In the spring of 1945, the Third Reich of Adolf Hittler was on the verge of collapse, caught between the Red Army advancing from the east to Berlin and American armies, British and Canadians, under the overall command of General Dwight David Eisenhower, moving from west along the river Rhine. From D-Day landings in Normandy last June, the Western Allies had recaptured France and the Netherlands and some commanders of the Wehrmacht were trying to negotiate the local rendering. Other units, however, continued to obey Hitler’s orders to fight to the last man. Most systems, including transportation, had collapsed and civilians fleeing in panic, the Russians advancing along.
” Hungry and frightened, lying on arable land, 15 meters away, waiting for the right moment to jump with their hands up “is how Captain HF McCullough of the 2nd Regiment anti-tanks of the 2nd Canadian Division, describes the chaos of the German surrender at the end of World War II.
In a day and a half, according to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, 500,000 Germans surrendered to their 21 th Army Group in northern Germany. Shortly after VE Day – May 8, 1945 – the British and Canadians captured more than two million Germans. Virtually none of the treatment was given, survives in the archives in Ottawa or London, just a few scant evidence of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the armies involved and the accounts of the prisoners themselves that indicate that the majority continued good health. In any case, most were soon released and sent home or were transferred to France to help in the work of post-war reconstruction. (The French army had captured fewer than 300,000 prisoners.)
As the British and Canadians, Americans were faced with a surprising number of German soldiers surrendered. The final count of prisoners captured by U.S. forces in Europe (excluding Italy and North Africa) was 5.25 million. But the Americans responded differently.
Among the first captives in the hands of the U.S. had one, the Cape Helmut Liebich, who had worked on an anti-aircraft pilot in the Baltic Peenemunde. Liebich was captured by the Americans on April 17, near Gotha in central Germany. Forty-two years later, remembers well that they had tents at Camp Gotha, only a barbed wire fence around a field that quickly became a neighborhood.
The prisoners received a small ration of food the first day, but was reduced by half. For rations were forced to run a race. Crouching should run through the American guards who beat them with sticks as they moved toward the food. On April 17, were transferred to rural America Heidesheim farther west, where there was no food for days, then very few.
Martin Brech
Image: American Concentration Camp.
In late March or early April 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.)
In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure that I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets. Many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring, and their misery from exposure alone was evident.
Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance.
Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from “higher up.” No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was “out of line,” leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners’ food, and that these orders came from “higher up.” But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with, and would sneak me some.
When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment.
Martin Brech lives in Mahopac, New York. When he wrote this memoir essay in 1990, he was an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Brech holds a master’s degree in theology from Columbia University, and is a Unitarian-Universalist minister.
This essay was published in The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1990 (Vol. 10, No. 2), pp. 161-166. (Revised, updated: Nov. 2008)
