Enemies in Love

by Alexis Clark

  In April 1944, in El Paso, Texas, nine black soldiers were denied access to the train station’s main dining room. Standing there in uniform, they could not get service. But about two dozen German POWs with their guards entered the same dining room and were immediately seated without objection. “They entered the lunchroom, sat at the tables, had their meals served, talked, smoked, in fact had quite a swell time,” wrote a black soldier, who along with the other African Americans was forced to sit in the waiting area, hungry and humiliated. He asked, “Why are they treated better than we are?” The letter, which was sent to the army weekly, Yank, was reprinted in multiple outlets and created an outcry of protest, but not enough to end segregation in the armed services.9

  Roy Wilkins, then the editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, said, “Nothing so lowers Negro morale as the frequent preferential treatment of Axis prisoners of war in contrast with deprecatory treatment of Army policy towards American troops who happen to be Negro.”10

  The reality, however painful, was that segregation in the military was considered acceptable behavior throughout the United States. A 1942 survey of white soldiers from the North and South revealed that the majority of them shared similar attitudes about segregation in the army regardless of region. White enlisted men from the North showed a strong prejudice against sharing recreational facilities with Negro troops; white soldiers from border states showed an even stronger dislike; and whites from the South showed the strongest prejudice of all. There were a few marked differences depending on education level—the more educated people were, the more liberal they tended to be in their attitude about segregation. But overall, very few objected to the segregated status of blacks.11

  Elinor and Gwyneth bided their time, uninterested and listless. Fortunately, there were horses at Camp Florence, and the two women would ride trails together at sunset. But they were mostly confined to the hospital, trying to keep themselves busy. The POWs were generally in good physical health, but an appendectomy or other surgery was necessary from time to time. And some prisoners came down with common colds and viruses that required checkups and bedside nursing. At times a new crop of prisoners from Europe or North Africa arrived with malaria and would have to be sequestered. There was a 7:30 a.m. “sick call” every day, which entailed a march to the hospital for anyone seeking medical treatment, and there were routine physical examinations performed every two months, primarily to check for scabies, hernias, and venereal disease.12

  Still, the thirty to forty black nurses who were stationed at Florence were largely underutilized. They also had no social outlets to cope with the loneliness of military life. If trying to find establishments that served them was challenging, dating was almost impossible. There were no black soldiers at Camp Florence. “There wasn’t a Negro man within a hundred miles of that camp. Everyone was white, except for us,” said Ora Hicks, a black nurse stationed there.13

  The nurses’ interactions with the opposite sex came in the form of friendly conversations with a few of the doctors from the North. But even those innocent encounters could backfire, as Dorothy Jenkins learned.

  Jenkins was around the same age as Elinor when she joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Born and raised in Oklahoma, she attended nursing school at Prairie View A&M University, a historically black college in Texas, because there weren’t any nursing schools in Oklahoma that admitted black women at the time.

  After she completed her nursing degree, Jenkins joined the Red Cross at the encouragement of her nursing instructors. Like Elinor, she became energized by the idea of serving her country in World War II. Army nurses were also paid much better than civilian nurses, a fact that black women could not overlook considering how much less they were paid than their white counterparts.

  The Naval Nurse Corps rejected Jenkins. “I remember the letter,” she said. “It said, ‘We regret to inform you that we are not accepting Negro nurses at this time.’” Consequently, Jenkins applied to the Army Nurse Corps while working at a hospital in New York City, and upon acceptance was sent to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, for basic training in October of 1944.

  Jenkins breezed through the six weeks of drills and exercises, all supervised by white nurses. “It was beautiful there and the supervising nurses were all very nice. But I remember that they weren’t experienced in segregation,” she said. “They sent a photo of us in uniform to our hometown newspapers. They sent mine to the Daily Oklahoman, who returned it and told them to find a black paper.”

