German “Comfort Girls” POWs Brace for Humiliation When Americans Order Them to the Showers, Shout “We Won’t Take Our Clothes Off!” — What the Guards Do Next Redefines Mercy Behind the Wire

The first time the Americans told them to line up for the showers, Annelise thought she would throw up.

The order came in broken German and sharp English, carried down the row of low wooden barracks by a young MP with reddened ears and a clipboard clutched too tightly in his hand.

“Alle Frauen, raus! All women, out! You go wash now. Delousing. Medizin. Move, please.”

Metal bedframes squeaked. Blankets rustled. Twenty pairs of tired eyes turned toward the open door, where bright spring sunlight sliced into the dimness like something sharp.

For a heartbeat, no one moved.

Then the murmurs began.

“Showers?”

“They’ll line us up again.”

“Not this time. I can’t. I won’t.”

The words snapped through the room like a wire pulled too tight.

Annelise—Lise to the few who still used the softer version of her name—felt her throat close. Her hands moved on their own, gathering the thin blanket tighter around her shoulders even though she was already fully dressed.

She was twenty-three years old and had run out of illusions months ago. She knew exactly what showers could mean in a camp, even one with the American flag snapping overhead instead of the crooked banners she had grown used to.

She also knew what men did when you were lined up and told to undress under watchful eyes.

Behind her, Greta whispered in a hoarse voice, “I won’t take my clothes off again. Not in front of them. Not for anyone.”

The word again made Lise’s stomach twist.

The MP shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, with sunburned cheeks and a jaw that looked like it clenched even when he slept. The metal badge on his chest caught the light.

“Come on, ladies,” he called, in the tone of someone trying very hard to sound confident and landing somewhere closer to nervous. “It’s just wash, okay? You get clean, you get new things. Orders from the doc. Let’s go.”

Someone at the back of the barracks let out a bitter laugh.

“New things,” Ilse muttered. “As if that word hasn’t already ruined our lives.”

Lise’s pulse hammered. She saw, in one dizzy flash, the last time a man in uniform had promised something “new”: a new posting, a new job, a new “opportunity to serve the Fatherland.” That path had ended in a locked building on the edge of a base, a door that backed onto a hallway that never seemed to stop echoing with boots.

They said Betreuungs­mädchen—“comfort girls”—as if the syllables smoothed anything.

The truth of it stayed with you in your bones.

The guard cleared his throat. “Raus, raus,” he tried again, softer this time. “Please. We don’t have all day.”

Lise looked at her hands. They were shaking.

“No,” she heard herself say, her voice coming out small the first time.

She swallowed, lifted her chin, and tried again.

“No.”

The room went still around her.

The MP’s head snapped toward her. “What?”

She stepped forward, heart battering her ribs. She had learned, in that building on the edge of the base, that sometimes words were the only thing she still owned. She grabbed this one with both hands.

“We won’t take our clothes off,” she said, louder now, the German spilling out before she forced the English through dry lips. “Wir ziehen uns nicht aus. We… will not undress.”

The other women shifted behind her, a rumble of breath and cloth and fear.

Greta’s voice rang out, thinner but just as fierce. “Not in front of soldiers. Not again.”

The MP stared at them, color draining from his face. “Nobody said anything about—” He broke off, flustered, glanced over his shoulder as if searching for someone older, someone who had the right words ready in a neat front pocket.

For a moment that stretched like a wire about to snap, the two groups regarded each other: the women with their arms folded tight over their thin uniforms, the young American with his clipboard, caught between orders and something he clearly hadn’t expected.

Then he did something none of them anticipated.

He took a step back.

“Wait here,” he said, almost tripping over his own heels in his haste to get out of the doorway. “Just—just wait. I’ll get the lieutenant. And the nurse. Don’t—just don’t go anywhere, all right?”

He jogged away, boots kicking up little puffs of dust.

The women stared after him.

“What is he going to do?” whispered Ilse.

“What they always do,” someone at the back muttered. “Just with more polite words first.”

“We’ll see,” Lise said, but her voice shook.

She had stood up. She had said no. For the first time in far too long, she had put her refusal out loud into the air.

