[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 54 (Thursday, April 26, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3984-S3985]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  AMERICAN PRISONERS OF THE HOLOCAUST

  Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, in September of 1944, the 106th Infantry 
Division embarked for Europe and soon joined heavy fighting at the 
Battle of the Bulge. But one member of the division, the Academy Award-
winning filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, was left behind in Indiana due to 
a minor illness. His connection with this brave group and the 350 
American soldiers taken prisoner after the battle and sent to a Nazi 
camp in Berga, Germany led Mr. Guggenheim to undertake a new 
documentary, which is the subject of an excellent New York Times 
article by Roger Cohen. So that more Americans can be educated about 
the events leading up to the Holocaust and the unspeakable horrors 
inflicted upon Americans as well as Europeans, I ask that Mr. Cohen's 
article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 17, 2001]

Where G.I.'s Were Consumed by the Holocaust's Terror; a Filmmaker Helps 
                     Thaw Memories of Wartime Guilt

                            (By Roger Cohen)

       Berga, Germany. Four plain wooden crosses stand in the 
     cemetery above this quiet town in eastern Germany. One of 
     them is inscribed ``Unknown Allied Soldier.'' He is unlikely 
     to be an American, because the G.I.'s who died here were 
     exhumed after World War II and taken home. But the mystery of 
     this soldier's identity is only one of many hanging over 
     Berga and its former Nazi camp.
       On a cold, late March day, with snow falling on the graves, 
     a thin, soft-spoken American stands filming in the cemetery. 
     He has hired some local volunteers, one of whom is portraying 
     a Nazi guard, as two others turn the earth in preparation for 
     the burial of the simulated corpses whose limp feet dangle 
     out of sacks. The scene has an eerie luminosity in the 
     silence of the snow.
       The weather is cinematographically perfect. It is also 
     unseasonably cold and infernally damp. The American, Charles 
     Guggenheim, shivers as he says: ``This is a slow business, 
     filming something like this. Sort of like watching grass 
     grow.''
       But for him the fate of the American soldiers imprisoned 
     and worked to death more than a half-century ago in Berga has 
     become something of an obsession.
       Time may be needed for an obsession to take hold, time for 
     the half-thoughts, nagging regrets and suppressed memories to 
     coalesce into a determination to act. Mr. Guggenheim, a 
     documentary filmmaker who has won four Academy Awards, waited 
     a long time to embark on this movie. His daughter, Grace 
     Guggenheim, has a theory as to why. ``This is sort of a 
     survivor's guilt story,'' she said.
       In September 1944 Mr. Guggenheim, now 77, was with the 
     American 106th Infantry Division, preparing to go to Europe. 
     But when the other soldiers embarked, he was immobilized with 
     a foot infection. He remained in Indiana while his fellow 
     infantrymen were plunged, within weeks, into the Battle of 
     the Bulge; two regiments were lost. Thousands of American 
     soldiers were captured, and several hundred who were Jewish 
     or who ``looked'' Jewish ended up in Berga. Up to now their 
     fate has received relatively little attention, partly because 
     the surviving soldiers long tended to repress the trauma.
       ``I could have been among the captured or the killed,'' Mr. 
     Guggenheim mused. ``I never wished I had come to Europe. 
     Anyone in the infantry who wishes for war has something wrong 
     with them. But I've thought a lot: why in the hell am I here 
     and they not? Perhaps in the next life they'll get even. I'm 
     trying not to believe in a next life.''
       Even this life seems incredible enough when gazing at 
     little Berga, a place outside time. It was exploited by the 
     Nazis before being taken over by the Russians, who mined 
     uranium in the area. In 1990 it was made part of a united 
     Germany.
       Unemployment here stands at about 24 percent, so Mr. 
     Guggenheim had no problem finding volunteers for his film. To 
     conjure an atmosphere of desolation was not difficult either: 
     beside the unused red-brick textile factory of a vanished 
     Jewish family (named Englander), stray cats wander through 
     junkyards, watched by old men standing huddled against the 
     cold. Germany's ghosts, its myriad secrets, are almost 
     palpable in a place like this.
       Among the onlookers near the cemetery is Sabine Knuppel, a 
     municipal worker. She says she has photographs of the ``old 
     days'' in Berga: a lighted swastika glowing among trees heavy 
     with snow. None of the old people in town like to talk about 
     those days, she says, when the Nazis set up a satellite camp 
     to Buchenwald in the middle of town and used the slave 
     laborers imprisoned there to dig tunnels into the rock cliffs 
     bordering the Elster River.
       All that, she continues, constitutes a ``lost world.'' But 
     once there were perhaps 1,000 prisoners working in the 
     tunnels, where the Nazis planned to install a factory 
     producing synthetic fuel. But until now, nobody in the town 
     knew there were Americans among the prisoners, Ms. Knuppel 
     says.
       After the war the Russians blew up many of the tunnels. In 
     their vestiges bats established a vast colony now officially 
     designated as a German nature reserve. Along the wooded banks 
     of the Elster, a dozen entrances to the tunnels may still be 
     seen; they are barred with steel doors.
       Layer upon layer of German secrets: more tangible in a 
     place like Berga than in the west of the country, where 
     postwar prosperity wiped away most traces of tragedy. Mr. 
     Guggenheim, whose award-winning documentaries include ``J. F. 
     K. Remembered'' and an account of the civil rights movement 
     called ``A Time for Justice,'' has been digging into the 
     secrets for two years now. He has interviewed 40 American 
     survivors of Berga for a documentary tentatively titled 
     ``G.I. Holocaust.''
       The film, a co-production of Mr. Guggenheim's company and 
     WNET, the public-television station in New York, centers on 
     what happened to a group of American soldiers captured by the 
     Germans after the Battle of the Bulge (which began on Dec. 
     16, 1944) and later transported to Berga.

