German POWs Were Told America Couldn’t Feed Itself. Then Their Train Reached Chicago.

In 1942, a German travel book printed in more than 126,000 copies told readers that Chicago was "filled with chaos" – the very model of a broken America. Hitler told the Reichstag that America had 13 million unemployed. Goebbels wrote that America's greatest achievements were refrigerators and radios. Then German prisoners of war crossed the United States by train – and many of those tracks ran through Chicago, past the largest stockyards on Earth: 375 acres, about 2,300 pens, room for 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle and 22,000 sheep at once. This is the story of what one young prisoner saw from that train window, why it shook everything he had been told, and what America's own rationing really looked like. Note: "Willi" is a composite character built from the experiences of German POWs who crossed America by train; his scenes are dramatized. The places, numbers and quotes are real and sourced below. Some scenes are dramatized illustrations; archival footage is from U.S. government and public-domain collections. CHAPTERS 0:00 The pens did not end 0:31 Willi 1:13 What they were told 3:06 The crossing 4:02 The train 5:15 Chicago, the railroad heart of America 6:15 The window 7:13 Silence in the car 8:07 The scale 9:04 To be fair: rationing in America 9:54 Why it hit so hard 10:41 The camps 12:25 After the war