Steven Karras

by The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military

  October 23, 1939, was the day I left Holland for New York. I was on the Westerdam, part freighter and passenger ship. A group of other refugees and I were in the hold because we did not have cabins, and it was a really rough voyage. When we came close to England, we saw a lot of sunken ships and ours was escorted through a minefield. We picked up more people in England and then were off to the States.

  When we landed in Hoboken, New Jersey, I looked down to the pier and saw my uncle and my cousin waiting for me. My uncle and aunt lived at 170th Street in Washington Heights. Walking down Broadway, I met quite a few people who I knew and it was quite exciting. Washington Heights was beautiful. Everywhere I looked I saw people I knew. I joined a synagogue and went regularly Friday and Saturday. I had a very hard time finding a job, but in time I started working as a mechanic.

  I was playing soccer in West Newark, New Jersey, when I heard in the dressing room that Pearl Harbor was bombed. When the war came, I did some defense work and my boss didn’t want me to go to the army. He said, “You’re more important here than if you were in the army,” but I didn’t want to do that. I went to Whitehall Street to volunteer for the army, but I was told that I couldn’t because I was an Enemy Alien. I replied, “This is ridiculous. I was thrown out by Hitler. How could you consider us enemies?”

  In Washington Heights, there were a lot of stories coming out of Germany. The newspaper Aufbau was publishing articles all of the time about how horrible the Jews were being treated, so we all knew what was happening over there.

  I WAS DRAFTED a little less than a year after I had originally tried to volunteer, and being drafted for me was an incredible sense of relief. When I went to Fort Dix, the entire coach on the train was full of refugees. We were all very anxious. My cousin Lou Wolf and I were inducted together and initially stayed in the same barracks.

  Since we had to march in Germany in school, I was already good at marching and I got used to basic and advanced training very quickly. The only problem was that I hated Camp McClellan in Alabama, because it was in the middle of the rainy season, so there were thousands of mosquitoes and the dampness was horrible. However, I knew I was there for a purpose and that purpose was to train to fight a war. My only worry was being sent to fight the Japanese, because I knew I could do more for America in Europe. Almost immediately I had great relationships with the other GIs; even though they used to call me a “Heinie,” there was just wonderful camaraderie among these men.

  After Alabama, I went to Wisconsin to join the 76th Infantry, a ski troop. Ski training was very tough. We had no experience prior to this, and it was extremely cold. We also trained in Michigan’s Upper Penisula, where the snow was unreal. The first time I jumped off a truck, I fell into a ditch and others had to dig me out. Not long after the army broke up the 76th, we were shipped to Camp Shanks, New York, a camp for replacement troops, from which I was shipped out to England in April 1944.

  There were quite a few ships in the convoy across the Atlantic. I was on an English transport, which was originally used for transporting meat from South America to Europe. The English kitchen left a lot to be desired, and when diarrhea broke out in the hold next to ours, I was blessed with it and it was a horror. All the way over, we were so sick.

  From Liverpool, we were transported to a camp in Bath, England. Everywhere you looked you saw troops. When I saw that camps were restricted and heard bombers overhead day and night, I knew, along with everyone else, an invasion was going to happen.

  ON THE MORNING OF D-DAY, we were on a hike. While we were marching, we looked up in the sky and saw plane after plane after plane. It was an unbelievable sight. That evening we packed our duffels and were prepared to go to France. I was thrilled because now it was my time to get into the fight, but I was also a little worried. I was afraid of being captured, but what really scared me was what would happen to me if I was challenged at night by a fellow soldier and responded in my very German accent.

  I arrived in Normandy via Omaha Beach on June 7. The staging area was as busy as Times Square, with trucks, tanks, and troops moving inland in all directions. It was mind-boggling. There were stockpiles of equipment all over the beach and we could tell there had been one hell of a fight the day before.

  I arrived in St. Mere-Eglise and was sent to a field surrounded on four sides by hedgerows. There were a couple of sergeants from the 29th Division who took role call. When they asked me what company I had been with and I replied, “I&R” (intelligence and reconnaissance), they said, “No room, go to D Company.” I told them that I knew nothing about heavy weapons and asked if I&R had an interpreter. They said no, so I was eventually put in I Company of the 115th Regiment, a reconnaissance troop.

  Shortly after I got to my unit, I got into a fight with another soldier, a corporal who made a remark I didn’t like. He and a noncom were walking by me and he said, “Now we got a Jew bastard in our outfit.”

  I looked up and said, “Corporal, what did you say?”

