When we got off the boat, a group of 50 soldiers, all armed with submachine guns, surrounded us. They looked at us as if we were a bunch of strange animals. We were still dressed in uniform with our old army coats wrapped around us. We were skinny, and many had grown beards. Our lack of exercise and decent food on the ship had reduced our resistance against colds. Our coughing should have scared those well-fed soldiers who stood around us. To my surprise my name was called. I reported to the officer in charge, who told me that I would be brought to a place for interrogation. I asked the officer in broken English whether I would be returned to our group. He assured me that I would be back in less than two hours. I was brought to a coast-guard type boat and transferred to an island which I later knew to be Alcatraz. Here I was confronted with a Jewish Lieutenant who spoke German fluently. Why would they want to interrogate a private first-class who was an eight-semester medical student? Maybe they suspected that there was some mystery involved with me, due to the fact that I was an advanced student in medicine, still with a rank of a PFC. Maybe they thought that I was part Jewish? Of course, I had worked on the ship with the English physician and had been found to be trustworthy. He had discussed with me my education and my family.

"Do you think Germany will win the war?" was the first question. I told him that we had not received any letters from Germany and had no chance to read the papers, so I could not give any comments regarding that question. "Why did Hitler throw all the Jews out of Germany?" was the next question. The news of the deaths in the concentration camps, which came to our attention for the first time after the war, did not appear in the American press before 1944. I answered as honestly as I could. "Do you think that the Jewish people are as intelligent or more intelligent than the Germans.?" I told the Jewish questioner that I thought that the Jewish race was as intelligent as the Germans. I also told him that close to fifty percent of all the physicians in Berlin before the war were Jewish. "Are you partially Jewish? Why do you have only the rank of an enlisted man?" He asked me then at length about my family, my parent's profession and what they thought about the war. Did they think that Hitler would win the war? The intelligence officer kept asking questions for one full hour, before I was brought back to the group still sitting on the pier.

We were driven by truck to the San Francisco railroad station. Here a modern passenger train was already waiting for us. It was late afternoon when the train started to move. We had not eaten all day and wondered when we would see any food. Anything but mutton was O.K. with us. The train could not have taken off more than 15 minutes, when a cook with a tall white cap came through the connecting door dragging a large kettle behind him. Another cook was right behind him passing out paper plates, plastic spoons, forks and knives. The cook placed a large slice of pineapple on each plate. We looked at the slice in disbelief. Maybe there were some reporters on the train, and in an interview we would have to state that we got a slice of pineapple in America? But the two cooks were only halfway through the car when the next cook appeared at the door. He gave us a plastic dish and filled it with a delicious chicken noodle soup. The next cook came and dished out a large piece of beef with mashed potatoes. Another followed with fresh peas and another with gravy. We thought we had not landed in San Francisco but in a fools' paradise. This went on for two hours and was followed with ice cream and apple pie. The captain walked through the train and watched us devour every morsel of food.

"You want some more?" he asked. "If you have some more we will eat it," was the answer. After four hours of continuous eating we had consumed a two-day ration. The captain had walked the train back and forth shaking his head. He had never seen people eat as much and with such gusto.

"Boys, this trip will take almost three days. I will get more rations for you at the next stop."

"Where are you taking us?" I asked him. "You are scheduled to go to Roswell in the state of New Mexico." Nobody had the slightest idea where New Mexico was. If it took three full days to get there, we must be traveling through two-thirds of the United States to reach New Mexico. We had gobbled down our food as if we had never eaten before in our lives. No reporter showed up to ask us whether the food was all right, and perhaps then we would return to our mutton diet. As I looked out of the window, it was pitch-dark outside. The train had stopped for an hour. Four locomotives were now pulling us slowly up a long grade. The area had become hilly around us. Two of the prisoners became cocky and voiced their intention of jumping out of the window. They wanted to find out how the country looked on the outside. I thought they were kidding.

"You guys are crazy. You cannot speak a word of English. You don't know where we are. You just have a full stomach for the first time. That must have gone to your heads." But we were unable to discourage them from their escape plan. When the train slowed down, before anybody could stop them, they opened the window and jumped the train.

I had no idea which way the train took us to New Mexico. Most of the time we saw nothing but desert. In the morning the captain walked through the train and took a head count. He noticed that two prisoners were missing. We told him that they had jumped the train three hours earlier and that they could not speak a word of English and probably would turn themselves in when they had nothing more to eat. They wanted to see the countryside. He only shrugged his shoulders. He had the train stopped at the next station to report their disappearance.