  Although that experience was embarrassing, Jenkins had grown up in a segregated state and had already developed a thick skin. But things quickly soured when she completed basic training and left for Fort Huachuca. After a few weeks there, she was sent to Camp San Luis Obispo in California to care for Italian and Japanese POWs.

  “I was surprised to have been sent to a prisoner of war camp,” she said. “Due to the integrated experience in New York, it was disappointing to go to POW camps, which segregated us.”

  Jenkins tried to make the best of her experience at the camp, but she soon learned that she would never be happy as a black nurse in the army. She befriended a Jewish warrant officer from New York, who invited her to the officers’ club with him one evening. When they walked in together, a silence filled the room, and everyone stared at Jenkins and the officer, giving them nasty looks and purposely bumping them while passing by. “They would walk close to us and give us an evil eye. We were told to leave and never to come back. Apparently, my presence upset the white officers and their wives, even though I was an officer in the army too.” Her friend was shipped overseas shortly after the episode, and Jenkins was transferred to Camp Papago Park, a German POW camp in Arizona. “It definitely was punishment,” she said.14

  Camp Papago Park was closer to Phoenix, but that didn’t change the isolating experience for black nurses like Jenkins, who found themselves routinely left out of army meetings and official social functions hosted by the white officers stationed there. At times the discrimination was so pervasive that some white officers would reprimand and insult black nurses in front of the German prisoners or, worse, allow the POWs to be disrespectful as well.

  In the hospital ward, one German POW told an African American nurse that he hated “niggers.” The nurse reported the incident to the commanding officer of Camp Papago Park with an assumption that the German POW would be sent back to his barracks and punished. But later that day she found out that nothing had happened to him. The nurse wrote to Mabel Staupers detailing the injustice. The German POW was able to plead his case to Colonel Moore, a Texan described in the letter as “the officer who refused to shake hands with the new Negro doctors when Huachuca was first opened.” Once Moore heard the POW’s side of things, the prisoner was allowed to stay put without a reprimand. “That is the worst insult an army officer should ever have to take,” wrote the nurse. “I think it is insult enough to be out here taking care of them when we volunteered to come into the army to nurse military personnel. . . . It is sickening to see the treatment given to these prisoners when our own men are actually suffering from lack of food and good treatment. All of this is making us very bitter.”15

  Whoever was in charge of a given camp would set the tone for racial tolerance. If the most powerful person was a staunch segregationist, then the environment for African Americans would be oppressive. At Camp Florence, there had been commanding officers who allowed black nurses to eat in the same dining area as white officers, and there were other COs who did not want blacks and whites eating together at all, which was the way it was when Elinor arrived. But no matter how many letters Mabel Staupers received from nurses pleading for relief, the military ignored them.

  Oneida Miller Stuart’s experience in the army only reinforced how indefensible the conditions remained for many black nurses, even toward the end of the war. Stuart was called “nigger” habitually. A black nurse who entered the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in 1945, Stuart was sent to Nichols Army Hospital in Louisvil
le, Kentucky, where large numbers of wounded Allied men were returning from battle. There, both black and white soldiers were patients, as well as German POWs. Naturally, the black nurses overwhelmingly tended to the African American enlisted men and German prisoners, but depending on demand, they found themselves caring for white American soldiers too. “We were called ‘nigger’ many a times,” said Miller. “But you just kept on going. They’d say, ‘Nigger don’t you put your hands on me.’ It would really get to me sometimes.”

  On her days off, Stuart would go into Louisville to look at dresses in various retail shops, but she couldn’t try anything on. Even as a member of the military, she, as a black woman, was only allowed to hold the piece up to herself in the mirror.16

  The German POWs at Camp Florence had arguably a better social life than the nurses did. The prisoners had a regular presence in the town of Florence, since they were hired out to work in the cotton fields, in Laundromats, or in plants. That put the POWs in close contact with local women daily. They were told not to go near any women, but fraternization was a fairly common occurrence.17

  Ray Radeke, a guard at Camp Florence, was always perplexed by the attention the local residents showered on the POWs. They were fascinated by them and always wanted to sneak glimpses. He noticed how young women would linger around areas where German POWs were working in Phoenix, and on more remote job sites Radeke saw women intentionally position themselves on an elevated area to sunbathe where the prisoners could see them.

