Crimes and Mercies (12 page)

President Truman decided in the spring of 1946 to keep at least 50,000 Germans imprisoned and working in the USA, while their families were starving, partly for lack of labour in Germany. During the discussion of what to do about the Germans in the US, Secretary of War Robert Patterson said that he wanted to return ‘all prisoners of war as soon as possible’. He pointed out that the programme of return had been announced four months previously, and he added, ‘It would not do to depend indefinitely on what amounted to slave labour while millions of our own people were unemployed … The Secretary of State supported me in this view.’ Truman ordered as ‘an emergency measure’ that 50,000 prisoners be kept for at least three more months, while disclaiming any intention of keeping them longer. The last non-criminal Germans were not released from US captivity until 1947, still during Truman’s presidency. It is hard to see what emergency the prisoners could have helped solve in the US, for there was unemployment in the US at the time, and the labour force was already over sixty-four million. The 50,000 slaves thus constituted 0.08 per cent of the labour force.
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In the many angry speeches made by US senators in 1946, not a word was uttered on the subject of the American prison camps in Europe, where more than 500,000 people died in 1945–46.
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At first it seems very strange that not a word appears about these American camps. At that very time, General Mark Clark in Austria wrote a memo saying that he had ordered his men to clean up the ‘deplorable’ camp at Ebensee, even though he doubted he had the authority, which rested with Eisenhower.
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Colonel Lauben was thinking that ‘the Vosges was just one big death camp,’
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and General Allard was describing Eisenhower’s camps as hardly better than the Japanese camps.
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But the senators, for all their righteous wrath, said nothing. Why?

The senators were kept in ignorance. All these American army
officers kept these secrets for forty years or more. Clark wrote his memo ‘for files’, where it stayed until disinterred in 1990 by the archivist Jane Yates in Charleston. General Allard made his criticism in secret in 1946, in a training manual that stayed in the archives at Fort Leavenworth until it was dug out by the researcher E. B. Walker of Alabama in 1991. The statement by Colonel Philip Lauben was not recorded until 1988, forty-three years after the event. And all the hundreds of English-speaking reporters who were in Europe at the time either failed to get the story, or knowingly suppressed it.

The secret of the camps was kept so well that not even the Chief Delegate in France of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) knew about them, though he was responsible for inspecting them under the Geneva Convention. Jean Pierre Pradervand, head of the French delegation of the ICRC, did not discover until he was told by the present writer in 1986 that the American army had prison camps in France in 1945.
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The ICRC refused this writer permission to use its archive on prisoners of war. They told me this was because they never allow anyone to use their archives. However, at the same time, they permitted three other writers, one American, one Swiss and one Israeli, to investigate their archives for books on the German expellees, or for reports of ICRC actions in Hitler’s concentration camps in the same period.

Much concerning these atrocities has been deliberately suppressed, some has been forgotten, some falsified, but perhaps the most poignant anecdote was given by an exprisoner, Johannes Heising, who in the 1990s published a book about his experiences in the US camp at Remagen.
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After the book was published, Heising was talking in 1991 with another former Remagen prisoner, Franz-Josef Plemper, who reminded him of something Heising had not described in the book: one night, the Americans had bulldozed living men under the earth in their foxholes. Plemper described the scene to him: ‘One night in April
1945, I was startled out of my stupor in the rain and the mud by piercing screams and loud groans. I jumped up and saw in the distance (about 30–50 meters) the searchlight of a bulldozer. Then I saw this bulldozer moving forwards through the crowd of prisoners who lay there. In the front it had a blade making a pathway. How many of the prisoners were buried alive in their earthholes I do not know. It was no longer possible to ascertain. I heard clearly cries of “you murderer.”’

And then Heising remembered.

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One composed of sectional wooden parts pierced to grip the earth and allow drainage.

*
Reports of prisoners of war and disarmed enemy force.

