In May 1944 I decided to ask Irmgard whether she was willing to marry me after the war. Our exchange of letters during the war in Africa and also during my captivity convinced me that I should try to make our liaison more permanent. In her letters to me she had not mentioned any close male friends who might have been competitors for her favors to my intentions. Since I could write only one one-page letter and two postcards every four weeks, I had to arrange an engagement celebration as a surprise. I wrote a postcard to Irmgard's best friend, telling her about my intentions and asked her to arrange a celebration of our engagement hoping that she would say "Yes." Then I wrote my mother and father that I intended to marry Irmgard and asked them to write or invite her if possible. Since I did not know where the Red Cross had stationed her, I had to take the chance hoping that she would get my letter first. It was not until late December 1944, five months after the Normandy invasion, until I heard from her that she had accepted. In January of 1945 the Alva camp was closed. As we were waiting in the camp for the trucks to bring us to the railroad station, the army allowed the local inhabitants of the city to clear out all the nice furniture we so laboriously had put together. With great sorrow I had to give up my job as laboratory director and say good-bye to the physicians who had taught me so much. Since I had the weekly AMA journals available, I was up to date with the latest developments in medicine. At least, we could take the books and musical instruments to the next camp, which was Camp Smith in Arkansas. There must have been 30 to 40,000 prisoners held in that camp. The more relaxed activity and guarding of Camp Alva was replaced by a very strict disciplinarian regime.

It was pretty certain that the war would come to an end soon. The "Battle of the Bulge" in the winter of 1945 was the last effort of the German Army. English and American troops were already fighting on German soil. The Americans thought it wise to give us some lessons in democracy. A series a movies about American history, election campaigns and presidents was shown to us. I started again to give my weekly newspaper reviews. This time nobody objected. When the press brought the first reports about the things which had happened in the concentration camps, we were certain in our belief that none of this could be true and it was put aside as American propaganda. The reports about the air attacks of several thousand planes on German cities and especially Dresden shook everybody up. We all had relatives living where the destruction took place. Avalanches of bad news and the collapse of the Thousand-Year Reich of Adolf Hitler hit us like a ton of bricks although we all had waited for the end.

A few days after the armistice we had to file into the camp movie house and witness the horror pictures of the concentration camps. We watched in disbelief. While the German soldiers fought courageously for the Fatherland, the Nazis had put the German name to shame. We could hardly hold our heads up when confronted with what seemed to be the truth concerning the concentration camps. The day Germany lost the war, the army put us on a 2,000-calorie diet. This was accepted with equanimity. We knew that our relatives did not have even that much to eat at home. But there was no fruit and very little meat in that diet. After two months several prisoners developed partial paralysis of their limbs. A physicians' commission arrived to find out the cause of these mysterious symptoms. It was beriberi, a lack of vitamin B1. We received more fruit and vegetables and had to take vitamin pills for a while.

The end of the war brought also a change in the distribution of the prisoners throughout the country. We all had to work now. Many were assigned to farm communities; others were sent to the southern states to help pick cotton and cut sugar cane. I was sent with 1,000 prisoners to a small camp next to San Martinsville in Louisiana. This is sugar cane country. The farmers had no machines yet for cutting. The machete was the tool. We were paired with black laborers and tried hard to keep up with our black companions. It was eight hours of stoop labor. After several days our hands and wrists were so sore that it was difficult to hold the machete. Not being used to this kind of labor, many developed tendon sheet inflammation of the wrists. After three weeks we had several injuries, where the machete had slipped out of the hand and hit the person standing in the next row of sugarcane in the shins. Several prisoners had cut tendons on the feet. There was no physician available in these sub-camps. It would have taken at least a day to transport the prisoner to the main camp and get the wound taken care of. The U.S.Army set up a dispensary in the camp and gave me the job. The four weeks of sugar cane cutting had brought my weight down to 140 pounds. When an intake of 2,200 calories with that hard labor threatened to kept us on a starvation level, we brought each day a bundle of cane into camp and let it simmer on the stove to make molasses as a supplement to our diet.

They had given me six beds for invalids and a few instruments to sew up lacerations. When the first injured leg tendon was brought to the dispensary, I exposed the two slipped tendon ends and sewed them together with silk. After I had placed a splint on the leg, I sent the patient to Camp Polk, the army base and prison camp which also had a hospital facility. After 48 hours the American camp physician visited our dispensary and told me that I should put the patient's leg into a cast and give him penicillin. He also left me some suture material for further accidents as well as a better needle holder and needles. I could now improve my procedures with cut tendons and lacerations.

