‘The Americans Said, ‘Double Bubble Gum” | Female German POWs Thought It Was Candy
The Cold Frontier of Camp Edison
The sky over Tulsa County had turned the color of an old zinc bucket by mid-November, heavy with the promise of an early winter. When the transport trucks finally ground to a halt inside the perimeter of Camp Edison, the air smelled of red clay, wet pine, and the sharp, metallic tang of exhaust.
Captain Margaret Sullivan stood on the gravel turnaround, her wool coat buttoned tight to her throat. She was one of the few female officers assigned to the facility, a logistics expert who had spent the last two years managing warehouses in New Jersey before being reassigned to this unprecedented experiment in the Oklahoma countryside. Before her stood fifty-three women from the Wehrmachthelferinnen—the German Women’s Auxiliary Corps. Captured during the chaotic, retreating months following the Allied advance through France and Belgium, they were the first significant group of female prisoners of war to arrive on American soil.
As the tailgates dropped, the women climbed down. They ranged from eighteen to thirty-five, their grey uniforms stained with Atlantic salt and the grease of continental trains. Yet, despite weeks of transatlantic transit, they did not slouch. They formed three neat ranks on the gravel, their chins high, their eyes fixed on the horizon just above Sullivan’s cap.
Among them stood Christa Lindamman. At twenty-three, Christa had spent the last two years as an intelligence clerk in Düsseldorf, translating intercepted Allied radio traffic into neat, gothic script. Now, her world was reduced to what she could carry in a small, cracked leather satchel: a family photograph taken before the Cologne bombings, a slim volume of Goethe’s poetry given by her father, and a single change of undergarments. She stared straight ahead, her jaw locked against the shivering that threatened to betray her exhaustion.
“They look like they’re still on parade,” Private Eugene Patterson muttered, shifting his carbine from one shoulder to the other. Eugene was nineteen, a local farm boy from just outside Tulsa whose draft notice had landed him three miles from his family’s cornfields instead of the beaches of Normandy. His face was still mapped with the pink remnants of boyhood acne.
“They’re soldiers, Patterson,” Sullivan said quietly, her voice carrying across the quiet yard. “Treat them as such.”
Sullivan stepped forward, her boots crunching rhythmically on the stone. She stopped five paces from Christa. “Welcome to Camp Edison,” Sullivan said in clear, deliberate English. “You will be housed in Barracks Three. You will be fed three meals a day. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, you will not be subjected to forced labor, but you will maintain your own quarters. Treat this facility with respect, and you will be treated with respect.”
Christa’s eyes flicked to Sullivan’s insignia, then back to the horizon. She understood every word—better than the Americans realized—but she chose the only weapon left to her: silence. She turned her head slightly, issuing a low, sharp command in German to the women behind her.
The ranks turned in unison, a single column of grey wool moving toward the black-tarred barracks. They spoke only in hushed, guttural tones among themselves, a wall of language that the American guards could not penetrate. To Eugene, watching them march away, they looked less like prisoners and more like a small, stubborn island of Germany that had somehow drifted into the middle of Oklahoma.
The Weight of Silence
For three weeks, the routine at Camp Edison was as rigid as the frost that began to whiten the barracks roofs each morning. The fifty-three women rose at 0500 hours, their bunks made with tight, military hospital corners before the first bugle blew. They swept the floorboards until the pine gleamed; they washed their uniforms in cold water, hanging them to dry on strings of wire that hummed in the prairie wind.
But it was a silent compliance. When Sullivan conducted morning inspections, the women stood by their iron frames like statues. If an officer spoke, only Christa or an older woman named Adelhyde would respond, offering nothing more than their name, rank, and identification number. During afternoon recreation, the women did not scatter. They clustered in the center of the muddy yard, their backs turned to the guard towers, speaking in low, rapid German that ceased the moment an American boot stepped within twenty feet.
Eugene Patterson found the silence unnerving. He was used to the easy, loud banter of the threshing crews and the noisy dinners of his mother’s kitchen. When he was assigned to deliver the midday coal rations to Barracks Three, he tried to nod, to offer a tentative “Good morning, ladies,” as he dumped the black lumps into the iron stove.
