The secret romance of a black Army nurse and Nazi POW
One glance, and the young soldier was spellbound. He strode across the mess hall and locked eyes with a regal woman in a nurse’s uniform. “You should know my name,” he said. “I’m the man who’s goin…
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The secret romance of a black Army nurse and Nazi POW
One glance, and the young soldier was spellbound. He strode across the mess hall and locked eyes with a regal woman in a nurse’s uniform.
“You should know my name,” he said. “I’m the man who’s going to marry you.”
She nearly laughed aloud: a Nazi prisoner of war and an African-American US Army officer in the middle of World War II? Ridiculous.
Friedrich came from cosmopolitan Vienna, the only son of a well-to-do but emotionally cold family. His parents gave him a fine education — he spoke fluent English — but little attention. He drew comfort from jazz music, especially the sultry sounds of New Orleans, and adored singers Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. For him, the tall, curvaceous Elinor was everything he imagined an American woman to be.
He wooed her with treats from the camp kitchen, where he worked as a cook. He would deliver a specially made apple strudel to her with a wink; she would theatrically blow him a kiss to get a laugh from other nurses at the table. He hoarded ingredients to make her wiener schnitzel
when everyone else got meatloaf.
“I could tell she was falling in love,” recalled Gwyneth Blessit Moore, another nurse at the camp. “The way she looked — we all knew.” An affair with an inmate could have gotten Elinor court-martialed. The nurses’ sisterhood kept her secret safe.
They finally consummated
their love on an operating table in an unused surgical theater between procedures. With access to the hospital schedule, Elinor could strategically choose an empty room.Just before he boarded a ship back to Europe in April 1946, they conceived a son. Elinor hid her pregnancy through her final months of Army service, then returned to Massachusetts to give birth.
