US PBS Special on Berga-US Jewish POWs

[Tarpon27]

http://www.pbs.org/previews/Berga/

Berga: Soldiers of Another War
World War II. My company… I can remember their faces just like yesterday. They went overseas and I didn’t, and some of them didn’t come back. I’ve been thinking about it for 50 years, wondering why it didn’t happen to me. That’s why I had to tell this story.
– Charles Guggenheim, Filmmaker


BERGA: SOLDIERS OF ANOTHER WAR, a documentary film revealing Nazi Holocaust atrocities inflicted on 350 American POWs “classified” as Jewish, airs on PBSWednesday, May 28, 2003, (check local listings). The 90-minute film is the final work in the long and distinguished career of the late documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim. The four-time Academy Award-winner wrote and directed the film, and because of his personal connection to the story, also narrated in the first person for the only time in his career.

Thousands of American GIs, including soldiers in Guggenheim’s 106th Infantry Division, were captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge. Those “identified” as Jewish — along with fellow GIs who “looked Jewish” or had“Jewish-sounding” last names — were selected to fulfill a quota and shipped off to a satellite of the notorious concentration camp at Buchenwald, where they suffered harrowing atrocities as slave laborers. Guggenheim, who had remained stateside with a debilitating infection during the final months of the war, carried with him a personal and moral obligation for more than 50 years to tell this untold story for his comrades who did not return and for those who have lived with the horror of their experience. While completing the film, Guggenheim faced a heroic battle of his own with terminal cancer. He died six weeks after the film was finished.

BERGA: SOLDIERS OF ANOTHER WAR sheds light on a little-known fact of World War II: imprisoned American GIs were forced to work alongside slave laborers from Nazi concentration camps. The film, shot entirely in black and white, tells the story through on-camera testimony by survivors and eyewitnesses, archival photographs and film, and re-enactment footage. Many scenes are recreated at original historic locations, using young East German locals to portray the American soldiers. The recreations capture the inhuman boxcar transport, slave laborers tunneling through quartz rock, brutal Nazi guards, austere prison conditions, abandoned corpses, makeshift burials in bleak and snowy fields and churchyards, the massive, forced slave labor march of prisoners away from advancing Allies and finally the GIs’ liberation.

After the war, Guggenheim tried to locate a friend from the 106th Division, but discovered he had died in captivity in a German salt mine. The salt mine turned out to be the slave labor camp at Berga, a small town in eastern Germany. After two-and-a-half years of extensive research, Guggenheim found 124 survivors and witnesses. Forty agreed to be interviewed. Many revealed that they had repressed their memories for more than 50 years and never talked about their imprisonment, not even to spouses and family members.

In December 1944, thousands of American soldiers captured during the Battle of the Bulge were transported to Stalag 9B, a prisoner-of-war camp northwest of Frankfurt, Germany. A military order commanded all Jewish soldiers to identify themselves. After the Americans refused to comply, Nazi guards selected GIs they “identified” as Jewish, thought “looked Jewish,” had “Jewish-sounding” last names or whom they classified as undesirables. Fewer than one-third of the American soldiers selected were, in fact, Jewish. Packed into railway boxcars with no food, water or toilets, they were transported further into the German countryside. Five days later, they arrived at Berga, a satellite of the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

The Americans were put to work alongside European concentration camp prisoners and forced to dig tunnels into rock cliffs that together would form an underground military factory. They were ridiculed, intimidated, beaten, denied heat, given insufficient water and fed substandard provisions. Many died of injuries, malnutrition, disease and exhaustion. Several were fatally shot by guards for no apparent reason. Some went mad.

By April 1945, as the Allies advanced, the S.S. ordered the evacuation of the camp. Surviving prisoners were marched through rain, snow and bitter cold on a 150-mile procession of death. Those unable to keep up were abandoned or shot, and those who died were buried in roadside graves or Christian church cemeteries. The nightmare finally ended on April 23, 1945, when advancing American units came upon and liberated the surviving prisoners. The war in Europe was over five weeks later.

