“The Camp Ran Out of Fuel” | Mountain Men Showed the POW Women How to Burn Sagebrush for Heat
The drafty administrative building of Camp Carson, Colorado, offered no shelter from the bitter truth. On January 15, 1945, Major Robert Hayes stared at the teletype message in his hands, its stark lettering delivering a devastating blow: due to critical fuel shortages across the Western Theater of the Second World War, coal deliveries to the remote outpost were halted indefinitely.
Hayes looked out the frosted window. Outside, the temperature had plummeted to twelve degrees below zero. The wind howled off the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains, driving sheets of dry snow across the barracks. Down in the compound, he could see several figures bundled in layered, ill-fitting uniforms, their breath clouding in the icy air. They were part of a unique experiment in wartime internment: sixty-three German women, members of the Wehrmacht’s female auxiliary corps, captured during the chaotic Allied advance across France the previous summer.
Unlike the sprawling, heavily guarded camps for male prisoners of war in Texas or the deep South, Camp Carson’s auxiliary site was a hastily converted civilian conservation outpost. It was chosen for its absolute isolation—a natural fortress of rock and snow designed to make escape impossible. But that very isolation was now a death sentence. The camp relied entirely on a single, treacherous mountain supply route. With the railway lines prioritized for the Pacific push and coal reserves depleted, Hayes knew they had less than a week’s worth of fuel remaining. When that ran out, the drafty wooden barracks would become frozen tombs. His only option would be to pack all sixty-three women and his skeleton crew of guards into the single, small administrative building. It would be an logistical nightmare, turning a disciplined camp into a desperate hive of freezing refugees.
A sharp knock broke the heavy silence of his office. Sergeant Mitchell stepped inside, stomping snow from his boots.
“Sir, there’s a local rancher at the gate,” Mitchell said, his teeth clicking slightly from the cold. “Name’s William McKenzie. He says he knows about the coal shortage. Claims he has a solution.”
Hayes frowned, rubbing his tired eyes. “A solution? Unless he’s got a fleet of coal trucks hidden in his barn, Mitchell, I don’t see what a rancher can do.”
“He says it’s not about coal, sir. He wants to show us how to burn sagebrush.”
Minutes later, William McKenzie stood in Hayes’s office. He was a weathered, imposing man of the high plains, clad in a thick sheepskin coat that smelled of woodsmoke and lanolin. His face was etched with deep lines from decades of facing the brutal Colorado elements. To Hayes, a career military man from Ohio, McKenzie looked like a frontier figure stepped straight out of a previous century.
“You look skeptical, Major,” McKenzie said, his voice a low, gravelly drawl. He didn’t wait to be asked to sit, instead leaning against the heavy oak desk. “But coal ain’t the only thing that burns. This valley is choked with sagebrush. It’s got an oil in it that burns hot and fast. Native tribes used it for thousands of years. Early settlers did too. If your people know how to harvest it, you can keep those stoves purring until spring.”
Hayes looked at the rancher, then back out the window at the shivering women in the yard. He was a soldier, trained in logistics and protocols, but protocols couldn’t create heat out of thin air. “They’re clerks, nurses, and radio operators, Mr. McKenzie,” Hayes said softly. “They’re from Dresden, Stuttgart, Cologne. They don’t know the first thing about surviving in the wilderness.”
“Then I guess we’d better teach them,” McKenzie replied.
Inside Barracks 3, Catherine Schroeder pulled her wool blanket tighter around her shoulders. At twenty-four, her life had been a series of sharp, disorienting turns. A year ago, she had been sitting behind a clean radio desk in Paris, believing implicitly the grand promises of the German Women’s Auxiliary Corps. She had thought she was defending her homeland from a safe distance, wrapped in the comforting blanket of state propaganda.
Then came the breakout at Normandy. The retreat had been a terrifying blur of strafing Allied planes, burning trucks, and the eventual, abrupt reality of surrender. When she was boarded onto a Liberty ship bound for America, she had been paralyzed by fear. The propaganda films in Berlin had depicted Americans as uncultured savages, brutal captors who would show no mercy to the vanquished.
