Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble Audiobook (Free)

In February 1945, 350 American POWs captured previous at the Fight from the Bulge or elsewhere in Europe were designated by the Nazis because these were Jews or were considered to resemble Jews. These were transferred in cattle vehicles to Berga, a focus camp in eastern Germany, and place to work as slave laborers, mining tunnels for a planned underground synthetic-fuel stock. This was the only incident of its kind during World War II.

Starved and brutalized, the GIs were denied their legal rights as about Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped with the Nazis’ Last Gamble prisoners of battle, their ordeal culminating within a death march that was halted by liberation near the Czech border. Twenty percent of the soldiers-more than seventy of them-perished. After t_he battle, Berga was virtually forgotten, partly because it fell under Soviet domination and partially because America’s Cold Battle priorities quickly transformed, and the encounters of these Americans were buried.

Now, for the very first time, their tale is told in all its blistering detail. This is actually the story of hell in a little place over an interval of nine weeks, at the same time when Hitler’s Reich was crumbling but its killing machine still churned. It is a tale of madness and heroism, and of the failure to deliver justice for the actual Nazis did to these People in america.

Among those involved: William Shapiro, a young medic from the Bronx, hardened in Normandy fights but, being a prisoner, unable to help the Nazis’ wasted slaves, whose bodies became as insubstantial as ghosts; Hans Kasten, a defiant German-American who enraged his Nazi captors by demanding, in vain, that his fellow U.S. prisoners end up being treated with humanity, thus committing the unpardonable sin of betraying his German roots; Morton Goldstein, a garrulous GI from NJ, shot dead from the Nazi in charge of the American prisoners in an incident that would spark intense argument at a postwar trial; and Mordecai Hauer, the orphaned Hungarian Jew who, after making it through Auschwitz, stumbled on the GIs amid the Holocaust at Berga and despaired in the sight of liberators become slaves.

Roger Cohen uncovers exactly why the U.S. authorities didn’t aggressively prosecute the commandants of Berga, why there was no particular recognition for the POWs and their harsh treatment in the postwar years, and why it took decades for them to receive proper payment.

Troops and Slaves can be an intimate, intensely dramatic story of war and of a largely forgotten section from the Holocaust.