Charles Guggenheim received 12 Academy Award nominations and won four Oscars for his films Nine From Little Rock, RFK Remembered, The Johnstown Flood and A Time for Justice. He also won the George Foster Peabody Award.

Quite an interesting program on the use of Jewish American POWs (350 taken, but according to one on the show, only 80 were actually Jewish...the rest were "suspected" as being Jewish or classified as "undesirables").

Regards,

Mark

[Peter H]

More on the story here:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/P ... 4mjvij.asp

Not everyone aboard the train to Berga knew what was coming. Some had no idea they would be persecuted at all because of their religion. One man remembers when the harsh reality dawned on him as a fellow soldier made clear, "Germany doesn't like Jews. And they're going to do something to us." "The only thing I could think was, I shouldn't have told them I was Jewish," says another. But their dog tags were dead giveaways, as one POW explains: "If your name was Greenberg or Goldberg, what chance did you have?"

Yet the Germans couldn't quite make the differentiation themselves, choosing men with names like "Watkins," "Acevedo," "Young," and "Griffin," too. In fact, of the 350 Americans sent to Berga, only 80 were actually Jewish. Hans Kasten, the leader who refused to name names, was among them and faced even worse treatment since he was a German-American. As an SS lieutenant told him, "the one thing worse than a Jew is a German traitor."

[Scott Smith]

Quite an interesting program on the use of Jewish American POWs (350 taken, but according to one on the show, only 80 were actually Jewish...the rest were "suspected" as being Jewish or classified as "undesirables").

I watched some of it and found the story hard to believe. American POWs were separated because they were or "looked" Jewish. Nonsense. And why only 80? More likely they were selected for the hard labor quota because they had pissed off the commandant or something.

The Geneva convention allows forced-labor for enlisted men as long as it is not in war industry. Digging bombshelter tunnels is technically not war industry but they would have been better employed clearing rubble from bombed cities or on farms, as was the case with German POWs in the USA.

Of course, the storytellers convert another of the atrocities and hardships of war into the Holocaust™. I fell asleep during the program, which was presented in somber, funerific black & white.

[demonio]

Hi Scott. Do you really think that the nazi's gave a #$%@ about the geneva convention ?

[Roberto]

Quite an interesting program on the use of Jewish American POWs (350 taken, but according to one on the show, only 80 were actually Jewish...the rest were "suspected" as being Jewish or classified as "undesirables").

I watched some of it and found the story hard to believe.

Tell us, Smith, what "story" involving criminal behavior for which your beloved Nazi regime is responsible do you not find "hard to believe"?

Of course, the storytellers convert another of the atrocities and hardships of war into the Holocaust™.

The imbecile and rather offensive term at the end aside, what other examples can Smith show us of "storytellers" converting "the atrocities and hardships of war" into what is commoly know as the Holocaust?

Would the events referred to in Goebbels' diary entry of 27 March 1942 qualify, for instance?

Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.
The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is to carry this measure through, is doing it with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention. A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophesy which the Fuehrer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It's a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime would have the strength for such a global solution of this question. Here, too, the Fuehrer is the undismayed champion of a radical solution necessitated by conditions and therefore inexorable. Fortunately a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.[my emphasis]
The ghettoes that will be emptied in the cities of the General Government now will be refilled with Jews thrown out of the Reich. This process is to be repeated from time to time. There is nothing funny in it for the Jews, and the fact that Jewry's representatives in England and America are today organizing and sponsoring the war against Germany must be paid for dearly by its representatives in Europe - and that's only right.

Source of quote:

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/g/goe ... ts-02.html

I fell asleep during the program, which was presented in somber, funerific black & white.

Then why do you watch such programs, something I rarely if ever feel compelled to do?

Some pathetic need to get worked up about "Greuelpropaganda", or just too much time on your hands?

[Roberto]

Hi Scott. Do you really think that the nazi's gave a #$%@ about the geneva convention ?

