Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Behind Werner was a truck loaded with crates of German food, Hungarian salamis, boxes of cigars, and cases of alcohol that had been seized that morning from passing German soldiers. Werner grabbed a bottle of Aquavit, a flavored Norwegian vodka, uncorked it, and made a toast to the dead Führer: “Long may he rot!” As he and his fellow 82nd Airborne paratroopers passed the bottle around, they all lit cigars.

  It was later that same day that Werner heard of his division’s discovery of Wöbbelin concentration camp. As news spread that U.S. forces had crossed the Elbe, the camp’s SS guards ran off to avoid capture, leaving behind the starving prisoners, most of them too sick or weak to leave. But the next day three inmates did make it the few miles into Ludwigslust, smashing the window of a closed store to acquire civilian clothes. Several 82nd paratroopers spotted the men in prison stripes breaking into the store, questioned them, and alerted their superiors to reports of the concentration camp.

  That same day, Werner drove to the camp with two intelligence officers as passengers. At the time, he had never heard of Hitler’s Final Solution, or of Auschwitz or the other Nazi death camps in Poland that had been constructed for only one purpose: to kill quickly and efficiently human beings by the thousands every day. Although he had known since the 1930s that concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald existed in Germany, he had never seen one until he entered Wöbbelin. Inside the main gate, half-starved-to-death human beings lay on ground littered with excrement and rotten remains of food. It was all so appalling and the smell so foul that the officers with him rushed to the fence and vomited.

  Wöbbelin concentration camp. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  Wöbbelin had opened three months earlier as a transit camp for inmates evacuated from other concentration camps in the path of the Soviets as the Nazis sought to cover up evidence of the mass killings. Forced on long death marches from the east, the majority of prisoners arriving at Wöbbelin were men, but there was an adjacent, smaller camp with women inmates. All had been left behind barbed-wire fences without adequate food or medical care under catastrophic sanitary conditions.

  In a washhouse, Werner found dead bodies stacked one atop the other. Some were in a state of putrefaction, with limbs, thin as sticks, falling off. Outside was a pit filled with water and a powdery chemical that looked like quicklime.

  Inside one of the tarpaper shacks that served as barracks, one survivor was sitting in a shaft of light picking off lice. His legs were covered with open sores festering with flies and maggots. He twisted around to show Werner his back, lacerated with old and new scars and welts, reminders of beatings by the guards.

  Back in the open courtyard, everywhere Werner turned were dead bodies and shrunken prisoners who seemed to be barely hanging on to life. Their faces, no matter their age, were old. For some, he knew their chances of survival were low despite the best efforts of doctors and medics from the division’s medical company that Gavin had rushed to the camp. Trucks were arriving to evacuate the sickest and most undernourished to an American field hospital that had been set up in Ludwigslust, where they would be given medical treatment and proper nourishment. Another one of Gavin’s early orders: German soldiers caught in the area were being brought into the camp to pull bodies that hadn’t yet completely decomposed out of the bubbling chemical pit. Werner spent time speaking with the inmates, many of whom showed him the numbers tattooed on their forearms. Most came from European countries conquered by the armies of the Third Reich, and had been used—some for years—as forced laborers. About a quarter of Wöbbelin’s nearly four thousand liberated inmates were Jews who had survived other camps before arriving here, where there had been no systematic exterminations. Rather, the estimated one thousand deaths in three months came from starvation, disease, and maltreatment.

  Evacuation of freed survivors from Wöbbelin to an American field hospital. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  Werner drove the two badly shaken officers back to Ludwigslust, then returned to the houses closest to the camp to find out from the residents what they knew about it. One man said he preferred to take a detour rather than to pass by it. Another said he hadn’t been concerned about what was going on there because he had enough worries. Werner insisted on entering their homes and looking in their kitchens, where he found nearly full larders. Perhaps there had been some rationing, but they were not suffering, living in nice houses where even the dogs and cats were well-fed. Yet the residents seemed unconcerned by the poor starving souls a few miles away. What had happened to the Germany he had once known and loved? It was a nation that would have to pay for its crimes for years to come.

  In accordance with a policy mandated by Eisenhower that ordered “all atrocity victims to be buried in a public place,” along with a stone monument to commemorate the dead, Gavin issued his own orders.

  Residents of Ludwigslust, especially those who during the past twelve years of Nazi rule had held some official position or had been members of the Nazi Party, were required to dig two hundred graves in the manicured gardens of the opulent Palace of Ludwigslust. Furthermore, Gavin mandated that the town’s entire adult population be at the mass funeral service, after which they were to walk between the rows of graves, paying their respects to the victims. Each of the deceased lay next to his or her grave, their bodies wrapped in white sheets locals were required to provide from home, with their faces uncovered. Dozens of captured German officers, including five generals, were made to attend.

  Werner and the 82nd’s other Ritchie Boys were assigned to watch over the German officers, who stood with them behind one row of graves. When Ludwigslust’s new mayor—the former one, doubtless a loyal Nazi, had committed suicide after murdering his wife and daughter when he heard the Americans were approaching—started speaking into a microphone, several German officers behind Werner turned their backs and lit up cigarettes.