His overtures were met with frozen stares. One afternoon, nineteen-year-old Edel Trout, a slight girl with pale skin and dark circles under her eyes, dropped her sewing needle near Eugene’s boot. Eugene bent down, retrieved it, and handed it back with a wide, easy smile. Edel reached for it, but Christa’s voice rang out from the corner of the room—a single, sharp “No.” Edel froze, pulled her hand back, and looked at the floor. Eugene, his face burning, laid the needle on the table and walked out.
“They think we’re going to poison them, or worse,” Eugene told Sullivan later that week in the orderly room.
“They’ve been told for three years that Americans are barbarians, Patterson,” Sullivan replied, looking up from her ledgers. “Fear looks a lot like pride when you don’t have anything else left.”
The pride, however, began to crack under the weight of the Oklahoma winter. By late November, a blue northern wind swept down through the plains, dropping the temperature into the single digits within twelve hours. The thin walls of Barracks Three groaned under the pressure. The single potbelly stove in the center of the long room could not fight back the draft that whistled through the floorboards.
The women stopped sitting upright during recreation. They stayed under their thin wool blankets, huddled in pairs for warmth. Edel Trout, whose cough had been a dry click in the back of her throat for a week, became feverish. Her cheeks burned a bright, unnatural red against the grey pillow.
Eugene noticed her absence from the midday meal line. After the officers had gone to the mess hall, he went to the supply shed. Without a signature or official permission, he pulled two heavy, olive-drab wool blankets from the reserve shelves and tucked a tin canteen filled with boiling water and three bags of black tea into his coat pocket.
He let himself into Barracks Three without knocking. The room was freezing, the air thick with the smell of damp wool and illness. Christa stood up immediately from her bunk, her posture defensive, but Eugene ignored her. He walked straight to Edel’s bed.
The girl was shivering so violently her teeth clicked. Eugene laid the two extra blankets over her small frame, tucking them beneath her chin. Then he pulled out the canteen, set it on her nightstand, and showed her the steam rising from the cap.
“Tea,” he said, mimicking the motion of drinking. “Hot. Drink it.”
Christa stepped into the light of the window, her arms crossed. She looked at the blankets, then at Eugene’s face, searching for the trick. Eugene didn’t look back; he just picked up his empty coal bucket and walked out into the wind, his ears turning red in the cold.
The next morning, when Eugene entered the barracks, the blankets were still on Edel’s bed, and the canteen was empty on the table. Edel was sitting up, her skin pale but her breathing clear. As Eugene walked past her to check the stove, she didn’t look away. She gave him a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. It wasn’t an alliance, but it was a crack in the ice.
The Feast of the Captors
By Thursday, November 23, the smell of Camp Edison had changed. The greasy scent of mutton and boiled cabbage was replaced by something heavy, sweet, and rich.
The American staff had spent two days preparing for Thanksgiving. Captain Sullivan had insisted that the prisoners join the garrison in the main mess hall, a decision that had drawn sharp complaints from several of the older guards. “We’re feeding the enemy turkey while our boys are eating K-rations in the Ardennes,” one sergeant had muttered.
“We are showing them who we are,” Sullivan had countered.
When the fifty-three German women filed into the mess hall, they stopped just inside the double doors. The long wooden tables were laden with white platters. There were roasted turkeys with skin the color of polished chestnut, mountains of mashed potatoes glistening with melted butter, dressing seasoned with sage that filled the room with an autumnal perfume, bowls of bright crimson cranberry sauce, and rows of pumpkin pies.
Christa Lindamman stood at the head of her column, her nostrils twitching against her will. In Germany, by 1944, a holiday meal meant turnip bread and perhaps a thin slice of sausage preserved from Michaelmas. The abundance before her looked less like a meal and more like a theatrical prop designed to humiliate them with American wealth.
“It is a trap,” whispered Ingaborg, a tall woman who had served as a field nurse. “They want us to eat like pigs so they can photograph us for their newspapers.”
“Sit,” Captain Sullivan’s voice broke through the murmurs. She pointed to the long tables where the guards were already taking their seats, leaving spaces between them.
