Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble [Hardcover]

Roger Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2005

In February 1945, 350 American POWs captured earlier at the Battle of the Bulge or elsewhere in Europe were singled out by the Nazis because they were Jews or were thought to resemble Jews. They were transported in cattle cars to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany, and put to work as slave laborers, mining tunnels for a planned underground synthetic-fuel factory. This was the only incident of its kind during World War II.

Starved and brutalized, the GIs were denied their rights as prisoners of war, their ordeal culminating in a death march that was halted by liberation near the Czech border. Twenty percent of these soldiers–more than seventy of them–perished. After t_he war, Berga was virtually forgotten, partly because it fell under Soviet domination and partly because America’s Cold War priorities quickly changed, and the experiences of these Americans were buried.
Now, for the first time, their story is told in all its blistering detail. This is the story of hell in a small place over a period of nine weeks, at a time when Hitler’s Reich was crumbling but its killing machine still churned. It is a tale of madness and heroism, and of the failure to deliver justice for what the Nazis did to these Americans.

Among those involved: William Shapiro, a young medic from the Bronx, hardened in Normandy battles but, as a prisoner, unable to help the Nazis’ wasted slaves, whose bodies became as insubstantial as ghosts; Hans Kasten, a defiant German-American who enraged his Nazi captors by demanding, in vain, that his fellow U.S. prisoners be treated with humanity, thus committing the unpardonable sin of betraying his German roots; Morton Goldstein, a garrulous GI from New Jersey, shot dead by the Nazi in charge of the American prisoners in an incident that would spark intense debate at a postwar trial; and Mordecai Hauer, the orphaned Hungarian Jew who, after surviving Auschwitz, stumbled on the GIs in the midst of the Holocaust at Berga and despaired at the sight of liberators become slaves.

Roger Cohen uncovers exactly why the U.S. government did not aggressively prosecute the commandants of Berga, why there was no particular recognition for the POWs and their harsh treatment in the postwar years, and why it took decades for them to receive proper compensation.

Soldiers and Slaves is an intimate, intensely dramatic story of war and of a largely forgotten chapter of the Holocaust.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A former Balkans bureau chief for the New York Times, Cohen last explored atrocity in Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo; he now steps back 60 years and moves a few hundred kilometers west to recount the fate of 550 American POWs shipped into eastern Germany during the winter of 1944-1945. Most were Jewish--or appeared Jewish enough to satisfy Nazi officials, who needed to meet labor quotas the dying concentration camp inmates were no longer fit to handle. Cohen's interviews with survivors show that the POWs met nearly as dire a fate, as they dug underground to build a synthetic fuel plant, with 20% of them dying and others being crippled for life by rock falls, dust, starvation and by the brutal treatment from the guards. Postwar, the camp fell within what became East Germany, where the investigation into the Holocaust was less rigorously pursued than in the West. The guards got off lightly; the commandant was sentenced to only eight years. Following Germany's reunification, exploration into the methods and motives of the Third Reich has been losing support, Cohen shows; his outrage is plain when he encounters a German environmentalist who wants the surviving caves turned into a bird sanctuary. The book is well organized, but the writing style is not always smooth; it's Cohen's level of detail that makes this journalistic history come alive. 75,000-copy first printing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Less than a hundred days before Hitler killed himself, three hundred and fifty American P.O.W.s—most of whom the Germans had identified as, or suspected of being, Jews—were moved from Stalag IX-B to Berga, where, alongside Jews from Auschwitz, they were starved, beaten, and forced to work in appalling conditions before being sent on a death march. Cohen gives a powerful account of a chapter of the war that was long suppressed—in part, he argues, because American authorities didn't recognize that their own soldiers had been caught in a "little outpost of the Holocaust." Cohen is particularly good at conveying the otherworldly encounters between Americans and European Jews in the camp, as when shock spreads over the face of a G.I. who realizes, after an exchange in broken Yiddish, that the crowd of wraithlike figures he sees is made up of Jews like him.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First edition, as stated edition (April 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037541410X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375414107
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #909,841 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Soldiers in the Holocaust, June 27, 2005

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble (Hardcover)

It has been sixty years, and all the stories of World War II are not yet told. Along with the big stories of horrors and triumphs, there are smaller ones on the same themes, and some of them were deliberately covered up or hushed up by the victors. Most of us didn't realize that captured American soldiers who should have been mere prisoners of war were actually shunted directly into the Holocaust and treated with the same sort of brutality meted out at the infamous camps like Auschwitz. In _Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble_ (Knopf), Roger Cohen has brought forth a grueling and difficult story of American soldiers, many but not all Jewish, who were assigned to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany, and worked as slaves, many to their deaths. Instead of becoming part of the history of infamy by the Nazis, the investigation done at the time was hushed up and the victims who lived did not get to testify against the officials in charge of the camp in the war crimes trials. Cohen's book represents a late but essential corrective.

