The Bizarre Reality of German POWs Farming in the American South

In 1944, German soldiers from Hitler's Afrika Korps were picking cotton in Mississippi — eating American food, riding cushioned passenger trains, and living behind wire at Camp Clinton alongside twenty-four German generals. Over 400,000 Axis prisoners were shipped to American soil during the war to solve a labor crisis, and the world they built inside those camps ran headlong into the deepest contradictions of the Jim Crow South. German POWs sat at lunch counters that Black Americans couldn't enter. Black soldiers stationed at the same bases couldn't use the same restrooms as the men who'd been shooting at them months before. This story was barely spoken of while it was happening.