If Sandy Lubinsky slowed for a moment — if he stopped to catch his breath after inhaling jagged rock particles for hours on end or to wipe his hands after slicing them apart by grabbing the shards littering the mining tunnel after an explosion — his Nazi captors would beat him ruthlessly with rubber hoses, ax handles or a shovel.
Once a strapping young man, five weeks in the tunnels had reduced Lubinsky to a half-delirious 79-pound walking skeleton.
The woeful aforementioned description of Lubinsky, who survived, was all too apt for many of Europe’s Jews who lived to see the tail-end of World War II. But Lubinsky didn’t hail from Galicia, Austria or Hungary. He was an American soldier born in a small Ohio town — and the Nazis couldn’t have cared less.
“Being Jews or being deemed Jews, they joined the category of vermin. They were less-than-humans who could simply be forced to labor until annihilated,” explains Roger Cohen, a foreign affairs writer for the New York Times, International Herald Tribune and the author of “Soldiers and Slaves.”
The Brooklyn-based, London-born author was in San Francisco last month to promote his spellbinding and thoroughly researched new book, which documents the grisly tale of 350 American soldiers captured in the Battle of the Bulge and assigned to the Berga labor camp to build an underground fuel factory.
It was a fool’s errand even the most devoted Nazi knew would never be finished before the inevitable end of the war.
Yet that didn’t mean the SS men in charge wouldn’t follow their orders religiously, working to death hundreds of European Jews and American soldiers — around a quarter of whom were Jewish, with the rest “looking Jewish” or being deemed troublemakers.
In working prisoners of war to death, the Nazis “knew what they were doing contravened every convention of war, and [gave] a taste of what might have happened if Hitler had won the war. The SS did not distinguish between American Jews and European Jews. This was the one instance that European Jews and American Jews worked side by side — and died side by side.”
If the fact that American soldiers, a disproportionate number of them Jewish, were worked like slaves comes as a surprise, don’t feel ignorant. You’re in good company. It was news to Cohen as well, and, being the Times’ former Berlin bureau chief, he thought the Holocaust was a subject he knew pretty well. Then he went to Berga.
Cohen’s story is an underreported one. At least 73 of the 350 soldiers did not live to be liberated, and many of the Berga survivors kept quiet after the war. Unlike so many World War II veterans, they were burdened by their dual identities as both solders and Holocaust survivors. When they spoke of the unimaginably severe conditions in the camp and the sadism of the SS commandants, many listeners tended to nod incredulously. Certainly things couldn’t have been that bad. The old man must be embellishing his experiences.
Add to that the fact that the existence of the oft-Jewish Berga soldiers didn’t highlight the U.S. military’s finest hours. It was embarrassing for the army that so many soldiers were so ill-treated, and no rescue attempts were ever mounted.
And a full prosecution of the German prison authorities wouldn’t have reflected well on America’s new West German allies; the commandants captured by the United States ended up serving several years in prison. The SS leader snared by the Soviets, who were not concerned with making friends, was hanged.
Finally, about 23 percent of the Berga soldiers were Jews, who had been forcibly segregated from their comrades by the Nazis. Cohen notes that the Nazis’ efforts to isolate the Jews were highly successful, as Jews made up only about 3 percent of the U.S. military overall. The fate of these Jewish soldiers just wasn’t the army’s top priority in the postwar years.
“Anti-Semitism was still prevalent in the department of the army and in the U.S. as a whole. I think this amounted to almost a cover-up,” said Cohen, whose parents immigrated to Britain from South Africa and trace their ancestry to Lithuania.
“Someone said to me, ‘In every German family, there’s a locked drawer.’ In those tunnels, I saw locked drawers. Here’s this sleepy little town. The place the soldiers stayed in is just a ruin. There’s no memorial, no plaque. I just felt I wanted to open up those tunnels and tell the story.”
“Soldiers and Slaves” by Roger Cohen (303 pages, Knopf, $25.95).