Yet, the reality of her captivity had been a series of strange dissonances. The quarters were cramped, yes, but the food was regular, hot, and abundant—miles better than the meager rations her family was receiving back in Saxony. The American guards were distant, but they weren’t monsters. They were mostly young boys from Iowa or Pennsylvania who looked homesick and seemed far more interested in trying to trade cigarettes for a conversation than in inflicting cruelty.
“Catherine, your hands are turning blue,” a voice interrupted her thoughts.
It was Ingred Bower, a practical, no-nonsense medical assistant who had become the barracks’ unofficial doctor. Ingred grabbed Catherine’s hands and began rubbing them briskly between her own. Next to them sat Helen Richter, a young supply clerk whose eyes always seemed wide with a permanent, haunted anxiety, and Elsa Wagner, the oldest woman in the camp. Elsa, a former administrative overseer in her late forties, had become the group’s matriarch.
“The stoves are barely lukewarm,” Helen whispered, her voice trembling as she looked at the dead iron radiator in the corner. “The guards are saying the coal is gone. Are they going to let us freeze to death?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Helen,” Elsa said sharply, though she too was shivering. “The Americans wouldn’t have shipped us across an ocean just to let us freeze in the mountains. They have a system for everything.”
“Systems fail in winter,” Ingred muttered, looking toward the window. “I’ve seen it on the Eastern Front. Cold doesn’t care about your paperwork.”
The heavy wooden door of the barracks swung open, letting in a swirl of snow and a blast of sub-zero air. Major Hayes walked in, accompanied by Sergeant Mitchell. The women instinctively stood at attention, a reflex drilled into them by years of military discipline.
Hayes looked at the line of shivering women. He didn’t see enemies; he saw a group of young women who were terrifyingly far from home.
“At ease,” Hayes said, his voice echoing in the stark room. “I’m going to give it to you straight. Our coal supply has been cut off due to the war effort. We have enough to heat the main administrative building for a short time, but we cannot maintain the barracks.”
A collective gasp rippled through the ranks. Helen gripped Catherine’s sleeve.
“However,” Hayes continued, raising a hand to quiet the rising murmurs, “we are not going to leave you to freeze. A local rancher has volunteered to teach us how to harvest a local fuel source—sagebrush. Starting tomorrow morning, details will go out into the valley to gather wood. We will adapt, and we will survive this winter. Sergeant Mitchell will draw up the rosters.”
When the officers left, the barracks erupted into a furor of hushed, angry voices.
“Gathering weeds?” Helen cried out, her pride wounded beneath her fear. “We are disciplined soldiers of the Reich! We are professionals, clerks, trained specialists! Now they want us to be peasants gathering sticks in the mud?”
“Would you rather be a dignified corpse, Helen?” Ingred snapped.
Catherine looked out the window, watching the gray dusk settle over the jagged peaks. She felt a profound sense of humility creeping over her. The grand illusions of the war were entirely gone now, stripped away by the raw, unyielding reality of the American West. If survival meant pulling bushes from the snow, then that was what she would do.
The next afternoon, the world was a blinding expanse of white and blue. Catherine, Ingred, and Helen were part of the first harvest detail, marched past the camp’s perimeter wire into the vast, rolling valley. The snow was knee-deep, making every step an exhausting struggle.
Waiting for them were William McKenzie, his nineteen-year-old nephew David, and an older ranch hand named Charlie Brennan. A horse-drawn sled sat nearby, loaded with empty burlap sacks.
McKenzie stood before the group of women, who stood shivering in their heavy grey coats. “Listen up,” he called out, his voice cutting through the wind. “This isn’t just about pulling up weeds. Sagebrush is a tough son of a gun. You don’t just yank it, or you’ll break the branches and lose the best wood. Look for the old-growth bushes—the ones with thick, twisted trunks. They’re gray, and they look dead, but they’re full of oil.”
McKenzie walked over to a large, gnarled bush protruding from the snow. He knelt, grabbed a thick, woody stem near the base, and gave it a sharp, twisting pull. It cracked loudly, breaking clean at the root. He held it up, the sharp, pungent, medicinal scent of sage filling the crisp air.
“David, Charlie, help them out,” McKenzie ordered.
Catherine walked toward a large patch of sagebrush, her boots crunching loudly in the crusty snow. Her fingers were already numb inside her woolen gloves. She found a bush, wrapped her hands around a branch, and pulled with all her might. Nothing happened. The plant seemed anchored to the very core of the earth. She tried again, slipping on the ice and falling to her knees.
