Crimes and Mercies (36 page)

38
Hilldring to State, RG 59, 3726A, NARS Washington.

39
Gollancz, op. cit., passim.

40
CRS, op. cit., p. 515.

41
Albrecht is cited in various speeches of Wherry
et al.
in the CRS for January to March 1946. His predictions are partly confirmed by experience recorded in the FEC Papers at Stanford, notably Murphy’s prediction that deaths would outnumber births by at least two million, and in Gustav Stolper,
German Realities
.

42
This means most children under ten and people over sixty. The rough estimate for children under ten is as follows: in normal times, 90 per cent of those born survive to the age of ten. Since about 900,000 babies were born per year, this means about nine million potential total. If 90 per cent survive, that equals approximately eight million alive after ten years. If half die, that equals four million dead. If only 10 per cent of persons then between the ages of sixty and eighty had survived from among those born in 1865–85, the potential was around fourteen million born, 1.4 million still alive, with half dying gives a total of 700,000. See Adenauer, op. cit., and population tree in Gustav Stolper.

43
Senator Wherry, quoting Probst Grüber (CRS, op. cit., p. 515). Thanks to Paul Boytinck.

44
This and the quotes from Johnson are from the CRS, op. cit., pp. 514–16.

45
The words in quotation are the paraphrase by F. Roy Willis of the report, in Willis,
The French in Germany
, p. 124.

46
Ibid.

47
See Appendix 5.

48
Montgomery to Mackenzie King, 24 October 1945, in King,
Diaries
, p. 1028.

49
 
Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein,
Memoirs
(London, 1958), p. 415.

50
In
The Progressive
, quoted by Senator Wherry (CRS, op. cit., p.517 ).

51
See Chapter V.

52
As, for instance, US Navy officer A. R. Behnke.

53
Senator Wherry, CRS, op. cit., p. 518.

54
Ibid.

55
Senator Langer, CRS, March 1946, p. 2801.

56
King, op. cit., p. 841.

Chapter III: ‘From There No Prisoner Returned’ (pp. 40–61)

1
For the Soviets, see:
Spravka
, by Russian Army historian Col. Andrei Kashirin, Moscow, January 1993; also G. F. Krivosheyev (ed.),
Without the Seal of Secrecy: The Losses of the Soviet Armed
Forces in Wars, Military Campaigns and Conflicts
; also Captain V.P. Galitski,
German POWs and the NKVD
; also the report of the Chief of the Prison Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Colonel P. Bulanov (‘the Bulanov Report’), corrected by Pogachev, 28 April 1956. In IP, OIe (transliterated from Cyrillic letters) in the CSSA, Moscow.

For the captures of the Western Allies in north-west Europe, see: ‘Report on Totals of Prisoners of War Taken’, SHAEF G1, 11 June 1945, 383.6/1–3, NARS Washington; for Canadians distinct from British, see report of General H. D. G. Crerar covering operations of First Canadian Army 11 March to 5 May 1945, in MG 26 J-4, Vol. 410, File 3978, Sheet C288484, NAC; for Allies in Africa/Italy, see Eisenhower,
Crusade in Europe
and Col. Dr Ernest F. Fisher, US Army historian.

The Western Allies overall took ‘about 8,000,000 German soldiers’ according to A. T. Lobdell, Commanding Officer of the German prisoners in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas. Since the Axis armies captured were composed in the West of about 85 per cent Germans, this means that the total prisoner take (which is the chief concern here), was around 9.4 million persons. Memo to Governor Dwight Griswold, 9 January 1947, in RG 260 OMGUS, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. One of the US Army historians gives the total for Germans held in north-west Europe
alone in May 1945, as 7,005,732 – see Oliver J. Frederiksen,
The
American Military Occupation of Germany, 1945–1953
(Historical Division, HQ, US Army Europe, 1953), p. 89. This excludes Italy and the prisoners held in North America captured in North Africa and Sicily.

2
Most of those captured in the West were Germans who were held in Italy, western Germany and France. A few hundred thousand were held in the UK, and about half a million in North America. The Soviets distributed theirs, including a million non-German Europeans, through a system with some 6,000 sub-camps, spread throughout the whole USSR. See Galitski, op. cit.

3
The first was found by Jakob Zacher in the archives of Langenlonsheim. Copies available in Dokumentationsstelle, Kriegsgefangenenlager Bretzenheim, Bretzenheim/Nahe.