Now she waited to see what it would cost.

Before the Americans came, the last time she had refused anything, an officer had laughed in her face.

“It’s only for a few weeks,” he’d said, leaning back in his chair as if this conversation were about door-to-door collections instead of her life. “We need volunteers. You will help keep morale high for the men at the front. Clean place, good food, proper supervision. You’re strong. You’ll manage.”

She’d been nineteen then, the war still balanced on the edge of hope in some circles, though ration lines were already lengthening and the shadows on people’s faces had changed shape.

She had been working in a munitions factory, fingers raw from turning metal into shells. One day her supervisor had called her into the office, closed the door, and gestured toward the officer, who looked at her like he was trying to decide whether she’d fit in a box.

“An honor,” the supervisor had said, his smile too tight. “A special assignment for the Fatherland.”

Lise had felt something cold uncurl in her stomach. “I’d rather stay in the factory,” she’d said, hearing the tremor in her own voice.

The officer’s smile had hardened. “You’d rather? Fraulein, this is not a menu.”

A week later, she’d been on a truck with other girls whose eyes all had the same dazed look, driving away from the city they knew toward a series of buildings whose windows never truly closed.

They’d told themselves, at first, that it was temporary. They’d told themselves that it was part of the war, like everything else. They’d told themselves that enduring was a form of endurance for the country, that the way the men’s eyes changed when they walked in the door was just another kind of battlefield.

Within a month, none of those words had helped anymore.

Only quiet, shared routines—braiding each other’s hair, humming lullabies under their breath, stealing moments to wash their faces in the cracked basin in the corner—kept them from unraveling completely.

When the shells started sounding closer than usual, when the officers stopped bothering to pretend any of this had to do with honor, the building’s walls seemed to lean inward.

And then the Americans had arrived.

One day, there was a shell that landed close enough to shake dust from the ceiling. The next, the officers were gone. The guards were gone. The lock on the main door hung crooked and useless.

The girls—women, really, though everyone insisted on calling them “girls” as if that made their bodies less responsible for anything—had stood in the doorway, blinking at the sudden flood of daylight.

“Are we free?” Greta had whispered.

“For the moment,” Lise had said, though she had no idea what freedom would even look like anymore.

Then an American patrol had come around the corner.

They had been tired men with stubble on their cheeks and bandages on their hands, guns slung low and eyes sharp. They had not expected, either, to find a building full of women whose papers said one thing and whose silence said another.

The sergeant in charge had taken one look at them, then at the empty officer’s quarters behind them, and sworn in English so creatively that even without full translation they understood the gist.

“You come with us,” he’d said at last, switching to halting German. “This place… no good. We make a camp. Safer. You will not be… used… there.”

The pause around the word used had been the first hint that perhaps the story Americans had heard about this place was not entirely different from the one the girls had been living.

They had gone.

What else could they do?

They were too visible to stay. The war was still a stew of stray shots and vengeful neighbors. No one had offered them a real home, and they doubted their old streets would welcome them back with open arms.

So they went behind new wire, under a new flag, with new guards who spoke a language that sounded like rocks rolling in a metal bucket when they shouted across the yard.

They slept in barracks now instead of cramped rooms behind the “club.” They ate from big steaming pots in a canteen instead of off trays shoved through a hatch. They wore simple uniforms instead of the dresses some officer had thought appropriate.

But one thing had not changed:

They were still entirely at the mercy of men in uniform.

Which was why, when the word showers drifted through the barracks that morning, something in Lise had clawed its way to the surface.

She had not been able to refuse before when she was nineteen, pressed into service behind a locked door.

She refused now.

Even if her voice shook.

Even if it earned her another kind of punishment.

The MP came back with reinforcements.

Not the kind the women expected.

A tall, lean lieutenant in a crisp uniform strode in, hat tucked under one arm, the other hand resting lightly on his belt. Lines of fatigue bracketed his mouth, but his eyes were clear.

Behind him came a woman in trousers and a khaki shirt, her hair pinned back under a cap with a small metal badge at the front. A Red Cross patch was sewn onto her sleeve. A stethoscope peeked from her pocket.

