Given Up For Dead

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MANY PEOPLE DESERVE credit for helping me tell this story, which had gone virtually untold for half a century. First and foremost, the late filmmaker Charles Guggenheim must be acknowledged, for it was his documentary, broadcast over PBS stations on Memorial Day weekend, 2003, that first made me (and millions of others, I’m sure) aware of this incredible tale.

The next person needing to be thanked is Mel Rappaport, of Douglaston, New York—a World War II veteran, a liberator of Buchenwald, and a person with very good connections. It was he who first put me in contact with some of the survivors, who then introduced me to others.

I am deeply grateful to the surviving veterans of Berga and Stalag IX-B who allowed me to interview them and told me their often painful stories. Without their willingness to share, the unspeakable things that went on in these terrible places may have passed into obscurity, dismissed as fantasy simply because the reality is so horrific and unbelievable.

Once I had decided to visit the locales written about in these pages, one person provided immeasurable assistance: Frau Sabine Richter, Berga-an-der-Elster’s finance director. It would have been virtually impossible to find the relevant sites in Berga without her generous assistance. She devoted many hours to escorting me to the sites of the camps and the sealed-up tunnels, and to answering my endless stream of questions. I am also indebted to the current mayor of Berga, Stephan Büttner, for his kindnesses.

Then, in no particular order of importance (for they are all important) are Will Mahoney of the Modern Military Records Branch of the National Archives II in College Park, MD; Dr. Mitchell Bard, author of Forgotten Victims; Helen Fowler, who lent me her late husband’s memoirs; the operators of the website www.LoneSentry.com; Dr. Patricia Wadley, national historian of the American Ex-POW organization; Peter House, Jr., for his father’s memoirs; Barbara Geisler; and my good friend Dr. Richard Sommers and the staff of the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, PA. I thank my agent, Jody Rein, and my editor at Westview Press, Steve Catalano, for their keen insights and unflagging desires to see this project through.

Last but certainly not least, my wife, Dr. Mary Ann Watson, and the members of her Denver book club, also deserve recognition for their careful reading of the rough manuscript and their thoughtful comments. To them and everyone else involved in this endeavor, I humbly offer my deepest appreciation.

Flint Whitlock

PROLOGUE

A LONG FILE of olive-drab American tanks, the vanguard of the 11th Armored Division’s “Task Force Wingard,” rumbled southward across eastern Bavaria along the Czechoslovak border. The April air was alive with a wild mixture of fragrances: engine exhaust, burning villages, torn-up earth, new spring growth, decomposing corpses, and victory.

Riding high in the turret of a well-worn, thirty-three-ton M–4 Sherman tank was a sergeant whose name has been lost to history. Like the battle-scarred tank, the sergeant had seen plenty of combat since the 11th Armored Division first ran into the enemy in Belgium at the end of December 1944. Then came pitched battles at Herzfeld, Leidenborn, Sengerich, Roscheid, Es-chfeld, Reiff, Ormont, Lissigen, Kelberg, Andernach on the Rhine, Worms, Hanau, Fulda, Gelnhausen, and so many other towns that they all began to blur into an indistinct, amorphous mass. Then Bayreuth fell on 14 April, the big German armored training camp at Grafenwöhr on 19 April, and the city of Weiden on 21 April.

The last couple of days, the going had gotten a little easier. Instead of bullets and tank-busting panzerfaust rounds flying in deadly profusion from the windows of every town and village they approached, the “Thunderbolts” of the 11th Armored were now greeted by silent white bedsheets fluttering from every window, a sign that the Germans—at least the civilian townsfolk—had had enough of war and were finally admitting defeat. The German army, if one could even call it an army, was retreating faster than the Americans were advancing.

