When 372,000 German POWs Lived in America

Between 1942 and 1946, the United States shipped roughly 425,000 Axis prisoners across the Atlantic — some 372,000 of them German — and scattered them through about 700 camps in nearly every state. They picked cotton for eighty cents a day, ate better than the rationed civilians outside the wire, and fewer than one man in a hundred ever tried to run. But the deadliest danger wasn't the guards or the desert — it was waiting in the next bunk over. What these men saw inside those camps, and what some of them chose to do years later, is a story no one finishes.