Two soldiers, both enlisted men, hovered by the door, clearly uncomfortable with being anywhere inside a women’s barracks at all.

The lieutenant glanced around, took in the set of shoulders, the crossed arms, the way every pair of eyes in the room had gone flint-hard.

He looked, for a brief moment, like a man who had walked into a room thinking he was dealing with a logistical problem and realized instead he had walked into the aftermath of a storm.

“Guten Morgen,” he said, his German strongly accented but surprisingly fluent. “My name is Lieutenant Harris. This is Nurse Bradley.”

The nurse nodded, her gaze gentle but steady.

“We’re here to explain the wash and medical inspection,” he continued. “Nothing will happen without your understanding. No one here is going to hurt you. Not on my watch.”

Lise clenched her jaw. She’d heard promises like that before.

“Your guard says you refuse to go to the showers,” he went on. “Can you tell me why?”

A bitter laugh rose in her chest, but she swallowed it. “We know what happens to women who are lined up and told to undress in front of soldiers,” she said, forcing the words through her teeth. “We have lived it. We will not do it again.”

Murmurs of agreement rippled behind her.

The lieutenant’s jaw tightened—not with anger at them, she realized, but with something else. Recognition, maybe. Fury, but not directed here.

He looked at the nurse. Something passed between them in that wordless way people have when they’ve already had the difficult conversation somewhere out of sight.

Bradley stepped forward.

“May I?” she asked softly, looking not at the lieutenant, not at the guards, but at the women.

Her German was halting, but sincere.

“I am here to examine you,” she said, touching the stethoscope lightly. “For health. Lice, infection, wounds. Many of you have been ill-treated.” The way she said ill-treated carried more weight than the simple words. “We can help. But we must also protect everyone in camp. Clean clothes, clean bed, medicine. No man will be in the washroom when you bathe. Only women. Only me and my staff.”

Lise narrowed her eyes. “And the guards?”

“They will wait outside,” the lieutenant said immediately. “We do not put armed men in a room where women are undressed. Not prisoners, not anyone. That is a rule, and I intend to keep it.”

He turned to the MP who’d first come to fetch them. “Corporal, when these ladies are brought to the shower building, you will escort them to the door. Then you will stand with your back to it. Anyone tries to look in, they answer to me. Understood?”

The corporal snapped to attention, relief flickering across his face like a cloud’s shadow. “Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir.”

The lieutenant looked back at Lise. “You have my word,” he said. “If any man under my command disrespects you, I will have him removed from this camp before the sun sets and sent somewhere he can dig latrines under supervision for the rest of the war.”

It was such a specific threat that Lise almost smiled despite herself.

“Words are easy,” Greta muttered.

“Agreed,” Harris said. “So here is something more. Nurse Bradley?”

The nurse reached into a cloth bag slung over her shoulder and pulled out a stack of garments—simple cotton shifts, clean and folded, and several large towels.

“These are for you,” she said. “You will take them with you to the washroom. The windows have been covered. You will undress in private stalls, bathe, and change into these. Your old clothes will be taken to be burned or boiled, whichever they deserve.” She offered the smallest flicker of a smile at that. “If any of you prefer, you may keep one undergarment on during the exam. We will work around it. I am not here to shame you.”

The room was so quiet, Lise could hear her own heartbeat.

“For lice and disease,” the nurse repeated. “Nothing else. Do you understand?”

It wasn’t perfect, Lise thought. Nothing would erase what had been done to them. No amount of clean cotton could scour out the memory of being ordered to undress not for health but for amusement, for control.

But this was different.

This was explanation. This was options. This was a woman standing between them and the world, saying we will do this on your terms as much as we can.

She realized, with a jolt, that she had been holding her breath since the first mention of showers. She let it out slowly.

“I will go,” she said at last. “If everything is as you say. If no men come in.”

“No men,” Harris said firmly. “You have my word as an officer. And if that’s not enough, as a brother. I would like someone to treat my sister with dignity, should she ever find herself far from home in someone else’s camp.”

Something in his voice rang true enough that Lise believed him.

She glanced back at the others.

Greta’s face was lined with suspicion, but her shoulders had loosened a fraction. Ilse looked like she might faint from sheer relief at the idea of hot water and soap without leering eyes.

