Why Some German POWs Called American Bread 'Cake' in Their Letters Home

In the spring of 1943, more than 275,000 Axis troops surrendered in Tunisia in what the Germans themselves called "Tunisgrad." They were loaded onto Liberty ships, carried across an ocean their own Navy had tried to strangle shut, and deposited in the dead center of the American continent — at places like Camp Concordia in Cloud County, Kansas. What waited for them on the other side of the mess-hall door was so far outside their experience that a veteran Afrika Korps sergeant reached for the German word for bread and wrote down the word for cake instead. That single word is the opening of one of the most quietly devastating stories of World War II. Under Article 11 of the 1929 Geneva Convention, the United States Army Quartermaster Corps was required to feed its prisoners rations equal in quantity and quality to its own depot troops. The result: roughly 4,000 calories a day for over 371,000 German POWs held across more than 700 camps in the American interior — eggs, bacon, real coffee with sugar and cold milk, pork chops that hung over the edges of the steel tray, and fresh oranges shipped by refrigerated rail from Florida without a bruise. Historian Arnold Krammer's landmark study Nazi Prisoners of War in America recovered the letters these men wrote home, letters the American censors filed and that collectively told the same story: the prisoners of Camp Concordia, Camp Papago Park, Camp Trinidad, and dozens of others were eating better than the civilians of Stuttgart, Munich, and Berlin. The Reich's own propaganda — the breadlines, the dust storms, the mongrel nation too soft to fight — dissolved in front of a metal food tray before a single word of reeducation was spoken. Then, in the spring of 1945, the first newsreels from Ohrdruf and Buchenwald flickered onto American movie screens. Eisenhower walked the ground himself. Patton stepped aside and was sick. Within days, a War Department directive cut the prisoner diet to the Geneva minimum — and the faucet, as the sergeant finally understood it, was simply turned off. If these stories matter to you, subscribe to TRENCH — premium documentaries of American military history, told with the respect the men who lived them deserve. Every video on this channel is built for the people who never stopped honoring the generation that carried this weight. Watch the related documentary already waiting on our channel — link in the end-screen. Research & primary sources — this documentary draws on: • Nazi Prisoners of War in America — Arnold Krammer (Stein and Day, 1979) • Stalag Wisconsin: Inside WWII Prisoner-of-War Camps — Betty Cowley (Badger Books, 2002) • The Forgotten Men: German POWs in American Captivity — David Fiedler (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) #WW2 #GermanPOW #AfrikaKorps 🎖️ TRENCH | American Military History Premium documentaries of WWII and the conflicts that forged a nation. 🦅 Subscribe for the Fallen — every film honors the men who never came home. ⚙️ THE TRENCH DOCTRINE: War history wasn't written by algorithms, and it won't be told by them either. We treat every documentary as a tactical briefing. We strictly refuse mass-produced, lazy AI shortcuts. Every strategic map, archival frame, and artillery echo is manually assembled and verified to honor the gravity of the frontline and the unforgiving reality of the American soldier. No two briefings here are interchangeable: every film stands on its own research, its own battle, its own men. 🎵 Tactical Audio & Score: Original cinematic battlefield atmosphere, custom-generated and exclusive to this channel (fully protected under our brand identity). 🤖 AI TRANSPARENCY: Like any weapon system, our AI tools operate under human command. Imagery, narration and score are AI-assisted instruments; the research, the story and the final cut are human decisions, and every fact is verified against the documented record before a single frame ships. DISCLAIMER: What you are about to watch is based on documented military history. In the tradition of war cinema, some scenes, dialogue, and personal accounts may be dramatized, and certain figures are composites — created to give voice to soldiers history recorded only as numbers. The battles were real. The men were real. This is one way the story may have happened. © Copyright 2026 TRENCH. All Rights Reserved.