Crimes and Mercies (11 page)

My book
Other Losses
was criticized for making estimates of the deaths of prisoners far higher than the critics felt were justified by the evidence offered. Now, however, detailed evidence from the US Army 106th Division medical records and from the records of the 50th Field Hospital adds depth to the picture.

Assessing the deaths, the first thing to notice is that there were three areas where corpses accumulated. First was in the open air inside the camps themselves, where the living might die of malnutrition, disease, exposure, be buried alive when their earth-holes collapsed on them, or drown in the latrine ditches. Many of the bodies of those who died from starvation and disease were pulled out to the camp gate and driven away by truck.

The second death area was in the camp hospitals themselves, usually located inside the camp in a tent.

The third area was during the transportation to, or in the ‘evacuation hospitals’. For several of the camp hospitals, we have detailed records.
²⁴
These hospitals were part of a system of sixteen field ‘hospital units’,
²⁵
each one set up usually in tents inside or very near to the camps. Their capacity was some 14,000 patients at peak. On average, in May, their capacity was around 9,500. Occupancy for two observed camp hospitals was around 90 per cent.
²⁶

About half the patients admitted to these hospital units in May–July 1945 were reported to have been evacuated further on, to ‘evacuation hospitals’ in Europe but far from the camp. Some of these ‘evacuation hospitals’ were purported to be located in former German civilian hospitals, which were supposed to be administered by a few Germans under American supervision. Others were staffed by Americans.

The records show that thousands of sick prisoners were taken from the camps and sent to these hospitals, and while there disappeared from the records. For instance, from 1 May to 10 July 1945,
44,646 prisoners were taken from the camps to hospital, including both camp hospitals and evacuation hospitals, but only 12,786 returned to the camps after treatment. The deaths recorded were 1,392. There is no record of the fate of the remaining 30,468. There is a strong clue however in the ambulance records of the medical department of the 106th Division. From 1 May to 10 July, the 106th Division ambulances carried 21,551 sick prisoners away from the camp hospitals to the evacuation hospitals. The page showing arrivals in the evacuation hospitals has a series of zeroes under
ENEMY
.
²⁷

This cannot be a statistical blip. First, the same pages of forms record with apparent coherence what happened to American personnel. And for them, there are regular arrivals at the evacuation hospitals, and departures from the same hospitals. Also, the 106th report is set up with columns and headings defining various categories of patients including Casuals and Enemy (Allied, Civilian), as well as US troops. All these categories are recorded on the same sheets of paper.
Only
the enemy prisoners depart for these places and fail to arrive.
Only
enemy prisoners do not turn up as returning ‘to duty’ – i.e., to the original prison camp. Nor does the report give breakdowns of enemy prisoners by communicable disease, for number of deaths, or for surgical cases, though these breakdowns are given in every case for sick Americans in their evacuation hospitals. The Germans become a series of zeroes.

At least one German doctor, Siegfried Enke of Wuppertal, who worked in American camp hospital units, has said that mortally ill patients were moved away to another building (probably called an evacuation hospital) and he never saw them again.
²⁸
This was also the experience of Rudi Buchal at Bretzenheim. Many of the mortally sick evacuees were taken to Idstein, north of Wiesbaden. Buchal has recently stated: ‘And I can remember that from there no prisoners returned.’

A vivid description of one such evacuation ‘hospital’ is given from the inside by a French doctor from Lorraine who volunteered to help the French and Americans to care for German
prisoners in May 1945. Dr Joseph Kirsch writes: ‘I volunteered to the Military Government of the 21st [French] Military region [near Metz] … I was assigned to the “French” Military hospital at the little seminary of Montigny … In May 1945, the Americans who occupied the hospital at Legouest brought us every night by ambulance, stretchers loaded with moribund prisoners in German uniforms … these ambulances arrived by the back door … we lined up the stretchers in the central hall. For treatment, we had nothing at our disposal. We could only perform elementary superficial examinations (auscultation). Only to find out the anticipated cause of death in the night … for in the morning, more ambulances arrived with coffins and quicklime … These prisoners were in such extremely bad condition that my role was reduced to comforting the dying. This drama has obsessed me since the war; I consider it as a horror.’
²⁹
The reader may judge what opinion the Americans had of these ‘hospitals’ by the fact that beside the patients they loaded quicklime and coffins.
³⁰

