Soldiers and Slaves
American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In February of 1945, 350 American POWs, selected because they were Jews, thought to resemble Jews or simply by malicious caprice, were transported by cattle car to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany. Here, the soldiers were worked to death, starved and brutalized; more than twenty percent died from this horrific treatment.
This is one of the last untold stories of World War II, and Roger Cohen re-creates it in all its blistering detail. Ground down by the crumbling Nazi war machine, the men prayed for salvation from the Allied troops, yet even after their liberation, their story was nearly forgotten. There was no aggressive prosecution of the commandants of the camp and the POWs received no particular recognition for their sacrifices. Cohen tells their story at last, in a stirring tale of bravery and depredation that is essential for any reader of World War II history.
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.
