Language barriers were one of the biggest hurdles in processing German POWs, not only in North Africa and Europe but in the United States as well. The Americans quickly found out that not only could many of the POWs not speak English, some of them couldn’t speak German either. Wehrmacht POWs included soldiers from Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, and Finland who couldn’t speak any more German than their American captors.17 The situation reflected Hitler’s desperation to recruit as many fighters as possible, even those who weren’t part of his idealized German race.

To make for an even more confusing and haphazard process, hardly any American translators worked at the makeshift POW camps, because of the high demand for German and Italian translators needed for intelligence gathering, radio transmission, and interrogation of high-ranking Axis officials. It didn’t take long for German prisoners to figure out that the language barrier could work in their favor. The clerk-typists who were functioning without translators recorded POWs’ personal information as best they could. But some prisoners tricked them by providing false names and inaccurate ranks. In the United States, the problem was even more severe. Some camps had a single interpreter for more than eight thousand prisoners.18