Crimes and Mercies. James Bacque

Medical Corps. He was sent to Gummersbach, east of Bonn, just after the Ruhr pocket collapsed in March 1945. ‘There was a huge mass of humanity in a field standing shoulder to shoulder in the mud, and I mean knee-deep. I would estimate that 75 per cent of them were wounded. The conditions were appalling.’ He immediately set up a 150-bed hospital in a tent for the prisoners. He said, ‘My headquarters leaned over backwards to do everything they could to help the prisoners,’ so he was able to get all the supplies he required immediately.¹³

      But the number of prisoners served by the tent hospitals was less than 1 per cent of the total on hand. And this was before the German collapse, so that millions of Allied prisoners were still being held hostage by the Germans. Thus the attitude of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) was probably more conditioned by fear for the hostages than by the Geneva Convention, which was in fact about to be abrogated by the US State Department.¹⁴

      Conditions in the camps deteriorated further after the hostage system collapsed. Despite the restrictions, other individual American guards tried to help the German prisoners long after the war ended, among them Captain Frederick Siegfriedt. He was detailed as prison officer in an undermanned Prisoner of War Overhead Detachment at a camp near Zimming in eastern France in December 1945, where there were about 17,000 prisoners, ‘all presumably SS ’. According to Siegfriedt, the previous prison officer had been relieved of his duties because of psychiatric problems. A lifelong friend of Siegfriedt was the medical officer for the detachment. ‘Captain L. had been an extremely hardworking and conscientious person all his life. It was evident that he was under extreme stress, trying to cope with the conditions at CCE 27 and receiving no co-operation, no help, no understanding, without even someone to talk to. I was able to serve to fill the latter need. He explained to me that most of the men had dysentery and were suffering from malnutrition. Some men in the cages had as many as seventeen bloody stools per day, he said. He took me to one of the former French barracks that served as the hospital. It had eight hundred men lying all over, on the cold concrete floors as well as on beds … almost without exception the other [US] officers were alcoholics or had psychiatric problems …’

      The rest of the men were kept in Nissen huts, made of chicken wire covered with tar paper. Water was supplied by a single tap inside the hut, which was usually frozen that winter. The prisoners slept on the muddy ground, about 180 to a hut. So crowded were they that it was impossible for them all to lie on their back at once. Sometimes at the roll calls in the morning, men fell over dead.

      ‘The operation of CCE 27 seemed typical of the entire system,’ Siegfriedt has said. ‘When an enclosure got a bunch of prisoners they didn’t know what to do with, or could not otherwise handle, they were shipped unannounced to another enclosure … I have no idea how many died nor where they were buried. I am sure the Americans did not bury them and we had no such thing as a bulldozer. I can only assume that a detail of German PWs would bury them. I could look out the window of my office and tell if the body being carried by was alive or dead by whether or not there was a fifth man following with the man’s personal possessions. The number could have been from five to twenty per day.

      ‘The officers’ mess was in a French two-storey house. It had a staff of forty-two [prisoners] with the maître d’ of the German luxury liner Europa in charge. Although there were usually no more than six or eight officers dining at one time, there were always at least that many uniformed waiters. One could not get a cigarette from pocket to lips without a light waiting. The facility was completely redecorated, that is repainted with murals for each special occasion, i.e. Christmas, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, etc. For lunch there was chamber music with four to six musicians and for dinner a choir of fifteen to twenty made up of the stars of the Munich and Berlin operas. In short, the staff was much more concerned with living the luxurious life than it was about the operation of the prison camps.’

      Siegfriedt attempted to alleviate the conditions by bribing guards at excess vehicle camps with cigarettes so he could take their trucks to scrounge some hay in the neighbourhood ‘to get the PWs off the ground. When the weather warmed up, the cages became ankle-deep in mud. I located a pierced-plank airfield* and, with a convoy of trucks, brought it back to get the men out of the mud. These, however, were band-aid measures for major problems that no one seemed to be in a position to deal with, nor did anyone seem to care.’

      Captain Siegfriedt concluded: ‘Obviously we, the US Army, were not prepared to deal with so many prisoners even when I arrived on the scene in December 1945.’ This was close to the Vosges area of France that US Army Colonel Philip Lauben described as ‘one big death camp’.

      Prisoners who survived the camp at Bretzenheim have described arriving there on 9 May 1945. They saw three rows of corpses along the road in front of the camp. Seventy-five dead from Bretzenheim were acknowledged by the Americans to have been buried in Stromberg on 9 May and another sixty on 10 May.¹⁵ Not all were killed by the usual disease, starvation and exposure.

      The village of Bretzenheim has also been the locale of much new research into the fate of prisoners. Herr and Frau Wolfgang Spietz of Bretzenheim took up a challenge from the local Protestant pastor in 1985 to prepare a display about the local camp which had been under American and later French control. With the official support of Bürgermeister Grünwald, this grew into the present documentation centre. A sensational find came in 1990 with the visit of Rudi Buchal of Grossenhain, in the east of Germany, who had been a prisoner in the American time. Buchal had served as a medical orderly-clerk in the so-called POW ‘hospital’ for prisoners, a tent with an earth floor inside the camp. It had no beds, no medical supplies, no blankets and starvation rations for the first month or more. Later, a few supplies were scrounged at random by American teams ‘ferreting’ the German towns nearby.

      Another of the prisoners who have come forward recently to the Spietzes is Jakob M. Zacher, a former teacher and school principal of Bretzenheim. He was especially interested in the fate of the prisoners because he had been held in several camps, including Bretzenheim itself. In the 1980s, he decided to look in the archives for 1945 of the village at Langenlonsheim, which was so close to the Bretzenheim camp that prisoners could see the spires of its churches above the trees to the north. In the town hall under the spires, he found the document showing that the Americans had threatened to shoot anyone who tried to take food to the camps. Other copies of the order have been found since in other villages.¹⁶

      Also in Bretzenheim in the Spietzes’s house, four ex-prisoners met in 1991 to discuss their experiences. Max Müller of Bad Kreuznach laid on the Spietzes’s dining-room table the water-stained original US Army ration book for Bretzenheim, a hardcover German ledger book with the name of a clerk who had kept it still legible in pencil on the cover. This was Robert Hughson, of the 424th Regiment, 106th Infantry Division. Later in the USA, the Supply Officer of the 106th told this writer, ‘Yes, I remember Hughson.’ And Captain Lee Berwick said, ‘We had supplies stacked all round the camp.’ He could not explain why the prisoners got only about 600–850 calories per day, which was the ration according to Hughson’s records.¹⁷ And these prisoners nominally had Prisoner of War status.

      Berwick’s statement about food supplies is at odds not only with the official army ration book, but with the reports of ten prisoners and several civilians received by the author. Without exception, they describe starvation conditions prevailing through the seventy-odd days when the camp was under US control.¹⁸ The prisoner Herbert Peters has reported similar conditions at the huge US camp at Rheinberg: ‘Even when there was little for us to eat, the provisions enclosure was enormous. Piles of cartons like bungalows with intersecting streets throughout.’¹⁹

      As the Americans prepared to leave Bretzenheim in July, Buchal was told by drivers of the 560th Ambulance Company, who had carried bodies and sick prisoner ‘evacuees’ away, that 18,100 persons had died in the six camps round Bretzenheim in the ten weeks of American control. The destination of the corpses was not revealed to Buchal. He also heard the figure of 18,100 dead from the Germans who were in charge of the hospital statistics, and from other American hospital personnel. The six camps were Bretzenheim, Biebelsheim, Bad Kreuznach, Dietersheim, Hechtsheim and Heidesheim. The reliability of Buchal