Well, they did in regard to French, American or British prisoners of war, less so in regard to Polish or Serb POWs. In regard to Soviet prisoners of war, they indeed didn't give a damn about the Geneva or Hague conventions (the contents of which had become international customary law by the end of the 1930, according to contemporary prevailing legal opinion) or any other rules and principles of war indeed.

[...]The Soviet offer to the German Reich to keep the HRLW on a mutual basis was also legally worthless, since the convention cannot be recognized by means of a treaty between parties to a conflict, but rather by means of an application under Art. 6 of the Hague Fundamental Agreement. This involves an official note to the government of the Netherlands together with the handing over of the certificate of accession. The question of whether the USSR’s note of 17 July 1941 can be considered an offer of a bilateral treaty based on the HRLW is a matter of conjecture, since Hitler rejected the offer, as we can see from the wording of the Foreign Office’s answer to the USSR.
The Foreign/Defense Department (Amt Ausland/Abwehr) of the OKW under Admiral Canaris said much the same in a memorandum of 15 September 1941, in reply to regulations issued by the OKW/AWA in a directive of 8 September 1941. This directive replaced that issued on 16 June 1941 concerning the analogous application of the Geneva Convention, and the new regulations for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in all German POW camps were mostly at odds with the rules of humanity in wartime. At the same time the memorandum clearly pointed out that the basic international principles (of war) concerning the treatment of prisoners were applied in the conventionless war. This was not affected by the escape clause in the Hague convention because the rules contained in this agreement had been accepted as customary law in the meantime. In this regard the memorandum referred to an enclosed Soviet directive on the treatment of POWs dated 1 July 1941, which largely corresponded with the fundamental principles of international law.
The ideas expressed by the Amt Ausland/Abwehr in its memorandum on the validity of customary law in the field of the law of war were nothing new; this was the opinion prevailing at the time. The source of jus in bello, the law of warfare, is not just limited to the above positivist rulings. The source can be extended to unwritten customary law, as was emphasized after the was in the War Crimes Trial and the subsequent trials conducted by the United States in Nuremberg.
The Amt Ausland/Abwehr’s memorandum had no effect. The Chef OKW, Keitel, rejected it, noting that: ‘These reservations correspond to the soldierly views of chivalrous warfare; this war is about the annihilation of a Weltanschauung, and therefore I approve of and vouch for the measures. Keitel had been swayed by Hitler’s opinion concerning the nature of war with the Soviet Union, and had thus squashed the plans of the AWA, his department responsible for prisoners of war, to treat captured Russians according to customary law analogous to the Geneva Convention.[...]

[Roberto]

What follows is my translation of an article published on the web site of the German Historical Museum, Berlin, under

http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/wk2/kriegsv ... index.html

