Crimes and Mercies (10 page)

The former German prisoners leading the way in new research have been officially ignored for many years, but they are now actively trying to uncover the truth behind the historical forgeries which have been accepted as real up to now. At Lambach in Austria early in 1996, during excavations for a new power plant, a mass grave was opened on an 80 m square site near the river Traun in Upper Austria. One theory is that these were the bodies of Jews who died during transport, but the evidence suggests strongly that these were German prisoners of the Americans. In 1945 there were American-run POW camps in the region, one at Hofau, another at Grüberfeld a little farther to the east, and one for SS men at Kuhweide to the west. Horst Littmann, an expert recommended by the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, concluded that the bodies were the dead prisoners from these American camps, men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, judging from the good condition of their teeth, the shape of their heads and other evidence.

Such in-ground investigations could happen in Austria, and people could dig up mass graves of prisoners at former Soviet camps recently in eastern Germany, but West German Otto Schmitt was prevented by the police from digging a friend’s land for evidence of prisoners on the site of a former American/French camp.
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The official US Army ration book, smuggled out by an exprisoner, for the huge camp at Bretzenheim, shows that these captives who nominally had prisoner-of-war status – supposedly the best-treated of all – got only 600–850 calories per day. The prisoners starved although ‘food was piled up all round the camp fence,’ according to Captain Lee Berwick of the 424th Infantry Regiment, guardians of the camp.
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Martin Brech has confirmed that Eisenhower’s terror policy was harshly enforced down to the lowest level of camp guard. At the
time that Brech was ordered to stop feeding prisoners on pain of being shot himself, it scarcely seemed credible to him that the army intended these prisoners to die. Then, seeing the new evidence in 1995, Brech said that, ‘It is clear that in fact it was the policy to shoot any civilians trying to feed the prisoners.’

Of course, individual French and American soldiers like Brech were honorable exceptions to the orders from higher up. The French Captain Julien of the IIIème Régiment de Tirailleurs Algérien, who took over at Dietersheim from the Americans in July 1945, forbade shooting at his camp. In fact, Julien was so appalled at the condition of the prisoners that he immediately organized food to come in from the village. But Julien got into serious trouble with the French Army for quarrelling with a fellow officer, Captain Rousseau, who shot at German women in Julien’s presence, at about the time and in the same place as a French officer shot Frau Spira. Rousseau is remembered to this day in the village as a bad man. At Bad Kreuznach, William Sellner of Oakville, Ontario, one day saw civilians throw food over the wire while guards watched indifferently. And yet, at night, guards would shoot machine gun bullets at random into the camps, apparently for sport. In Bad Kreuznach, Ernst Richard Krische wrote in his diary on 4 May: ‘Wild shooting in the night, absolute fireworks. It must be the supposed peace. Next morning forty dead as “victims of the fireworks”, in our cage alone, many wounded.’
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One American who tried to help the prisoners was Dr John Allensworth, now of Mineral Wells, Texas, who was an officer in the US Army Medical Corps. He was sent to Gummersbach, east of Bonn, just after the Ruhr pocket collapsed in March 1945. ‘There was a huge mass of humanity in a field standing shoulder to shoulder in the mud, and I mean knee-deep. I would estimate that 75 per cent of them were wounded. The conditions were appalling.’ He immediately set up a 150-bed hospital in a tent for the prisoners. He said, ‘My headquarters leaned over backwards to do everything they could to help the prisoners,’ so he was able to get all the supplies he required immediately.
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But the number of prisoners served by the tent hospitals was less than 1 per cent of the total on hand. And this was before the German collapse, so that millions of Allied prisoners were still being held hostage by the Germans. Thus the attitude of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) was probably more conditioned by fear for the hostages than by the Geneva Convention, which was in fact about to be abrogated by the US State Department.
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Conditions in the camps deteriorated further after the hostage system collapsed. Despite the restrictions, other individual American guards tried to help the German prisoners long after the war ended, among them Captain Frederick Siegfriedt. He was detailed as prison officer in an undermanned Prisoner of War Overhead Detachment at a camp near Zimming in eastern France in December 1945, where there were about 17,000 prisoners, ‘all presumably SS ’. According to Siegfriedt, the previous prison officer had been relieved of his duties because of psychiatric problems. A lifelong friend of Siegfriedt was the medical officer for the detachment. ‘Captain L. had been an extremely hardworking and conscientious person all his life. It was evident that he was under extreme stress, trying to cope with the conditions at CCE 27 and receiving no co-operation, no help, no understanding, without even someone to talk to. I was able to serve to fill the latter need. He explained to me that most of the men had dysentery and were suffering from malnutrition. Some men in the cages had as many as seventeen bloody stools per day, he said. He took me to one of the former French barracks that served as the hospital. It had eight hundred men lying all over, on the cold concrete floors as well as on beds … almost without exception the other [US] officers were alcoholics or had psychiatric problems …’

