Same same with Italian POWs in Southern California during the war. More than a few returned later to settle, start families and become American citizens.
A substantial number of the captured Hessian and other Germanic troops who fought over here for the British during the American Revolution either stayed, or returned after the war. David Hackett Fischer in his excellent Washington’s Crossing estimated the figure as being 30% or so IIRC.
As a lawyer with a strong interest in international law, I strongly disagree with this. Empirically, the vast majority of rules of international law are complied with the vast majority of the time. It’s international law that enables countries to have embassies in another country, or for exporters to sell products to customers in another country, or even for planes from one country to fly across the airspace of another and land in a third. People see, of course, the major violations of international law such as wars, but they ignore the many, many instances when the law works perfectly fine as a matter of course. Or, to bring up a comparison to another area: Murders and other crimes do happen, but that doesn’t make people doubt the validity, legitimacy and usefulness of the legal prohibition against them, or of the existence of criminal law in general.
They did. See the hilarious 1980s film A Private Function, starring Michael Palin and Maggie Smith, for a comedic take on it.
Maggie Smith at her most imperious:
“Gilbert! I think sexual intercourse is in order!”
My Paternal Grandmother told me there were German speakers where she grew up in Stuttgart, Arkansas.
Italian POWs in Arkansas rioted when given lard to cook with instead of olive oil.
It revolves around the lead-up to the Royal Wedding, which was Nov. 1947. Apparently to enforce meat rationing, all livestock had to be tracked. As I understand, the Labour Party beat Churchill in an election right after the war, but Churchill became prime minister again a few years later (1951) because among other reasons the Labour policies had still failed to eliminate rationing.
There are German speaking communities in many places in the U.S. which come mostly from immigrants in the 1800s. Pennsylvania Dutch is probably the most widely known, but there are many others, such as Texas German (Texasdeutsch), which comes from German immigrants in the 1800s, Plautdietsch, spoken by Russian Mennonites who immigrated mostly to Kansas in the late 1800s, Amish and Mennonites in Indiana who also speak Pennsylvania Dutch, and of course the Wisconsin immigrants mentioned by @Ulfreida.
I don’t know enough about it to know whether the group in Arkansas is related to the Russian Mennonites who speak Plautdietsch or not.
And yes, I had to look these up to get the spelling right. There’s no way that I could remember “Plautdietsch” off the top of my head, though Pennsylvania Dutch is also called “Dietsch” (I live in Pennsylvania - You don’t have to go too far from where I live to find convenience stores with horse and buggy parking).
I first learned of these from the youtube channel Feli from Germany, who, as the name implies, is literally from Germany, but now lives in the U.S. She has a couple of videos where she watches people speaking Pennsylvania Dutch and Texas German to see how well she can understand them.
When are the international police going to arrest Kim Jong Un? How about Putin? There’s no teeth in international law. It’s a voluntary system readily ignored when inconvenient.
The war came remarkably close to bankrupting the entire nation.
There were many cases where German POWs stayed in at least the U.S. and the U.K. after World War Il. I talked with someone once in England who had an interesting last name. I asked him about it. He said that his father was a German POW in England. He said that some of the German POWs weren’t even kept all day in a prison while in England during the war. Many of them were happy to be in England since things were so bad in Germany at that point. They spent their nights in prisons apparently and worked at certain jobs during the day, where they weren’t watched over carefully. This particular POW (the father of the person I spoke to) was allowed to leave the place where he worked and go to someplace nearly for their lunch. This POW would go to a nearby place to pick up food and then go to a nearby park to sit and eat. Afterwards he would go back to his workplace. This person said that one day his father went to sit down on a park bench in that park bench, where he asked the woman sitting at the other end of the bench if he could sit there too. The woman he was asking eventually became his wife. So a German POW in England met an English woman by chance and eventually married her.
This is such a romantic story that I insist that when you write the screenplay of a romantic comedy about it that I get a cut of the profits.
In the US, a good percentage of them file for disability benefits. 
Thank you all for your comments.
I had hoped to see some personal stories from those who were involved in battles, but I understand that many may not want to discuss what they experienced and felt.
For reference, my opinions, thoughts and questions are formed by having grown up during the Vietnam War, Civil Conflict? Especially during the scenes of soldiers being transported from the roof of the American Embassy and the hundreds or more Vietnamese being left behind.
I never fully understood, then and now, how we could withdraw after years of fighting for…well, whatever we were fighting for and just leave. MacArthur vowed to return to the Philippines and did.
If that’s what you want, I can share anecdotes of my two grandfathers, both of whom served on the German side in WW2.
Both of them were pretty much left to their own devices after the armistice of 8 May 1945; the German forces were disintegrating, and there was no organised effort to reintegrate them. My paternal grandfather was, IIRC, in Austria at the time of the armistice. From the anecdotes I’ve been told, he “was given by someone” (I’m not sure if the true story is that he stole, but that’s what I’ve been told) a bicycle and managed to ride on it from Austria to the region in Germany where he was originally from. He reunited with his family there and found a civilian job. Had to go through the denazification procedure a few years later but was never a prisoner of war.
My maternal grandfather was in Czechia at the time of the armistice. He managed to get civilian clothing and also tried to make his way into Germany, but was arrested by Czech militia and identified as a German. Luckily for him, they took him for a Wehrmacht (i.e., regular army) soldier, not the SS member that he was; there was a rule in the SS that men would get a tattoo with their service number and blood group, but owing to some failure of the bureaucracy he had never got that tattoo. So he was treated as a Wehrmacht prisoner, handed over by the Czech to the Soviets and was imprisoned in a POW camp in Poland for a year or so. Had he been identified as SS, he would certainly have received much harsher treatment. His then girlfriend, later wife, my grandmother, was less lucky; she worked as a secretary in a German army office on the Balkans during the war, got into Soviet captivity and spent four years in a coal mine in the Ural mountains before being repatriated the day before Christmas Eve 1949. That’s at least the story I’ve been told.
That “whatever we were fighting for” explains why we withdrew. We spent more than ten years in Vietnam and never had a clear strategy. It wasn’t like the Philippines where we had a clear goal of kicking the Japanese out. We couldn’t kick the Vietnamese out of Vietnam.
I knew a former German soldier who settled here after the war. He had been shipped to Idaho or somewhere to dig potatoes and got shipped to UK, landed at Tilbury, England in 1947. On landing, he was handed a cup of tea. “Hmm, not bad,” he thought. His home was in the Soviet zone and his family had got word to him that the Russians were shipping all returned PoWs off to Russia - especially if they had been in the Waffen SS, as he had. So he stayed. He was still officially classed as a prisoner for some years, until 1949, I think he said.
Many Italians also stayed after the war, they worked in the brickfields at Luton.
Unless I’m dramatically mistaken, the Foreign Legion is, and always has been all-volunteer. What happened if I read it right is that a lot of former Waffen SS soldiers basically avoided any sort of reckoning by joining up in the French Foreign Legion, and so did a lot of other former German soldiers. The French sent the Legion to Vietnam in 1946, so quite a few former Germans (and likely a lot of other WWII vets from other nations) fought there.
Oh, international law isn’t especially good at holding individuals to account. But that’s not really its point. It’s only very recently that this was even contemplated, and it’s still a pretty marginal topic in international law. International law is mainly about relations between states, and it mainly holds states to account. North Korea is an international pariah, beset by sanctions on all sides. That’s a product of international law at work.
Volunteers yes, but heavily prompted: staying in a barren land with barbed wires before going to a home now razed, family killed and in Russian occupation zone or signing up for 3 hot meals, heated rooms and better sanitation?