At 3:47 p.m. on September 21, 1945, Sergeant Reinhold Pabell walked away from a farm work detail near Washington, Illinois. In his pocket he carried $10.20 in American currency. He wore a pair of khaki prison trousers he had dyed blue with ink from a camp library. He was a German prisoner of war, a veteran of the Eastern Front and the Italian campaign, and he had decided that he would not return to Germany.
The guards at the small subsidiary camp would not notice his absence until the evening count. By then, Pabell would already be on a bus to Chicago. What neither the guards nor federal authorities realized was that this former seminary student had spent months preparing for his disappearance. He intended not merely to escape, but to remain.
Reinhold Pabell had been born in Germany and had studied for the priesthood at the University of Münster before the outbreak of war. He was educated and fluent in German, English, and Russian. When hostilities began, he served as a sergeant in the 115th Panzer Grenadiers, attached to Hitler’s First Army. His first major assignment took him to Ukraine on the Eastern Front, where attrition was relentless and entire units vanished in weeks. He survived months of brutal winter combat before being transferred in 1943 to the Italian theater.
The Italian campaign offered no relief. During an American advance, Pabell was leading his men through irrigation canals when he was shot while attempting to cross a dam. The wound bled heavily. Believing he was dying, he crawled toward an American aid station, hoping only to reach shelter before losing consciousness.
There he encountered an American lieutenant, Paul D. Lindsay, who treated his wound and saved his life. During the procedure, the two men spoke. Lindsay knew some German; Pabell spoke English. They discovered that both had once studied theology. The exchange lasted less than half an hour, yet it left a lasting impression on both men.
After recovering in American custody, Pabell was transported across the Atlantic to the United States in 1944 and assigned to Camp Grant in Illinois. The camp housed approximately 2,500 German prisoners, many from the Afrika Korps captured in North Africa. Pabell expected harsh treatment. On the Eastern Front, he had seen how German forces handled Soviet prisoners—starvation, beatings, and lethal forced labor.
Instead, he was served white bread. In wartime Germany, white bread was rare and associated with privilege. At Camp Grant it was routine. He was given vanilla ice cream for dessert, and he watched another prisoner weep upon tasting it. Corn on the cob, unfamiliar to many Germans except as livestock feed, was offered with butter and salt. At first, some prisoners suspected mockery. Once they tasted it, suspicion gave way to astonishment.
Meals included cake and grapes. After months of deprivation on the Eastern Front, Pabell found himself eating better as a prisoner than he had as a German soldier. The scale of American abundance unsettled him. The United States could feed enemy combatants with food that German civilians struggled to obtain.
Transportation was equally striking. Prisoners were moved by train in upholstered passenger coaches. In Europe, Pabell had ridden in cattle cars and open freight wagons. Now, as a captive, he traveled in relative comfort.
Camp Grant bore little resemblance to the prison camps he had known. Barracks were clean and heated. Each prisoner had a bunk with a mattress and blankets. Meals were taken at tables with plates and utensils. There were recreation areas, musical programs, and a library stocked with books in German and English.
Prisoners could volunteer for work details and earn $0.80 per day in canteen coupons. The labor—farm work, canneries, even shifts at the Quaker Oats factory in Rockford—was physically demanding but far removed from combat. Local farmers often treated the prisoners with unexpected courtesy. Some residents brought cookies and lemonade during breaks.
Pabell volunteered for every work detail available. He wanted to observe America beyond the camp fence. He saw mechanized agriculture on a scale unfamiliar in Germany—tractors, combines, and harvesters enabling one man to cultivate vast acreage. He enrolled in correspondence courses offered through the camp, studying Russian and Persian. The American administration provided textbooks without charge.
At night he studied languages. By day he worked. In spare hours he carved small wooden replicas of German military decorations—Iron Crosses and insignia—which he sold to guards and visitors. They paid in American dollars, not camp coupons. He saved every dollar, unsure at first what he was preparing for, but convinced he would need American currency.
When Germany surrendered in May 1945, relief among the prisoners mingled with dread. Letters from home described devastation. Cities were rubble. Food was scarce. Occupation zones divided the country. Pabell received a letter in July from his mother. She was living in the shell of their house. His father was missing. His brother had been killed in 1944. His sister was in a refugee camp. The letter spoke of hunger, disease, and uncertainty. His mother urged him not to return.
That night, he decided he would not go back.
During his year in America, he had observed something he believed did not exist in prewar Germany: mobility. Farmers who had begun with nothing owned productive land. Guards spoke casually of men who rose through effort and fortune. In Germany, social position felt fixed. In the United States, it appeared fluid.