Heading toward the multi-spired Bavarian city of Cham, Task Force Wingard suddenly sped up and struck out for the village of Rötz. The sergeant in the lead tank looked across a fresh-green expanse of farm fields and saw a most unusual sight. Up ahead, the tank commander could make out what appeared to be a couple hundred stick figures, some of whom began waving their scarecrow-like arms at him. He ordered the driver to halt and raised his binoculars for a closer look. Strange, he must have thought; the stick figures appeared to be wearing the same mustard-colored wool uniform that he wore, except that their uniforms were torn and stained and covered with patches of mud. Many of the stick figures were also long-haired and some were bearded. If they were soldiers, he thought, they certainly looked like no soldiers he had ever seen.

One of the stick figures staggered toward him, waving its arms, a ghoulish grin spreading across its emaciated, unshaven face, tears streaming into hollows that were once its cheeks. Who was this sepulchral figure? The sergeant wanted to know.

The tanker put his hand on the grip of his holstered forty-five-caliber pistol, unsure of what was happening, of what to do. As the figure drew closer, the sergeant could hear words—unbelievable words—rasping from the gaping hole that was its mouth: “Don’t shoot! We’re Americans!”

And then another aroma filled the spring air, one that blocked out the fragrance of the verdant April countryside: the terrible stench emanating from the living skeleton.

What Task Force Wingard had stumbled upon were the remnants of a group of American GIs who had been taken prisoner some four months earlier and who had been on a death march to nowhere since being removed from their slave-labor camp at Berga, 300 kilometers to the north three weeks earlier.

In the autumn of 1944, Nazi Germany was being crushed from three sides. From the east, Joseph Stalin’s huge Soviet army, burning with hatred to avenge the atrocities Hitler’s forces had been committing within the Motherland since June 1941, was slowly pushing back the Wehrmacht and SS divisions like a glacier pushing back a mountain range.

From the west and south, American, British, and Free French forces, too, were on the march, inexorably forcing the German army into a massive retrograde action. From overhead, daily raids by thousands of Allied aircraft were pounding the Third Reich into shattered, smoldering, unrecognizable rubble. The whirlwind that Hitler had unleashed against Poland and the world on 1 September 1939, when he began history’s most devastating war, was being reaped tenfold.

The war in Europe, however, was far from over. Millions of soldiers and civilians had already perished; within the next six months, hundreds of thousands more would join those already dead. The most cataclysmic conflict of all time was racing toward its bloody dénouement. In Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), the final work of German composer Richard Wagner’s monumental series of operas known as the Ring Cycle, the spirits ruling the world meet a fiery end; if Germany could not be victorious, Hitler, a great devotée of Wagner’s music and anti-Semitic philosophy, was determined to bring his nation, and perhaps even civilization itself, down with him.

Although many of his generals and most of his soldiers had long ago abandoned the idea of a German victory and were merely trying to save their own skins, Adolf Hitler continued to live in a dreamworld, or, as one of his minions put it, in a “cloud-cuckoo-land.” In his delusional state, he ordered divisions and armies that no longer existed to rush to the front on trains that no longer ran and throw themselves in an orgy of self-immolation against the advancing enemy hordes. His fifty-five-year-old body, still wracked by injuries sustained in the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt at Rastenburg, East Prussia, was old and feeble now, his reasoning by turns shrewd and delusional. His raspy voice railed against those traitors who had plotted to kill him and who had been agonizingly hung from meathooks as punishment for their perfidy. Even his favorite general, Erwin Rommel, had given tacit approval of the plot and would soon be forced to commit suicide; Hitler could trust no one but the shrinking coterie of loyal members of his Fascist family—Heinrich Himmler, Josef Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Eva Braun.

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, but he refused to believe the evidence. Now, in September 1944, arrows drawn on the maps showed that the Russians—those subhuman Bolsheviks Hitler had boasted he would conquer and enslave before the winter of 1941 came on—were driving westward along a thousand-mile front that stretched from the Baltic to the Caspian Seas. Slowly, like being sucked into a continent-wide threshing machine, his best troops were being pulverized by the advancing Soviets.