The notion of hospitalizing sick Germans got a bizarre twist as the Americans advanced into Germany. The army actually removed sick Germans when they were captured lying in their hospital beds. These patients were forced, regardless of their condition, into the open-air camps.
³¹
Thus in the spring of 1945, the army reversed the meaning of the term ‘hospital’. Sick prisoners were not sent there. The sick were evacuated
from
the hospitals, which then stood silent.
³²

The evidence that evacuations were nearly all hidden deaths grows even stronger with the arrival of the French in July. The French, who took over the whole Rhine area – including camps and hospitals – from the Americans in July, complained that the Americans had said that there were 192,000 men in the camps and hospitals, but the French actually found only 166,000.
³³
US Army Colonel Philip S. Lauben admitted in a memorandum to General Paul of the US Army on 7 July that the prisoner total to be turned over was ‘only in the neighborhood of 170,000’.
³⁴
Since this was the area controlled by the 106th, Lauben’s missing 22,000 prisoners are probably accounted for a second time, in this
book. Not only could the French not find them, the US Army couldn’t find them either.

Lauben had a broad view of the whole prisoner situation. As a member of the SHAEF HQ staff, he was in charge of returning prisoners from Norway, of the hand over to the French, and of other special missions, with overall responsibility for prisoners through the German Affairs Branch. Since both Lauben and the 106th Division surgeon admitted they were not there, and the French did not find them, is any other fate but death imaginable for these people?

The most impressive of the detailed evidence of deaths recorded by hospital units comes from the 106th Division. In the hospital units of the 106th, not including ‘evacuation hospitals’, 1,392 people died in seventy days among a patient load of 23,095. This means that for more than two months, by US Army medical records, the prisoner-of-war death rate
in hospital
was 2.6 per cent per month, or 31.2 per cent per annum.
³⁵
This is exactly the same as the rate of 0.6 per cent per week used in
Other Losses
to compute deaths for prisoners of war in the same camps in the same period.

A subsidiary report from the 50th Field Hospital Detachment A at Bad Kreuznach confirms the overall picture. At Bad Kreuznach, a camp of some 56,000 in the 106th command, the deaths in hospital recorded by Major Jennings B. Marshall, commander, numbered 174 among 1,825 patients in twenty-four days, or 9.5 per cent.
³⁶

At Bretzenheim, just three miles away, Max Dellmann, the camp’s Protestant pastor in 1946, was told by the German doctors of the 50th Field Hospital HQ Detachment in the camp, that between 3,000 and 4,000 men had died there while the Americans were in command.
³⁷
The German doctors knew only of the deaths in the camp itself, which did not include the deaths in the ‘evacuation hospitals’.
³⁸
So to find the complete total for Bretzenheim, the Dellmann total must be added to the Bretzenheim share of the death totals in the hospital units reported by the 106th medical section (above).
³⁹
On this basis, the
overall death rate for Bretzenheim in April–July 1945 works out to between 45 and 57.5 per cent per year. It is important to remember that the total ‘death production’ for the camp during the period has three components: the dead in the camp itself, who were either buried there or trucked away; the dead in the camp hospital; and those who died in or en route to ‘evacuation hospital’ and euphemized as ‘evacuated’. The totals are:

Camp, including the camp hospital:          3,000 to 6,240
⁴⁰
‘Evacuated’:                                           3,380 to 4,142
⁴¹

The overall total for Bretzenheim is between 6,380 and 10,382. This works out to an annual death rate somewhere between 44.9 and 73 per cent.

