The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (37 page)

Rosensaft told Harrison he was “disappointed in liberators,” not only for the condition of the camp but because many of the Germans who worked at Bergen-Belsen during the war still held jobs there. Not much had changed. Jewish DPs were forced to do much of the manual labor. “If they refuse to work on the Jewish Sabbath,” wrote Harrison, “they are punished.” They
were still under armed guard, not free to move at will around the camp. Given the circumstances, Harrison wrote he wasn’t sure what “liberation really meant.”

At the end of the long day in Bergen-Belsen, Harrison, dressed in an overcoat, white shirt, trousers, and a tie, posed for a photograph with a group that included Josef and Hadassah Rosensaft. He was the tallest person in the photo, and a worried smile creased his face. His empathy did not go unnoticed. A Jewish prisoner in Bergen-Belsen who met him that day later wrote that Harrison chain-smoked during their conversation and tears streamed down his face. “He was so shaken,” wrote the survivor. Finally, Harrison asked, “But how did you survive and where do you take your strength from now?”

Harrison did not hide his despair. At his quarters later that night, he wrote in his diary, “Seldom have I been so depressed. I thought the lowest point had been reached at some of those spots in Munich. But today at Belsen. Only seven hours spent there but it seemed like a lifetime. And to think that I was told, quite officially, there was no need of my visiting Belsen because it had been burned down and no people left here. And then to come here and find a mere matter of 14,000 displaced people.” Harrison had been misled by the American military and he knew it.

After Bergen-Belsen, Harrison traveled to Kaunitz DP camp. The camp housed several hundred survivors, mostly Jewish women from Hungary who had been transferred from Buchenwald concentration camp. He interviewed a twenty-three-year-old architecture student named Meredith, who explained that the women were housed in the village alongside German civilians. “I don’t think Germans like us too much,” she told him. “We are rather a trial to our commandant.” Harrison noted in his diary, “Everybody well organized. Whole place run by people themselves.” Meredith and others told Harrison that they did not want to stay in Germany. “All Hungarians want to go home,” he wrote.

On August 3, 1945,
only eleven days after his visit to Bergen-Belsen, Harrison submitted a draft report to Truman. In the report, he drew from his deep knowledge of immigration and refugee issues. He had overseen the registration of German, Italian, and Japanese citizens living in the United States in the run-up to the war. As director of the INS from 1942 to 1944, he’d established the camp in Crystal City and overseen other American internment camps. He was well schooled in the secrets of American internment—the arrests of immigrants born in Axis countries because of their nationalities; the prisoner exchange; the boredom of internees who lived under armed guard for indefinite periods. He’d resigned as INS commissioner as a protest of US immigration laws that discriminated against non-Europeans—Jews, Asians, Africans. Harrison also understood the difference between American internment and the Nazi genocide. Now he had Truman’s ear. When he sat down to write his report for the president’s eyes, Harrison did not hold back.

In direct, clear prose, his report indicted the American military. “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them,” wrote Harrison. “They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.” This was the essential message of his report: the treatment of the Jews by the American military was no better than that by the Nazis, except the Americans were not directly killing them.

The first paragraph describing the conditions of the camp set the firm tone for the remainder of the report: “Generally speaking, three months after V-E Day and even longer after the liberation of individual groups, many Jewish displaced persons and other possibly non-repatriables are living under guard behind barbed-wire fences, in camps of several descriptions (built by the Germans for slave-laborers and Jews), including some of the most notorious of the concentration camps, amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary and
generally grim conditions, in complete idleness, with no opportunity, except surreptitiously, to communicate with the outside world, hoping for some word of encouragement and action in their behalf.”

In a section on basic needs of Jewish DPs, he listed “clothing and shoes (most sorely needed), more varied and palatable diet, medicines, beds and mattresses, reading materials.” Then he noted that clothing for the refugees was requisitioned from Germans and reported that the military had not compelled German civilians to give up a sufficient amount of clothing. “The internees feel particularly bitter about the state of their clothing when they see how well the German population is dressed. The German population today is still the best dressed in all of Europe.”

Harrison’s first recommendation to Truman was to abolish the nonsegregation policy of the military. During the war, Jews were singled out by the Nazis for genocide and, under the present policy, were still living alongside Germans who had tormented them. Harrison argued their persecution had earned them the chance to live separately in camps. “In the days immediately ahead, the Jews in Germany and Austria should have the first claim upon the conscience of the people of the United States and Great Britain and other personnel who represent them in work being done in Germany and Austria. The first and plainest need is a recognition of their actual status and by this I mean their status as Jews. Refusal to recognize the Jews as such has the effect, in this situation, of closing one’s eyes to their former and more barbaric persecution.”

The only real solution to the problem, Harrison argued, was the immediate evacuation to Palestine of those Jews who wanted to leave Europe. This was Harrison’s second major recommendation—open immigration to Palestine. “To anyone who has visited the concentration camps and who has talked with the despairing survivors, it is nothing short of calamitous to contemplate that the gates of Palestine should be soon closed.” He asked Truman to release one hundred thousand immigration certificates to Jewish DPs so that they could resettle in Palestine. In every camp, Harrison had asked Jewish survivors where their first preference to go was, and in every camp the overwhelming answer was Palestine.

He also recommended that immigration laws in the United States be relaxed so that more Jews from Europe could obtain visas to America. This recommendation directly affected Irene in Philippeville, where she waited for her application to resettle in America to be granted.