Only in the west, Hitler thought, was there any hope of redemption. The Americans and British and French, while militarily powerful, were squabbling allies. Perhaps they could be divided, both physically and emotionally. Their peoples, like the German civilians, were war weary. But, unlike the Germans, they were products of soft democracies; Hitler could order his people to fight to the last bullet and the last man if need be, but Roosevelt and Churchill and de Gaulle could not. Viewing the mounting casualty lists, the American, British, and French home fronts would rise up and demand an end to the awful bloodletting. Perhaps, Hitler reasoned, if he could deliver a massive blow in the West, he could reach a negotiated peace, then turn what was left of his armies against the Soviets. Hitler knew that the Western Allies had no love of Stalin and Communism, and had come to Russia’s aid only to forestall an inevitable German victory. Perhaps he might even persuade them to join forces with him and go to war against the Bolsheviks; surely America and Britain did not want to see much of Europe dominated by Russia!¹

By the summer of 1944, the Allies were on a roll. To pile on the metaphors, on 6 June, British, American, Canadian, and Free French units had landed along a sixty-mile swath of Normandy coastline and delivered a mighty blow to the German jaw. A Soviet operation known as Bagration, mounted on 22 June, was a proverbial kick in the German ass. On 15 August, another Allied landing, this one on the French Riviera, was a knife-thrust into the gut, while the continual fighting in Italy was like a pit bull with its jaws locked onto the Fascist leg. Showing no mercy, the aerial assault on Germany was also stepped up, raining millions of tons of bombs onto the Third Reich’s head.

Reeling from the massive blows, German troops on all fronts began retreating, despite Hitler’s numerous “stand and fight” orders. While the Führer’s soldiers were putting their collective shoulders against the back door that was being battered by the Russians, the Americans and British were on the front porch, kicking in the front door. Germany’s heavily fortified frontier, the Westwall, along its border with France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, proved to be no match for the invaders.

But fierce fighting along the wall, especially at Aachen, Metz, the Hürtgen Forest, and in Alsace-Lorraine—along with ferocious winter weather and an over-extended supply line—had brought the Allied advance to a crawl.

Giving him the breathing space the combination of factors had provided, Hitler made plans for one final effort to reverse the tide swelling against his beloved Deutschland. Whereas the Allies would later call the operation the “Battle of the Bulge,” the German leader code-named it Wacht-am-Rhein (The Watch on the Rhine), after a well-known German song. It was not the Rhine River, however, that Hitler planned to secure; it was the port at Antwerp, some seventy-five miles west of the front at Aachen, that he hoped to reach. Antwerp had become the Allies’ nearest port, through which millions of tons of ammunition, fuel, rations, weapons, clothing, and other vital supplies were pouring.

Antwerp also was the terminus of the dividing line between the Allies’ two great western armies: Field Marshall Sir Bernard Law Montgomery’s Twenty-first British Army Group to the north and Lieutenant General Omar Nelson Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group to the south. If his troops could split the two forces, inflict massive casualties, and capture the port of Antwerp, Hitler believed it would be possible to convince the American and British people that continuing the war was futile and that a negotiated settlement was the only logical way to end the dying.

Hitler’s eyes darted across the maps for a suitable place from which he would launch his counter-assault. Then he saw it. The Wehrmacht would plunge like a flaming spear through the dense Ardennes Forest—the same improbable place through which his divisions had begun their surprise invasion of France and Belgium in 1940. At this point, he envisioned hundreds of panzers, self-propelled artillery, and infantry divisions plunging in a violent thrust through the “impenetrable” forest and straight into the soft spot of the American front lines.²

That soft spot happened to be, for the most part, occupied by thousands of scared, fresh-faced Americans, many of them Jewish, newly arrived in Europe and strangers to combat. What happened to them during the battle—and afterward, as prisoners of war—is an incredible, virtually unknown story of fear, courage, desperation, brutality, survival, triumph, and betrayal.