Captured. Detained, Enslaved
REMY, STEVEN P.
Captured, Detained, Enslaved Given Up for Dead: America's POWs in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga By Flint Whitlock Westview. 283 pp. $26.00. Reviewed by Steven P. Remy Associate...
...Unwilling or unable to talk about their experiences for many years, the Berga internees would, the author notes, "remain prisoners of the Nazis...
...Both authors place the commuted sentences in the broader context of the accelerating Cold War and intense German resentment over war crimes trials...
...Not surprisingly, there were several attempts at escape and sabotage...
...Whitlock describes the behavior of the guards as generally sadistic, their brutality punctuated by random acts of kindness, such as proffering a little extra food...
...Like most of the roughly 100,000 Americans taken by the Germans during the War, they were held in POW camps and treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions...
...I considered five years' imprisonment for Merz to be an adequate sentence...
...The reader must trudge through 100 pages of background to the Battle of the Bulge and Operation Nordwind, and endure a number of wince-inducing sentences: "No matter where on the maps he looked, the German chancellor saw that his Reich— the empire he had created with nothing but his own indomitable will—was crumbling...
...The Americans were held in an auxiliary facility, Berga 2, overseen by the SS...
...Their lawyers apparently succeeded in convincing the court on appeal that they had behaved humanely...
...Photographs (taken by the author) of the original camp site and its environs are surprisingly effective at evoking a terrible past barely submerged beneath present-day normality...
...The Berga GIs were assigned to a slave labor force digging a series of tunnels for a protected oil-shale facility...
...As the guards ordered them to identify themselves, the dog tag quandary revived...
...At the beginning of April the Berga prisoners— now numbering 280—were being moved south along the German-Czechoslovak border in an apparent "death march...
...It was widely believed that anyone with an ?," signifying "Hebrew," could suffer the gravest consequences if captured by the Germans...
...Whitlock's efforts at rescuing this story from relative obscurity are certainly praiseworthy...
...Third Army...
...officials for "forgetting" Berga's victims is understandable, but Germans—both West and East—must share a good portion of the blame...
...Two of the principal ones—Ludwig Merz and Erwin Metz—were captured and tried as war criminals in September 1946...
...Their ordeal began in January 1945, when the Germans singled out Jews from among the hundreds of POWs being held in Stalag IX-B in Bad Orb, near Frankfurt...
...General George S. Patton's Third Army was advancing rapidly eastward...
...Disease steadily claimed lives, while the work, cold, lice, hunger, and other deprivations made daily existence almost unbearable...
...He has added new material to Bard's account of Berga in Forgotten Victims, and to Charles Guggenheim's 2003 PBS documentary Berga: Soldiers of Another War...
...Whitlock recounts in detail the prisoners' survival strategies—both physical and psychological...
...That Lucius Clay, the American Military Governor, was willing to believe such falsehoods was revealed in a letter to the outraged father of one of the Berga prisoners who had died in the camp...
...This was a political calculation made by American officials like Clay and emergent West German leaders, above all Konrad Adenauer...
...Its memory was submerged, along with the Nazis' crimes against the Jews, in the official narrative of Soviet suffering at the hands of the "Fascists...
...In Given Up for Dead, Flint Whitlock tells the story of 350 GIs, a disproportionate third of them Jewish, who were imprisoned roughly 50 miles east of Weimar at the Berga concentration camp...
...Some turned to suicide...
...Most notably, he has tracked down and interviewed some of the last surviving Berga prisoners...
...During the final two German offensives of the War— the Battle of the Bulge and Operation Nordwind—several thousand American soldiers were captured...
...On April 22,1945, the surviving prisoners, having reached the town of Rotz, were liberated by the 11th Armored Division of the U.S...
...Whitlock, like Mitchell G. Bard in his Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler's Camps (1994), conveys the sense of betrayal Jewish GIs felt when their suffering went unrecognized by the U.S...
...The story of American prisoners of war is no longer "untold," though the appellation continues to appear on the covers of some books...
...His principal contribution is to recount—often in graphic detail— their personal agony...
...Fears that special treatment would befall Jewish soldiers captured by the Germans proved to be justified...
...The Berga prisoners, however, shared the fate of many European Jews, Slavs, Soviet POWs, and political prisoners: They were made slave laborers...
...The lot of the sadistic Berga guards is sad and familiar...
...Whitlock's indignation at U.S...
...They contend, I think correctly, that winning the allegiance of a population that supported Hitler to the very end was viewed as necessary to building a stable liberal democracy in postwar West Germany and insuring its ties to the anti-Soviet bloc...
...Nor does he adequately address the question of why the Germans went to the trouble of selecting what was a comparatively small number of Jewish GIs for slave labor...
...The ordeal was relatively short-lived...
...His discussion of the postwar trials is cursory...
...For the grim purpose of providing appropriate burial information, all soldiers were asked to indicate their faith...
...In fact," Whitlock points out, "very few of the ex-POWs even knew that the trials had taken place until many years later," although many of them could have been witnesses...
...But lost in the author's narrative is the larger picture...
...government...
...Berga was part of the German Democratic Republic for 40 years, and the East German dictatorship did not memorialize the camp...
...Despite the lack of survivor testimony, the two guards were sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted and both were freed by the mid-1950s...
...Along the way, some of the men held a memorial service for Franklin D. Roosevelt after a German officer informed them that the President had died...
...Nevertheless, if the "forgetting" of Berga was a casualty of the Cold War, the fault does not lie entirely with American and West German politicians...
...Moreover, they wished to show they were as loyal and courageous as anyone else, thus defying a signal feature of the pervasive anti-Semitism of 1930s America...
...But most Jewish GIs, whether native born or German and Austrian refugees drafted in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, felt that not specifying their true heritage would amount to a form of betrayal...
...Though a few depositions from American former prisoners were introduced as evidence for the prosecution, no GIs testified in person...
...As to Merz," Clay wrote, "there was little evidence connecting him directly with any atrocities and there was considerable evidence to the effect that he did his utmost within his power to ameliorate conditions for the American prisoners...
...In trying to stretch a single event into a full-length work, Whitlock also does not get to discussing Berga itself until halfway through the volume...
...Reviewed by Steven P. Remy Associate professor of history, Brooklyn College A tiny letter stamped into their dog tags presented a dilemma to Jewish GIs in the North African and European theaters in World War II...
...Still, the personal accounts of former POWs in Given Up for Dead give the hardships of capture and imprisonment—not to mention the years spent wrestling with the physical and psychological scars—a human face...
Vol. 88 • March 2005 • No. 2