“Here, let me show you,” a gentle voice said.
She looked up to see David McKenzie standing over her. He had a kind, open face, his cheeks reddened by the frost. He didn’t look at her with the suspicion or hostility she had grown to expect from men in uniform. He offered her a hand, pulling her to her feet, and then knelt beside the bush.
“You’re fighting the plant,” David said, demonstrating with his own gloved hands. “Don’t just pull straight up. You have to twist it down toward the root first, rock it back and forth, then snap it. Like this.” He twisted, rocked, and with a sharp crack, a large branch came free. He handed it to her. “Try it.”
Catherine took a deep breath, her chest aching from the cold air. She approached the next branch. She gripped it, pushed it down, rocked it side to side, and felt the tension give way. With a final twist, it snapped. She held the heavy, aromatic wood in her hands, a sudden, unexpected surge of pride washing over her.
“Good,” David smiled, a genuine, warm expression that made the freezing valley feel a little less hostile. “You’ll be an expert by sunset.”
Across the field, the other women were undergoing their own transformations. Ingred, who had been the most dismissive, was working with a furious, rhythmic efficiency, filling her burlap sack with single-minded focus. The physical labor, harsh as it was, provided a strange, meditative release. For months, they had been passive captives, waiting for their fates to be decided by generals and politicians across the globe. Now, with every branch they snapped, they were taking control of their own survival.
By late afternoon, the sled was piled high with bulging sacks of sagebrush. The women’s faces were flushed, their muscles aching, but as they marched back to the camp, the atmosphere had shifted. The feeling of humiliation had evaporated, replaced by a quiet, resilient solidarity.
That evening, a crowd gathered in the open space between the barracks. William McKenzie had set up a large, modified metal oil drum to act as an outdoor brazier. The women, the guards, and Major Hayes stood in a loose circle as the old rancher laid the twisted sagebrush branches inside and struck a match.
For a moment, there was only smoke—a thick, white cloud that carried the intense, clean scent of the high desert. Then, with a sudden whoosh, the oil in the wood caught. Bright, orange-yellow flames leapt into the night sky, crackling fiercely.
The transformation was immediate. A wave of intense, radiant heat washed over the circle. Catherine closed her eyes, feeling the warmth penetrate her frozen cheeks, her numbed toes, and her aching hands. It was a dry, roaring heat, far more immediate than the sluggish warmth of the coal radiators.
“She burns fast, so you have to keep feeding her,” McKenzie shouted over the crackle of the fire. “But she’ll keep you alive!”
Charlie Brennan appeared with a massive tin pot, pouring steaming, black coffee into metal tin cups. Catherine accepted a cup, her fingers wrapped around the hot metal. The coffee was incredibly strong and bitter, but as it slid down her throat, she felt the first genuine, deep warmth she had experienced since arriving in Colorado.
Looking around the fire, she saw Sergeant Mitchell laughing at a joke Charlie made. She saw Elsa Wagner talking quietly with William McKenzie, the old rancher listening intently to the older German woman’s words. The barriers of war, nationality, and propaganda seemed to melt away in the glow of the sagebrush fire. They were no longer captors and enemies; they were simply human beings huddled together against the brutal, unyielding winter.
As January bled into February, a fragile sense of normalcy settled over Camp Carson. The daily harvest of sagebrush became a ritual, a heartbeat that governed their existence. The barracks were kept warm, the stoves tended by shifts of women who took pride in keeping the fires alive.
The relationship between the camp and the local community deepened. David McKenzie and the other ranchers regularly visited, bringing not just survival tips, but an understanding of the land. They taught the women how to read the clouds coming over the peaks, how to identify animal tracks in the snow, and how resourcefulness, rather than sheer force, was the key to enduring the wilderness.
In the evenings, around the central fire, the camp became a place of cultural exchange. The women taught the guards traditional German folk songs; the guards tried, with comical results, to teach the women the steps of American swing dances. Catherine found herself talking for hours with David McKenzie during his visits. She learned about his family’s ranch, the generations that had carved a life out of the rocky soil. In turn, she spoke of Dresden, describing the beautiful baroque architecture, the museums, and the winding Elbe River.