[[Page S3985]]

       This group of about 350 men was selected from among the 
     more than 2,000 American prisoners initially taken to the 
     Stalag 9B prisoner of war camp at Bad Orb, 50 miles north of 
     Frankfurt. Among them was William Shapiro, now a retired 
     doctor living in Florida. A medic attached to the 28th 
     Infantry Division, he was captured on Dec. 17, 1944, the day 
     after the battle began.
       ``On arrival at the prisoner of war camp, we were 
     interrogated,'' Dr. Shapiro said in a telephone interview. 
     ``With a name like Shapiro, it was quite evident I was 
     Jewish. I was then pushed into a particular barracks, mostly 
     for Jews and other undesirables. Our job was to clean the 
     latrines. We were guarded by the SS with dogs, rather than 
     the Wehrmacht. I'd never even trained with a gun. I thought 
     the Geneva Convention would protect me as a medic. At that 
     time I knew nothing of Auschwitz or the planned extermination 
     of European Jewry, although of course I knew of Hitler's 
     hostility to Jews.''
       In the special barracks he was eventually joined by the 
     other 350 Americans who would go to Berga. Their identities 
     had not been as immediately obvious. Many were selected in a 
     grim process recalled to Mr. Guggenheim by several soldiers 
     of his own 106th Division.
       They described how prisoners were ordered to stand at 
     attention in the parade ground. The commandant then gave the 
     order for all Jews to step forward. ``Nobody moved,'' said 
     Joseph Littell, one of the survivors. ``He said it again. 
     Nobody moved. He grabbed a rifle butt and hit Hans Kasten, 
     our leader, with a blow you couldn't believe. Hans got up. He 
     hit him again. The commandant said he would kill 10 men every 
     hour until the Jews were identified.''
       The group of 350 was eventually assembled of some Jews who 
     identified themselves under pressure; some soldiers, like Mr. 
     Kasten, who volunteered; and some who were picked by the 
     Germans as resembling Jews. Mr. Kasten, an American of German 
     descent, suffered repeated taunts, being told that the thing 
     worse than a Jew was a German who turns against his country. 
     After several weeks the group was loaded into boxcars without 
     food or water, arriving at Berga on Feb. 13, 1945.
       The Nazis had a policy, ``annihilation through work,'' and 
     these Americans learned what this meant. Housed in a barracks 
     beside the prison camp, fed only on bread and thin soup, 
     sleeping two to a bed in three-level bunks, deprived of water 
     to wash, urinating and defecating into a hole in the floor, 
     regularly beaten, the soldiers were herded out to work 12 
     hours a day in the dusty tunnels.
       ``The purpose was to kill you but to get as much of you 
     before they killed you,'' Milton Stolon of the 106th Division 
     told Mr. Guggenheim. Gangrene, dysentery, pneumonia, 
     diphtheria did their work. In the space of nine weeks about 
     35 soldiers died.
       The persecution of American prisoners at Berga has remained 
     little-known because many of the victims, like Dr. Shapiro, 
     chose not to speak of it for a half-century after the war. 
     With the cold war to fight and West Germany a postwar ally, 
     the United States government had little interest in opening 
     its archives and inflaming conflict between Americans and 
     Germans.
       In recent years, however, the research of an Army officer, 
     Mack O'Quinn, who investigated the events at Berga for a 
