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Title details for Given Up For Dead by Flint Whitlock - Available

Given Up For Dead

American GI's in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga

by Flint Whitlock
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In December 1944, the Ardennes Forest on the German-Belgium border was considered a "quiet" zone where new American divisions, fresh from the States, came to get acclimated to "life at the front." No one in Allied headquarters knew that the Ardennes had been personally selected by Hitler to be the soft point through which over 250,000 men and hundreds of Panzers would plunge in the Third Reich's last-gasp attempt to split the Americans and British armies and perhaps win a negotiated peace in the West. When the Germans crashed through American lines during what became known as the "Battle of the Bulge," in December 1944, thousands of stunned American soldiers who had never before been in combat were taken prisoner. Most were sent to prisoner-of-war camps, where their treatment was dictated by the Geneva Convention and the rules of warfare. For an unfortunate few - mostly Jewish or other "ethnic" GIs - a different fate awaited them. Taken first to Stalag 9B at Bad Orb, Germany, 350 soldiers were singled out for "special treatment," segregated from their buddies, and transported by unheated railroad boxcars with no sanitary facilities on a week-long journey to Berga-an-der-Elster, a picturesque village 50 miles south of Leipzig. Awaiting them at Berga was a sinister slave-labor camp bulging with 1,000 inmates. The incarceration at Berga is the only known instance of captured American soldiers being turned into slave laborers at a Nazi concentration camp. Given Up for Dead is the story of their survival. For over three months, the American soldiers worked under brutal, inhuman conditions, building tunnels in a mountainside for the German munitions industry. The prisoners had no protective masks or clothing; were worked for 12 hours per shift with no food, water, or rest; were beaten regularly for the most minor infractions (or none at all); were fed only starvation rations; slept two to a bed in ghastly, lice-infested bunks; and were never allowed a bath or a change of clothing. Of the 350 GIs in the original contingent, 70 of them died within the first two months at Berga; the others struggled to survive in a living nightmare. As the Allies' front lines moved inexorably closer to Berga, the Nazi guards forced the inmates to endure a death march as a way of keeping them from being liberated; many died along the route. Only the timely arrival of an American armored division at war's end saved them all from certain death. Strangely, when the war was over, many of the Americans who had survived Berga were required to sign a "security certificate" which forbade them from ever disclosing the details of their imprisonment at Berga. Until recent years, what had happened to the American soldiers at Berga has been a closely guarded secret.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 13, 2009

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780786736645

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780786736645
      • File size: 13881 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      March 15, 2005
      In December 1944, many American soldiers were captured in the Battle of the Bulge. Most prisoners were treated according to the rules established by the Geneva Convention, but 350 POWs who were Jewish or from other "undesirable" ethnic or religious groups (including Catholics) were sent to the slave-labor camp Berga, outside Bad Orb, Germany. They worked in the mines and surrounding forest; the camp was crawling with lice, there was very little food, they were beaten, and they suffered from mental cruelty. On April 3, 1945, the survivors were marched south toward Bavaria, and on April 22, American soldiers liberated them. Some of them had died "on the route to nowhere." After the war, the U.S. Army told some of them not to disclose any details of their captivity. Whitlock interviewed survivors, and his book, with 95 black-and-white photographs and 11 maps, chronicles their story for the first time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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