  Werner whirled around and demanded they drop the cigarettes. One tall German captain looked at him with daggers in his eyes. He told Werner he had no right to give an order to an officer, as he was merely a sergeant. Werner repeated his order, but the Germans kept smoking.

  Werner drew his .45 pistol and pointed it at the captain’s head.

  “You have a choice,” Werner said in German. “Either I shoot you for disobeying my order or you extinguish your cigarette and face the funeral.”

  At left, German civilians forced to pay respects to two hundred victims from Wöbbelin concentration camp during burial ceremonies in Ludwigslust on May 7, 1945. (U.S. Army Signal Corps)

  The captain gave him a hateful look but threw down the cigarette. The other Germans followed suit and turned back toward the services.

  Only later did it fully sink in for Werner Angress that his finger had been on the trigger and his threat to shoot had been real.

  Manny Steinfeld was also there that day. He had helped make the funeral arrangements for the two hundred Wöbbelin victims, and at the service, he was shocked by the locals’ demeanor. They obviously did not want to be there and seemed to feel that an injustice had been done by making them attend. They watched the proceedings without showing any sympathy or remorse. Manny had never seen a funeral with so few tears. While the victims were at least getting proper burials, they were going to their final resting places as unidentified victims of the Nazis, with no loved ones to grieve their deaths. Indeed, many of their loved ones had themselves been victims. About one-fourth of the survivors were Jewish, so it was decided that an equal percentage of the graves would have a painted Star of David over them, and the rest had wooden crosses.

  None of the locals Manny spoke to accepted blame or admitted to having any knowledge of the horrors that had taken place three miles away. In occupied Germany, the refrain “We didn’t know” was becoming as common as “Ich bin kein Nazi” (I am no Nazi). The Germany Manny had left when his mother put him on a train as a fourteen-year-old to join other Jewish refugee children on a ship to America had lots of f
lag-waving Nazis. Now that the Thousand-Year Reich had fallen, where had they all gone?

  The eulogy was delivered by the 82nd Airborne chaplain with whom Manny had crash-landed into Holland aboard a glider during Operation Market Garden. Now a major and a veteran of four parachute jumps into combat zones, George “Chappie” Wood spared none of the Germans in attendance.

  “The world has been horrified at the crimes of the German nation; these crimes were never clearly brought to light until the armies of the united nations overran Germany. This is not war as conducted by international rules of warfare. This is murder such as is not even known among savages. Though you claim no knowledge of those acts, you are still individually and collectively responsible for these atrocities, for they were committed by a government elected to office by yourselves in 1933 and continued in office by your indifference to organized brutality. It should be the firm resolve of the German people that never again should any leader or party bring them to such moral degradation as is exhibited here.”

  When Manny had at last been able to walk into Wöbbelin concentration camp that first day, he passed mounds of skeletal remains. At one barracks, dead bodies were piled up four feet high at the entrance. Stepping into another barracks, he found emaciated men lying on straw in their own filth like farm animals.

  Manny Steinfeld did not return to the concentration camp. He could not shake the fear that his mother and sister had ended up in such a place. If they had, he prayed that the end of the war had come in time for them.

  12

  DENAZIFICATION

  On April 7, 1945, Hauptmann Curt Bruns was tried by a military commission at First Army headquarters in Duren, Germany. The charge against him for “ordering, directing or causing” the deaths of Ritchie Boys Kurt Jacobs and Murray Zappler after they became POWs was read aloud. Bruns pled not guilty through his U.S. Army lawyer appointed to defend him.

  The case was one of several tried by a commission appointed by General Courtney Hodges, commanding general of the First Army, prior to the end of the war. It was specifically authorized by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which provided for trying under military law “those war criminals who are accused of such violations of the laws and customs of war that threaten the security or impair the efficiency of our forces.” The commission that would decide Bruns’s fate consisted of five army colonels, a major, and a lieutenant. Conviction required the votes of at least five of the seven members.

  Called as a witness for the prosecution, First Lieutenant Fred P. Drexel, of the 106th Infantry Division, who had been attached to Jacobs’s and Zappler’s IPW team until a month before their deaths, testified that both men were German-born Jews who became naturalized U.S. citizens.

  In a pretrial memo, an Inspector General investigator pointed out that if Jacobs and Zappler had been citizens of Germany at the time they were captured and shot, the defense might claim their execution as spies was justified under “privileges of lawful belligerents,” even though under the laws of war they would first have had to be convicted by a military tribunal. When the trial began, the defense attorney followed exactly this strategy, asking on cross-examination if Drexel had “any direct personal knowledge” they were “actually citizens of the United States.”

  “No, sir, I do not.”

  On redirect, the prosecutor drew out from Drexel that he and Jacobs and Zappler had all been trained at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, then asked: “Was it compulsory in the school you attended for nationals of countries or nations other than the United States to be naturalized before they were assigned to IPW teams?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, it was, sir.”

