Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Guy was stunned by what he heard and probed for more details.

  “Who was the officer who ordered the execution?”

  “Hauptmann Bruns. I don’t know his first name.”

  “What is his position?”

  “Commanding officer of 2nd Battalion, 293rd Regiment.”

  “Who carried out the orders?”

  “Feldwebel Hoffman,” Kauter said. “A platoon sergeant in my company, 6th Company. And other corporals and sergeants from the 5th and 6th Companies.”

  Guy prepared a report naming “Capt. BRUNS (2 Bn 293 Regt)” as a suspect in the execution of the two U.S. soldiers. This ensured that if or when Bruns fell into Allied hands he would be held for questioning. He listed Kauter as a “highly reliable” witness. He put a hold on Kauter so he would be kept in isolation at the cage, where he could be interviewed by an investigator from the army’s Office of the Inspector General (IG), which was beginning to document war crimes for legal prosecutions.

  The next day, Kauter was questioned under oath by Lieutenant Colonel Hermann Meyer, an assistant IG. Kauter repeated what he had told Guy but added more details about the execution. He said Hauptmann Bruns spoke briefly to the two Americans and then announced, “The Jews have no right to live in Germany.” Before they were shot, Kauter continued, the two Americans protested and asked to be treated as captured soldiers.

  Q: How were they standing? With their hands in the air?

  A: No, at attention with their backs to the firing squad.

  Q: Where were they shot?

  A: Shot in the back.

  The army investigators were limited in how far they could take the investigation. U.S. forces had not yet secured the Bleialf area, where heavy fighting was still taking place, which meant that a search for the bodies and any further evidence would have to wait.

  Guy knew that the 106th Division had lost the two entire regiments in that area in the opening days of the Battle of the Bulge. He was certain that the two dead American interrogators must have been members of a regimental IPW team assigned to the 106th. It tragically illustrated why so many Ritchie Boys had changed their German or Jewish names before shipping overseas, and why they destroyed clues to their past such as addresses, photographs, and letters, which could not be found on them should they become POWs. They never even spoke to one another in their native tongue. Although they had been trained not to reveal anything about themselves—they all had cover stories to explain their language skills to prisoners—some interrogators broke this rule, taking a perverse pride in telling an arrogant or impertinent Nazi that they were Jewish. But even those who made such revelations usually refrained, wisely so in event of their own capture, from telling POWs they were from Germany or anywhere in Europe.

  For Guy, the reported execution of two U.S. interrogators was his worst fear come to life. It was why he had not dreaded a quick battlefield death as much as he did being captured by the Nazis and having them discover that he was a German Jew. This was the nightmare of everyone on his team and every Ritchie Boy he knew.

  Less than three weeks later, on February 7, “Capt. BRUNS” of the 2nd Battalion, 293rd Regiment, 18th Volksgrenadier, was captured by units of the U.S. Third Army in a bunker at Schwarzer Mann, ten miles northeast of Bleialf. Interrogators at Third Army headquarters had read Guy’s report on Bruns’s alleged role in the executions of two American soldiers, and they sent their prisoner immediately under heavily armed escort to First Army headquarters. Because of the seriousness of the crimes being investigated, Bruns was put in his own cell.

  Curt Bruns was twenty-nine years old, with blue eyes and thinning red hair. He had been a grocery clerk in Stuttgart before entering the army in fall 1936, by which time Hitler’s military buildup was well under way. He advanced steadily through the ranks of the German army, becoming a Wehrmacht officer on September 1, 1939—the day Germany invaded Poland—and a battalion commander in January 1944. He had a wife and young child who lived in Bad Kissingen, a Bavarian spa town.

