German POWs Thought America Staged the Cars. Then the Train Kept Moving.

One morning in 1943, German prisoners crowded the windows of an American train. Near what one prisoner believed was Akron, Ohio, factory workers were arriving for the morning shift in big cars. German propaganda had told the men that the United States was too short of fuel to use its automobiles. One devoted Nazi offered an explanation: the Americans had staged the cars for them. Then the train kept moving. This episode follows Horst von Oppenfeld of the 10th Panzer Division from surrender in Tunisia to New York and Camp Concordia, Kansas. It asks why an ordinary parking lot could challenge propaganda more effectively than an official lecture — and why the same evidence did not change every prisoner. The gasoline shortage was not wholly invented: Americans lived with ration books, tire restrictions and a 35-mile-per-hour limit. What the propaganda concealed was how those restrictions were organized to keep factories running. CHAPTERS 0:00 The parking lot that should have been empty 0:54 The surrender in North Africa 1:40 From New York to Kansas 2:24 The truth inside the fuel claim 3:34 What American production looked like 5:03 Camp Concordia 6:07 The victory wedge 7:08 Belief inside the wire 7:53 What slowly changed 8:44 After captivity SOURCES Lynn Ermann, “Learning Freedom in Captivity,” The Washington Post Magazine, January 18, 2004; Ermann's book proposal based on interviews with Horst von Oppenfeld, Wolf Dieter Zander and other former POWs; Kansas Historical Society, “Camp Concordia”; National Park Service, “Rationing of Non-Food Items on the World War II Home Front”; US Office of War Information, Report from the Nation, September 17, 1943; The Washington Post obituary of Horst von Oppenfeld, May 22, 2010. FOOTAGE AND IMAGES Telenews Presents Willow Run (1942), NARA NAID 92846; Willow Run Liberator Bomber Plant (1943), NARA NAID 92833; Willow Run Access Highway Dedication (1942), NARA NAID 91858; United News, “Rommel's Defeat in Africa” (1943), NARA NAID 38931; US Army Signal Corps, NARA 111-ADC-164; United News No. 95 (1944), NARA NAID 39002; War Department Film Bulletin 164 (1944); Office of War Information, Troop Train (1943) and The Town (1945). Government footage is public domain. Context footage from a different place or year is identified on screen. Washington Post Magazine pages and portraits are reproduced for identification and historical commentary. Thumbnail: historical illustration.