To escape from Camp Grant itself would be difficult. The camp was heavily guarded and located in a populated region. But the subsidiary camps—smaller work detachments—were lightly secured. In August 1945, Pabell volunteered for a long-term farm detail near Washington, Illinois. The camp housed approximately 40 prisoners, supervised by two guards and enclosed by a single fence.
He prepared carefully. He dyed his trousers blue. He studied bus routes and train schedules from newspapers in the camp library. He memorized the distance to Chicago: 53 mi. A bus ticket cost $5. He had saved $10.20.
On September 21, 1945, during a hot and uneventful afternoon, he walked away. He followed a farm road, then crossed fields to reach a county road. After 2 hours, a farmer stopped and offered him a ride. When asked his origin, he replied, “Poland.” In Illinois, that explanation required no further elaboration.
Dropped in Washington at 6:30 p.m., he purchased a bus ticket to Chicago. At 7:15 p.m., he boarded. As farmland gave way to city lights, he watched the horizon glow. Chicago, with more than 3 million residents, offered anonymity unimaginable in his hometown of 15,000.
The bus arrived downtown at 9:43 p.m. He stepped into the city with $5.20 remaining. He wandered until he reached Grant Park, where he slept beneath a bush near Lake Michigan. He had escaped, but he possessed no legal identity.
At dawn on September 22, he bought coffee and toast for $0.30. In the vastness of Chicago, he discovered something critical: invisibility. In a city that size, strangers passed without scrutiny.
He chose a name: Philip Brick. Common and forgettable.
He went to a Social Security office downtown. When asked for his name, he replied, “Philip Brick.” He provided a birth date—August 12, 1920—and a birthplace—Chicago, Illinois. The clerk handed him a form and instructed him to fill it out. No documentation was requested. He listed a street address he had seen on a sign. The form was stamped and filed.
Philip Brick now existed on paper.
With less than $5, he sought employment. After unsuccessful attempts downtown, he found a diner on Clark Street seeking a dishwasher. The owner, Margaret, hired him at $3 per day, 6 days a week, plus one meal per shift.
He rented a small boarding house room for $4 per week. He ate one meal daily at the diner and survived on bread and coffee otherwise. By December 1945, he had saved $60.
Seeking higher wages, he responded to an advertisement for a bookstore clerk in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. The owner, Mr. Harrison, 73 years old, required assistance organizing his chaotic inventory. Pabell’s university education and fluency in three languages proved valuable. He reorganized the store by subject and author, identified foreign-language titles, and improved sales.
In June 1946, Harrison offered to sell the store for $500. Pabell had $420. He paid $300 upfront and agreed to remit the remainder over 6 months. Philip Brick became a business owner.
By the end of 1946, the store generated $30 to $40 per week in profit. He moved to a better apartment and purchased new clothes. In early 1947, he met a customer named Betty while assisting her in locating a first edition of Ernest Hemingway. They began meeting for coffee. They married in September 1947. In 1948, their son Robert was born.
By then, Reinhold Pabell—the German sergeant—had been replaced by Philip Brick, Chicago bookseller.
Yet the Federal Bureau of Investigation had not abandoned its search. Of 2,883 German prisoners who escaped from camps in the United States during the war, nearly all had been recaptured quickly. By 1950, six remained at large. The FBI maintained active case files on each.
The Social Security discrepancy eventually surfaced. No birth record existed for Philip Brick in Chicago. In 1952, a routine audit triggered investigation. Surveillance led agents to the Uptown bookstore.
On March 14, 1953, two FBI agents entered the store. One drew his weapon and asked, “You’re Reinhold Pabell, aren’t you?”
After 9 years of deception, he did not deny it.
He was arrested and charged with violating immigration and detention laws. Newspapers reported the story nationally: a German prisoner of war had lived undetected in Chicago for nearly a decade, building a business and family.
The prosecution sought deportation. The defense argued that aside from the escape itself, he had committed no crimes. He had paid taxes, registered for the draft under his assumed name, and lived peacefully.
Then Paul D. Lindsay appeared in court.
Now a lawyer in Dallas, Lindsay testified that Pabell had once saved his life during a German counterattack in Italy by diverting a patrol away from the wounded American officer. The testimony reframed the narrative. Pabell was not merely an escaped prisoner but a man who had shown humanity in war.
Neighbors and customers attested to his character. The court faced a dilemma: the law had been violated, yet the defendant had integrated fully into American life.
A compromise emerged. Pabell would be deported to Germany for 6 months. Thereafter, he would be permitted to immigrate legally and return to his family.