IV
A H
OLIDAY IN
H
ELL

East of the American and French camps, in a different world, similar atrocities were happening. One was described by a survivor: ‘The old women are bolder than the rest. You couldn’t turn them bad. They believe in God. And they would break off a piece of bread from their meagre loaf and throw it to us. And old camp hands – non-political offenders of course – weren’t afraid either. All camp veterans knew the saying, “Whoever hasn’t been here yet will get here, and whoever was here won’t forget it.” And look, they’d toss over a pack of cigarettes, hoping that someone might do the same for them during their next term. And the old woman’s bread wouldn’t carry quite far enough, what with her weak arm, and it would fall short, whereas the pack of cigarettes would arc through the air right into our midst, and the convoy guards would immediately work the bolts of their rifles, pointing them at the old woman, at kindness, at the bread: “Come on old woman, run along.”’ This description, mirrored to the gesture in the US camps, was actually written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, about Stalin’s Gulag.
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The Gulag (
G
lavnoye
U
pravleniye
Lag
erei) was terrifying in part because it was so hidden. Like Soviet Russia itself, the prison system run by the MVD/NKVD/KGB was virtually unknown,
while at the same time being universally feared. It was the same with the parallel Gulag for the prisoners of war, also run by the MVD/NKVD/KGB.

This was a vast system of 6,000 camps spread across the USSR from Minsk in the west to Karaganda in the south-centre, Vorkuta in the north and Magadan in the north-east.
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Magadan was especially horrible. Solzhenitsyn visited the remains of the camp on his way home to Moscow in 1994, to pay homage to the dead slaves who had lived and died alongside him. Vorkuta, a dismal collection of huts thousands of kilometres north-east of Moscow, was reached after a terrifying voyage in an open barge or scow, when the prisoners were in danger of freezing to death as they were sprayed with icy water.

In these camps they mined for coal, iron, copper or gold; they cut timber; they were sent out on work details to build roads, bridges and railway embankments. Some of them were detailed to build houses in Moscow, which stand to this day and are proudly displayed to tourists as ‘the German houses’. Others were co-opted into re-education camps such as Krasnogorsk, west of Moscow, where they were indoctrinated in communism. A few with technical skills worked on high-technology installations such as the new telephone exchange north of Moscow.

The first European prisoners, Poles and Finns, were taken in 1939. To them were added Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians in 1940, Germans, Italians, Romanians and so on after June 1941. The surviving Poles were released in the autumn of 1941 at Churchill’s suggestion, to form battalions of freedom-fighters who would try to liberate Poland from the Nazis with the help of the USSR.

The camps for Germans and other Europeans were at their worst at the beginning of the war.
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After the initial disorganization following the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) worked very close to the front, taking over and recording prisoners. The death rate was very high at first among the Germans and Italians captured at Stalingrad, caused in part by the fact that the Axis
soldiers were already dying when captured. Before surrender, the Germans were losing between 400 and 500 per day because of frostbite and disease.
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Between 10 January and 22 February 1943, the Red Army took prisoner 91,545 men. Conditions even after capture were appalling. Former POW G. Kurtz said later: ‘I survived Stalingrad, the exhausting marches, I even survived the death camp of Beketovka, where in a couple of weeks, of my 55,000 comrades, 42,000 died from hunger and disease.’
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Beketovka was so bad in comparison with other camps that an investigation was conducted between 22–25 March. The doctors reported that 29 per cent of the prisoners were well, but that 71 per cent were sick, infested with lice, and exhausted. Most had inadequate clothing; some were dressed in civilian clothes. Better accommodation and more food were supplied. The rations ordered for the prisoners were 600 grams of bread per day, plus 120 grams of fish, 600 grams of potatoes or vegetables, 20 grams of sugar, with matches, soap and other supplies. By the end of the war, the camp had its own vegetable gardens. By 1949 these were so productive they were selling 1,819,000 roubles’ worth of produce per year.
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Among the one million German prisoners on hand in summer 1945, until the last prisoner went home in 1955, about 94,000 died (9.4 per cent).
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Once the Soviets were organized, only a day or two elapsed usually between a soldier’s capture and his entry into the NKVD camps and
into the record books of the NKVD,
where his fate was accurately recorded
. These books were kept by NKVD officers, each of whom signed his name to the statistics it contained. He was responsible not only for the prisoners, but for their production and consumption. Junior officers were ordered to feed the prisoners a plentiful ration in October 1944.
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The ration included 600 grams of black bread every day, spaghetti, meat, sugar, vegetables, rice, amounting in all to more than 1,400 grams or more than three pounds of food per person per day. The weak, the sick and the officers got more, the war criminals less.