The basis for the treatment of prisoners of war was to be the Hague Convention of 1907, according to which prisoners were to be treated humanely and "in regard to food, accommodation and clothing in the same way as the troops of the government that has taken them prisoner". The Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War of 1929 contained further provisions about a humane treatment of prisoners including the prohibition “to use them for harsh and dangerous work”. Except in Japan and in the Soviet Union these conventions were valid in all nations taking part in the Second World War.
The German command did not accord the protection of international laws of war to the 400,000 Polish soldiers who became prisoners after the assault on Poland. It took away the status of prisoners of war from the soldiers on ground that a no longer existing Polish state could not have armed forces. The prisoners could be declared civilians and used as forced laborers in the German industry and agriculture. The strictest provisions applied to them: infractions were generally punished by murder or internment in a concentration camp. The same fate awaited the about 100,000 Serbian prisoners after the conclusion of the Balkans campaign, who as so-called “Südostgefangene” (south eastern prisoners) were also used in the German economy under the worst conditions.
The conventions were generally complied with, on the other hand, in the western theaters of war. Norwegian, Danish, Belgian, Dutch and Greek soldiers were released from captivity soon after the end of hostilities. About 15,000 heavily wounded Allied soldiers were exchanged via Sweden, Spain or Switzerland against an equal number of heavily wounded Germans. About 1.6 million of the French soldiers taken prisoner during the German offensive in the West in 1940 had to do remunerated labor service in the German Reich.
After the beginning of the German assault on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 the Wehrmacht took prisoner about 3.35 million Soviet soldiers in gigantic encirclement battles until the end of the year. Until the end of the war about 5.7 million Red Army soldiers went into German captivity, which 3.3 million of them did not survive. In the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union the German command considered that it didn’t have to show any consideration to Soviet prisoners. Jews and Communist functionaries (the latter within the scope of the “Commissar Order”) were systematically singled out and murdered. With the coming of cold in the autumn of 1941 mortality soared and about 2 million Soviet prisoners of war froze to death in the improvised camps without housing or died due to inhumane treatment. The “death by hunger” taken into account by the NS regime was omnipresent, many prisoners tried to avoid it through cannibalism. Hundreds of thousands of exhausted Soviets lost their lives on transports to forced labor in Germany or succumbed to epidemics in gathering camps. About 930,000 Soviet prisoners of war survived the war in Germany. A million men had been previously released by the Germans, many of them as "Hilfswillige" in the service of the Wehrmacht, which itself was losing huge numbers of German prisoners since 1943. Until the end of the war about 11 million German soldiers were in captivity.
With the capitulation of 91.000 soldiers of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad in February 1943 and of about 130,000 soldiers of the German Africa Corps in Tunis three months later huge Wehrmacht units went into captivity for the first time. Until then there were about 100.000 soldiers in Soviet and a few thousand men in British captivity, mostly members of the navy and pilots shot down. At the end of July 1943 the “Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland (NKFD)” came into being near Moscow as an anti-National Socialist organization of German Communists in exile and Wehrmacht prisoners of war. Their attempts to induce German front line soldiers to surrender through loud speaker addresses and leaflets met with little success, however. The Western Allies also intended to encourage German soldiers to surrender, after the Allied invasion in Normandy in June 1944, with millions of red passage bills distributed from the air and containing the assurance that surrendering soldiers would be treated according to the rules of the Hague and Geneva conventions.
After the liberation of France by the Western Allies the number of Germans taken prisoner by the Anglo-Americans jumped from 200,000 in the summer of 1944 to more than a million men in the spring of 1945. Thanks to food packages of the American and the International Red Cross the German prisoners of war in prison camps in Western Europe and North America had sufficient food and their bare necessities covered otherwise. Only the mass of about 7,5 million German prisoners of war after the capitulation in May 1945 led to grievous supply difficulties. Especially in the "Rheinwiesenlager" such as Remagen thousands of German prisoners of war died of hunger and exhaustion in makeshift dugouts or in the open field.
The about 3.3 million German prisoners in Soviet captivity fared much worse. The masses of illustrated leaflets distributed from the air by the Soviets with pictures of satisfied Wehrmacht soldiers did not nearly reflect the conditions in the Siberian prison camps, in which until 1944 only one in every ten prisoners survived. After forced labor, hunger and disease about two million prisoners from the Soviet Union returned to Germany, the last of them in January 1956.

[demonio]

So they conform to the convention for Aryans but to hell with everyone else ?

[Roberto]

So they conform to the convention for Aryans but to hell with everyone else ?

Not quite. Poles and Serbs were also not "Aryans", but POWs from those countries were not treated nearly as badly as Soviet POWs - although they fared much worse than French, British or American POWs.

What follows is my translation from Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945, 2nd edition 1997, pages 244- 249]