But the warmth of the sagebrush fires could not keep the outside world away forever.
In the spring of 1945, the snows began to melt, revealing the muddy brown earth of the valley. And with the thaw came the news they had all known was coming. The radio in the administrative building announced the fall of Berlin. The war in Europe was over.
A few weeks later, the official notices arrived at the camp, posted on the barracks doors by Sergeant Mitchell. Repatriation was imminent. The prisoners of war were to be processed and returned to Germany.
Instead of joy, a profound, suffocating dread settled over the barracks. The letters from home, which had finally begun to trickle through the Red Cross, painted a picture of absolute horror. Germany was a landscape of apocalyptic ruin.
Helen Richter sat on her cot, clutching a piece of paper, her tears smudging the ink. “My parents…” she choked out, her voice breaking. “Their apartment in Cologne. It’s gone. An air raid in March. They can’t find my sister. There is nothing left. No house, no family, no food. What am I going to return to?”
Catherine knelt beside her, reading her own letters. Her beloved Dresden had been firebombed into ash. Her family was scattered, living in refugee camps in the countryside, facing starvation and typhus. The Germany they had left no longer existed. It was now a land of grief, ruins, and foreign occupation.
That night, the fire in the metal drum burned low. A small group of women—Catherine, Ingred, Helen, and Elsa—gathered in the shadows of the barracks, their voices hushed but intense.
“We cannot go back to that,” Helen whispered, her eyes wide with terror. “We will die of hunger, or worse. Here, we have found peace. We have found people who treat us like human beings.”
“But we are prisoners of war,” Ingred said, her practical nature asserting itself, though her voice lacked its usual certainty. “The law says we must be sent back. We don’t have a choice.”
Catherine looked out toward the dark silhouette of the mountains. She thought about William McKenzie, who had looked at a group of enemy soldiers and seen people worth saving. She thought about David, who had taught her how to bend and snap the sagebrush rather than break herself against it.
“We have a choice to ask,” Catherine said, her voice firming with a sudden, deep-seated resilience. She had learned English rapidly over the winter, practicing with David and the guards. “We can ask to stay. As displaced persons. As immigrants.”
“They will never allow it,” Elsa said softly. “We fought against them, Catherine.”
“The ranchers know us,” Catherine countered. “The community knows us. If we can find sponsors—people who will vouch for us, give us work, and a place to live—the government might listen. I will speak to Major Hayes.”
It was a bold, unprecedented move. The next morning, Catherine stood before Major Hayes’s desk. She did not wear the rigid stance of a prisoner, but the calm, steady posture of a woman who had survived the mountain winter. In clear, precise English, she laid out the request on behalf of twenty-four of the women.
Hayes listened in silence, his eyes tracing the map of Germany on his wall, then looking down at the paperwork detailing the devastation of Europe. He knew what awaited them over there. He had seen the reconnaissance photos.
“You realize what you’re asking, Miss Schroeder,” Hayes said, his voice heavy. “The legal status of a enemy combatant changing to an immigrant… it’s an administrative nightmare. Washington will fight it.”
“We survived the winter because your people showed us how to adapt, Major,” Catherine said, looking him in the eye. “We learned how to live on this land. We have no homes left in Germany. Let us help build homes here.”
Hayes sighed, a slow smile touching his lips. “You’ve gotten tough out here, haven’t you?” He leaned forward. “I will forward the petition to the State Department. But understand this: you will need American citizens to legally sponsor you. Families who will guarantee your housing and your livelihood so you aren’t a burden on the state. Without that, the paperwork is dead.”
The news spread through the valley like wildfire. What followed was a remarkable testament to the bonds that had been forged in the crucible of winter.
Mrs. Opel Brennan, Charlie’s wife, was the first to arrive at the camp gate. She was a formidable woman with a sharp tongue and a huge heart. She walked straight into Hayes’s office and signed the sponsorship papers for Helen Richter and another young girl, Anelise Weber.
“I need girls who know the value of hard work,” Opel declared to the camp. “Anyone who can harvest sagebrush in a blizzard can handle my kitchen and my dairy barn.”