Eugene Patterson signaled frantically from a table near the center, pointing to the empty benches around him. Christa looked at Sullivan, then at Eugene. With a stiff nod, she led her group forward. She sat directly opposite Eugene, her posture rigid, her hands folded in her lap.
For the first ten minutes, the Germans did not touch the food. They watched the Americans pile their plates high. It was Sergeant Yamamoto, a Japanese-American clerk from California who had been transferred to the camp administration, who broke the tension. He sat at the end of the table, his own plate filled with turkey and rice. He looked at Christa, picked up a bowl of stuffing, and passed it to her, speaking in a flat, even tone.
“It’s not poisoned,” Yamamoto said. “My family lost our farm in Fresno last year. If anyone has a reason to put something in the food, it’s me. But the cook is from Ohio. He only knows how to use salt and butter. Eat.”
Christa looked at the man’s face—his eyes, his uniform, the strange complexity of his presence in this American camp. She looked down at the stuffing. Slowly, she took the heavy silver spoon, scooped a small portion onto her plate, and passed the bowl to Ingaborg.
The first bites were eaten in silence, but the sheer density of the fats and sugars worked a strange magic on the room. The human body, when starved of luxury for years, recognizes sugar as a kind of truce. The silence began to dissolve into the sound of passing platters and the clatter of forks.
Eugene, eager to fill the conversational void, began pointing to different items. “Potatoes,” he said, exaggerating his jaw movements. “Mashed potatoes.”
“Kartoffeln,” Edel Trout said softly from down the table.
“Kar-tof-feln,” Eugene repeated, his pronunciation clumsy and thick with an Oklahoma drawl.
A tiny, involuntary snort of laughter escaped Edel’s nose. She covered her mouth quickly, her face turning pink. Christa looked at her sternly, but the corner of Christa’s own mouth twitched.
By the time the pumpkin pie was cleared, the air in the mess hall had softened. The Americans were telling stories of their homes—of hunting deer in Michigan or harvesting cotton in Mississippi—using their hands to describe the sizes of things. The German women listened, some translating for the others in low, quick whispers. They did not join in the laughter, not yet, but they no longer looked like prisoners awaiting execution. They looked like people who were very full, very tired, and very far from home.
The Bubble Gum Incident
The true test of the camp’s fragile peace arrived three weeks before the spring thaw, on March 15, 1945.
A heavy rain had turned the Camp Edison compound into a sea of red, sucking mud that made every step a chore. The initial warmth of Thanksgiving had settled back into a cautious, polite distance. The women worked in the laundry and the infirmary now, but they still returned to their barracks like a garrison retreating to a fortress at night.
That afternoon, Eugene Patterson received a care package from his mother in Tulsa. It was a shoebox wrapped in brown paper and tied with rough twine. Inside, beneath three pairs of hand-knitted wool socks and a jar of pickled peaches, sat a large, cardboard box containing forty individual squares of Fleer’s Double Bubble Gum. The wrappers were a brilliant, gaudy combination of bright pink, blue, and yellow, featuring the small cartoon character “Pud” with his oversized cap.
Eugene’s face lit up. He stuffed his pockets with the pink chunks before heading down to Barracks Three for the midday meal check. The women were sitting at the long tables, eating their ration of beef stew and bread.
“Hey,” Eugene said, stepping inside and shaking the rain from his hat. “Look what came in the mail.”
He reached into his pockets and showered a handful of the bright pink squares onto the center of the table. They scattered across the wood like exotic beetles, their bright wrappers contrasting sharply with the dull grey of the barracks and the brown of the stew.
Christa Lindamman picked up one of the squares. She held it between two fingers, turning it over to examine the cartoon comic strip printed on the paper. She had never seen anything like it. In Germany, packaging was functional, grey, and scarce. This object was loud, unnecessary, and smelled intensely of synthetic strawberries.
“What is this?” she asked Eugene, her English improving but still formal. “A sugar ration?”
“It’s Double Bubble,” Eugene said, grinning. “Gum. You chew it. It’s from my ma.”
