Some POWs who resented picking cotton and considered it low-level and demeaning work commented on how blacks were treated. Corporal Hein Severloh, a German POW at Camp McCain, in Mississippi, said, “We picked cotton the length of the Mississippi. I’m an agriculturalist and I know how to handle hard work, but there it was truly very, very hard. It was terribly hot, and we had to bend over all day. We had nothing to drink. . . . There were a great number of Blacks on the plantation. They required us to gather 100 pounds of cotton a day; but of the blacks they demanded two or three times more. . . . For them it was worse than for us. And you have to see how they lived. Their farms: very ugly, very primitive. These people were so exploited.”7

It was impossible for African Americans not to compare their experiences with those of German prisoners of war. One black soldier noted that there was a segregated bathroom for blacks at a POW camp in Texas, but German prisoners used the same bathroom as white Americans. Germans fighting for Hitler could use facilities reserved for whites, but black Americans, including those serving in the military to defeat Hitler and preserve democracy, were relegated to segregated latrines. One black soldier wrote, “Seeing this was honestly disheartening. It made me feel, here, the tyrant is placed over the liberator.”8

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