  During his initial interrogation, Bruns recalled the two American prisoners who spoke German and acknowledged that he had ordered them separated from the other American POWs, though he claimed he did not know they were Jews. He confirmed that he had spoken to them in German, and one of the GIs had told him he had studied law in Berlin. As to what happened to them after his men marched them away, Bruns said he was only later told they had been shot on orders of his regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Witte. He admitted Witte was not at the customs house at the time and arrived a few hours later. And he said that he and Witte did not discuss the two prisoners because they had more pressing matters to deal with. According to Bruns, Witte was recalled to Berlin a short time later and court-martialed for disobeying orders during the fighting at Saint Vith. The interrogators suspected Bruns was fingering his senior officer in ordering the killing of the two Americans because he had reason to believe that Witte was dead.

  A German prisoner named Anton Korn was placed in a cell next to Bruns and told to get him talking about the Jacobs and Zappler case. Korn, a former political prisoner in Germany because of his membership in the Communist Party, had been inducted into the army and captured in Normandy. In the months since, he had been made a trusty at First Army headquarters, where he had been used by Guy, Fred Howard, and other interrogators to help them get information from and about other prisoners. At five foot ten, with a muscular build, Korn could have passed for a middleweight boxer, and he was capable of taking care of himself in the cage. Korn’s communist affiliation reassured the Americans, as everyone would have been badly embarrassed if he turned out to be a Nazi in disguise feeding them bogus information. But all the interrogators who worked with Korn agreed he was reliable, accurate, and trustworthy.

  Korn spent two days in the cell next to Bruns, pretending to be a tough German paratrooper sergeant who had killed a number of Belgian civilians and was being investigated by U.S. authorities for war crimes. Bruns believed the story, and that got him to open up about his own case. He told Korn about his battalion taking hundreds of U.S. prisoners on December 20, 1944, among them two German Jews who had interrogated his own men days earlier. Bruns said he had ordered that the two Jews be “mowed down,” explaining that he had solemnly sworn “regardless of whether Germany will win the war or not, to devote my life to the destruction of Jews.” Bruns stated he was unafraid of incriminating witnesses as he was “mentally superior to these men.” He bragged to Korn about outsmarting the interrogators by giving the name of his regimental commander because he knew they would never be able to find him. Bruns admitted to other heinous deeds, including killing some of his own men with a machine pistol when they said they wanted to surrender rather than fight several days before his own capture.

  Less than a week later, the bodies of two dead Americans were found in the field near the customs house, just across the German border north of Bleialf. Just days earlier, the 4th Infantry Division had cleared out all enemy opposition in the area. U.S. forces had taken that long—nearly two months—to return to the positions across the Our River that had once been held by the 106th Infantry when the Germans launched their surprise Ardennes offensive.

  That same afternoon, Technician Fourth Grade John Swanson and another member of the graves registration section were led to the scene by members of their division’s MP platoon. The area had been covered by snow that had recently started melting. They found the dead GIs on their backs, about eight inches apart in a trench that was only two and a half feet deep. The arms of one man were down at his side; the other man’s arms were frozen in the thrust position, as if he had tried to catch himself from falling forward. Their bodies and faces were intact, not torn up like artillery shell and shrapnel casualties. From the front, no major wounds were visible, only small amounts of red liquid clotted around the eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. It looked like blood, but more than likely it was the purge fluid seen in decomposing bodies, the result of decayed tissues l
eaking from the lungs and brain. Neither dead man was wearing shoes or a helmet. One had on a field jacket as an outer garment and the other a wool army overcoat. Both men had dark hair. The younger was of average build, the older stocky. There were no weapons, ammunition, canteens, or other military gear on or near their bodies.

  One body was identified by a set of dog tags and the other by a driver’s license and Social Security card. Before being slipped into body bags, the corpses were tagged: KURT JACOBS AND MURRAY ZAPPLER.

  The next day, Hauptmann Curt Bruns was questioned by Lieutenant Colonel Meyer, the assistant inspector general (IG) who had earlier taken a sworn statement from the witness, Corporal Kauter. Bruns denied that he had given the orders to shoot Jacobs and Zappler and claimed that he hadn’t even heard about the killings until he was told by one of his soldiers. He admitted to ordering the two German-speaking interrogators separated from the other American POWs and escorted away by his men, but he again claimed his regimental commander must have ordered the killings.