In the late afternoon of the third day the train came to a halt on tracks outside of the town of Roswell, a town which could not have had more than 5,000-10,000 inhabitants. Desert with shrubs mixed with a few plowed fields was all we could see. Trucks took us five miles outside of the town to a small army base. A barbed-wire fenced-in area had recently been built around a cluster of barracks. We had to undergo the customary "shake- down" and were released into the camp. We found it was already occupied by 11 German sailors, who one month ago had been rescued from a submarine in the Caribbean Sea. We received new army clothes which had been dyed navy blue. The pants and shirts were stenciled with a large "P.W." on the back. The underwear was painted with enamel paint in the same way.

Three days after our arrival they brought in the two escaped prisoners. They insisted that they had experienced a great time. They had walked to a little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and tried to communicate with two girls. They were arrested by the local policeman, who took them for foreign spies.

We considered our accommodations luxurious. There were 30 cots in each barrack. We had a heater and blankets. The kitchen was equipped with modern facilities to cook, bake and prepare food. The captain told us in our first briefing that we would get army rations, which is 4,500 calories per day. We had two chefs who had worked in the best hotels in Berlin. They produced some of the fanciest meals one could imagine with the 4,500 calories daily allowance. For us the war was over. The only way we could damage the enemy war effort, we thought, was by eating all the food and not returning any.

The first thing we did was to construct a soccer field. It did not take long until we regained our normal weight. We got 50 cents a week so we could buy some cigarettes in the canteen and drink a five-cent coke. This canteen was also used by the American guards. If we did not like the army food, the prisoner-chef could fix up a hamburger as he did for the guards. I had never eaten an American hamburger. So I ordered one. When I picked it up, I took a bottle, which I thought was some kind of catsup, and put a liberal portion over the patty. Nobody had told me that Tabasco sauce was different from catsup. When I started to take the first bite, I wondered why everybody around me had his eyes fixed on my hamburger. All the conversation stopped. I took the first bite and immediately felt as if my whole mouth was on fire. I rushed for the nearest faucet and tried to cool my burning mouth. The whole gang had fun with my first hamburger experience.

I moved into the dispensary, where I had to take care of all the headaches and colds, and line up soldiers who wanted to see the army doctor. The American medical officer brought us the news that everybody had to undergo a diphtheria inoculation. They had heard that the German Army had not developed a diphtheria toxoid. When a German soldier came down with the disease, he received a large dose of diphtheria antitoxin which was made from horse serum. It often caused an allergic reaction against the horse serum. I thought that the immunization with diphtheria toxoid was a good idea. At lunchtime I spoke to all soldiers and told them about the impending inoculation. The captain had left the syringes and diphtheria toxoid at the dispensary and refused to get involved in the project. He told me to go ahead with the inoculations that same afternoon. I went ahead and gave over 250 shots, telling everybody that no major side effects were to be expected. At nine o'clock the first soldiers walked into the dispensary with 103-degree fever, complaining of severe headaches and shivering. By midnight one third of the camp was running a high temperature; some were delirious. I made numerous "house calls" and had to listen to threatening remarks. Fortunately with most patients the reaction subsided within 24 hours. When the doctor came into the camp the next morning. I told him that I was almost lynched thanks to him. He just laughed. The next day he brought me an American medical textbook in which was stated that it was dangerous to immunize a person who previously had come down with diphtheria. A "Schick" test should be done in adults before an immunization against diphtheria is contemplated. Well, better the next time.

Our camp commander, the captain who had brought us from San Francisco, was a friendly midwestern fatherlike figure of German descent. We were barely in the camp three weeks when he rode around inside the camp with two sergeants to show us three beautiful horses he must have rented in Roswell. He wanted us to admire the animals and the rider's equestrian skills. As they rode around, one prisoner put the top of a thistle under the tail of the sergeant's horse. The horse behaved suddenly like a bronco and galloped full speed toward the barbed wire, where he threw the sergeant into the 10-foot fence. He had several gashes in his arms and face, but the horse had stopped right in front of the fence. We helped him to the dispensary and dressed his wounds. The prisoner had already removed the thistle. So the riders were at a loss to explain the behavior of the horse. That ended horse shows inside our camp. The captain had not received a copy from the War Department with instructions on how to treat his prisoners.

In the beginning security was very lax. Three weeks into our stay at Camp Roswell two prisoners escaped. As in South Africa the American guards had not gotten wise as to how to prevent escapes. The garbage truck was again the means of leaving the camp. We knew about the escape plan and prepared the usual stuffed puppets and put them into their beds for the nightly head count, which was due at 10 p.m. The next morning at seven o'clock we stood outside to be counted. We had very cleverly dressed puppets propped up between two soldiers.