The Development of Mortality 1942-1945

Although in the years 1942 to 1945 prisoners of war were constantly being transported from the eastern parts of the Wehrmacht High Command area for labor service on the territory of the Reich, the manpower shortage of the German war industry could not be done away with. It is true that the number of prisoners of war employed on the territory of the Reich increased from 487,535 in October 1942 over 505,795 in July 1943 and 594,729 in February 1944 to about 750,000 on 1 January 1945. When one compares this with the total number of prisoners who fell into German hands and with the total number of prisoners present at the respective times, however, it becomes clear that a great part of the transports only served to replace the losses that had occurred through death or work incapacity. The total number of prisoners had increased from 3,350,000 in December 1941 over 4,716,903 in mid-July 1942, 5,003,697 in January 1943, and 5,637,482 in February 1944 to 5,734,528 on 1 February 1945. The number of prisoners present in the Wehrmacht High Command and Army High Command areas, on the other hand, had grown from 976,458 in March 1942 to 1,675,626 in September 1942, but then dropped over 1,501,145 on 1 January 1943 and 1,054,820 on 1 May 1944 to 930,287 on 1 January 1945. While the total number of prisoners increased by 1,017,625 between July 1942 and February 1945, the number of those remaining in captivity in the same period dropped by 745,000 – despite all efforts to increase the number of workers.
The steady diminution of the number of prisoners was partially due to releases – almost exclusively of “auxiliaries” and volunteers for the “eastern troops”. Until 1 May 1944 818,220 prisoners had been released in the Wehrmacht High Command and Army High Command areas; until the end of the war another 200,000 may have been released in the course of the efforts to strengthen the “eastern troops”, so that in total one may count on about a million released.
What mainly decimated the number of prisoners, however, was the continuing extraordinarily high mortality of the prisoners, which in the winters of 1942/43 and 1943/44 and then from the summer of 1944 onward reached new peaks. Exact data cannot be provided here either. If one deducts from the total number of Soviet prisoners who fell into German hands those who were still in captivity on 1 January 1945 – 930,287 -, the estimated number of releases – 1,000,000 – and the estimated number of prisoners who got back to the Soviet side through escape or during the retreats – 500,000 –, there results a number of about 3,300,000 prisoners who perished in German captivity or were murdered by the Einsatzkommandos, i.e. 57.8 per cent of the total number of prisoners.
The full significance of this number shows when comparing it to the mortality of other prisoners in German custody. Until 31 January 1945 there had died 14,147 of the French, 1,851 of the British and 136 of the American prisoners. In relation to the respective total number these deaths amounted to 1.58 per cent for the French, 1.15 per cent for the British and 0.3 per cent for the Americans. [Footnote: Based on the number of existing prisoners as of 1.11.1944, according to a listing of the Wehrmacht Information Bureau: French 893,672, British 161,386, Americans 45,576. The number of French prisoners was originally much higher, but a great many had been released. Of the Polish prisoners there were 67,055 still registered on 1.11.1944, so that the mortality (with 3,299 deaths) would be 4.92 per cent. It must be taken into account in this respect that also in their case the overwhelming majority had been released, although they had been treated considerably worse than the released French prisoners of war. If in the case of the French also those released were taken into account, the distance towards the mortality of Soviet prisoners of war would be even greater.]
Of the 3,155,000 German prisoners who fell into the hands of the Red Army between 1941 and 1945, there died between 1,110,000 and 1,185,000, i.e. between 35.1 per cent and 37.4 per cent. [Footnote: Kurt W. Böhme, Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in sowjetischer Hand, page 151 and errata sheet][...]

[demonio]

Thanks for the info Roberto

[Peter H]

Robert Gellately in his Backing Hitler also mentions the hardship of Italian POWs in Germany after 1943. 515,478 were forced to work inside the Reich and around 45,000 died from overwork,hunger,disease.

And this:

Italians were executed in Hildesheim at the end of March 1945 by the Gestapo and SS in what must rank as one of the most heartless and horrifying massacres in the bloody history of the Third Reich.Hildesheim suffered a series of disastrous bombing attacks culminating on 22 March that left the city in ruins and caused nearly 1,000 deaths.Several days later,Italian and German workers who were trying to clean up the mess came upon a bombed-out food depot and were encouraged by the German guard to help themselves to the largely spoiled food in the ruins.Some of this 'plundered' food was then discovered by police on several hundred of the 500 or so Italian prisoners.The post-war investigation pieced together what happened.It found a mass grave with 208 bodies(17 of them women),of whom an estimated 130 were Italians.In this event,execution was by hanging,and was carried out on an improvised gallows with five nooses.Each victim was forced to stand on a table,had one of the nooses placed around his or her neck,and,when the table was kicked away,strangled to death.Even as the first person struggled in their death throes,the next victim was led to the table and the noose,and the procedure continued until all five nooses were full.The others awaiting death nearby under SS guard,could see what was in store for them,and after 20 minutes,when the five dead bodies were removed,the first of the next five Italians were led to the gallows.