Moreover, Harrison argued that the United States must force Germany to accept responsibility for the extermination of millions of Jews. “If it be true, as it seems to be widely conceded, that the German people at large do not have any sense of guilt with respect to the war and its causes and results, and if the policy is ‘To convince the German people that they have suffered a total military defeat and that they cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves,’ then it is difficult to understand why so many displaced persons, particularly those who have so long been persecuted and whose repatriation or resettlement is likely to be delayed, should be compelled to live in crude, over-crowded camps while the German people in rural areas continue undisturbed in their homes.” Harrison’s reference to the policy regarding Germans was one of the principles agreed by the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States during the Potsdam Conference in Berlin.

What became known as the Harrison Report was printed in its entirety in the
New York Times.
Truman’s reaction was swift: he supported Harrison’s recommendations. On August 31, Truman forwarded Harrison’s report to Eisenhower, commander of US forces in Europe. In his letter, Truman told Eisenhower that he agreed with Harrison’s recommendations and asked the general to make his own inspection tour and “clean up” the conditions in the camps. “I know you will agree with me that we have a particular responsibility toward these victims of persecution and tyranny who are in our zone,” wrote Truman to Eisenhower. “We must make clear to the German people that we thoroughly abhor the Nazi policies of
hatred and persecution. We have no better opportunity to demonstrate this than by the manner in which we ourselves actually treat the survivors remaining in Germany.”

Eisenhower was furious.
In a confidential message to Truman, Eisenhower agreed to tour the camps but minimized Harrison’s findings: “It is possible, as you say, that some of my subordinates in the field are not carrying out my policies and any instances found will be promptly corrected.” Instead, Eisenhower painted a brighter picture of conditions, arguing that no one representing “Jewish interests” had filed a formal complaint about US-controlled concentration camps. That belied the fact that the Harrison Report was one long indictment of the US military’s management of the camps.

In conclusion, Eisenhower told Truman, “Mr. Harrison’s report gives little regard to the problems faced, the real success attained in saving the lives of thousands of Jewish and other concentration camp victims and repatriating those who could and wished to be repatriated, and the progress made in two months to bring these unfortunates who remain under our jurisdiction from the depths of physical degeneration to a condition of health and essential comfort.”

Patton’s response was straightforwardly hostile and validated the charge that anti-Semitism was rife in the American military. In response to Harrison’s criticism that Jews were living like prisoners, Patton defended the policy of not segregating Jews from other Germans and Europeans. He said that Jewish DPs “either never had any sense of decency or lost it during their internment by the Germans.” He defended their still being under armed guard and opposed any “special treatment.” Without the guards, Patton said the Jews would “spread over the country like locusts.”

On October 17, 1945, the disagreement between Eisenhower and Harrison became public when the
New York Times
printed a copy of a letter Eisenhower sent to Truman after the general’s inspection. Eisenhower wrote that since Harrison’s visit in July, clothing and shoes had been made available for survivors, that medical services were “uniformly excellent,” and that
all of the camps were stocked with adequate rations, much of it from the Red Cross.

The following day, in a radio address from Philadelphia, Harrison countered Eisenhower’s statement. He argued that Eisenhower’s claim that Jews were transferred to better quarters was misleading. He suggested that the houses of German civilians should be requisitioned and Jews housed there. “What difference does it make what kind of camps they are living in?” he asked. “The point is that there shouldn’t be any camps at all, but houses. Shifting them from one camp to another can hardly be said to be liberation.”

The public embarrassment of Eisenhower and the Army prompted immediate improvements. In the remaining months of 1945, Jewish DPs were segregated in camps and were given preferences in employment. Many concentration camps were closed. Eisenhower created a position, “advisor on Jewish affairs,” and named Simon H. Rifkind, a federal judge from the Southern District of New York, to the position. Rifkind arrived at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Frankfurt on October 20, 1945.

In his diary, Harrison not only made notes of what he saw in the concentration camps but also described his general impressions of Germany that summer on his tour: “Food ration lines, no business being conducted, trucks and wagons with people and scant belongings, walking with bundles, many bicycles. Women working in fields. Broken bridges.”

These were some of the same scenes, proof of the defeat of Germany, that Ingrid remembered seeing that summer, as she and her family settled into life in Idstein. She worked in the fields herself, gathering potatoes when she could find them. Her long red hair and American accent attracted attention.

“Hey, Fräulein,” called the GIs who’d occupied the village by then. “What are you doing today?” Day by day, Ingrid seemed to close down emotionally, coming and going from the apartment by the train station, jumpy and distracted. An American citizen, she was mistaken for a German by American GIs.

Meanwhile, in Philippeville, Irene Hasenberg waited for one of those golden papers to arrive that would allow her to immigrate to America. By then, Irene was one of only twelve Jews from Bergen-Belsen in Philippeville. Finally, in December 1945, about three months after Truman received Harrison’s report, the regulations relaxed and Irene received word that her papers were in order. In mid-December, she boarded a Liberty ship, filled with troops, bound for the United States. Ingrid, far away in Idstein, had no hope of returning to her homeland and no idea that her life was in any way connected to that of a Jewish woman named Irene.

In May 1945, Ingrid Eiserloh’s ten-year-old brother, Lothar, watched two regiments from the Second Armored Division of the US Army, nicknamed the Hell on Wheels division, roll into the streets of Idstein in bulky tanks. The battle for Idstein was over in a few minutes as the Germans did not put up a fight. At the sight of American occupiers, German soldiers ran through the streets—weapons down, hands over their heads—and surrendered.

The American tanks parked in the center of the city. Soldiers and civilians alike brought their weapons and handed them to Army tank commanders. Lothar watched in fascination as even the oldest men in the village brought their decrepit hunting rifles and added them to the pile. It took several days for the GIs to collect all the weapons in Idstein, a small city with a population of about five thousand. Within a week, the two regiments took over the school that Lothar and Ingrid attended and converted it into a mess hall.