“German Women Taken as Prisoners of War Confessed They Lived in More Terror of Their Own Retreating Soldiers Than of the British Guards Watching Them, and the Hidden Reason Behind That Fear Stuns Even Historians and Survivors Who Dare Speak”

Decades after the war ended, a group of elderly women sat in a quiet community center, far from the noise of gunfire, uniforms, and marching boots that had once defined their youth.

They were German.
They had been prisoners of war.
They had survived evacuation columns, ruined cities, and the uncertainty of captivity.

And yet, when one interviewer asked them a seemingly simple question—

“Who did you fear most back then?”

—none of them answered the way people expected.

They did not say “the enemy.”
They did not say “the British.”

Instead, with a mixture of shame and clarity, one of them replied:

“We were more afraid of our own infantry than of the British guards.”

The room fell quiet.

It was a disturbing answer, not because it accused one side or praised another, but because it revealed something deeper, more haunting, and far more complicated than the usual black-and-white narratives of war.

Why would women held as prisoners fear their own retreating soldiers more than the foreign troops guarding them?

The truth behind that fear is not a single moment or one event.
It is a chain of beliefs, orders, rumors, consequences, and choices that turned the world upside down for these women—and made “enemy” and “protector” feel dangerously blurred.

This is their story.

The March Into Uncertainty

They were not front-line fighters.
Most of them had been:

signal operators,

clerks,

medical assistants,

cooks,

or support staff assigned to administrative units.

They had been taught that their duty was to help “keep everything running.” They filed reports, sorted messages, and handed out bandages. For many of them, the front line was something they saw only on maps, never from a trench.

But as the war turned and the front collapsed, those neat maps crumpled. Lines shifted. Orders changed. Civilians fled. Military units retreated. Chaos swallowed everything.

The women were bundled into convoys and told to move—east, west, anywhere that wasn’t the advancing line. They walked for days, then weeks, across roads packed with frightened civilians and scattered soldiers.

They were told one thing over and over:

“You must not fall into enemy hands.”

The warning was simple but heavy. No one explained exactly what would happen if they were captured, but the tone was ominous enough to make the imagination run wild.

At the same time, another threat hovered over them—quieter, but just as real:

“If you desert, if you surrender, if you are caught not following orders, your own people may punish you first.”

It was a double-edged fear:

Fear of the unknown enemy.

Fear of their own side’s discipline and suspicion.

And in the confusion of collapsing fronts, the second fear often felt closer.

Rumors, Orders, and a Dangerous Kind of Loyalty

The women remembered the stories that spread along the convoys like smoke:

“One unit tried to turn back. Their commanding officers threatened them.”
“Someone was accused of spreading defeatism.”
“A driver who panicked was dragged out and publicly shamed.”

Were all these stories true? No one knew. Rumors didn’t need proof. They only needed echoes.

For the women, those echoes turned into a powerful lesson:

If you become a problem, your own side might treat you harshly—before the enemy even sees you.

They learned to:

avoid asking questions,

keep moving,

follow instructions without hesitation,

and never appear weak or uncertain.

There was an unspoken understanding:

“We must fear mistakes more than we fear bullets.”

This wasn’t about bravery. It was about survival inside a system that rewarded obedience and punished any hint of collapse.

And then, one day, everything changed.

The Day the British Flag Appeared

The women’s column had been marching for days with little food and even less clarity. They saw smoke in the distance, heard distant artillery, and passed groups of retreating soldiers who seemed as confused as they were.

Then, at a crossroads, they saw something they had been told to avoid at all costs:

A British unit.

Vehicles.
Uniforms.
Helmets.
A flag that did not belong to their side.

Their commander froze.

For a brief, breathless moment, everyone waited to see which fear would win:

fear of the enemy,

or fear of their own command.

Some women squeezed their eyes shut, bracing for shouts, shots, or sudden orders.

Instead, something unexpected happened.

The British troops, seeing the exhausted women under a flag of surrender, did not charge, did not shout, did not raise their weapons.

They motioned for the women to come forward.

Calmly.

Orderly.

One of the women later recalled:

“I was trembling so much I could barely walk. I thought this was the end. Then I heard one of them call for water… for us. I didn’t understand.”

It was the first crack in the narrative they had been fed for years.

A Different Kind of Command

From the moment the women were processed as prisoners, the difference in treatment was immediately obvious.

They were not greeted with smiles—this was still war, and trust did not appear overnight. But they were met with procedure rather than random emotion.

Names were written down.
Belongings were logged.
Questions were asked with translators present.

The British officers followed guidelines based on international conventions which, imperfect as they were in practice, still set expectations:

prisoners must be fed,

housed,

given basic medical care,

kept under control without unnecessary cruelty.

The women were unfamiliar with these rules in detail. They only recognized one thing:

“No one screamed at us for collapsing. No one punished us for being tired.”

In captivity, ironically, some of them felt safer than they had felt on the road with their own retreating forces.

One woman later said:

“I was afraid of the guards—but I was more afraid of making a mistake in front of my own officers. The guards followed their rules. Our officers did whatever fear and chaos told them to do.”

Why They Feared Their Own Infantry More

To outsiders, the women’s confession sounds strange, even disloyal.

But their fear wasn’t about ideology. It wasn’t about which flag flew overhead. It was about who, in that moment, seemed more dangerous when everything was falling apart.

On the retreat:

Their own units were exhausted, angry, hungry, and under immense pressure.

Disorganization bred suspicion.

Harsh discipline sometimes appeared like the only tool for maintaining control.