The women gathered around the table, their curiosity overriding their caution. Edel Trout took a square, peeled back the waxed paper with trembling fingers, and revealed the thick, pink block inside. It was hard to the touch, dusted with a fine white sugar powder.
“Candy,” Edel murmured in German. “Like the sugar drops we had before the war.”
Before Eugene could explain, Edel popped the entire block into her mouth and brought her back teeth down hard.
The reaction was instantaneous. The gum, cold from the March air, did not dissolve like chocolate or soften like a sugar plum. It resisted. It was tough, rubbery, and synthetic. Edel’s eyes went wide with sudden, sharp panic. She chewed twice more, her jaw locking, her face contorting into an expression of intense disgust and fear.
“It is rubber!” she cried out in German, her voice rising to a shriek. “Christa! It is not food! It is… it is poison!”
The word Gift—poison—echoed through the barracks. The other women, who had been about to put the gum into their mouths, dropped the wrappers as if they were hot coals. Ingaborg stood up so fast her bench tipped backward, clattering against the floorboards. Two other women scrambled back toward their bunks. Christa rose to her feet, her eyes flashing with a sudden, lethal rage, her hand pointing directly at Eugene’s chest.
“You give us this?” Christa shouted, her voice shaking with the weight of five months of captivity. “You make a joke of us? You give us chemical things to make us sick?”
Eugene’s smile vanished. He stood frozen, his hands raised in front of him as fifty German women glinted at him with a mixture of terror and fury. He realized, with a sickening thud in his stomach, that they thought this was a targeted attack—an attempt by the American farm boy to destroy their health.
“No! No, wait!” Eugene yelled, his voice cracking. “It’s not poison! It’s gum! Look! Look at me!”
He yanked a wrapper from his pocket, tore it open with his teeth, and shoved the pink block into his own mouth. He began to chew furiously, his jaw working in massive, exaggerated circles. He held his hands out, showing he wasn’t collapsing, wasn’t choking.
The women watched him, their breath held. Christa did not sit down, but her eyes narrowed, watching his throat to see if he swallowed.
“You don’t swallow it,” Eugene sputtered, grease from his stew still on his chin. “You just chew it. Like this. Watch.”
He gathered his breath, closed his lips, and used his tongue to flatten the greyish-pink mass against the back of his front teeth. Then, with a puff of his cheeks that turned his face a dark plum color, he blew.
A small, pink bubble emerged from his lips. It grew from the size of a marble to the size of a walnut, then to the size of a large, smooth egg. It shimmered slightly in the dull light of the barracks window—a perfect, ridiculous sphere of pink latex.
POP.
The bubble burst, snapping against Eugene’s nose, chin, and eyelashes in a web of sticky, pink strands. He stood there, his eyes blinking through the pink film, looking incredibly foolish and completely harmless.
For three seconds, the barracks was dead silent.
Then, from the back of the room, a tiny sound escaped Edel Trout. It was a high, choked giggle. She covered her face with her hands, but her shoulders were shaking. The giggle spread to Ingaborg, who let out a loud, bark-like laugh. Within ten seconds, the entire room erupted. The fifty-three German prisoners of war were doubled over, some clutching their stomachs, others pointing at the private first class who was currently trying to peel pink rubber off his eyebrows.
Christa Lindamman looked at Eugene, then down at the pink wrapper in her hand. The tension that had held her shoulders straight since November seemed to leave her all at once. She sat down on the bench, covered her eyes with her palm, and laughed until tears ran through the dirt on her cheeks.
“You Americans,” she whispered, shaking her head as she looked up at him. “You are completely mad.”
The Language of Rebuilding
The “Double Bubble Incident,” as Captain Sullivan later recorded it in her private diary, was the turning point. The wall of silence did not just crack; it dissolved into the mud of the Oklahoma spring.
By April, the camp looked different. The prisoners began to spend their afternoon recreation hours sitting with the guards on the porch of the orderly room, the shared space no longer a boundary line. The pink wrappers from Eugene’s care packages became a strange currency; several of the women kept them tucked into their poetry books or pinned to the walls above their bunks as a reminder of the day the war became absurd.
Christa Lindamman began holding informal English classes in the mess hall after supper. She sat at the head of the table with a grease pencil and an old blackout board, drawing pictures of common objects and listing their names in English and German.