4
The witness has asked that his name not be revealed.

5
Brech to the author, letters and interviews, 1990 and 1991.

6
Brech’s camp at Andernach was in the Advance Section zone of the Army, where the conditions were described by the Medical History of the ETO as typical of conditions throughout US camps in Europe.

7
This exemption was meaningless, because the prisoners were not registered by name for many weeks, so no one in the US command, much less a German civilian, could find out who was inside. Only by a chance sighting through the wire could a civilian find a family member. An exception to the strict order not to allow civilians to provide food seems to have occurred in the camp at Emmering near Fürstenfeldbruck, when in May 1945 the local clergy and civilians assembled supplies from their own meagre stores and were permitted to deliver them to the prisoners. See a series of articles on the camp in the
Emmeringer
Gemeinde Spiegel
, March 1986.

8
Hanns Scharf of California, interview with the author, 1991.

9
Berwick has said that he never ordered anyone to shoot at prisoners. This author accepts that statement without question.

10
Interview with Herr Tullius in Bretzenheim, July 1991.

11
Interview with the author, 1991.

12
Tagebuch with the author.

13
Interview with the author, October 1996. Dr Allensworth dissociates himself entirely from the author’s overall criticism of US policy.

14
 
State to American Embassy, Paris, 12 May 1945, in 740.62114/5-445 State Department Archives, Washington.

15
Town of Bad Kreuznach, post 60, file no. 6754 06 WASt: War Graves lists for 1954 and 1963. Also cited in G. Maria Shuster,
Die Kriegsgefangenenlager Galgenberg und Bretzenheim
(Stadt-verwaltung Bad Kreuznach, 1985).

16
Shown to the author by Heinz Bücher of Büdesheim, who is writing a history of the camp at Dietersheim.

17
Captain Berwick has told the author that: ‘I take issue with the accounts of starvation at Camp A6 [Bretzenheim].’ He met every day with the German
Lager
captains (leaders of each cage within the enclosure), and does not remember any complaints that food was insufficient.

18
The names of the prisoners are Paul Bastian, Konrad Schildwachter, Paul Kaps, Walter Drechsel, Erich Werner, Dr Herbert Bolte, Rudi Sauer, Gerhard Wolter, Winfried Punder and Rolf Freyer. Civilians who commented on the camp were Frau Grünwald, Frau Bastian, Frau Lambert and Frau Blank, all of Bretzenheim.

19
Letter of Herbert Peters of Hilden, Germany, to his son. In the author’s possession.

20
Letter of recommendation, 8 July 1945. Signed Lt. Roy D. Schneider, HQ Dispensary, Detachment B, 50th US Field Hospital. In possession of Rudi Buchal, Grossenhain, Germany. Copy with the author.

21
Paul Bastian, interview with the author, 1991; Konrad Schildwachter, letter, November 1990.

22
Quoted in ‘Menschen in Lagern an der Nahe und im Hunsrück’ in
PZ-Information 8/86
(Bad Kreuznach: Pädagogisches Zentrum, 1986) p. 46.

23
Other US soldiers at the camp – Bill Dodge, Tiller Carter and Frank Borbely – all said that Captain Lee Berwick’s figures on the camp were probably accurate in their opinion.

24
Most of the records referred to here are filed under HQ 106th Infantry Division, Office of the Surgeon, APO 443 US Army, Annual Report Medical Activities 1945, signed Belzer, dated 18 September 1945. They are from Record Group 332 at or around Box 18, others from RG 112 at and around Box 313. All were at NARS Suitland until the recent move to College Park, Maryland.

25
 
The number varied during the period, which lasted from about mid-April to 10 July 1945. Enclosures actually in use varied during the period from zero at 14 April to possibly seventeen at the end of May. Some camps were shown as projected in reports, but never reported as containing prisoners. On 31 May sixteen are shown, of which fourteen were occupied. They were all in the ASCZ, on and near the Rhine (HQ Adsec Com Z, Office of the Surgeon, Report).

26
Status of Med Service PWTE Report, HQ, Adsec, Office of the Surgeon, April–June 1945, RG 332 Box 15, NARS College Park. Also Robert Hughson’s official ration book for Bretzenheim, in Dokumentationsstelle, Bretzenheim, which lists hospital occupancy as well as rations and number of POWs in camp. Copy in the author’s possession.

27
See p. 17 of the 106th Medical Report. The records for American patients are remarkably complete, showing for instance that the ambulance services of the 106th made 2,434 trips covering 193,949 miles, evacuating 21,551 prisoners to ‘evacuation hospitals’ in May to 10 July. The Hospital Unit statistics of the 106th Division Medical Report covered all the American Rhine camps including Bretzenheim from the end of April to 10 July 1945.