Officers worried about desertion and collapse.

Orders and reality clashed.

In that mix, vulnerability was risky.

If you:

cried,

stumbled,

questioned a command,

fell behind,

you risked becoming a problem for your own side.

By contrast, once in British custody:

Expectations were clear.

Orders were firm, but not unpredictable.

The guards didn’t seem personally threatened by the women’s emotions or fatigue.

They were responsible for control, not for proving ideological loyalty.

One woman summed it up perfectly:

“Our soldiers were fighting for survival. The British guards were working a job.”

The difference was frighteningly simple.

Life in the British Camp: Stricter Than Kindness, Softer Than Fear

The camp was no paradise.

There were:

strict schedules,

roll calls,

barbed wire,

rules about where they could walk,

and little privacy.

Food was basic, but consistent.
Medical care existed, but resources were limited.

Yet again and again, the women told the same kind of story:

“I expected cruelty. I expected to be treated like something less than human. Instead, I was assigned a bunk, given soup, and told what time to wake up. I wasn’t asked to swear loyalty. I was just expected to follow camp rules.”

One recalled a moment that shattered her expectations entirely:

She had dropped her cup in the food line. In the tension of the retreat, she would have expected harsh shouting, maybe a public scolding.

Instead, the British guard simply picked it up, handed it back, and said in broken German:

“Careful. You’ll need this.”

That tiny moment, barely worth mentioning to someone who had never known chaos, felt monumental to her.

“No one used my fear against me,” she explained. “They had power over me—but they didn’t use it the way I’d been taught to expect.”

The Silent Burden of Guilt

The strange thing about feeling safer in the enemy’s camp than among your own retreating units is that it carried a heavy quiet guilt.

Many of the women carried that secret for decades. Some didn’t speak of it until very old age.

Why?

Because it felt like betrayal.

They worried people would misunderstand:

that they were “praising” one side and “condemning” the other,

that they were rewriting history based on emotion,

that they were ungrateful to the people they had once called comrades.

But their stories were not about blame.

They were about how human beings behave under different kinds of pressure.

Their own infantry was under existential pressure.

The British guards were under procedural pressure.

One was fighting for a collapsing cause.
The other was managing surrendered human beings.

In those conditions, fear attached itself not to flags, but to unpredictability.

The women feared most:

the shouting they couldn’t predict,

the punishments they didn’t understand,

the suspicion that any misstep could be seen as disloyalty.

In the camp, things were still hard. But they were not arbitrary.

And that difference mattered.

The Doctor’s Perspective: “They Were Afraid to Relax”

A British camp doctor who monitored the women later wrote in his private notes:

“Our German female prisoners were physically exhausted, but the more interesting thing was this: they always seemed braced for something. As if rest was suspicious. As if sleep was unsafe.”

He described how long it took for them to:

eat without glancing over their shoulders,

speak freely among themselves,

request extra blankets without apology,

stop flinching when someone called their name loudly.

He noted:

“They were more frightened of being accused of something than they were of being shot. That fear did not come from us—it came with them.”

The nurses noticed the same thing.

One recalled:

“It took weeks before they realized that asking for more water wouldn’t get them into trouble. When they finally started asking, it was like watching flowers slowly turn toward the sun.”

The Shock to Historians and Listeners

When historians and interviewers first heard these accounts, they were struck not by sensational scandal, but by something more unsettling:

The idea that in some moments, the safer place emotionally was behind the enemy’s wire.

That is not a comfortable story for any side.

It doesn’t fit “heroes vs. villains.”
It doesn’t flatter one flag or condemn another in a simple way.

Instead, it reveals:

how authority under strain can become frightening,

how systems of control can sometimes feel worse than captivity under a structured opponent,

how indoctrinated fear can linger long after uniforms are removed.

The “shock” is not that the British were kind. Many forces, on all sides, had individuals who behaved decently.

The shock is that:

For some women, their idea of “home” and “own side” became tangled with fear, pressure, and unpredictability—while the “enemy camp” offered rules, food, and a strange kind of emotional safety.

That inversion is what continues to unsettle people.

The Real Reason Behind Their Fear

When you strip away the drama, the root reason the women gave for fearing their own infantry more than the British guards was this:

“Our own side needed something from us—proof of loyalty. The British only needed us to follow camp rules.”

One demanded inner alignment.
The other demanded external compliance.

With their own side, fear grew from the constant need to prove they were “good enough,” “brave enough,” “loyal enough.”

With the British, fear existed—but it was colder, simpler: follow instructions, and the day passes.

That subtle difference shaped their experience.

In the camp, they were prisoners.
On the retreat, they were tools—expected to function no matter what.

One woman summed it up decades later:

“The British could decide what happened to my body. But back then, my own commanders seemed to control my soul.”

It wasn’t about politics anymore.
It was about where their sense of self felt least under siege.

The Quiet Aftermath

After the war, many of these women went home:

some to families,

some to ruins,

some to new countries.

They married. They worked. They raised children and grandchildren.

They did not introduce themselves as “former POWs.”
They did not talk about fearing their own infantry more than the enemy.

But the memory lingered.

It came back in:

the way they insisted on calm in their households,

the way they flinched at shouting,

the way they valued clear rules over unreasonable commands,

the way they taught their children that authority must come with responsibility.

And only in the quiet years, when someone finally asked gently and without judgment:

“What were you really afraid of back then?”

—did the truth find its way to the surface.

Not to rewrite history.
Not to accuse everyone in uniform.
But to remind us that in war, fear doesn’t always point in the direction we expect.