  The guards were also aware of the potential for relationships between POWs and nonwhite women. Hans Lammersdorf, a POW at Camp Papago Park, was shocked when a white guard told him to stay away from black and Mexican women because they were inferior. “These Americans, they were officers, told us to be ashamed of mixing with those people,” he said. The words were almost identical to the warnings the Germans had given Lammersdorf about mixing with Polish people. “So here in America they were telling us the same thing, basically.”18

  Lammersdorf and many other POWs were shocked by the racism in the United States and how prejudice was accepted and preached as openly as it was in Germany, and it wasn’t just a lone deranged guard spouting white supremacist ideology. Lammersdorf, while en route to a POW camp in Arizona, discovered that discrimination toward blacks was systemic and institutional. “On the train from Houston . . . to Papago Park, they had separated the Whites and the Blacks. We prisoners of war were in the White compartments. We were not with the Blacks. They had their own compartments. In the railroad station in Houston we saw the separated facilities. The restrooms, Black and White. We looked at it and thought ‘By golly, what’s going on here?’” Once in Arizona, a few guards pulled Lammersdorf and the other prisoners aside and talked to them about racial purity. “We were amused that Americans could criticize us for racial prejudice when they had some of their own.”19

  But not all American citizens were intrigued by German POWs. By the last year of the war, Phoenix residents were getting fed up with what they perceived as careless super vision of the German POWs. In particular, residents of Chandler, a suburb near Phoenix, were offended by the prisoners “riding through the middle of town, ogling the girls and whistling at and insulting them.”20

  The presence of POWs was a sore point for many of Chandler’s residents. The prisoners were transported almost daily through town, and their freedom took locals by surprise. On one occasion, a soldier-guard reportedly had been drinking and allowed a Nazi prisoner to carry his rifle as they strolled down the road. The guard was placed on thirty-day suspension.21 The monotonous routine of a POW camp contributed to a comfort level between the prisoners and the American guards at Camp Florence, and a loosening of protocol. The prisoners and guards were in the same age-group, usually late teens to mid-20s, and there also was a mutual understanding of what serving in the military meant. Eventually the conditions became so lax that in an inspection report the camp was cited for lack of discipline. The “prisoners at base camp and branch camps were seen working in shorts and without any upper garments both in camp and on private contract work,” it stated.22

  If the guards at Camp Florence preached racial superiority to Frederick, or if their friendships with other prisoners crossed boundaries, it had little impact on him. He had carved out a peaceful existence for himself that didn’t include fascist ideology or racial prejudice. Cooking and listening to music were his sustenance.

  Jazz played a big role in Frederick’s ability to cope with the monotony that came with being a prisoner of war. He had the sounds of New Orleans at his fingertips, which provided comfort and healing from the pain of his childhood. He felt intimately connected to jazz and the black musicians who performed it, even though Frederick’s interactions with blacks were largely nonexistent. He didn’t know any people of color in Oppeln, nor when his family later moved to Vienna. He envisioned black people as warm, passionate, and artistic, but that was based on a fantasy he’d spun and not on experiences he’d had. He was only nineteen years old when he was captured—daydreaming was part of his existence, along with raging hormones, and listening to music seemed to calm his restlessness.