  Next to take the stand was the German corporal from Bruns’s battalion who had first reported the executions to Guy Stern. Heinrich Kauter testified to being captured along with other Germans on December 16 and being interrogated by Jacobs and Zappler. He explained how he and the other Germans were liberated by their own forces on December 20, and while they were passing the customs house some of them reported to Hauptmann Bruns about being interrogated by two German Jews.

  “What did Captain Bruns say about the two American Jewish soldiers?” asked the prosecutor.

  “He said, ‘The Jews have no right to live in Germany.’”

  After the two interrogators were pulled from the group, Kauter said, they were lined up with their backs to the wall of the customs house and spoken to by Bruns, who then called over Sergeant Hoffman.

  “What orders did Captain Bruns give to Sergeant Hoffman?”

  “I didn’t hear,” Kauter said.

  Kauter did, however, hear one of the Americans say to Bruns and Hoffman in German that they wanted to be treated as American POWs under the Geneva Conventions.

  Q: What did Captain Bruns say?

  A: He didn’t say anything.

  Q: What happened next?

  A: They were taken away by Sergeant Hoffman and four men.

  Q: Were those men armed with weapons?

  A: Yes.

  Q: What happened after they marched them off?

  A: They took them away from the customs house, not far away from the corner of the forest, and shot them.

  Q: Did you see these two Americans shot?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Did you hear the shots fired by these German soldiers that hit these two American soldiers?

  A: Twice it was fired, yes.

  Q: You speak of hearing fire twice. Did you mean single shots or shots in volley?

  A: Volley.

  Q: Did you see the American soldiers fall?

  A: Yes, they fell.

  Q: Where was Captain Bruns at the time these shots were fired and the Americans fell?

  A: He was on the street.

  The next witness called was First Army trusty Anton Korn, who testified to his two days spent in a cell adjacent to Curt Bruns, during which time Bruns told him of his hatred for Jews and admitted to ordering the two American interrogators to be separated from the other POWs and shot.

  After briefly cross-examining Korn, the defense called its one and only witness, Curt Bruns. Under questioning by his attorney, Bruns admitted for the first time that he knew “maybe one” of the German-speaking Americans was Jewish. He told how he had them separated from the other POWs so he could question them, but claimed, also for the first time, that he put them back at the “end of the column” of hundreds of American POWs as they marched away.

  “Do you know what, if anything, happened to those two German-speaking soldiers later?” asked his attorney.

  “Yes. At ten o’clock the group of prisoners went away, including the two German-speaking soldiers. At two o’clock I heard what happened. My commander . . . must have given the order to shoot [them].”

  Under cross-examination, Bruns stuck to his story that he had heard about the shootings only after the fact. He identified Korn as being in the cell next to his for two days and admitted to talking to him “about a case,” but denied making the admissions of guilt Korn attributed to him.

  The prosecutor next asked Bruns if he had made the statement “Jews cannot live in Germany.”

  “No,” answered Bruns.

  The sworn statement of Margarethe Meiters, a nineteen-year-old German woman who lived in the customs house, was placed into evidence. She had told army investigators she knew who Hauptmann Bruns was, but she never talked to him because he was “too cocky.” She saw him on the morning of December 20 yelling to his men escorting the group of American POWs, “If they don’t hold their hands up, I’ll shoot them!” She then entered the customs house to do her chores and did not see the two Americans removed from the larger group. Later that day, Margarethe said that Lieutenant Oppermann, whom she knew was Bruns’s adjunct, came into the customs house and told her, “In Germany there isn’t room for captured Negroes or Jews. Today we shot two Jews. Didn’t you hear it or see it?” She told him she had not. The lieutenant went on to describe the g
risly details of the murders: that they had been shot in a meadow up the road and they were “still lying there . . . we didn’t bury them,” in case she wanted to go out and see them. She did not.

  Then both attorneys gave short closing arguments.

  Upon secret written ballot, the commission members concurred in a finding of guilty, and by a vote on a separate ballot, they sentenced Curt Bruns to death by firing squad.

  At 9:30 A.M. on June 14, 1945—five weeks after the war in Europe ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender—U.S. Army MPs came for Hauptmann Curt Bruns in the Braunschweig city prison west of Berlin. They drove him to a quarry outside of town that was being used by the army for executions. Placed before a tall wooden stake, he was asked by a colonel if he wanted to make a last statement. Bruns said only that he was dying an innocent man.

  His feet were tied together and his hands tied behind the stake. He was offered a blindfold, which he accepted. The U.S. Army firing squad marched into position, a sergeant leading eight privates carrying locked and loaded rifles. One rifle contained a blank cartridge, so that no individual could know whether he had fired a fatal bullet.

  They halted and formed a line facing the prisoner.

  “Squad, ready!” commanded the colonel.

  “Aim!”

  All eight rifles were lifted into position.

  “Fire!”

  Hauptmann Curt Bruns was struck by a single volley.

  Hauptmann Curt Bruns, convicted by a military tribunal of ordering the murders of Ritchie Boys Kurt Jacobs and Murray Zappler, arriving at the quarry where he was executed by a firing squad on June 14, 1945. (U.S. Army Signal Corps)

  He slumped over at the stake, dead, dressed in the same German officer’s uniform he had worn that day in front of the customs house.