  He said, “Now we got a Jew bastard in our outfit.” I sprung up and hit him so hard in the face that it knocked him over. I couldn’t box, so I took him down and we started wrestling. We got into a bear hug on an incline and started rolling down the hill; since I was on top I beat the hell out of him.

  That day I was assigned to his squad, which was made up of about twenty-eight men. We didn’t talk for several months and he never marched in front of me. “He’s not going to shoot me in the back,” I overheard him say once.

  IN NORMANDY we couldn’t make it cross-country very well. There were so many sunken roads that made it difficult to bring in jeeps, so we reconnoitered on foot. The hedgerows were murder. The Germans had a habit of setting up machine-gun nests where four fields would meet, so they could control two fields with one machine gun. One of the biggest problems was all of the dead animals, such as horses and cows, that the Krauts shot and left everywhere. The smell of all of the decomposing animals was very hard to take, and the combination of maggots, flies, and heat was brutal. Bulldozers had to be brought in to clear all of it away.

  On my first day of combat I saw two dead German soldiers who had been run over by tanks, and they were flat as pancakes. That didn’t bother me. The same day, however, I saw a couple of dead American soldiers and got sick to my stomach. That bothered me terribly.

  We spent more time behind German lines than we were behind our own. If it was a motorized patrol we went by jeep, otherwise there were foot patrols. In France we had roads with hasty minefields, where Germans in retreat hastily threw mines down on the roads. Our lieutenant had an idea that one of us would lie on the hood of a jeep to look out for mines while he drove very slowly. We were ambushed many times, when I was shot at and I fired my weapon.

  AFTER ST. LO, we advanced to Landels, in a county called Calvados, where the French produce a spirit—applejack—called Calvados. I’ll never forget my first sip. When we came to this town we saw a burning tank that had hit a mine and our lieutenant, Elmer Hill, a prince of a guy, called in the combat engineers to clear the mines. It was the lieutenant who suggested we go into Landels.

  In the center of town was a little country store, and I went in and spoke a little French to this little proprietor. I asked him why the county was called Calvados and, without answering me, he disappeared into the backroom. A few moments later he brought out a huge bottle of Calvados. Apparently he misunderstood me, but I decided to open the bottle and take a drink. When the guys in my platoon asked me if it tasted any good, I replied, “It’s the best I’ve ever had.” In about a half-hour, there were twenty-eight guys as drunk as can be.

  Then our lieutenant said, “Boys, I’m sorry to spoil your little party, but we don’t have time for the engineers. Let’s go straddle those mines.” So we straddled those mines and moved forward up the road. Somehow the Germans picked up our radio and they opened up on us with 88s. That was the beginning of a big battle in which we took a lot of prisoners.

  A few days later we ca
me to a town and I didn’t see anybody alive: mostly dead women, children, and old men. A German division had come through the town, an SS division called Das Reich Regiment, Der Fuhrer.

  AT THE END OF AUGUST, we moved up to Brest and fought there for three weeks. In Brest, there was an underground Wehrmacht hospital that we captured. We were extremely tired, so we decided to stay there overnight. The food and drink storage they had down there was incredible. There were some wounded and dead Germans, and some of their medics remained. Since I was the only German speaker, I told them to go upstairs and I separated the officers from enlisted men, so the officers were on the left and the enlisted men on the right.

  Before marching them, I asked if any of them had ailments, but nobody volunteered that information. The reason I asked was if I put a sick man at the head of a column, it would slow the pace, so there wouldn’t be any stragglers. The Germans didn’t answer because they figured they would be shot, since that’s the kind of thing they would do to their prisoners who couldn’t walk. The German prisoners were so meek. Very seldom did we see some of them acting the way they did prior to being captured.

  We started marching and all of the sudden, I hear one of the prisoners saying, “Hans.” I told them to be quiet. A little while later, someone said again, “Hans.”

  I asked, “Who’s talking?”

  “It’s me,” said the soldier, “don’t you know me anymore, Lorch?”

  I said, “How the hell should I know you?”

  “We used to go to school together in Dieberg. I lived on Theobald Strasse and you lived on the corner of Frankfurt and Theabold.”

  Then, I knew immediately who he was. We brought all of them to a staging area and that’s the last I ever saw of him. I was surprised that he recognized me, because I hadn’t seen him in ten years since I was still a kid. I was sure I looked different with army clothes.

  THE GERMANS IN BREST surrendered on September 19, which for me was significant because it was Rosh Hashanah. All of the Jewish boys jumped on trucks and were taken to services that were held in a nearby church.