  “Who shot these men?” Meyer asked.

  Bruns replied: “The prisoner escorts from my battalion.”

  When Meyer asked him why he wouldn’t admit that he ordered his men to shoot the prisoners, Bruns said he stood by his statements.

  Ten days later, Bruns was questioned by Lieutenant Colonel Jesse E. Bishop, the lead investigating officer. Bruns once again denied that the two Americans were shot on his orders or even that he knew about the killings firsthand, although he seemed to slip up when asked where the executions had taken place, replying, “About five hundred meters from the customs house, which can be marched in five minutes.”

  The U.S. investigators decided to take Bruns out to where the bodies had been found. While army lawyers were confident that Korn’s testimony would be persuasive at trial, they hoped that taking Bruns to the scene of the crime would shake him up and get him talking. And if he was feeling at all guilty, perhaps he might even make a confession.

  Karl Frucht, one of the German-born interrogators who worked at First Army headquarters with Guy, accompanied the suspect, along with two armed MPs. They drove past the customs house, parked, and walked into the meadow where the bodies had been discovered. Frucht reported that Hauptmann Curt Bruns not only had nothing to say, but as he stood over the shallow grave of the two Ritchie Boys, he “did not move an eyelid.”

  After the fall of Saint-Lô, Martin Selling’s team moved south in an all-night convoy with the 35th Infantry Division of Patton’s Third Army. Near Falaise, they faced off with the Waffen-SS division Das Reich, an elite unit that had as its symbol a Wolfsangel, an early Nazi symbol inspired by an actual wolf trap. The division was already guilty of war crimes, and it had been rushed up from southern France to try to stop the Americans from breaking out at Saint-Lô. When that failed, they were ordered to act as rear guard for other German units escaping encirclement through the Falaise Gap to live and fight another day.

  Martin saw these SS soldiers as brutal cowards with oversized egos. They were so accustomed to lording over French villagers and poorly armed Resistance fighters that being shot at by U.S. soldiers enraged them. They had been known to execute American POWs, including a captain from Martin’s regiment and his driver, who had been captured after taking a wrong turn.

  Summoned to his regiment’s command post, Martin walked in to find an outraged American colonel and a glaring SS Scharführer clutching a white flag and the latest issue of Stars and Stripes. Standing between them was an unarmed GI. The two officers were shouting and gesticulating without understanding each other. When Martin appeared, the colonel and the German looked to him to straighten things out. It took some back and forth in both languages, but soon the situation became clear. The GI had been taken prisoner by SS troops. Before his capture, he had obtained an advance copy of Stars and Stripes, which had a picture of three blondes and the caption, “Three captured German nurses.” The GI showed his captors the picture and convinced them he had come to negotiate the release of the nurses. The SS lieutenant had accompanied him over to U.S. lines under the white flag to facilitate an exchange of prisoners: one GI for the three nurses. The problem was that no one knew anything about any German nurses; the picture and caption seemed to be a joke. And at this moment not a funny one.

  The regiment’s command post was atop the western slope of a deep valley and the Waffen-SS forces were dug in on the eastern slope, with an open highway connecting the two across the vineyard-covered valley. The German lieutenant had walked with his American prisoner through the center of the U.S. lines without being blindfolded, so he now knew their strength, the layout of their defenses, and the location of the command post. The German officer was still angrily asking about the nurses, and the U.S. colonel was livid because under the rules of war, the use of the white flag meant he would have to allow the SS officer to return to his side.

  Martin had the unpleasant task of explaining to the German that there were no nurses to liberate and that he was now going to be blindfolded for the walk back. The colonel then directed Martin to take the German back to his lines.

  On the long walk across the valley, with the German Jew leading the blindfolded SS officer by the crook of his arm and telling him when to watch his step, the two began to talk. The officer could tell that Martin was German, and he asked why Martin had emigrated. Instead of answering, Martin asked about reports that Das Reich had wiped out the entire population of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, some five hundred men, women, and children. The German officer confirmed what Martin had heard, but attempted to justify the killings by claiming they resulted from somebody firing at them from the village. Martin, sickened by this excuse for mass killings, asked no more questions.