[Scott Smith]

Hi Scott. Do you really think that the nazi's gave a #$%@ about the geneva convention ?

The Geneva convention, like all treaties, is nothing more than an international agreement. Treaties are based first of all on mutual self-interest and reciprocation; and secondly, upon trust, i.e., that the interests of a long tradition of friendship outweigh any disadvantages of an agreement in the interests of peace and ending continued conflict or potential conflict.

Simply put, the Germans mostly upheld the Geneva convention with their Western enemies because they mostly upheld these agreements with the Germans.

This was not the case with the Soviets who did not sign the Geneva convention before the war, and neither side tried to fight under those rules. After the first German reversals, when the SS wanted Russian POWs for labor in the winter of 1941-42 as the Germany economy started to gear for Total War, it found that the Wehrmacht had let them all perish (because the General Staff had not planned for such huge intakes nor for a long campaign). And the Russians didn't treat the German POWs any better.

In the West, when reciprocation was no longer a factor, such as when the war ended and Allied POWs were released, then conditions for German POWs still held by the Allies deteriorated sharply. With reciprocity no longer a concern, there was simply no longer any reason to follow the Geneva conventions. And in fact, Eisenhower declared German POWs as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" expressly so that the Americans would not seem "legally" compelled to follow those prior agreements, i.e., without being seen as such. If the Victors couldn't feed the POWs after the war, well, the war was over and all, and they had no business holding them in the first place. Of course, Germany was held to one standard of feeding its prisoners at Nuremberg despite the privations and circumstances of wartime. The Allies had no more war to fight and plenty of American largesse to burn judging by the global role intentionally carved out for itself by the Interventionists.

[demonio]

Thanks Scott

[Scott Smith]

Of course, the storytellers convert another of the atrocities and hardships of war into the Holocaust™.

The imbecile and rather offensive term at the end aside, what other examples can Smith show us of "storytellers" converting "the atrocities and hardships of war" into what is commoly know as the Holocaust?

Basically, all modern history is tainted from the Holocaustian glass. There are many reasons for this: Interventionism, Zionism, Victimology, are some of them.

The Holocaust, for example, keeps Jews being Jews when more and more are just giving up the Faith and the Idea. The Big-H is also Biblical Fundamentalism articulated for the Last Days, according to Evangelical Christians, who see the return of Christ to the Holy Land as imminent and articulated by American-Israeli chauvinism and mischief in the Mid-East.

The Big-H is also a symbolic means for the Democracy-Capitalist plutocracy of undermining the idea of national sovereignty in order to promote the expansion of global financial markets and exploit labor markets abroad. We see this, for example, in Germany where nationalism is very, very baaad (if not anti-Semitic) and in the United States where economic-nationalism is akin to Genocide, or atavistic at best. We are supposed to want to buy shoes made with foreign sweatshop labor, either here or abroad, otherwise we are racists and xenophobes. Capitalism makes profits for the few; it cannot manufacture national culture, whether German, Turk, American, or Mexican. If you don't like it, Buy Stocks!

Globaloney sucks.

I fell asleep during the program, which was presented in somber, funerific black & white.

Then why do you watch such programs, something I rarely if ever feel compelled to do?

I don't watch much TV anyway but since the summer hiatus is beginning there will be nothing but Friends and Seinfeld reruns, so I'm having the cable disconnected. I want to have more time hiking in the desert, reading, and hopefully, writing.

Some pathetic need to get worked up about "Greuelpropaganda", or just too much time on your hands?

When I turn on the tube I want to learn something. Usually it is just a sugar-coated waste of time in-between batteries of commericals. But I am concerned about what drivel is force-fed to the country, given that rebuttals would be considered Hate.

[Scott Smith]

Thanks Scott

You're welcome!