"Soldaten wie andere auch" means Soldiers like the others. Years ago I learned that a fellow employee's father had been a Latvian volunteer under German military command. Captured in Italy during 1944, the father finished the war in prison camp at Fort Dix NJ. He secured sponsorship from a citizen (much like the German POW you mentioned), moved to Oswego NY and began life over again as an American. His son came to Alabama for work, heard my stories about the Civil War and fell in love with the state's history. At last contact he had moved to Brewton and was eagerly digging into the past of Escambia County AL.

For what it's worth, his mother was captured and brought here as well. She was a translator in a Latvian refugee camp outside Dresden when it was the USAAF bombed and destroyed that city in February 1945. While far short of the 250,000 dead claimed shortly afterwards, more people died in the attack on Dresden than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

To return to topic, people tend to demonize all enemy soldiers, particularly when atrocities are attributed to any of them. Only a few were involved in incidents like the executions on Buck Island, but people in northeast Alabama commonly associated their neighbors who enlisted in Federal service with these outrages.

For those unfamiliar with what happened on Buck Island, here's a 2006 post on this message board about this sad incident --
http://history-sites.com/cgi-bin/bbs53x/alcwmb/arch_config.pl?noframes;read=22249