“The bucket,” she would say, pointing to the iron pail by the door.
“Das Eimer,” thirty voices would repeat.
“No, der Eimer,” Christa would correct them with a smile. “But in Oklahoma, they just call it ‘the pail.'”
Other women found ways to use the skills that had once served the Reich. Adelhyde, whose precision with numbers had made her a formidable logistics clerk in Berlin, took over the inventory system for the camp supply depot. Within three weeks, she had reduced the waste of coal and flour by twenty percent, earning a commendation from Sullivan that she wore like a medal. Ingaborg worked eighteen hours a day in the camp infirmary alongside the American doctor, treating both guards with flu and prisoners with infected cuts with the same cool, professional tenderness.
Edel Trout, the youngest, began teaching German to Eugene Patterson. They sat on the steps of Barracks Three in the pale April sunshine, Eugene trying to force his flat Tulsa tongue around the soft, liquid sounds of the Rhineland.
“Ich wohne in Oklahoma,” Eugene said, his face screwed up with effort.
“Better,” Edel said, her English now smooth enough to tease him. “But you sound like a cow when you say ‘Oklahoma.’ It must be lighter. Like a bird.”
“I ain’t no bird, Edel,” Eugene laughed, spitting a stream of gum into the grass.
They were no longer just captives and captors. They were individuals who had been caught in the great, grinding machinery of the mid-century, thrown together on a patch of red dirt five thousand miles from the fighting, discovering that when you strip away the flags and the wool uniforms, everyone is mostly just cold, hungry, and terrified of the dark.
The Shadow of the Truth
The news of the world outside reached Camp Edison in fragments. On May 8, 1945, the radio in the orderly room erupted with the sound of sirens, cheering crowds in Times Square, and the voice of President Truman announcing the unconditional surrender of Germany.
Inside the camp, the American guards cheered, firing a few stray rounds into the sky. But in Barracks Three, the announcement was met with a heavy, complicated silence. The war was over, yes. The killing had stopped. But for the fifty-three women, their country was gone. Germany was no longer a state; it was a geography of ruins, divided into zones of occupation, its cities turned into mountains of brick and ash.
A week later, the first letters from Europe began to arrive through the Red Cross.
Christa received a thin, grey envelope from her aunt in Essen. Her father, the man who had given her the Goethe poems, had died in February during an air raid on the rail yards. Her family home was a crater filled with dirty rainwater.
That evening, Sullivan found Christa sitting alone on the steps of the laundry building, her satchel open in her lap, staring out at the red sunset.
“I am sorry about your father, Christa,” Sullivan said, sitting beside her on the rough concrete.
“He was an old man,” Christa said, her voice flat, devoid of tears. “He did not like the party. He told me when I joined the Auxiliaries that I was signing my name to a contract with the devil. I told him he was old and did not understand the new world.” She turned her face to Sullivan, her eyes hollow. “He was right.”
The true weight of that contract arrived at the end of May, when the camp library received the first editions of Life magazine and the national newspapers containing photographs from the liberation of Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau.
The Americans didn’t hide the papers. They laid them out on the long reading tables in the recreation hall.
Christa walked into the room on a Tuesday afternoon to find Ingaborg and Adelhyde standing over a spread of black-and-white images. None of them spoke. The photographs were undeniable: piles of emaciated bodies like cordwood, mass graves being filled by bulldozers, the gaunt, living skeletons staring through barbed wire with eyes that had forgotten how to see.
Christa felt the blood leave her face, a cold, oily sweat breaking out on the back of her neck. For three years, she had processed reports about labor allocations, about “special handling” of populations in the East. She had believed they were clearing fields, building roads, managing a difficult empire.
“This is not possible,” Adelhyde whispered, her voice trembling as she covered her mouth. “This is… this is film magic. The Americans made this to shame us.”
“No,” Christa said. Her voice was barely a whisper, but it cut through the room like iron. She looked at the photograph of a small child’s shoes piled by the thousands outside a gas chamber. She remembered her neat reports, her clean desk in Düsseldorf, the pride she had felt in her perfect filing system. “It is true. We knew. We did not look, but we knew.”
