Posted on 06/01/2003 1:07:13 AM PDT by risk
Holocaust Soldiers
In February 1945, the Nazis classified 350 American POWs as Jews. PBS's documentary "Berga: Soldiers of Another War" sheds light on the nightmare that followed.
by Victorino Matus
05/28/2003 12:00:00 AM
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NOT THAT WE BASE OUR IMPRESSIONS on life in a German POW camp entirely on "Hogan's Heroes," but there is an understanding that life in a stalag wasn't nearly as bad as life, say, under the Japanese. Roughly 4 percent of Americans died in German and Italian camps while a staggering 27 percent died in Japanese camps. In Western Europe, Allied prisoners (except the Russians) enjoyed certain benefits thanks to the Geneva Convention. They received Red Cross parcels, enough food, and were often allowed to exercise and play soccer. It wasn't the Waldorf-Astoria, but it wasn't Auschwitz either. At least for most of them. With the Allies closing in on the Reich, the stalags began to swell. By 1944, Stalag 9B, northeast of Frankfurt, held 10,000 Red Army prisoners. Following the Battle of the Bulge in December of that year, an additional 4,000 Americans filled the camp. As SS interrogators took down the names, ranks, and serial numbers of the newly arrived, they happened to notice a sizable number of Jewish-sounding names. It was only a matter of time before the Germans demanded to know which of these 4,000 American POWs were Jews. "In our country, we don't differentiate by religion--we are all Americans," said Hans Kasten, a POW designated as an intermediary for the two sides. His answer was apparently incorrect--after giving it he was thrown down a flight of stairs. Kasten went back to his men and instructed them that under no circumstance is anyone to admit who among them is Jewish. At the next day's lineup, not a single POW responded to the SS officer's request for all Jews to step forward. Enraged, the Germans decided to make the selection themselves, based on which names sounded Jewish and who looked Jewish. In the end, 350 men were separated, unaware of the horrors to come. Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim served in the 106th Division--elements of which were captured after the Bulge. Himself a Jew, Guggenheim could have easily been one of those 350 men if not for a serious case of blood poisoning, that caused him to miss his deployment to Europe. When he finally met up with members of his unit, he asked what had happened to a Jewish friend of his. To his shock, Guggenheim was told he died in a salt mine. His friend was one of those labeled "undesirable" and shipped off to Berga, a satellite camp of Buchenwald in eastern Germany. His fate was a constant source of pain for Guggenheim and it led him to make a documentary, "Berga: Soldiers of Another War," which airs tonight at 8:00 p.m. on PBS. Interviewed by historian David McCullough last fall, Guggenheim talked about the need to do this film. "This was the first time Americans who spoke like I did, who looked like I did, who grew up in the same country as I did, were part of something that I never comprehended as being close to me. And I decided to do a film about this thing that was done to Americans--not only Americans, but American soldiers." Guggenheim shot on location in the town of Berga and combined first-hand accounts along with stark photographs of the camp's victims from April 1945. It was to be Guggenheim's final film--he died of pancreatic cancer six weeks after its completion. "Berga" is a powerful examination of the limits of humanity--both the ability to do evil and the will to survive. (And if there is any justice, Guggenheim should posthumously receive his fifth Academy Award for this work.) 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." Berga already existed when the new prisoners entered in February 1945. The camp's inmates were to dig 17 tunnels underground in order to construct an armaments factory safe from Allied bombing. The arrival also marked the first time these Americans witnessed the Holocaust with their own eyes. Conditions at the camp were horrific. The prisoners were two per mattress, four in a bunk. They were never allowed to change clothes. Lice was rampant. There was dysentery and typhoid. Daily nourishment consisted of watery soup and one loaf of bread divided among twelve men. They quickly learned to eat slow, chew slow, "make it last." The POWs spent 12 hours a day in the quartz mines, which, according to one man, was worse than coal mines: "Coal dust can make your lungs black. But it doesn't rip your lungs out. Quartz, you breathe it in and then spit it out and a piece of your lung comes out. It was bloody. Quartz rips your lungs apart." All told, some 70 Americans died during the course of two months at Berga. Those who survived would never be the same. "We became shadows of ourselves," says one. Leo Zaccaria remembers how he refused to give up his knife for days after being liberated. "I was an entirely different person. I had become an animal." Hans Kasten's first thought was to find the SS lieutenant who tormented him. He never found the officer but says, "I would have killed him . . . slowly." Still others fell to tears when at last they spotted American tanks. Says Sanford Lubinsky: "When I saw that American flag coming down that road, nothing looked so beautiful in all our born days. It's a very beautiful thing when you haven't seen it for a long while." "Berga: Soldiers of Another War" airs Wednesday night at 8 p.m. on PBS.
