What Nazi Soldiers Discovered in a Canadian Prison Camp

Описание: December 1944, Camp 133, Lethbridge, Alberta. 12,500 German POWs arrive expecting torture and starvation. Nazi propaganda told them Canadians were barbarians who would ignore Geneva Convention rules. They believed their captors were descendants of criminals living in frozen wastelands. Instead, they discover heated barracks with two blankets per man, 3,200 calories daily—more than German civilians eat back home. They watch Canadians throw away food that would feed entire families in bombed German cities. Prisoners working on local farms see grain storage buildings holding enough to feed cities, perfect vegetables left in fields because harvests are too abundant. On Christmas Day 1944, something unprecedented happens. The dining hall transforms with pine branches and white tablecloths. Canadian officers sit down to Christmas dinner alongside their German prisoners, not to supervise but to share a meal as equals. One officer whose brother died fighting Germans asks young prisoner Franz about his mother's Christmas cookies. Franz, raised in Hitler Youth for five years believing Canadians were inferior, writes in his secret diary that something broke inside him that night. The wall built by years of propaganda crumbled under simple human decency. When Germany surrenders May 1945, prisoners spend months waiting for repatriation. Franz finally returns home in 1946 to find his father dead, his mother starving, cities in rubble. The guilt overwhelms him—he was safer as a prisoner than his family as free citizens. In a 1980s interview, elderly Franz reflects: he learned more about humanity from his enemies than from his own government. That single Christmas dinner taught him ideology is cheap, but real human decency is priceless.