Other local families followed. Ranchers, shopkeepers from the nearby town, and farmers stepped forward, offering jobs, spare rooms, and legal guarantees. The William McKenzie ranch, naturally, sponsored Catherine and Ingred.
The turning point arrived on June 20, 1945. The morning air was warm, smelling of pine and damp earth. Two transport buses stood in the camp courtyard.
The camp was divided. Thirty-nine of the women had chosen to return, desperate to find missing children, husbands, or parents amidst the ruins of Europe. The goodbyes were heartbreaking. Tears flowed freely as women who had shared barracks, rations, and the freezing cold embraced one another for the last time.
Catherine stood by the gate, watching the first bus pull away. Helen stood beside her, weeping softly, but holding the hand of Opel Brennan, who stood like a protective rock beside her. The women who were staying turned away from the dust of the departing buses, facing the open valley. They were no longer prisoners. Their uniforms were gone, replaced by simple civilian dresses provided by the townspeople. They were starting over, from absolute zero, in the heart of a country that had once been their enemy.
Twenty years later, in the summer of 1965, the heat in West Texas was a thick, shimmering blanket. Inside Leisel’s Hill Country Kitchen, the air conditioning hummed, a comforting counterpoint to the scorching sun outside.
Leisel Hartman McKenzie—known to her patrons simply as Leisel—stood behind the long wooden counter, wiping it down with a damp cloth. The restaurant was a vibrant, bustling reflection of her life’s journey. The menu on the wall was a unique culinary map: Texas chicken-fried steak and smoked brisket sat alongside traditional German potato salad, homemade sauerkraut, and delicate, golden schnitzel. It was a combination that had baffled local critics initially, but had eventually won the hearts of the entire county.
Her fifteen-year-old daughter, Margarete, was at the back booth, begrudgingly chopping a mountain of onions for the evening rush.
“Mama,” Margarete complained, wiping a tear from her cheek. “Why do we have to make everything from scratch? The diner down the road uses frozen stuff. It’s so much faster.”
Leisel stopped wiping the counter. She looked at her daughter, seeing so much of her own youth in the girl’s impatient eyes. She walked over to the booth, sat down opposite her, and reached into the small apron pocket she always wore. She pulled out a small, dried, gray-green sprig of a plant and laid it on the table between them.
Margarete looked at it. “What’s that? It smells like medicine.”
“It’s sagebrush,” Leisel said softly, her voice carrying the faint, pleasant lilt of a German accent softened by two decades of Texas drawl. “I kept it from the mountains up north, from Colorado.”
Margarete frowned. “The stuff you told me about? The POW camp?”
“Yes,” Leisel said, her eyes growing distant, looking past the neon signs of the restaurant into the snowy expanses of her memory. “When the coal ran out, we thought we were going to freeze to death. We were terrified, angry, and full of pride. But a wise old man—your late grandfather, Bill McKenzie—and his nephew David, they didn’t see us as enemies. They brought us out into the snow and showed us this plant. They taught us how to bend it, twist it, and make a fire that could keep the darkness away.”
She picked up the sprig, rubbing it between her fingers, releasing that sharp, clean, timeless scent into the Texas afternoon.
“I teach you to make things from scratch, Margarete, because resourcefulness is the only thing that truly makes you free,” Leisel said, looking intently into her daughter’s eyes. “When you know how to take what little the earth gives you, even when it looks dead and gray like this bush, and turn it into warmth and life… then you never have to be afraid of the winter again.”
Margarete looked at the sprig, then at her mother’s hands—hands that were smooth now, but bore the invisible, indelible strength of a survivor. She nodded quietly, picking up her knife, and went back to work with a renewed, focused rhythm.
Leisel stood up and walked to the front window of the restaurant. Outside, the Texas sun beat down on the wide expanse of the highway. Her life had been completely transformed. The frightened twenty-four-year-old auxiliary clerk from Dresden had vanished, replaced by a successful American businesswoman, a mother, and a pillar of her community.
She looked up at the blue sky, offering a silent, enduring thank you to the memory of old Bill McKenzie, to Major Hayes, and to all the ordinary people who, in the darkest depth of a world war, had chosen compassion over hatred. They had taught her that survival was not merely about keeping the heart beating; it was about holding onto one’s humanity, adapting to the terrain, and having the courage to grow anew in the ashes of the old world.