“All right,” Lise said.

She lifted her chin again, but this time it wasn’t pure defiance.

“We will go. But if a man comes in while we are undressed, I will scream the roof down. And then I will find you, Lieutenant Harris.”

He nodded solemnly. “That seems more than fair.”

The shower building was a squat concrete structure at the edge of the compound, built for function, not comfort. Steam curled out from under the eaves. The smell of carbolic soap hit Lise’s nose as soon as they crossed the yard.

True to his word, the corporal marched them to the door and then turned his back, boots planted firmly in the gravel, gaze fixed on the horizon as if nothing in the world inside that building concerned him.

Inside, the room had been divided hastily with sheets hung from wires, creating narrow stalls. Someone had painted numbers over each space, the white still streaky.

“Not fancy,” Nurse Bradley said wryly, “but it does the job.”

Two other women bustled around the room—one in a Red Cross uniform like Bradley’s, the other in a plain dress with a simple cross on a chain around her neck. She spoke German more fluently and introduced herself as Sister Maria, though she explained that here she was just a volunteer, not on official church duty.

“If you prefer, I can stay with you behind the curtain while you wash,” Maria said. “Or not. Your choice.”

The very idea that they would be given choices at all in a washroom made Lise feel dizzy.

She stepped into a stall, fingers fumbling at the buttons of her thin camp shirt. For a moment, her body remembered too many other rooms where undressing had meant surrender, humiliation, pain.

She rested her forehead against the cool concrete wall and counted slowly to ten.

On the other side of the sheet, she could hear Ilse whispering, “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s just water,” like a mantra.

“No men,” Greta muttered. “No men, no men, no men.”

Lise took a breath and turned the tap.

Hot water. Not lukewarm, not cold from a barrel, but honest-to-goodness hot water flowed over her skin, carrying away weeks of sweat and dust and fear. Her muscles, clenched for so long she had almost forgotten they could feel any other way, began to unknot.

She washed quickly at first, half expecting the curtain to rip open at any second, exposing her to a row of staring eyes.

No one came.

No voices shouted.

The only sounds were the hiss of water, the soft slosh of feet shifting on wet tile, the occasional gentle murmur from Bradley or Maria—“Easy, there,” “You can keep that on if you like,” “I know, I know, just breathe.”

When she stepped out, towel wrapped tight around her, Bradley was waiting with a small metal tray.

“May I look at your arms?” she asked. “For injection marks, for bruises? Only what you allow.”

Lise swallowed. “Do you need to… look everywhere?”

“Not unless you tell me something hurts there,” Bradley said. “I’ve read the reports. I know what some of you have endured. I won’t ask you to relive it.”

The straightforward acknowledgment—no euphemisms, no awkward avoidance—made something inside Lise crack unexpectedly.

She nodded, blinking fast.

Bradley’s hands were brisk but gentle as she checked for lice around the hairline, pressed lightly along Lise’s ribs to feel for tenderness, listened to her heartbeat through the stethoscope’s cold circle.

“You’re underweight,” she said. “But I’ve seen worse. We’ll see what we can do about the food. Any fevers? Night sweats?”

“Sometimes,” Lise admitted. “Bad dreams.”

“I’d be more surprised if you didn’t,” Bradley said. “We have aspirin, some tonics. Not much else. But sometimes having someone to talk to helps.”

Lise gave a raw little laugh. “Who would want to hear these stories?”

“I would,” Bradley said quietly. “Not because I enjoy them. But because if you don’t speak them, they sit in your bones and rot. And we have enough rot in this world already.”

Later, when all the women had been washed, inspected, and wrapped in clean cotton shifts that felt almost indecently soft against their scrubbed skin, they sat on benches in the sunshine behind the building, hair damp, faces a little stunned.

Their old clothes had been gathered into a pile near a barrel. Some were too filthy or infested to save; those would be burned. Others would be boiled and laundered.

“What do you want done with these?” Maria asked, nodding at the pile. “The things you wore before—before the camp, I mean.”