  As soon as Martin saw the German troops, he stopped and removed the lieutenant’s blindfold. Without saying another word, he turned and started the walk back. On his solitary return across the exposed vineyards and road, he realized how stupid he had been not to have brought a white flag for himself. He saw that soldiers on both sides were watching him, crouched in half-hidden positions behind the vines and bushes, and he suddenly felt naked and exposed. With every step, he expected to be shot in the back, perhaps by the Scharführer himself, who had been so blasé about murder. But the kill shot never rang out, and Martin finished the longest walk of his life on shaky legs and drenched in sweat.

  When he reached the other side, he found that the colonel had given orders to pack up his command post, which was already hurriedly being moved.

  They remained locked in combat with the SS division for several more days, then suddenly the SS withdrew through the gap filled with other retreating Germans. Martin saw that these martinets were no longer the vaunted Nazi supermen of the past, although they could still put on a convincing show to frightened civilians and their own rear-echelon troops. Unlike typical Wehrmacht infantry units, they were well motorized, and they demanded the right-of-way even as they raced to the rear. The men of Das Reich, it seemed, were deathly afraid of being captured.

  A week later, Martin was busily interrogating new prisoners when he was interrupted and told to report to the intelligence officer. When he walked into regimental headquarters, he found several stern-faced staff officers staring at a message from Third Army headquarters. They were being asked to explain why the regiment had not passed on information from a prisoner they had interrogated who was a member of a German tank unit operating nearby. Headquarters deemed it vital information that armored tanks were operating in the area in light of the regiment’s plan for an upcoming attack. Martin thought back to his recent interrogations, and couldn’t recall anyone being from a German tank unit or saying anything at all about Panzer tanks in the vicinity. A message was sent back to the Third Army stating there were no reports of enemy tanks in their sector.

  An hour later, a command staff car pulled up with a major and two Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) investigators looking to question Martin. They accused him of no
t including German tanks in his IPW reports, and it became clear that they were questioning not only his competency but his loyalty. They could not understand why he was so determined to deny the presence of armored forces in front of his regiment. They pushed him to admit something; as a mere sergeant, and one with a “heavy accent,” he had perhaps misunderstood something? Or made an omission?

  Overhearing the cross-examination, the regiment’s assistant operation officer, Captain Orval Faubus, finally asked the investigators where they had gotten the information that a prisoner had reported tanks.* Their initial silence was nearly as bad as their explanation. An MP had been escorting some POWs back from interrogations, and—using his high school German—he had asked the prisoners why they wore blue-gray uniforms instead of the usual German army gray. They answered, “Panzergrenadiere.” Hearing panzer, the guard excitedly told his MP battalion commander that there was German armor in the area, and that officer passed the word to higher-ups.

  Unfortunately, it was bad information. Martin had interrogated some of the men in the blue-gray uniforms. Panzergrenadiere were formed earlier in the war to be motorized infantry units attached to armored divisions. Their units mainly operated on the Russian front and had suffered heavy losses. They had been hastily patched up, stripped of their remaining motorized equipment, and shipped to the western front to fight as regular infantry, while retaining their distinctive uniforms and unit designations. For several days, Martin had reported their presence in the regiment’s sector and given their accurate strength and composition as an infantry-only force.

  Somehow, this explanation was not enough for the major and the investigators from headquarters. Martin had an uneasy feeling they had come looking to unmask a German spy in the ranks. The investigators wanted the regiment’s planned attack for the next day to be postponed due to the “conflicting reports” of armor. Faubus looked at Martin, who repeated that he had heard nothing at all about enemy tanks in the area. Faubus and the rest of the regimental staff accepted Martin’s stand, sent the investigators packing, and carried off the attack the next morning as planned, without a single German tank being spotted.