28
Interview with the author, November 1987.

29
Dr Joseph Kirsch, cited in Gerard Östreicher, ‘Ces prisonniers allemands “Morts pour raisons diverses”’ in
Le Républicain
Lorrain
, 3 June 1990.

30
It is possible that some of the ‘evacuation hospitals’ indeed treated their patients well. The prisoner Werner Borrmann of Quebec reported that he was sent to a small hospital near Idstein, then Bad Schwalbach, where German doctors and nurses treated him well. Borrmann believes that these hospitals were under American supervision; however, the French were taking control of the region in early July, so the responsibility may have lain with them.

31
Experience of many prisoners, including Wolf von Richthofen, Paul Kaps and Heinz Thaufelder.

32
In so-called ‘hospitals supporting PWTEs’, 16,229 beds were unoccupied in June 1945.

33
Letter from Marshal of the French Army Alphonse Juin to US Army General John T. Lewis, 11 October 1945 (NARS).

34
 
Lauben to Paul, 7 July 1945 (SHAEF Papers, Modern Military Records, NARS, Washington).

35
The patient load was admissions to hospital units of 44,646 less the evacuations to evacuation hospitals ‘further to the rear’ of 21,551, equals load of 23,095. But because there were 26,000 to 31,860 people not accounted for and not found at French takeover, it is clear that there were either more deaths in the hospital units than the figures show, and/or more men were evacuated to the evacuation hospitals than the figures show. The most conservative estimate is that 26,000 died in the evacuation hospitals, leaving around 5,860 as the patient load among whom 1,392 deaths were actually recorded. Or it may be that the 1,392 dead formed only the recorded part of the total of 26,000 otherwise unrecorded deaths in the evacuation hospitals and hospital units. In any case, to the hospital unit deaths must be added not only the evacuation hospital deaths as above, but also the deaths in the camp itself, apart from the hospitals. Reports, HQ 106th Infantry Division, Office of the Surgeon, various dates in 1945. Most are in RG 112, entry 31 ETO, in or near Box 313 (NARS).

36
Report of Jennings B. Marshall, Major, Medical Corps Commanding, 50th Field Hospital, Detachment A, Bad Kreuznach, 29 May 1945. Records of 50th Field Hospital Unit, RG 112 and 407, Boxes 411–14 (NARS).

37
Dokumentationsstelle, Kreigsgefangenenlager Bretzenheim. The lowest death rate so far discovered in an American field hospital unit is reported by the 62nd Field Hospital, where some 4 per cent of the patients died in eighty days (approximately 18 per cent per year). This does not include the deaths in the camp itself (Kripp) nor in the evacuation hospital to which the moribund were sent.

38
See the report of Dr Siegfried Enke of Wuppertal on p. 48 of Bacque,
Other Losses
(Note 21).

39
The calculation is as follows: the Dellmann observations of 3,000 to 4,000, taken with the average population of Bretzenheim – about 73,800 for the ten weeks – show the death rate was around 21 to 28 per cent per year. It is not clear whether Dellmann’s figures include both the two hospital unit cages and the twenty non-medical cages, so it is assumed here that they do, leading to a lower estimate for the death rate. Bretzenheim was about 13 per cent of the total 106th population, so it probably
accounted for about 3,380 to 4,142 of the 26,000 to 31,860 missing (French source) and not accounted for (American source) in the 106th cages on 10 July. The death total therefore is somewhere between a minimum of 6,380 and a maximum of 8,142. The death rate is therefore somewhere between 45 and 57.5 per cent per year.

40
Sources: Pastor Dellmann, Rudy Buchal, and Captain Lee Berwick plus extrapolations by the author from 50th and 106th records.

41
Bretzenheim’s 13 per cent
pro rata
share of total shown as evacuated in 106th records.

42
The total of prisoners disposed of in the breakdowns of returns, deaths, evacuations to the rear and admissions of communicable diseases in the hospital units is slightly more than the total shown as evacuated from the main part of the camp to the hospital units. The excess may be due to double counting of some prisoners returning alive from the evacuation units, but this is unlikely since none is recorded. Or it may be due to double counting of men with two communicable diseases. The total of these extra people is 2,418. If indeed they were all living prisoners returning from the evacuation units, and are therefore to be subtracted from the 31,860 men for whom the Americans could not directly account, then the total of those for whom the Americans could not account on turnover shrinks from 31,860 to 29,442. The number not there according to Lauben was 22,000; the number missing according to the French was 26,000.