The sultry heat of Louisiana did not bother me or the other prisoners. The spectacular thunder storms in the Gulf region always intrigued me. They were accompanied by violent winds. Often the whole sky was filled with flashes of lightning. They were so high in the air that one could barely hear the sound of the thunder. The lightning's jumped mostly from cloud to cloud rather than hitting the ground. On one such night I went into my tent after I had watched the natural spectacle in the sky for hours. I had four sick prisoners in my tent and checked them to be sure they were comfortable and had enough to drink; then I went to bed. Around midnight a cloudburst with a hurricanelike wind woke me up. Before I could get out of bed, the tent collapsed and all its contents, including the potbellied stove, were carried through the air and dumped several feet toward the barbed-wire fence. I must have lost consciousness for some time because when I woke up, I found myself lying on the grass in six inches of water. I felt my head and noticed a king-sized bruise. Everything was in total darkness. The watchtowers around the camp had been toppled over by the wind. It was still pouring in buckets, with the wind taking anything that was loose and pushing it against the fence. As I got onto my feet, still dazed, I looked for the four comrades who had been in sick bay. I found them crawling in the water looking for a tarpaulin for a cover. The sudden hurricane had taken us by surprise. Two guards who fell with the towers were killed. Many of us were injured. It took us two weeks to get the camp organized again. All my newly acquired medical books were soaked. After three weeks we were shipped back to the main camp. The hurricane had put an end our cane cutting. Now our food improved somewhat and had more variety.

Since the war's end the letters from Germany stopped. The newspapers had reported Hitler's death, the beginning of the war trials in Nürnberg, the partition of Germany into four occupation zones, the breakdown of all communications, the lack of food and the lack of coal. Roosevelt had died and Truman had become President. Morgenthau, a financier and close adviser of Roosevelt, had proposed turning Germany into an agrarian country and removing all its industry. The Russians had occupied all of East Germany. Millions of Germans were driven from East Prussia and Silesia. All the eastern provinces of Germany were given to Poland, and an avalanche of refugees was driven over the borders into what was left of Germany. The future for us looked bleak.

Christmas was coming and I still had not received a single letter from Irmgard or my parents. In the last letter Irmgard had mentioned that she tried to get released from the Red Cross service to join her sister Susi in Diessen to take care of the children of her sister Gretl, who had died during the childbirth of her daughter. Susi had found refuge in the house of the chimney sweep of Diessen, where she looked after her son and her sister's children. The letter was mailed in late spring 1944 and I received the anwser in March 1945.

All kinds of rumors spread through the camp. We were told that some of us would be shipped to England to help rebuild the devastated cities which had suffered damage during the first two years of Hitler's war. Another rumor had us to be sent to France to work on their reconstruction.

Our stay in Louisiana came to an end with the transport of 5,000 prisoners to a camp near Richmond, Virginia. Here American officers lectured us about the constitution and the balance of power between the three branches of government. We heard about American history and the presidents. We were taken to an army movie theater three times a week. Most features had an historical background. With our 50 cents pay each week we bought all the cigarettes we could get hold of. We had read in the newspaper that the American soldiers in Germany could buy anything for a few cigarettes. We wanted to be prepared. The uncertainty about our fate kept us in suspense. Nobody told us whether we would be sent home or turned over to the English or French authorities. The lack of any news from home rested heavily on our shoulders. When snow started melting in Virginia, the first pussy willows started sprouting. The ground thawed and turned into a sea of mud. The war had been over for ten months already. Why did they still keep us in the U.S.? We all became irritated and impatient. Each of us had a large duffel bag stuffed to the bursting point, full of clothes, two blankets, chocolate, candy bars, cigarettes, jars with peanut butter and crackers. The hope to be shipped directly to Germany was so great that we had accumulated all these goodies. In addition, I had seven heavy medical books. I had spent two months after the hurricane drying all the pages of the books. Most of them had to be separated page by page and dried in the sun.

In the middle of March 1946 we were loaded onto the train and brought to Camp Shanks, an army base outside of New York. We knew that this was a camp for our future embankment. Americans who had come back from Europe were being discharged here. Each of us got paid with a check made out by the U.S. Treasury Department for $140 dollars. This check could not be cashed in the United States but had to be paid by the German government. The official rate of exchange was four marks and twenty pfennig for one dollar. D-marks were not issued until 1948 at the rate 1-20. One cigarette in Germany could be purchased for five marks. So the dollar check was practically worthless.

I had now crossed the whole United States. After our landing in San Francisco, I had traveled to New Mexico, from there to Oklahoma, to Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia and now to a camp near New York. I had worked most the time in the medical field. First in the dispensary, than for eighteen months I had run a medical laboratory. I had met well-trained American physicians who had bent over backward to treat me as a medical colleague. For three years I had read the latest medical literature and studied the latest medical books. I had listened to the radio and heard the best commentaries of a free press, and I had seen American movies. I was sold on American freedom and had developed great respect for the constitution. There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to return to this country so full of opportunity.