     master's degree thesis, and a 1994 book by Mitchell Bard, 
     ``Forgotten Victims'' (Westview Press), have thrown light on 
     the treatment of the G.I.'s. Still, many of the soldiers said 
     they spoke about their experiences for the first time to Mr. 
     Guggenheim; the notion that American prisoners of war were 
     persecuted as Jews or Jewish sympathizers has not received 
     broad attention.
       Mr. Guggenheim said it was still a shock that this happened 
     to Americans, bringing home the realization that if the Nazis 
     had won the war, ``they would have gotten us, too.''
       A descendant of German Jews, he grapples with ambivalent 
     feelings about the country, unable to forget what a 
     ``civilized nation'' did to its Jews even as he is surprised 
     by how civil postwar German society is.
       He also grapples with how to find an appropriate treatment 
     of a Holocaust movie, troubled by what he sees as the 
     frequent trivialization of the Holocaust in film. Too often, 
     he said, Hitler's crimes have become a ``quick fix for 
     involvement'' and a good fix for raising money from Jewish 
     families. Like sex and violence, the Holocaust ``demands 
     people's attention, even if they do not feel good about it.''
       His answer to the ethical dilemma is the sobriety of his 
     research and treatment: painstaking interviews, careful 
     reconstruction of a little-known chapter in the war, 
     attention to detail. The scenes filmed in Berga will 
     supplement a core of archival film, photography and 
     interviews. ``What is most moving to me is the way the 
     survivors have talked about themselves and about each other, 
     often for the first time,'' he said. ``In many instances they 
     had never talked about this before.''
       Dr. Shapiro was among those who suppressed his memories. 
     ``It took 50 years for all of us to begin to come to terms 
     with this,'' he said. In early April 1945, with the American 
     and Soviet armies closing in, the camp at Berga was ordered 
     evacuated, and a death march began for hundreds of prisoners. 
     At least another 50 Americans died in the ensuing days before 
     advance units of the American 11th Armored Division liberated 
     the prisoners on April 22, 1945, near Cham in southeastern 
     Germany.
       The rate of attrition--more than 70 American dead in just 
     over two months after arrival at Berga--was among the highest 
     for any group of G.I.'s taken prisoner in Europe. Dr. Shapiro 
     weighed 98 pounds on his liberation; he cannot recall the 
     last days of the forced march despite repeated efforts to do 
     so. ``I had become a zombie,'' he said.
       Time has passed, but Dr. Shapiro's voice still cracks a 
     little as he thinks back. Periodic nightmares trouble him. 
     ``I traveled the same road as an American prisoner of war as 
     the Jews of Europe,'' he continued. ``I was put in a boxcar, 
     starved, put on a death march. It was a genocidal type of 
     approach.''
       That road might also have been Mr. Guggenheim's. After the 
     war he asked a returning member of the 106th Division about a 
     Jewish soldier he had known and was told the man had died in 
     a German mine. But where, how, why?
       The questions lingered in his mind for more than a half-
     century before taking him where an infected foot prevented 
     him from going in 1944: to a remote town in Germany where the 
     bat-filled tunnels are now sealed and snow falls on a 
     cemetery where an ``Allied Soldier'' lies.

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