German prisoners of war arriving in the United States could hardly believe what they were seeing. Some of them became convinced that the trains carrying them across the country were somehow running in circles. The same fields, the same railroad tracks, the same endless landscape — surely they couldn't still be traveling through the same country.

The train ride and the escape taught the same unexpected lesson: America did not need to exaggerate its size. It was simply that big.

Chapters

0:00 The Train That Was Supposedly Going in Circles
0:30 Why the Prisoners Believed It
1:02 The Escape Across the Desert
1:27 What Germans Were Told About America
1:39 Hitler's View of the United States
2:06 “I Don't See Much Future for the Americans”
2:46 The Arithmetic Hitler Skipped
3:19 Alaska and Hawaii
3:25 The Railroad That Crossed a Continent
3:59 Three, Four, Sometimes Five Days
4:25 The Endless American Landscape
4:33 A Prisoner From Bavaria
4:43 400,000 German Prisoners
4:53 From the Port to the Train
5:26 Four Days Without a Border
5:51 The Prisoners Who Recorded the Towns
6:20 Arizona Was Nearly Germany-Sized
6:39 Texas, Montana, California and New Mexico
6:46 Papago Park
7:14 The Great Escape
7:35 The Homemade Boat
7:42 The Route to Mexico
8:06 The River That Wasn't There
8:30 Dragging the Boat Across the Desert
8:36 Walking Toward Mexico
8:52 The Lesson of the Desert
9:08 The Train Wasn't Going in Circles
9:20 The Real Explanation
10:07 The Country Outside the Window
10:23 America Was Simply That Big

SOURCES

Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Starting World War II, 1937-1939 (1980).

Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, intro. H.R. Trevor-Roper (1953).

Arnold Krammer, Nazi Prisoners of War in America (1979).

Office of the Provost Marshal General, Prisoners of War: European Theater (1945).

John Hammond Moore, The Faustball Tunnel: German POWs in America and Their Great Escape (1978).

Allen W. Powell, Splinters of a Nation: German Prisoners of War in Utah (1989).

Association of American Railroads, Railroads and the War (1943).

Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway, Vol. 2 (2000).

U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States (1943).

Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, "Papago Park Prisoner of War Camp" (historical marker file).

Sources & Archives

U.S. National Archives

Internet Archive

Wikimedia Commons

Periscope Film

Archival Footage

Archival footage: U.S. National Archives, Prelinger Archives, Ford Motor Company collection, Die Deutsche Wochenschau; some scenes use illustrative footage of the period not the people named.

How This Episode Was Made

Original research and script by WWII Desk.

Archival film, photographs, documents and other historical material from the U.S. National Archives, Prelinger Archives and other collections are re-edited to match the narration and combined with our own maps, document reconstructions and graphics.

Some scenes use illustrative footage of the period to represent locations, events, equipment and environments described in the narration and are not necessarily footage of the specific people named.

Sources are listed above.