The conclusion is simply inescapable that nearly all the men missing on handover to the French were actually dead.
⁴²
When these missing are added to the known dead actually recorded in army figures for May 1 to July 10, the toll rises to between 26,000 and 33,557.
⁴³
This means the overall death rate in the Adsec (Advance Section, US Army) camps during the ten weeks starting May 1 was between 27.6 per cent per year and 35.6 per cent per year.
⁴⁴
The latter figure is exactly the same as the figure based on Tables IX and X in the Medical History of the ETO.
⁴⁵
And it is close to the rate at which prisoners were dying according to the ‘Other Losses’ category reported in the weekly PW and DEF reports
*
of the Army in 1945 and confirmed by Colonel Lauben himself, before he was re-educated by a US Army official in 1990.
⁴⁶

It is clear from a scrutiny of the records that the army in 1945 was disposing of the news of their dead by falsifying statistics. This extended to the highest levels. For instance, on 4 August 1945, 132,262 DEF prisoners were reported by the prisoner of war section of Eisenhower’s command (hitherto SHAEF) to have been ‘transferred’ to Austria, where General Mark Clark was the politi
cal commissioner. Clark as political commissioner was responsible for immigrants and emigrants, including DEF prisoners arriving in Austria, so he reported that in the month of August a total of 17,953 DEF prisoners arrived in Austria. Clearly, no transfer of 132,262 ever took place. If the 114,309 missing prisoners were transferred away as ‘Other Losses’, but never arrived in Austria, what happened to them? There is only one way to leave a place and not to arrive anywhere else, and that is to die.

The prisoner-of-war death figures reluctantly given out by the Americans and French from the 1950s to the 1990s to cautiously inquiring Germans were so ridiculously low that they were under the civilian death rates for the time. This extraordinary news – that starved people ridden with lice, pneumonia, TB and typhoid fever, sleeping in mud, have a lower mortality than civilians eating every day in houses – did not strike the German observers as odd. They blithely ignored evidence that was howling at them.
⁴⁷
For instance, the authority on whom the German writer Kurt W. Boehme depends for prisoner facts for France, General Louis Buisson, was not only the head of the Prisoner of War Service of the French Army and the author of the ridiculously low French death figures, he also did not include in his prisoner-of-war totals 166,000 men the French received in camps in Germany from the Americans. Yet a few pages further on in his manuscript, Buisson asserts that a number of these same POWs were ‘
relâché sur place
’, or ‘released’ on the spot, in Germany. So 166,000 men disappear from view in Buisson’s manuscript, those who were released are used to reduce the total of the remainder in French camps, and for forty-seven years no one notices this sleight-of-hand.

These prisoners were supposedly being held in order to provide labour to help rebuild the damage caused in the war. The French had a strong claim to the labour of Germans, because Hitler had broken the truce agreement of June 1940 to return French prisoners to their homes. He kept one and a half million French sol
diers and civilians slaving in Germany for years during the war. The French also wanted German labour to repair some of the damage done to their country during the campaigns. Having captured very few prisoners themselves, they asked the British and Americans for part of their bag. The Americans granted them around 800,000, the British some 55,000.
⁴⁸

Vengeance predominated in the French camps. As the months passed, so did the lives of hundreds of thousands of their Germans. After the French press began reporting mass deaths in the French camps in September–October 1945, senators in the United States began a vigorous protest against this aspect of US Army policy. In March 1946, when deaths in one part of the Buglose-Labouheyre camp system had peaked at 25 per cent for one month,
⁴⁹
Senator Langer said in the Senate: ‘On 12 October 1945, the United States Army officials stopped turning over German prisoners to the French after the International Red Cross charged the French with failing to provide sufficient food for German prisoners in French camps … General Louis Buisson, Director of the War Prisons, said that food rations were “just enough to allow a man to lie down, not move, and not die too quickly”.’
⁵⁰
 
The Senator went on: ‘In spite of the certain fate awaiting German prisoners of war in French hands, this government continues to be a party to sentencing German prisoners of war to starvation in continued violation of the articles of war of the Geneva Convention.’
⁵¹

He was right about the conditions the French camps, but he had been deceived about the US Army’s transfer policy. The army had pretended to stop delivering German slaves to the French, but in fact they continued. More than a hundred thousand were delivered after the ban was announced. Some Germans who had already been discharged by General Mark Clark in Austria were seized again and sent to France.
⁵²
The British also were using some 400,000 German prisoners as low-paid forced labour in the United Kingdom, and the Americans had some 600,000 Germans at work in the fields of the United States or in labour camps in Europe.
⁵³
The prisoners
in the US, having been well treated until May 1945, were then put on rations so low that some were in danger of death, though the records are not clear as to how many actually died. However, the death rate was probably quite low.
⁵⁴