Lise stared at the faded remnants—a dress she’d arrived in, its seams straining; a blouse given to her by a “club manager” more as a uniform than a gift; a pair of shoes that had never fit right.

“Burn them,” Greta said fiercely. “All of them.”

“No,” Ilse said, just as fiercely. “Not all. I want… I want to cut them up. Make rags. Let them clean floors, not men’s boots. Let them be useful, not… what they were.”

Lise listened to them argue quietly, and something like a plan formed in the back of her mind.

“Burn the ones that carry the worst nights,” she said slowly. “Keep some cloth. We can sew. We can mend things in the camp. Make new from old.”

She swallowed.

“It’s not much. But it’s something we choose. With our hands.”

The others nodded, one by one.

Choice. Hands. Simple words, heavy as bricks.

Over the next weeks, the women’s routines shifted.

They still woke to the clang of a bell and the rattle of boots on gravel. They still stood for roll call, still felt the wire at the edge of the compound like a physical presence, even when they tried not to look at it.

But now there were tasks that felt less like punishment and more like participation.

They were assigned to work in the laundry, the kitchen, the sewing room. An American quartermaster, overwhelmed by the constant need to mend uniforms, nearly wept with relief when he realized how neat Lise’s stitches were.

“You just saved me from a mutiny,” he told her wryly, handing over a mountain of torn shirts. “If I’d handed these out with holes still in the elbows, I’d have had eight very unhappy sergeants on my case.”

She smiled, the motion still unfamiliar on her face.

In the sewing room, they cut up old dresses and turned them into aprons and curtains for the infirmary. They repaired torn blankets. They pieced together quilts from scraps that didn’t match in any logical way but somehow fit.

One afternoon, as Lise sat by the open window, her needle rising and falling in steady rhythm, Lieutenant Harris stopped in the doorway.

“You’ve been busy,” he said, looking around at the neat stacks of mended clothes.

“We were told we could work,” she replied. “We know how.”

He stepped inside, fingers trailing across a folded quilt. “My mother would like this,” he said softly. “She always said a home isn’t really a home until there’s a blanket in it that has more stories than straight lines.”

Lise said nothing.

He cleared his throat. “We’ve had word from higher up,” he said. “The war is ending. It will take time, but repatriation is being arranged. Some of you will go back soon. Others…” He hesitated. “Others may choose to apply for displaced persons status.”

“Displaced,” she repeated. “As if we are furniture that has been moved.”

He gave a crooked smile. “The words aren’t perfect. But the idea is that you’ll have some say in where you go. If home is… complicated, there may be options.”

The idea of going back to her old street, to neighbors who might know exactly what she’d been doing near the front, made Lise’s throat close again. She pictured their faces—pitying, judgmental, pretending not to know.

She pictured, instead, a place where no one knew her history unless she chose to tell it.

“What options?” she asked.

“Some will go to larger cities,” Harris said. “Some may end up in camps run by other organizations—Red Cross, church groups. Some may even apply to emigrate, though that’s down the road and not simple.”

He shifted his weight, suddenly looking younger.

“I can’t promise you a straight path,” he said. “I can only promise that in this camp, for as long as you are under our responsibility, we will not treat you as… as merchandise. Or as a stain. You are prisoners by circumstance, not by crime.”

She looked up sharply. “Not everyone sees it that way.”

“I know,” he said. “I get letters from back home, too.” He shrugged slightly. “But I can choose how I act, here and now.”

She thought of Mac, the Black sergeant in the laundry who, in another camp somewhere else, might not have been allowed to sit at the same table as his white counterparts. Here, he ran a whole building, made jokes in two languages, handed out extra soap when he thought no one was looking.

The world was full of crooked lines.

Here, in this unlikely place, a few of them had been bent back, just a little, toward something straighter.

“Do your people know?” she asked suddenly.

“Know what?” Harris replied.

“What happened in those houses,” she said. “What was done to girls like us.”

He looked at the floor for a long moment.

“Some know,” he said. “Some don’t. Some don’t want to. Some have decided it’s easier to call you… willing. To pretend you were just… entertainers.”

The word made her flinch.

He saw it.

