Soldiers and Slaves; American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble
Natasha Perkel (maps) New York, N.Y. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. [12], 303, [5] pages. Previous owner's address label and advertisement for this book pasted to fep. Illustrations. Maps. Includes Epilogue, Notes, The Berga Prisoners, Acknowledgments, and Index. Chapters cover The Devil Quotes Scripture; Sucker Punch; The Obedience of Corpses; The Selection; Prayer Book and Sword; Walking Shadows; Weasels in a Hole; The Dying Weeks; and Orders from Nowhere. Roger Cohen (born 2 August 1955) is a journalist and author. He was a reporter, editor and columnist for The New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune (later re-branded as the International New York Times). He has worked as a foreign correspondent in fifteen countries. In 1983, Cohen joined The Wall Street Journal in Rome to cover the Italian economy. The Journal later transferred him to Beirut. He joined The New York Times in January 1990.[6] In the summer of 1991, he co-authored with Claudio Gatti In the Eye of the Storm: The Life of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. The authors wrote the book based on information from Norman Schwarzkopf's sister Sally, without Schwarzkopf's help. In 2004, he began writing a column called 'Globalist', which is published twice a week in The International Herald Tribune. In 2005, Cohen's third book, Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. In 2006, he became the first senior editor for The International Herald Tribune. 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 the 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. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Berga, World War 2, Concentration Camps, Conscript Labor, Prisoners, Prisons, Elster, Death March, David Hauer, Mordecai Hauer, Jawischowitz, Johann Kasten, Jews, Genocide, William Shapiro, Natasha Perkel
ISBN: 037541410X
[Book #82169]
Price: $40.00