In August 1953, he departed for Germany. He found a nation rebuilding from ruin. After 6 months, he returned legally through Ellis Island in February 1954. Betty and Robert awaited him.
He resumed operation of the bookstore and in 1960 became a naturalized United States citizen. In 1955, he published a memoir titled Enemies Are Human, recounting his wartime experience, escape, and transformation. The book argued that individuals could choose humanity even amid conflict.
He ran the bookstore for another 30 years, living quietly as a husband, father, and grandfather.
Reinhold Pabell died on May 27, 2008, at age 87. His obituary noted his service in the German army, his imprisonment, his escape, and his long career as a Chicago bookseller.
Of the 2,883 German prisoners who escaped American camps during World War II, he alone remained free long enough to build a lasting life before being discovered. His story was not merely one of evasion, but of reinvention.
He had entered the United States as an enemy soldier. He left it, decades later, as a citizen.
The legal proceedings that followed Reinhold Pabell’s arrest in March 1953 exposed a tension at the heart of postwar America. On paper, the facts were clear. He had been a prisoner of war at Camp Grant in Illinois. He had walked away from a work detail in September 1945. He had assumed a false identity, obtained a Social Security card under fabricated information, and lived for 9 years as Philip Brick, a Chicago businessman.
Yet the man standing in the courtroom did not resemble a fugitive in the conventional sense. He was married to an American woman, the father of a young son, the owner of a bookstore known and respected in his neighborhood. He had paid taxes. He had registered for the draft during the postwar years. He had broken no law other than the escape itself and the falsification of identity required to sustain it.
The prosecution framed the case in terms of legal principle. Pabell had been an enemy combatant lawfully detained. By escaping, he had violated the terms of his imprisonment. By remaining in the country under an assumed name, he had subverted immigration law. To allow him to stay without consequence, they argued, would undermine the rule of law and set a dangerous precedent.
The defense approached the matter differently. They did not deny the escape. Instead, they emphasized conduct after the fact. For nearly a decade, Pabell had lived peacefully and productively. He had harmed no one. He had demonstrated industry, responsibility, and commitment to his adopted community. Deportation, they argued, would punish not merely a former prisoner but a husband, father, and employer whose life was now intertwined with American society.
The appearance of Paul D. Lindsay altered the emotional tenor of the trial. Lindsay, once the lieutenant who had treated Pabell’s wound in Italy, now a practicing attorney, testified under oath that during a German counterattack near the aid station, Pabell had diverted a patrol away from Lindsay’s concealed position, likely saving his life. This act of wartime humanity complicated any simple narrative of enemy and ally.
Newspaper coverage reflected the ambiguity. Some editorials insisted that the law must be upheld regardless of personal sympathy. Others described the case as a test of American magnanimity in victory. The paradox was widely noted: Pabell had entered the United States legally as a prisoner of war. He had not crossed a border clandestinely. His offense lay in refusing repatriation and assuming an identity that allowed him to remain.
The presiding judge faced a choice between rigid enforcement and measured discretion. Ultimately, a compromise was negotiated. Pabell would be deported to Germany for a period of 6 months. After that interval, he would be permitted to apply for lawful immigration and return to the United States under proper documentation.
In August 1953, he left Chicago for Germany. The departure was not a triumph but an interlude. The country he returned to was no longer the shattered landscape described in his mother’s 1945 letter. Reconstruction was underway. Rubble had been cleared from many city centers. Industry was reemerging under Allied supervision. The outlines of what would become West Germany’s economic recovery were visible.
He visited his mother, who had survived the worst postwar years. He located his sister. They regarded him with a mixture of recognition and distance. He dressed differently now. His habits had changed. Even his German carried subtle shifts in rhythm and pronunciation. In their eyes, he was no longer entirely German. The years in America had altered him.
The 6 months passed. In February 1954, he reentered the United States legally, processing through immigration authorities at Ellis Island. This time he bore authentic documentation. Betty and their son Robert met him upon arrival. The temporary rupture closed, and he resumed the life that had been suspended rather than erased.
In 1955, he published a memoir titled Enemies Are Human. The book recounted his experiences as a German soldier, his wounding in Italy, his time as a prisoner of war in the United States, his escape, and his years under the name Philip Brick. Its central theme was not defiance but reconciliation. He wrote that individuals are not reducible to the governments they serve and that acts of kindness can persist even amid war.
The book received moderate attention. Major newspapers reviewed it. Academic circles discussed its implications for postwar reconciliation. Some veterans’ organizations objected to the publication, arguing that a former enemy combatant should not profit from his escape. Others defended him, interpreting his story as evidence of the integrative capacity of American society.