“I don’t think that,” he said quietly. “I’ve seen enough to know the difference between choice and survival. So has Nurse Bradley. So have most of the men here, now that they’ve heard your stories.” His mouth twitched. “You’ve made quite an impression, you know. Especially since that first day, when you nearly took Corporal Jenkins’s head off for mentioning showers.”

A flush rose to her cheeks. “I was afraid.”

“And you did something about it,” he said. “That’s more courage than most men I know have ever had to show.”

The day the first group left, there were no banners, no speeches. Just bags packed, names checked, trucks idling at the gate.

Greta was on the list.

She stood in the barracks doorway with a canvas bag slung over her shoulder, fingers worrying the strap.

“Do you think they’ll look at us and see what we were?” she asked Lise quietly. “Back there, at home?”

Lise met her gaze. “We know what we were,” she said. “We know also what we survived. If they choose to see only the first and not the second, that’s their failing, not ours.”

Greta let out a shaky breath. “Where did you get all this strength?” she asked.

Lise thought of a young American MP going pale at the idea of ordering them to strip. Of a lieutenant who backed away instead of pushing forward when confronted with their fear. Of a nurse who had looked at their scars without flinching. Of a sergeant who had turned a washhouse into a place where no one raised their voice.

“Some of it is mine,” she said. “Some of it… I think I borrowed.”

Greta laughed, a sound with real warmth in it. “Tell them, then,” she said. “If you write to anyone from here. Tell them their ‘next move’ was not what we expected.”

“You mean when they brought in the nurse instead of more guards?” Lise asked.

Greta shook her head. “No. When they listened.”

She squeezed Lise’s hand once, hard, then turned and climbed into the truck.

As the vehicle rumbled away, kicking dust into the morning light, Lise realized something else about that first day.

The American guards’ truly stunning move had not been bringing in a woman, or hanging sheets for privacy, or insisting no man would step into the showers.

It had been the simplest thing, the thing she had least expected from anyone in a uniform:

They had stopped. Backed up. Changed course.

They had heard “We won’t take our clothes off” and, instead of forcing the issue, had asked, “Why?” and then adjusted.

No grand speeches. No world-shaking policy.

Just a handful of choices, made in a small camp behind barbed wire, that told her—told all of them—that the rest of their lives did not have to be defined by the worst rooms they’d ever been in.

Years later, when the taste of camp coffee had faded and the scar on her left wrist had turned pale and smooth, Lise would sit at her own kitchen table and try to explain that day to a daughter who had never heard bombs fall.

They lived in a different city now, under a different flag. There were still shortages sometimes, still arguments in parliament, still people who thought some lives counted more than others. The world had not turned into paradise just because one war had ended.

But there were also small, stubborn mercies.

Her daughter would ask, “Mama, were the Americans good or bad?”

And Lise would sigh, thinking of the nights when a guard had thrown an extra blanket over someone shivering, and the days when another guard had let his eyes linger too long on a frightened girl’s face.

“They were people,” she would say at last. “Some were kind. Some were not. They had rules that helped and rules that hurt. But one day, when it mattered very much to me, they did something… good, in a way I did not expect.”

Then she would tell the story.

How a young woman, tired and afraid, had stood in a doorway behind foreign wire and said, in a voice that shook, “We won’t take our clothes off.”

How the guards, instead of shouting her down, had taken a step back.

How, in that small stepping back, a line had been drawn between what she had known and what might still be possible.

Her daughter would wrinkle her nose. “It doesn’t sound like much,” she might say, accustomed to larger gestures in her history lessons.

And Lise would look at her—the clear eyes, the easy way she moved through a world that, while far from perfect, had space for her voice.

“It was,” she would say softly. “You don’t know, my love, how big a thing it is, in some places, at some times, for a man with a gun to hear a woman’s ‘no’ and decide that this is the moment he will obey.”

She would picture again the sheeted stalls, the smell of soap, the nurse’s gentle hands, the lieutenant’s grim promise.

She would remember the sound of her own heartbeat slowing as she realized, for the first time in a long time, that undressing did not have to mean danger.

And she would know that, in the long ragged line of her life, that day marked a sharp turn.

A place where dignity stepped, barefoot and damp-haired, back over the threshold.

THE END