The German POW Freidrich Albert (left) worked in the kitchen and wooed nurse Elinor Powell (right) with secretly made wiener schnitzel and apple strudel.
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.
But Friedrich Albert had it right: Elinor Powell was the girl of his jazz-drenched dreams. Their secret romance began, for her, as a rebellion against the segregated Army’s racism — and deepened into a passion that overcame both war and prejudice. “Enemies in Love” (New Press), by journalist Alexis Clark, tells their story.
“I think I stayed angry most of my Army career,” Elinor said years later. “Going into a completely segregated situation was constantly a shock for me.
It was 1944 when both of them arrived at Camp Florence in a remote area of southern Arizona. Friedrich, a Luftwaffe medic who had been captured in Italy, was one of the 370,000 German fighters shipped to 600 work camps in the US as the war raged in Europe.
Elinor grew up in a mostly white but racially tolerant Boston suburb, where her family — including a grandmother who escaped slavery as a teen and came north via the Underground Railroad — were respected local leaders.
Before raising a family in Connecticut after the war, Elinor was a frustrated nurse and Friedrich a nicked-up German medic.
She seethed over her assignment to tend the foreign prisoners. Army policy barred nearly all black nurses from prestigious work in the war’s overseas theaters.
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.
When Friedrich taught a baking class in a camp-recreation program, Elinor was the first to sign up. They made eyes at each other while kneading dough for bauernbrot and brötchen.
Encouraged, he volunteered to work at the camp hospital as a translator. Harried higher-ups never noticed how often he managed to sneak off with 2nd Lt. Powell for kisses and caresses in a quiet stairwell. “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.
What might have been a passing — if risky — fling continued for more than a year, as Germany surrendered, atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and diplomats drew up peace plans.
The lovers were never exposed, even when Friedrich was caught leaving the prisoners’ barracks for a late-night rendezvous. The guards shaved his head and beat him but didn’t find out where he had been going.
No German POW could win a visa and remain in the United States. There was only one path to a postwar reunion, they decided: Friedrich must father Elinor’s American child.
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.
“You are a part of me,” he wrote her during their yearlong separation. “I need you terribly.”
Their plan worked: With baby Stephen’s birth certificate, Friedrich got his visa. On June 26, 1947, days after his return to the US, he and Elinor married in New York City. He changed his name to “Frederick” to signal the start of his new American life.
But making a home in a bigoted society turned out to be even harder than carrying on their forbidden romance. Over the next decade, they made countless moves across two continents in search of a community to welcome their mixed-race family, which soon included a second son, Chris.
In Boston, one landlord after another evicted them — some would-be neighbors objected to living near an ex-Nazi soldier; others could not bear a black woman next door. In Pennsylvania, Stephen was forced into a segregated elementary school despite state laws outlawing them. In Göttingen, Germany, where Frederick worked in his father’s new brick-making business, his mother’s racism drove them away. “How come Frika couldn’t marry someone white?” she railed.
At last they found Village Creek, a consciously integrated neighborhood in Norwalk, Conn., and settled down with their children.
Frederick transformed his trade in captivity into a career. He became a vice president at Pepperidge Farm, in charge of its experimental kitchen. One of its signature products was the apple-pie tart — an echo of the special strudels he created for Elinor decades before.
The Alberts remained in their Connecticut home until Frederick’s death in 2001 at age 75. Elinor succumbed to cancer, aged 84, in 2005. “They loved each other deeply until the day they died,” son Chris said.
Chris grew up to be a respected trumpeter who toured the world with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Music, he says, was the thread that bound him to his father. “That lack of warmth he felt growing up, he found it in jazz and when he saw my mother.”
