I met one of these German POWs while hitchhiking across Germany in 1973. He was a Lutheran minister who learned his English near Dallas. He said the day he was captured was the happiest day of his life, including the birth of his son. He knew he would live. He didn't mention Texas Jim Crow segregation. As a naive 18 year old, it didn't occur to me to ask, though I had a mother who had deliberately sat in the back of the streetcar in New Orleans in 1946, attracting hostile stares from the local white passengers up front.