German POWs Were Told The Luftwaffe Had Wrecked America, Until Their Train Crossed It

A story in which a train window turns German certainty into disbelief. In 1943 and 1944, hundreds of thousands of German prisoners, many of them veterans of Rommel's Afrika Korps, cross the Atlantic. Many have been told by Goebbels' propaganda that Luftwaffe bombs left the cities of America's East Coast in ruins. Then they board the trains. Pullman cars instead of army boxcars. A guard at each end of every coach. Coffee and sandwiches, served politely to the enemy. Faces pressed to the glass, they hunt for bomb damage, and some even complain that the railroads are steering them around it. But no German bomber ever reached an American city. Instead they find cars everywhere, shipyards at work, and a single state, Texas, one and a half times the size of Germany. In 1943 alone, the country they thought was wrecked built 85,898 military aircraft. Germany built 25,527. Discover the story of the men who crossed an ocean looking for ruins and found them waiting at home.