp Aliceville.
A brand‑new facility built on 400 acres of former cotton fields in western Alabama, surrounded by pine forests and guarded by nothing more threatening than the Second WAC training detachment and a handful of older military policemen.
The camp commander, Colonel William B. Tuttle, faced a problem common across the American South that summer. Every able‑bodied man under 40 was either overseas or working in war plants. Harvests were rotting in the fields.
So Washington issued an order that would have been unthinkable in Berlin.
German prisoners of war would be loaned out to local farmers under strict guard, paid 80 cents a day in camp scrip, and returned each evening.
The Cotton Fields of Alabama
On the morning of June 28, 1944, the temperature already stood at 94°F when 320 prisoners from the 352nd Infantry Division—survivors of Omaha Beach—were loaded onto open trucks.
They wore freshly dyed U.S. Army fatigues marked with large white “PW” letters on the back. Their destination: a series of small farms along the Tombigbee River.
The guards—12 enlisted men of the 433rd Military Police Escort Guard Company and four members of the Women’s Army Corps—carried only sidearms and clipboards.
At 10:15 hours, the convoy halted at the edge of a 160‑acre cotton field owned by Mrs. Evelyn Harris, seven months pregnant with her third child. Her husband was a staff sergeant with the First Infantry Division in Normandy.
Like hundreds of thousands of American women that summer, she had taken over the farm with the help of neighbors and two elderly hired hands.
The Germans climbed down, expecting the usual sullen hostility—or at best, cold indifference. Instead, they saw, stretching across the rows of waist‑high cotton, more than 40 women, almost all visibly pregnant, working with hoes under the merciless sun.
Some had toddlers tied to their backs with flour‑sack slings. A few were great‑grandmothers, but most were young wives whose husbands were fighting the very army these prisoners had served.
“Drink, Son”
Unteroffizier Hans Bürgger, a 27‑year‑old veteran of the 916th Grenadier Regiment, later wrote in a letter smuggled home:
> “We had been told America was starving its women and children while the men hid behind oceans. Instead, we saw these women, heavy with child, doing work that would break a lancer in an hour—and they did it without complaint.”
At 11:00 hours, the WAC corporal in charge, Corporal Margaret O’Neal, gave the order in halting German learned from a phrase book:
“Arbeit – Kallen hier anfangen.”
The prisoners were handed hoes. The American women stepped aside only long enough to show them the rows, then returned to their own sections.
For three full minutes, no one spoke. The only sound was the cicadas and the soft thud of blades into the red clay.
Then something happened that no propaganda minister in Berlin could have scripted.
Mrs. Harris, sweat‑soaked and eight months pregnant, walked over to the water bucket, filled a tin dipper, and handed it to the nearest German private—a 19‑year‑old from Bremen who had lost three fingers on D‑Day.
He stared at the dipper as though it might explode.
She pressed it into his hand and said in slow Alabama English, “Drink, son. Ain’t nobody dyin’ of thirst on my place.”
Within minutes, the women were passing the dipper up and down the German line. Several prisoners removed their fatigue caps out of reflex—the same gesture they once reserved for officers and party officials.
A Quiet Collapse of Certainty
By 14:00 hours, the temperature had climbed to 101°F. Heat shimmer rose from the soil. Several prisoners began to stagger. The guards themselves, wilting in the sun, radioed camp for relief that would not arrive for hours.
It was then that the psychological crisis hit the Germans hardest.
These were men who had bayoneted French civilians in 1940, who had watched friends die under American artillery at St‑Lô, who fully expected to be worked to death or lynched the moment they stepped onto American soil.
Instead, they were being treated with a casual humanity that contradicted everything the Reich had taught them about their enemy.
Feldwebel Karl Weiss remembered thinking:
> “If these women—pregnant, alone, defenseless—can treat us this way, what have we actually been fighting for?”
One prisoner, Oberreiter Rudolf Schramm, dropped his hoe and simply sat down in the dirt, head in hands.
A 22‑year‑old farm wife named Dorothy McCra, nine months pregnant and due any day, walked over and offered him a salt tablet from her pocket.
Schramm, who had earned the Iron Cross First Class for knocking out three Shermans near Caen, began to cry silently. No one mocked him.
Pies, Not Bullets
Word of the strange scene spread up the chain of command. That evening, Colonel Tuttle drove out personally.
What he found stunned even him. German prisoners working at double speed to finish the pregnant women’s rows first, refusing to rest until every American woman had been sent to sit in the shade of the pecan trees.
Several Germans were openly helping carry water and tools for women they had never met 12 hours earlier.
The turning point came not with a dramatic speech, but with a simple act.
At 17:30 hours, as the trucks prepared to return the prisoners to camp, Mrs. Evelyn Harris walked to the lead vehicle carrying a burlap sack. Inside were 22 freshly baked sweet‑potato pies—one for each guard, and two for each truckload of prisoners.
She handed the first pie to Unteroffizier Bürgger with the words:
> “Tell your boys this is what we do for guests in Alabama… even uninvited ones.”
Bürgger, a man who had once burned French villages under orders, stood at attention and saluted—not the Hitler salute, but the old imperial military salute he had not used since 1934.
The Slow Undoing of an Ideology
Over the next weeks, the pattern repeated across three states. German POWs volunteered for the hardest contracts—tomato picking in Arkansas, peanut harvesting in Georgia—specifically requesting farms worked by pregnant women or widows.
Desertions, already rare, dropped to nearly zero in the southern camps. Letters home began to carry a new tone: confusion, shame, and in some cases, the first stirrings of genuine reflection.
The U.S. Army, wary of fraternization charges, eventually restricted such mixed work details. But the damage to Nazi ideology had already been done.
In December 1944, the Army’s Prisoner of War Special Projects Division noted a 40% increase in German prisoners requesting political re‑education classes after agricultural details involving American women and children.
No medals were awarded that day in Aliceville—only pies and salt tablets. Yet the casualty was devastating to the Reich all the same: the slow collapse of certainty in thousands of German hearts.
By war’s end, more than 60,000 German prisoners chose to remain in the United States rather than return to a shattered homeland. Many cited their first day working among American farm women as the moment they began to question everything they had been taught.
A Thank‑You, Decades Later
Evelyn Harris gave birth to a healthy son on July 14, 1944. She named him William, after the camp commander who had made the work details possible.
In 1989, a reunited Hans Bürgger returned to Aliceville at the age of 72. He laid flowers on Evelyn Harris’s grave and left a simple note in German:
> “You defeated us with kindness we did not know existed. Thank you for my life twice over.”
This was just one of countless untold stories from the Second World War.
Subscribe to **WWII Records** as we continue to bring these forgotten chapters of history back to life.