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard. |
It's tragic that we're still fighting anti-semitism so many years later. And it's truly ironic that the American left has allowed it to seep into their politics through the Mein Kampf-inspired accusation of a Jewish cabal guiding our response to 9/11.
As I once told a raving Lebanese taxi driver who was complaining to me about American "preferential treatment" for Israel, "Look buddy, our nation has invested its blood in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust. We're not going to abandon them now just because a few Arabs are saying their small segment of arrid land is too much to offer out of the whole middle east."
The terrible treatment of these soldiers just for being of a particular "race" was unspeakably cruel. I was impressed by how the American who had been elected leader of the prisoners had resisted beatings in his efforts not to reveal those who were Jewish. And I was also impressed by the comments of the other soldiers who said that they really hadn't distinguished between religions among them, and that it wasn't American to do so.
link to the PBS home page for Berga: Soldiers of Another War. Here's a link to the soldier's list:
Just click on the picture of the document.
The following piece is available under "Stories" and the name Kasten.
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We have to remember that some right wing extremists also deny the Holocaust happened, like newly captured Eric Rudolph, suspected Atlanta Olympic Park bomber.
Solved the slavery issue in the United States.
As the son of a man who rode in B24s over Europe, nearly being killed by a flak burst over Rumania, I can tell you that it is no accident that young people in America hate war. My father, who would later become a staunch Cold Warrior, is one of the most sensitive people I've ever met. I believe these men who fought and killed so many returned to their homes and resolved to raise children who understood the evil side of war. They put so much energy into teaching us that war was wrong, that they neglected to encourage the marshal spirit in us.
I've come to the conclusion that freemen must always fight. There is no war to end all wars. It is the very willingness to fight and die that puts one's enemies at bay; nothing else will stop them. Moreover, I'm convinced that the American Revolution should continue to be exported. It's no accident that we have been the beacon of liberty in the past century; our founding fathers were leading humanity in a quantum political leap forward.
We can't keep teaching our children that war is not for democracies. Democracies are built out of winning wars of liberation; dying for a just cause is not the worst way to end one's life. I hope your daughter begins to understand the origins of the pacifism that permeate our nation's left today. Our isolationism is admirable, and our hatred for unjust killing is something the world should study more carefully. But our abject unwillingness to defend ourselves (just study the opposition to missile defense weapons in through the 1960s-90s) is shameful.
Your daughter has a long road of seeking knowledge ahead. She may believe that WWII ended the need for human conflict. But she would do well to read about the millions of Russians who were jailed and killed by Stalinists. A good place to start is The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (concisely reviewed by Stephen F. Cohen). Reading anything by Solzhenitzyn can help one to gain a grasp of the depravity of communism and its dictators, some of whom are alive and well in our very hemisphere today. If that doesn't convince her, she can explore the millions of deaths Mao caused both by starvation due to centrist farm micromanagement and by outright murder and forced labor.
Any time a pacifist in America thinks that it weren't American might that kept Stalinists from spreading the murderous chains of communism world-wide should think again. And apologists for Arab/Islamic extremists should understand that their origins are both in the Nazi party and in almost two millennia of bloody conquest and oppression. Your daughter basks in the light of a the post-enlightenment here in the west. Islam will probably never reach that moment, and certainly hasn't yet.
Your daughter may benefit from getting to know the strengths of her possibly European heritage. Maybe your great great grandparents came to America and some of them fought in the revolutionary war. Maybe they fought in the civil war. Maybe they fought in WW1 or Korea. Maybe someone in your family defended freedom in Vietnam, and although it ended badly, was brave enough to go and stand up for what he believed. Take her to a VFW outpost and introduce her to some of the men who have understood that fighting is sometimes the only answer.