The escaped prisoners had no knowledge of the town and its surroundings. Neither spoke a word of English. They had gotten hold of some civilian clothes and only wanted more or less to explore the neighborhood. After two days hunger drove them to enter a house in the city and ask for some food. They were brought to the police station, where they were accused of being foreign spies. The town had no idea that there were German prisoners near Roswell, because the American press had not reported the presence of prisoners in the country. The two captured Germans assured the chief of police, after a German-speaking citizen interpreted for them, that there were prisoners of war in the army base near Roswell and that they had escaped two days ago. The chief called the army base and told them the situation. When the captain called us in the afternoon for a surprise head count, we guessed that the Germans must have been captured. We took our two mannequins between us during the count. The captain got on the phone and asserted, "There's nobody missing in the camp. You'd better find out who those two strangers are."

The two Germans were interviewed again and told that nobody was missing inside the camp. They should confess that they were German spies. The police chief called the captain again and asked him to have the count repeated. The evening count was perfect. There was no one missing. The police chief was at a loss. The Germans were brought into the interrogation room and grilled for several hours. At three in the morning four guards came into the barracks and pulled the blankets away from each sleeper. When they found our mannequins in the beds, the mysterious German spies could come back to the camp. The next day we read the whole story in the Roswell News. The story even made the news in the national press. To our great sorrow the captain was transferred.

In March 1943 the English Army carried out a daring commando raid on the approaches to the harbor of Dieppe on the French coast. They wanted to test the strength of the German defenses for a later planned invasion of the continent. During a foggy night they had landed several hundred men next to the harbor installations and blown up several bunkers. The Germans were not totally surprised by the attack and offered fierce resistance in hand-to-hand fighting. After several hours of battle, the English retreated in their boats across the channel. But they had to leave 50 English and Canadian prisoners in German hands. English and American papers brought the following headline news the next morning: "Germans chain English prisoners during a surprise attack on the harbor of Dieppe." In the second paragraph on the front page it said: "We have received information from the War Department that the U.S. already holds 250 German prisoners at an unknown location. These were captured by the English Army in Libya and shipped recently to this country."

The outcry against the chaining of English prisoners was great. The press demanded that the German prisoners in this country be handcuffed as a reprisal. Since the English had sent the bulk of the prisoners they had taken up to this time --namely us-- to the U.S., we assumed that we might become the objects of a chaining attempt.

During the usual morning count of the prisoners the new American camp commander with the rank of major broke the news about the chaining of English prisoners to us.

"I have received orders to handcuff some of you as a reprisal for the chaining of English and Canadian prisoners by the Wehrmacht. I am very sorry that I have to do this to you," he apologized," but it will be only for a few hours. We haven't any handcuffs available, but I am promised by the Roswell police department that they will furnish us with some of theirs."

We immediately discussed the intended chaining and decided that under no circumstance would we let ourselves be hand-cuffed. We sent a delegation to the major and asked him to hear us out.

"Major, if you try to chain some of us, you'd better have a large military unit with machine guns, ambulances and doctors standing by, because this will lead to a bloodbath that will really make headlines in your newspapers."

"It will be only for a few hours. Nothing will happen to any of you," the major replied. "I do not even know whether I can get any handcuffs."

We wondered whether the people in Washington would succumb to the pressure of the media and go ahead with the chaining. We felt some compassion for the new commander. We had to assemble again for a speech by the commander. "You all will have to march to the soccer field and will sit there for three hours. You will be guarded by 20 guards with submachine guns. You will have to sit there for all of the three hours. You will not be handcuffed. I cannot get the handcuffs. Would that be acceptable to you ?"

We thought that this was a good solution. So we spent three hours sitting on the soccer field in the afternoon sun kidding with the machine-gun-carrying guards. After 30 minutes a reporter came with a camera. Six prisoners were asked to place their hands on their backs to give the impression as if they were hand-cuffed.

Two days later the major brought us the local newspaper and read with a certain pride: "German prisoners handcuffed in an American prisoner-of-war camp as reprisal for the Dieppe chaining."

The situation eased the next day as the papers reported that the Germans had handcuffed only six soldiers to prevent their escape. They stated again that all prisoners would be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention.

In May 1943 the English Eighth Army entered Tripoli from the east. The Americans, who had landed in West Africa in November 1942, had taken Tunis. 250,000 soldiers, most of them Germans, were trapped without a chance to escape, and taken prisoner. A sad chapter of German war history had come to end.

The decision to bring an additional 200,000 soldiers to North Africa after the Americans had entered the war was sheer suicide. There was no way that Mussolini or the German High Command could have brought any of the troops back to the continent. One month before the collapse Rommel had already returned to Germany.