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.