Her freedom to be a pacifist is guaranteed by the blood of men and women who would die for it. And many more will go forth and die again just so that she and her kind may continue to take the time to think it over, and possibly realize that fighting for freedom is human nature.
War is the origin of all freedoms. And freedom fought and won, followed by a sound rule of just laws is the beginning and sustinance of the only kind of peace that can last. John Adams said, "the only good government is a Republican government, a nation of laws, not men." What did he mean by that? Many on the left are tossing this statement around in criticism of our war on Iraq. But this statement had more to do with why the American Revolution is a global revolution than anything else. In addition to advocating representational government, Adams was probably also referring to the fact that our Declaration of Indepencence and our Constitution, based on The Magna Carta and other emminent writings on liberty and justice, were superior instruments of government the likes of which human beings had never seen before. The strong and brave men who stepped up to their muskets and died to make these laws possible were bringing forth a new form of government that would set the standard for freedom for centuries to come. Moreover, the shot that was heard around the world was a shot fired in anger. And by the way, tell your daughter that it was fired by men led by a gunsmith named Captain Davis, who had furnished his independent Minutemen with the finest in military muskets and bayonets.
I have great confidence in both you and your daughter. Her heart is in the right place now, and she has years to spend talking with you, learning about her place in history as an American, and exploring the processes of liberty on her own. Good luck retracing America's encounters with war together.
Quantum leap to abortion: When people lie to themselves and pretend that other people aren't really people, really, really, bad things happen like, holocausts, slavery, and abortions.
Wow! Extremely well said. Thank you.
I gotta say, I've been listening to my dad a lot lately. He became a writer after he came home with a purple heart. Everything I know about freedom I owe to him and my mother, two of the toughest and most gentle people I've ever met. My mom is a peaceful woman who hates war more than anyone I know, but she still claims that we never should have slacked off on the B52 strikes in Vietnam, and she's still bitter that we didn't win! Never threaten a freewoman's children or her nation's troops.
"The most dangerous place in the world is between a [free] woman and her children." -- Elizabeth Gauger
There's this "Death in Vegas" mix called Dirt. In it, a sample of Woodstock's John Morris telling everyone the concert is going to be free:
"This is one thing that I was gonna wait a while before we talked about. Maybe we'll talk about it now so you can think about it. Because you all, we all have to make some kind of plans for ourselves. It's a free concert from now on..."The chorus repeats itself over and over again:But the one major thing you have to remember tonight when you back up to the woods to go to sleep or if you stay here, is that the man next to you is your brother and you damn well better treat each other that way, cause if you don't, then we blow the whole thing, but we've got it right there.
Flinch you'll get a [explitive] gun butt to the gut.I was jamming out to this song one day, and I realized what it was telling me. This is what my father (and his brothers, by the way) was fighting for: optimistic kids, sitting around and trying to figure out how to improve the world, and singing peace music together.
There's more to my epiphany than dope smoking teen agers. The chorus talks about flinching in the face of a threat, and in so doing, facing the violence anyway. I know this is probably a reference to police brutality. But it made me think of Marines sloshing up beaches on beaches in the Pacific, facing withering fire from Japanese positions. It made me think of all the horror our troops faced in defeating Hitler and Hirohito. And I realized: they didn't flinch. And so Woodstock became a reality. Those kids were rebelling against the very things my father and his brothers fought to save, but they were also asking for a better world in their own way.
Your daughter's acts of rebellion were enabled by men who fought for things she doesn't yet see were valuable. I explained this music to my father, and he got it. I mean he got it 100%. He said, "Yes, that's exactly what I was fighting for. I didn't agree with those kids at Woodstock, but they were expressing what they believed, and I would have died to offer them that chance."
I'm sure there were U.S. Marines tearing up Iraqi positions with their SAWs and and M16s with Emminem raps stuck in their heads; let's see if we can't get an image of Woodstock having been possible because of men who would go to war stuck in your daughter's.
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