Pabell did not seek public prominence thereafter. He returned to his bookstore in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood and devoted himself to its operation. The shop, once cluttered and disorganized, had become known for its thoughtful arrangement and carefully curated inventory. He cultivated relationships with estate sale companies and acquired private libraries in bulk. Customers came not only to purchase books but to seek recommendations and conversation.
Betty managed accounts and ordering. Their partnership sustained both the business and the household. Robert grew up above the store, surrounded by shelves of literature in multiple languages. The life Pabell had constructed under false pretenses became, after 1954, legally and socially legitimate.
In 1960, he was naturalized as a United States citizen. The transformation was complete in law as well as in practice. The former sergeant of the 115th Panzer Grenadiers now held the rights and responsibilities of the nation that had once held him captive.
Over the ensuing decades, he witnessed the unfolding of American history: the Korean War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Cold War’s long tension. He had once worn the uniform of Nazi Germany; now he observed American political debate and social change as a participant rather than an outsider. Those who knew him as Phil Brick, the bookseller, seldom connected the quiet, courteous proprietor with the young soldier who had crossed the Eastern Front.
Reinhold Pabell died on May 27, 2008, at the age of 87. His obituary recounted his wartime service, his imprisonment, his escape, and his decades in Chicago. Yet those who attended his funeral spoke less about the escape and more about the bookstore—the conversations held within it, the recommendations given, the sense of community it fostered.
After his death, the bookstore closed. Betty, unable to manage it alone, sold the inventory and retired. The building on Clark Street remained, though under new ownership and a different purpose. In the neighborhood’s memory, however, Phil Brick endured.
Among the 2,883 German prisoners of war who escaped from camps in the United States during World War II, nearly all were recaptured within days. A few lasted weeks. Only Pabell remained free long enough to establish a family, a business, and a public identity that endured for nearly a decade before discovery.
His case raised enduring questions. What is owed to former enemies who surrender and demonstrate change? How should a nation balance the enforcement of law with the recognition of transformation? At what point does punishment cease to serve justice?
The American government could have imposed permanent deportation. It could have treated him solely as a fugitive combatant. Instead, it chose a limited sanction followed by legal reintegration. That decision reflected not absolution of his wartime service but acknowledgment of the life he had built thereafter.
Pabell’s own interpretation, articulated in his memoir, was that war distorts individuals, but does not wholly define them. He had once prepared for the priesthood. War had interrupted that path and redirected him toward violence and survival. In America, he believed he had been given the opportunity to reclaim a version of himself not entirely shaped by the battlefield.
The simplicity of his escape—walking away from a field in rural Illinois with $10.20—contrasted with the complexity of what followed. The act itself required opportunity and preparation. The years afterward required persistence, discipline, and adaptation.
He did not become American through birth or through the ordinary immigration process. He became American through labor, integration, and eventually through lawful recognition. The transformation was gradual, contested, and incomplete until formalized in citizenship.
In the end, his story was neither a tale of cunning alone nor merely of indulgent mercy. It was the account of a man who seized an opening at a moment of upheaval and constructed a new existence from it. The legal system ultimately confronted the irregularity and resolved it within the framework of postwar reconciliation.
The German prisoner who walked away in 1945 died more than 60 years later as an American citizen, remembered primarily for the bookstore he ran and the community he served. His life traced an arc from soldier of a defeated regime to participant in the civic life of his former enemy.
That arc, rather than the escape itself, defined his legacy.
In the decades after his return to the United States in 1954, Reinhold Pabell—legally restored to the country he had once entered as a prisoner—rarely revisited the circumstances of his escape except when asked. The notoriety of his case faded as postwar America turned its attention to new conflicts and domestic transformations. In Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, he was known not as a former German sergeant, but as Phil Brick, the proprietor of a used bookstore whose quiet manner and encyclopedic knowledge of literature drew a loyal clientele.
The store became a fixture of the community. Shelves were arranged by subject and author, a system he had implemented during his first months of employment under Mr. Harrison. Foreign-language volumes, once neglected, were cataloged carefully. Estate libraries were acquired and redistributed. Students from nearby schools browsed for affordable texts. Collectors searched for rare editions. Conversations unfolded across the counter about philosophy, history, and poetry.
Betty managed the accounts and correspondence. Their son, Robert, grew up among stacks of books and the rhythms of retail life. For customers, the store offered more than merchandise; it offered continuity in a neighborhood that experienced steady change through the 1960s and 1970s.