She turned and walked out of the library, her legs shaking so badly she had to lean against the wall of the barracks to keep from falling. The pride that had sustained her through transport ships, through the cold winter, through the shame of defeat, collapsed into a pile of ash. She was not a soldier who had lost a fair fight; she was the clerk for a house of horrors.
The Choice and the Speech
By the autumn of 1945, the U.S. government began the process of closing Camp Edison. The prisoners were given a choice under the resettlement acts: they could return to their respective zones in Germany to help with the reconstruction, or, if they could find American sponsors and clear the security screenings, they could apply for residency status to remain in the United States.
The decision split the barracks. Thirty-two of the women, including Edel Trout, chose to return. “My mother is still in Bavaria,” Edel told Eugene as they packed her bags. “She needs me. The fields must be planted.”
Eugene stood by her trunk, holding a fresh carton of Double Bubble gum he had bought at the post exchange. He slipped it into her side pocket. “Don’t go biting it all at once now,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
“I will chew it properly,” she said, her eyes wet as she looked up at him. “I will show them in Munich how to blow the bubble.”
Christa Lindamman chose to stay. Along with Ingaborg and eleven others, she signed the paperwork to become a contract laborer for the reconstruction authorities in the U.S., eventually transitioning into administrative roles for the emerging international relief agencies. She could not go back to Düsseldorf; the ghost of her father and the ghost of her own complicity were too thick in the German air. She wanted to pay a debt she knew she could never fully settle.
Thirty-one years later, in the autumn of 1976, the General Assembly hall of the United Nations in New York was quiet as the speaker walked to the podium.
Christa Lindamman Henderson was fifty-four now. Her hair was silver, styled in a neat, professional bob, and she wore a sharp, tailored navy suit. She was the senior director of the European Refugee Resettlement Project, a woman whose life had been spent in the grey, difficult trenches of displaced persons camps and international food distribution networks.
She looked out at the delegates—men and women from nations that had spent the last three decades threatening to burn each other to the ground with atomic fire.
“We speak often in these halls of treaties, of borders, and of strategic balances,” Christa said, her voice clear, her English bearing only the faintest, musical trace of her youth in the Rhineland. “We believe that peace is something signed with heavy pens on long tables by men in dark coats.”
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small, faded object. She held it up between her thumb and forefinger. It was a vintage piece of Fleer’s Double Bubble Gum, its pink and yellow wrapper slightly frayed at the edges, preserved for over thirty years in the back of a leather satchel.
A few of the younger delegates smiled, whispering to each other in confusion.
“In March of 1945,” Christa continued, looking down at the small square, “I was an enemy of this country. I was a prisoner of war in a place called Oklahoma. I was filled with hatred, with pride, and with the terrible, crushing guilt of what my nation had done. I believed that the world was divided into the strong and the weak, the killers and the killed.”
She looked toward the American delegation, where an older man with grey hair and a slight stoop sat near the back—Eugene Patterson, who had flown from Tulsa to sit in the visitors’ gallery.
“And then, a nineteen-year-old farm boy gave us a piece of rubber,” Christa said, her mouth softening into a smile. “We thought he was trying to kill us. We shrieked, we panicked, we accused him of murder. And instead of calling the guards, instead of drawing his weapon, this boy blew a pink bubble until it burst all over his face.”
The assembly hall went completely still.
“It was a ridiculous moment,” Christa said. “It was small. It was insignificant in the history of the Second World War. But in that room, fifty-three women who had forgotten how to feel anything but fear began to laugh. And in that laughter, we realized that our captors were not monsters, and we were no longer gods. We were just human beings, trapped in the dark, waiting for someone to show us how to live again.”
She set the gum down on the marble podium, her palms flat against the wood.
“Do not look for peace only in the grand gestures,” she said, her eyes sweeping the room. “Look for it in the extra blanket given without permission. Look for it in the shared bread of a Thanksgiving dinner. Look for it in the willingness to look foolish so that someone else might feel safe. For it is in those tiny, absurd drops of humanity that the ice of hatred begins to break, and it is from those small seeds that a new world is built.”
