Berga am Elster:
American POWs at Berga
by Mitchell G. Bard
American Jewish soldiers had to decide what to do.
All had gone into battle with dog tags bearing an "H" for
Hebrew. Some had disposed of their IDs when they were captured,
others decided to do so after the commandant's threat.
Approximately 130 Jews ultimately came forward.
They were segregated and placed in a special barracks. Some 50
noncommissioned officers from the group were taken out of the camp,
along with the non-Jewish NCOs.
The Germans had a quota of 350 for a special
detail. All the remaining Jews were taken, along with prisoners
considered troublemakers, those they thought were Jewish and others
chosen at random. This group left Bad Orb on February 8. They were
placed in trains under conditions similar to those faced by European
Jews deported to concentration camps. Five days later, the POWs
arrived in Berga, a quaint German town of 7,000 people on the Elster
River, whose concentration camps appear on few World War II maps.
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Conditions in Stalag IX-B were the worst of any
POW camp, but they were recalled fondly by the Americans transferred
to Berga, who discovered the main purpose for their imprisonment was
to serve as slave laborers. Each day, the men trudged approximately
two miles through the snow to a mountainside in which 17 mine shafts
were dug 100 feet apart. There, under the direction of brutal
civilian overseers, the Americans were required to help the Nazis
build an underground armament factory.
The men worked in shafts as deep as 150 feet that
were so dusty it was impossible to see more than a few feet in front
of you. The Germans would blast the slate loose with dynamite and
then, before the dust settled, the prisoners would go down to break
up the rock so that it could be shoveled into mining cars.
The men did what they could to sustain each other.
"You kept each other warm at night by huddling together,"
said Daniel Steckler. "We maintained each other's welfare by
sharing body heat, by sharing the paper-thin blankets that were given
to us, by sharing the soup, by sharing the bread, by sharing
everything."
"Surviving was all you thought about,"
Winfield Rosenberg agreed. "You were so worn down you didn't
even think of all the death that was around you." He said his
faith sustained him. "I knew I'd go to heaven if I died, because
I was already in hell."
On April 4, 1945, the commandant received an order
to evacuate Berga. This was but the end of a chapter of the
Americans' ordeal. The human skeletons who had survived found no
cause to rejoice in this flight from hell. They were leaving friends
behind and returning to the unknown.
Fewer than 300 men survived the 50 days they had
spent in Berga. Over the next two-and-a-half weeks, before the
survivors were liberated, at least 36 more GIs died on a march to
avoid the approaching Allied armies. The fatality rate in Berga,
including the march, was the highest of any camp where American POWs
were held—nearly 20 percent—and the 70-73 men who were killed
represented approximately six percent of all Americans who perished
as POWs during World War II.
This was not the only case where American Jewish
soldiers were segregated or otherwise mistreated, but it was the most
dramatic. The U.S. Government never publicly acknowledged they were
mistreated. In fact, one survivor was told he should go to a
psychiatrist. Officials at the VA told him he had made up the whole
story.
Two of the Nazis responsible for the murder and
mistreatment of American soldiers were tried. They were found guilty
and sentenced to hang, despite the fact that none of the survivors
testified at the trial . Later, the case was reviewed and the
verdicts upheld. Nevertheless, five years after being tried, the
Chief of the War Crimes Branch unilaterally decided the evidence was
insufficient to sustain the charges and commuted the sentences to
time served — about six years.
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