Pabell became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1960, an act that symbolically completed a transformation begun years earlier. Citizenship formalized what daily life had already made evident: his allegiance, livelihood, and family were rooted in America. He paid taxes, voted, and participated in civic life. The identity once constructed out of necessity—Philip Brick—had become legally inseparable from the man who first assumed it.
His memoir, Enemies Are Human, published in 1955, continued to circulate modestly. Its title captured the argument he believed his life illustrated: that individuals are capable of moral choice even when nations are locked in violent struggle. He did not deny his service in the German army, nor did he excuse the crimes of the regime under which he had fought. Instead, he emphasized personal encounters—an American lieutenant who saved his life, a German soldier who spared an enemy, a court that weighed law against mercy.
Some readers found the message unsettling. The memory of war remained vivid in the 1950s. Others regarded the book as a testament to reconciliation in a world divided by the emerging Cold War. In academic discussions about postwar rehabilitation and the treatment of prisoners of war, his case was occasionally cited as an example of successful reintegration.
He never sought celebrity from the episode. Interviews were rare. When asked about the escape itself, he described it as less dramatic than it appeared in headlines. The decisive element, he maintained, had not been the walk from the farm field, but the years of labor afterward. Survival required anonymity at first, then credibility. A false name alone could not sustain a life; only work and reliability could.
The FBI agents who had arrested him in 1953 had confronted a man who no longer fit the profile of a fugitive. That dissonance—between legal violation and lived conduct—had shaped the court’s compromise. In retrospect, the 6-month deportation and lawful return marked the transition from concealment to acknowledgment. After 1954, there was no pretense. Reinhold Pabell and Philip Brick were the same person in public record as well as private understanding.
As decades passed, the war receded into history. Veterans aged. Camps such as Camp Grant were dismantled or repurposed. The subsidiary camp near Washington, Illinois, where he had once decided to walk away, became an obscure footnote in local memory. The number 2,883—German prisoners who had escaped from camps across the United States during World War II—remained a statistical curiosity. Of those men, most were recaptured swiftly. A handful evaded detection for short periods. Only Pabell managed to remain free long enough to establish a family and enterprise before discovery.
His death on May 27, 2008, at age 87, closed a life that had spanned imperial Germany, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, postwar reconstruction, and more than half a century of American citizenship. Obituaries recounted his wartime service, imprisonment, escape, and bookstore. Those who attended his funeral spoke of a neighbor and merchant rather than a former enemy soldier.
After his passing, Betty sold the bookstore’s inventory and retired. The building on Clark Street changed occupants. The shelves that once held German philosophy, Russian literature, and American novels were cleared. Yet the memory of the shop endured among long-time residents. For them, Phil Brick was part of the neighborhood’s fabric.
His son Robert, by then in his 70s and living in California, carried forward a family history shaped by concealment and revelation. The grandchildren grew up aware that their grandfather’s life had included chapters far removed from their own experience.
In retrospect, the central question of his story was not how he evaded capture for 9 years, but how he constructed permanence from contingency. The United States had offered him humane treatment as a prisoner of war—adequate food, shelter, education, and work. He interpreted that treatment not merely as policy, but as evidence of a society different from the one he had left. Whether that perception was idealized or accurate, it shaped his decision.
He had once studied theology and philosophy, disciplines concerned with human nature and moral agency. War had redirected him toward violence and survival. America, as he experienced it in captivity and afterward, provided a context in which he believed reinvention was possible. His life became an experiment in that belief.
The government’s decision to allow his lawful return after deportation reflected another dimension of postwar America: a willingness, in certain circumstances, to temper punishment with pragmatism. The law had been upheld—he was deported. Yet the possibility of legal immigration acknowledged that individuals could change and contribute.
Reinhold Pabell’s story cannot be separated from the larger history of World War II, nor from the regime under which he initially served. He had fought as a soldier in Hitler’s army. He had participated in campaigns marked by devastation and atrocity. That past remained part of his biography. At the same time, his later conduct demonstrated a different set of choices.
The man who walked away from a work detail in September 1945 did so with $10.20 and a pair of dyed trousers. He entered Chicago alone and without legal identity. What followed was not merely evasion, but construction: of a business, a marriage, a fatherhood, and eventually a citizenship.
His life invites reflection on the boundaries between enemy and neighbor, punishment and mercy, identity and reinvention. It illustrates that the aftermath of war extends beyond treaties and trials into the quieter realm of personal transformation.
When he died, he was remembered primarily not as a fugitive prisoner of war, but as a bookseller. That distinction—between the role he once occupied and the one by which he was finally known—defined the arc of his life.
The escape itself was a single act on a September afternoon. The life that followed was the true measure of what that act set in motion.