The rest of the men were kept in Nissen huts, made of chicken wire covered with tar paper. Water was supplied by a single tap inside the hut, which was usually frozen that winter. The prisoners slept on the muddy ground, about 180 to a hut. So crowded were they that it was impossible for them all to lie on their back at once.
Sometimes at the roll calls in the morning, men fell over dead.

‘The operation of CCE 27 seemed typical of the entire system,’ Siegfriedt has said. ‘When an enclosure got a bunch of prisoners they didn’t know what to do with, or could not otherwise handle, they were shipped unannounced to another enclosure … I have no idea how many died nor where they were buried. I am sure the Americans did not bury them and we had no such thing as a bulldozer. I can only assume that a detail of German PWs would bury them. I could look out the window of my office and tell if the body being carried by was alive or dead by whether or not there was a fifth man following with the man’s personal possessions. The number could have been from five to twenty per day.

‘The officers’ mess was in a French two-storey house. It had a staff of forty-two [prisoners] with the
maître d’
of the German luxury liner
Europa
in charge. Although there were usually no more than six or eight officers dining at one time, there were always at least that many uniformed waiters. One could not get a cigarette from pocket to lips without a light waiting. The facility was completely redecorated, that is repainted with murals for each special occasion, i.e. Christmas, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, etc. For lunch there was chamber music with four to six musicians and for dinner a choir of fifteen to twenty made up of the stars of the Munich and Berlin operas. In short, the staff was much more concerned with living the luxurious life than it was about the operation of the prison camps.’

Siegfriedt attempted to alleviate the conditions by bribing guards at excess vehicle camps with cigarettes so he could take their trucks to scrounge some hay in the neighbourhood ‘to get the PWs off the ground. When the weather warmed up, the cages became ankle-deep in mud. I located a pierced-plank airfield
*
and, with a convoy of trucks, brought it back to get the men out of the mud. These, however, were band-aid measures for major problems that no one seemed to be in a position to deal with, nor did anyone seem to care.’

Captain Siegfriedt concluded: ‘Obviously we, the US Army, were not prepared to deal with so many prisoners even when I arrived on the scene in December 1945.’ This was close to the Vosges area of France that US Army Colonel Philip Lauben described as ‘one big death camp’.

Prisoners who survived the camp at Bretzenheim have described arriving there on 9 May 1945. They saw three rows of corpses along the road in front of the camp. Seventy-five dead from Bretzenheim were acknowledged by the Americans to have been buried in Stromberg on 9 May and another sixty on 10 May.
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Not all were killed by the usual disease, starvation and exposure.

The village of Bretzenheim has also been the locale of much new research into the fate of prisoners. Herr and Frau Wolfgang Spietz of Bretzenheim took up a challenge from the local Protestant pastor in 1985 to prepare a display about the local camp which had been under American and later French control. With the official support of Bürgermeister Grünwald, this grew into the present documentation centre. A sensational find came in 1990 with the visit of Rudi Buchal of Grossenhain, in the east of Germany, who had been a prisoner in the American time. Buchal had served as a medical orderly-clerk in the so-called POW ‘hospital’ for prisoners, a tent with an earth floor inside the camp. It had no beds, no medical supplies, no blankets and starvation rations for the first month or more. Later, a few supplies were scrounged at random by American teams ‘ferreting’ the German towns nearby.