Dozens of reports from returned prisoners show that this ration was not always given, because the officers and guards stole the prisoners’ food for themselves. Several Germans have reported that once they began to receive food parcels from home, they shared the food with their guards.
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In contrast with the American policy threatening death to civilians for feeding prisoners, the Soviet policy was to feed the prisoners adequately. And this policy emanated from the highest, most frightening authority in the Soviet Union, Stalin himself.
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The death rate was sharply reduced by 1945, mainly because the Soviets wanted to get useful work out of the prisoners. As Stalin told Harry Hopkins, an emissary of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, in May 1945, he liked the German prisoners best because they worked the hardest. However, the actual production was by Soviet measure, slightly less than the cost to the state of keeping and guarding them. This is not surprising since the whole country has been grossly inefficient.

Russian work camps have always been like this. The fate of Tsarist prisoners was much studied in the nineteenth century by prison officials and by one famous writer, Anton Chekhov. When he was rich and famous, he risked his life and reputation to inquire into the fate of the lowly prisoners on Sakhalin Island. While serving their terms, Chekhov wrote, the convicts in the Due mine in 1889–90 produced coal at the rate of about 10.8 poods per day, which was 4.2 poods below the norm set by the camp administration. When freed, some of them stayed on the island and worked for wages in the mine. Now that they were paid by the pood (approximately 36 pounds, or 16 kilos), their output immediately rose by between 70 and 100 per cent.
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The sources of wealth and poverty are plain to see in Sakhalin. So long as totalitarian power was applied, it hurt society twice, by impoverishment and by the spread of human misery, in the prisoners themselves, and in the guards, because of their soul-destroying work. With the end of state power over the prisoners, everything got better. Wealth was born of freedom. This was the judgement of one of the world’s great writers, in a book that
resulted in considerable reforms to the legal and political system in Tsarist Russia.

The MVD/NKVD/KGB reproduced Sakhalin on a vast scale with their camps for prisoners of war. The worth of the output of the prisoner-slaves was measured by the MVD in 1946–49.
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The slaves’ output was never enough to pay for their meagre maintenance; the output came to around 80 per cent of the cost of maintaining the camps. Such was the effect of slavery on the people, mainly Japanese and German, who spring from nations renowned for the intelligence, organization and general efficiency of their working people. Alex Adourian, now of Toronto, experienced this paradox when he was a prisoner in a Soviet camp in 1945–53. The guards told them in 1949 that now they would be paid for their work. At the end of the first month, the administration calculated that the prisoners owed them money. They were forgiven the debt.
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In sub-camp 12 of the BAM-line (Baikal–Amur) railway construction camps east of Lake Baikal in 1946, the prisoners were led out one day in winter to a forest, where they were supposed to survey the trees to be cut to help build the BAM railway east from Baikal to the Amur river. A Soviet forestry expert came to mark off with paint the tall straight trees to be cut down. They were to be used for the construction of work camps on the railway and for railway ties. After a week or so of tree-marking by the Soviet expert, the prisoners were led out with axes. They were guarded by NKVD troops numbering about ten per hundred prisoners. The guards spread out in the forest a great distance from the prisoners, so they were not aware at first what was going on. The prisoners deliberately cut all the crooked, useless trees. Once they were down, the useless trees impeded all further work until moved. So the work was nearly all wasted, and the railway slowed down. The prisoners were not punished because they pretended it was a mistake. And they had actually cut their ‘norma’ or norm for the period, so it did not matter. Such things as these helped keep production so low that the Soviets would have been better off without the Gulag. NKVD statistics show that the output of
the camps (lumber, housing, coal, gold, high-tech construction such as telephone exchanges) was, in 1946, around 75 per cent of the cost of the camps in guard wages, food, clothing and supplies. By 1948 this had improved to over 85 per cent, but in all the years of measuring the output never exceeded the cost. The prisoners were being subsidized to stay there. It was in effect free lodging, a holiday in hell.