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