  With regular access to U.S. Armed Forces Radio, he followed several black musicians, such as Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald.23 And if there was a record player around, he could play one of the guards’ V-Discs, which were special phonograph records produced just for U.S. military personnel. The V-Discs played an active role in the lives of Americans stationed all over the world. They were the product of a special arrangement between the United States Army and private recording companies from 1943 to 1949. Many popular bands and singers, from Louis Armstrong to Frank Sinatra to Bing Crosby, recorded for the V-Disc program. Some of the discs also contained introductions by bandleaders and artists, wishing the soldiers good luck and offering prayers.24

  The propaganda meant nothing to Frederick because he had always had only one opinion of the war—that it was wrong. For him, music represented the warmth he never received as a child. There was nothing he could look back on in his upbringing that made him nostalgic about his relationship with his father. He didn’t have memories of Karl teaching him how to fish, camp, or talk to girls, because none of that ever happened. And he also didn’t know what real committed love looked like, because his parents didn’t have a loving marriage. With his father away every weekend with his girlfriend, Frederick knew only infidelity, loneliness, and betrayal. He had no idea what true romantic love felt like, but when he listened to jazz he longed for it.25

  The dysfunction of Margarete and Karl’s relationship fueled Frederick’s desire to have a genuine relationship with a woman. He didn’t want any arrangement or obligation for the sake of keeping up appearances. He wanted an intense bond with a woman who would be by his side and make him feel valued as a man. And he associated his passion for love with music by African Americans.

  It seemed like a typical late summer afternoon. It was scorching hot outside as usual, and Frederick was relieved that his kitchen duties allowed him to wear lightweight clothing. He normally didn’t venture out into the mess hall, as every POW had his designated role. The cooks stayed in the kitchen; the servers worked the main floor. But every now and then, those in the back wanted to see what was happening out front. And that day, Frederick glimpsed into the dining area. Not long before, a group of black nurses had been transitioned into the hospital staff. Since most of the POWs had never spent any time around black people, the nurses’ arrival did not go unnoticed.

  A profound feeling overcame Frederick when he spotted a beautiful, tall black woman. He had never felt so drawn to a complete stranger before. It was if he had been hypnotized when he first made eye contact with Elinor. She walked in with other nurses and headed toward their designated eating area, which was removed from the tables where white officers and physicians sat. Frederick didn’t see anyone else in the room. She was striking at six feet tall, and her impeccable posture gave he
r a regal quality; her mother had always told her daughters to stand up straight the way dignified and important women did.

  Incapable of concentrating on his kitchen duties, Frederick bypassed the POW waiters and walked right up to Elinor. He looked her in the eyes, smiled, and said with a German accent, “You should know my name. I’m the man who is going to marry you.”26

  Flattered and relatively shocked, Elinor smiled. She later giggled with Gwyneth about the encounter. Who was this POW approaching her in the mess hall so boldly? Flirting with a German prisoner of war was the furthest thing from Elinor’s mind. He was probably just a kid, anyway. She remembered being told that some of the POWs were as young as fifteen.27 In 1944, Elinor was twenty-three years old. If she had been anywhere else—Boston, New York, or even Fort Huachuca—she would have had the attention of numerous African American men, but that was not going to happen in Florence. She had to admit that the handsome German made her day a bit lighter.

  It wasn’t a complete shock to Elinor that a white man found her attractive. She had true friendships with white people growing up in Massachusetts, as did her parents. But it’s not entirely clear if Elinor had ever shared a romance with a man of a different race.

  Still, she figured the encounter with Frederick was amusing and harmless, a onetime episode. POWs were bored, as bored as the nurses. She had just met one who wanted to have some fun. A simple flirtation, nothing else.

  Frederick had trouble sleeping after he met Elinor. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He didn’t even get her first name because he had to rush back to the kitchen. He only saw that her badge said “Powell.” He would volunteer to serve as many meals as possible so he could see her, stare at her, and get to know her. He hadn’t felt joyous or passionate about something for a long time. Now suddenly he felt alive, and he knew he had fallen in love. It sounded ridiculous and immature, and given his background, the fact that she was black also made it incomprehensible. But Frederick knew something magical had happened when he looked into Elinor’s eyes. She was what he had been waiting for all his life.28