Another of the prisoners who have come forward recently to the Spietzes is Jakob M. Zacher, a former teacher and school principal of Bretzenheim. He was especially interested in the fate of the prisoners because he had been held in several camps, including Bretzenheim itself. In the 1980s, he decided to look in the archives for 1945 of the village at Langenlonsheim, which was so close to the Bretzenheim camp that prisoners could see the spires of its churches above the trees to the north. In the town hall under the spires, he found the document showing that the
Americans had threatened to shoot anyone who tried to take food to the camps. Other copies of the order have been found since in other villages.
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Also in Bretzenheim in the Spietzes’s house, four ex-prisoners met in 1991 to discuss their experiences. Max Müller of Bad Kreuznach laid on the Spietzes’s dining-room table the water-stained original US Army ration book for Bretzenheim, a hardcover German ledger book with the name of a clerk who had kept it still legible in pencil on the cover. This was Robert Hughson, of the 424th Regiment, 106th Infantry Division. Later in the USA, the Supply Officer of the 106th told this writer, ‘Yes, I remember Hughson.’ And Captain Lee Berwick said, ‘We had supplies stacked all round the camp.’ He could not explain why the prisoners got only about 600–850 calories per day, which was the ration according to Hughson’s records.
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And these prisoners nominally had Prisoner of War status.

Berwick’s statement about food supplies is at odds not only with the official army ration book, but with the reports of ten prisoners and several civilians received by the author. Without exception, they describe starvation conditions prevailing through the seventy-odd days when the camp was under US control.
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The prisoner Herbert Peters has reported similar conditions at the huge US camp at Rheinberg: ‘Even when there was little for us to eat, the provisions enclosure was enormous. Piles of cartons like bungalows with intersecting streets throughout.’
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As the Americans prepared to leave Bretzenheim in July, Buchal was told by drivers of the 560th Ambulance Company, who had carried bodies and sick prisoner ‘evacuees’ away, that 18,100 persons had died in the six camps round Bretzenheim in the ten weeks of American control. The destination of the corpses was not revealed to Buchal. He also heard the figure of 18,100 dead from the Germans who were in charge of the hospital statistics, and from other American hospital personnel. The six camps were Bretzenheim, Biebelsheim, Bad Kreuznach, Dietersheim, Hechtsheim and Heidesheim. The reliability of Buchal has been attested by the US Army itself. When he was
finally discharged, Buchal received a paper stating that in the opinion of the US Army officers who commanded him, ‘During the above mentioned period [April–July 1945] he proved himself to be co-operative, capable, industrious and reliable.’
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Captain Berwick said on reading Buchal’s report of 18,100 corpses in a draft of this chapter, ‘That might be true.’ The 18,100 figure is in general confirmed by reports from five prisoners who survived Bretzenheim. Several report deaths of over fifty per day for a long period in the camp alone, apart from the hospital.
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One reported 120–180 bodies per day coming out of the camp, apart from the hospital.
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The death total of 18,100, taken with the known period of ten weeks and the known average population of the six camps, 217,000, means that the death rate was 43 per cent per year. This is much higher than the figure 35.6 per cent apparent from Table X in the Medical History of the European Theater of Operations, which was used to help determine the overall death rates in
Other
Losses
in 1989. A high number of corpses on many days was also observed by several American guards at the camp.
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Captain Berwick was in charge of the German
Lager
captains who had to carry out the dead bodies every day. Berwick estimates that three to five bodies per day were taken from each of twenty cages within the larger enclosure, during the worst time, which lasted some sixteen days. This means that from the camp proper, excluding the hospital, some 960 to 1,600 bodies were taken away in only sixteen days from Bretzenheim alone. Berwick does not know where they were taken. Adding the probable hospital deaths computed from statistics for the hospitals at both Bretzenheim and Bad Kreuznach nearby, and from the overall medical records of the 106th Division, which guarded Bretzenheim and Bad Kreuznach, the overall death rate at Bretzenheim – in the open camp, in the hospital inside the camp, and among those evacuated to outside ‘evacuation hospitals’ – was above 40 per cent per year during those ten weeks. Berwick has also said that, because the guards made efforts to improve the camp, the death rate there dropped very significantly after the
disasters of the early weeks. ‘By July, the deaths were negligible,’ he said.