The Nazis took thousands of American soldiers prisoner in the winter of 1944, and most went on to the more typical POW camps. Even in the closing days of the war, however, and even against Americans, the Nazis had not lost their particular hatred for Jews. About 350 of the captives were singled out for special transfer to Berga, as were about 350 others, many of them Jewish soldiers, but also others who had been branded as troublemakers at other camps, or those who just looked Jewish according to the prejudices of whatever goon was making the decision. The Berga workers included American POWs as well as Jewish prisoners from other camps like Buchenwald. They were often simply worked to death, digging what was to be, in one of Hitler's last mad plans, an underground facility to make synthetic fuel. They had to endure vicious guards, starvation, infected wounds from their mining work, and more; much of Cohen's book describing the treatment of the prisoners is heartbreaking to read. Berga was in operation for just 52 days at the beginning of 1945, and then there was a dreadful death march as the Germans kept losing ground in the war. Of the 350 prisoners, around a fifth died, a rate far higher than any POW camp in Europe.

The trials of the prisoners are in some ways not the saddest part of the book. The men who endured Berga did not get their story told and did not get to give their evidence in the war crimes trials of their brutal slave-drivers. Cohen has looked at the documents from an American war-crimes investigation from 1945, and found them thorough, with many official statements from prisoners. The records, however, became classified and even the existence of the camp was not acknowledged. Family members writing to an official shortly after the end of the war to find out what happened in Berga got a reply that said "... it has been learned that there was no German prisoner of war camp by that name." Prisoners who eventually got back to the US found that even the Veterans Administration could not believe that they were concentration camp survivors, and were denied disabilities. Many of the prisoners had to sign a "Security Certificate for Ex-Prisoners of War" which said that POW activities had to remain secret for the duration of the war and into peacetime. A brutal Nazi sergeant remembered as particularly vindictive was imprisoned for less than ten years by the Americans, partially because his victims didn't testify. An SS officer in charge, in contrast, was captured by the Russians in 1951, tried by them, and hanged. While the US Army never compensated the prisoners or gave them disability benefits for the time in the camp, a few years ago the survivors did get compensation under slave labor legislation from Germany. Cohen's dramatic, haunting, and elegantly written book will help ensure that this important story is not lost.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing tale of cruelty and survival, August 2, 2005

By 

Richard E. Hourula (Berkeley, CA. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble (Hardcover)

Wow!
Reading a lot of history (particularly about war) I often feels that nothing will shock me any more. Then I get a hold of a book like Roger Cohen's "Soldiers and Slaves" and find myself gasping in disbelief.
Here is a story of incredible bravery. Here is a story of incredible cruelty. Here is a story of the incredible ability to survive against all odds. Here is an incredible story.
Hitler's last major offensive of World War II in December 1944 resulted in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Though the Germans ultimately lost the battle they exacted a huge toll in allied casualties and captives.
This is the story of how some of those captured -- particularly American Jews -- came to be swept up in the Nazi's Holocaust.
Cohen tells the story of the approximately 500 American POWs taken to the Berga prison camp in eastern Germany where many were worked or starved or beaten to death.
We are also introduced to a Hungarian Jewish family that was swept up in the latter stages of the Holocaust and how one teen aged son from that family ended up in Berga.
Cohen thus exposes readers to many aspects of the war: battle, capture, POW camps, the Holocaust, escape, sadism and the very unique story of Berga.
There are two things that makes "Soldiers and Salves" such a riveting read. One is the details. We learn exactly what people had and were deprived of. What they wore, ate, drank. What the weather was, what people spoke of and what they they yearned for. This leads to the second aspect of the book that is so integral to its success. The people. Cohen does what is essential in such a story by fully acquainting readers with the main characters. Through interviews, diaries and letters Cohen has come to understand the central figures of the story and passes that understanding on to the reader.
Meet William Shapiro a GI medic from the Bronx who long after the war suppressed his memories of the awful treatment he received and witnessed at Berga. Meet Hans Kasten a German American (whose life even before Berga is worthy of a book) who stood up to his captors, later escaped and sought revenge. Meet Mordecai Hauer the young Hungarian Jew, clutching desperately to life and with equal determination to his family's lives. Meet Erwin Metz, the sadistic sergeant a Berga who cruelly meted out punishment.
"Soldiers and Slaves" is an important addition to the ever burgeoning library of good non fiction on World War II.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Soldiers and Slaves, May 5, 2005

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Neal Bellet (Wayne, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble (Hardcover)

Soldiers and Slaves by Roger Cohen is the story of 350 Americans, captured during the Battle of the Bulge, who end up in a Nazi slave labor camp. A major portion of this group were Jewish. The prisoners were sent from a Stalag, where the Jewish prisoners were separated from their fellow POWs. How these men were treated at Berga was a travesty. What was a greater travesty however was how the Americans allowed those who perpetrated these heinous acts to get away with what, considering how they treated their prisoners, amounted to nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Cold war concerns got in the way of justice. The men who were able to survive the camp and the horrific death march after they were forced from the camp by their Nazi guards were heroes in every sense of the word. Those who are alive today still suffer both physically and emotionally as a result of their experiences. Recently, another book on the same subject was published. Although that book was good, this one is a much more interesting read and I recommend it to any WWII buff.