  I knew what the Germans were doing to Jewish people. While I didn’t know to what extent, I knew that it wasn’t good. So, I carried my hatred for the Germans with me into battle. I had some prisoners who admitted there were things happening to Jews in Russia that were unimaginable. Sometimes I told prisoners that they were talking to a Jew, and they would start to shake in their boots.

  From Brest, we went to Rennes, which was a fairly large city. In Rennes we went to a café in which the waitresses couldn’t speak English and we couldn’t speak enough French. There was a civilian there who did speak a bit of English and asked, “Gentlemen, can I help?” So we asked him to translate for a few of us, which he did and then returned to his table to resume eating. I couldn’t help but stare at this man because for some reason, I had a hunch that he was Jewish. I got up from my chair and made my way over to where he was sitting. He was too preoccupied with his meal to notice that I was standing over him, until I said in Hebrew, “L’Shana Tova” (Happy Jewish New Year). I startled him so much that he bit down on his fork. He slowly got up and the two of us embraced. He cried and so did I. Afterwards, I went back and told the guys that we had to do something for this man. I arranged for the fellows to get candy bars and cigarettes for him, but he disappeared after paying our whole tab.

  WE MOVED TO BRUSSELS, and then to Maastricht and Valkenburg in Holland. I used to live twenty-five miles away from there when I left Germany. Since we were on the border between Holland and Germany, we made several night patrols from into Germany. The first time I stepped on German soil was on Kol Nidre night (eve of Yom Kippur).

  While we were there, we lost an entire company. They were all taken prisoner with the exception of one man who came to our command post (CP) a nervous wreck. Apparently, there was a soldier in that company that was related to General Hodges. All of the sudden, division wanted to know what happened to that particular company. It was reported to S-2 Intelligence, Major Bruning (who was the nephew of former Reich chancellor, Heinrich Bruning, under Hindenburg); the major was a hell of a nice guy.

  We were supposed to go out on a patrol and bring back prisoners to find out what happened to this company. Major Bruning suggested we go out in a horseshoe formation, get Germans in the horseshoe, and then close up and capture them. Lieutenant Neff, a Jew from Chicago, said, “Okay, men, I need two volunteers.”

  The fellow who had called me a Jew bastard when I first came to the field said, “Lieutenant, I’ll take the lead on one end.” So, I volunteered to take the other end, then walked up to the guy and said, “John, tonight for the first time I’m with the 29th, I respect you as a man, and as a soldier, and I want to forget what happened between us in the past.” He threw his arms around me and kissed me, and from that point on we became best buddies.

  MY FAMILY WAS ALWAYS ON MY MIND, especially as I got closer to Germany. When the division was in Holland, across from a coalmine (we used the coal to blacken our faces and hands during our night patrols) there was a bar where I encountered a German Jewish refugee who had been in hiding. At first he was petrified of me because I wore a uniform, as he didn’t know the difference between an American uniform and a German one. I told the man not to worry, because I too was Jewish. When I told him that I was originally from Germany and had lived for a while in Holland, in Roermond, he said, “Come with me to my house. There is a Jewish family that had also lived in Roermond staying with me.” It turned out the family was from the same region as me and knew my entire family. In fact, the son–in-law was a business competitor of my father.

  The news they had for me was not good. They told me that the whole family, including my parents and sister, but with the exception of my uncle, aunt, and cousin, had been deported to Westerbork concentration camp. After our meeting, I kept these people supplied with rations until my company moved out.

  My cousin Lou Wolf’s outfit, the 2nd Armored Division, was attached to the 29th Division for a while, and our paths crossed from time to time. When I saw Lou, he told me about an older prisoner he had interrogated in Titz; the man’s ID stated that he had come from Dieberg. Lou immediately asked the prisoner if he had known the Lorch family to which the old man replied, “There were a few Lorchs there, which ones?”

  “Max and Ida,” said Lou.

  “They were very good friends of mine.” Upon hearing Lou’s last name, Wolf, he asked, “Are you the son of Hugo or Albert? It couldn’t be Leopold because he had no sons.” It turned out that this man was wonderful to my parents after I had left. He brought them food and took care of them before they were deported. I wish I could have thanked him.

  When the division moved into Muenchen-Gladbach in March 1945, I had an experience that left quite an impression on me. On March 27, I was one of four hundred Jewish servicemen from the 29th Division and other outfits who attended a Passover Seder in a castle that had until recently belonged to Joseph Goebbels. As everybody began to gather in the dining room, I noticed some very large portraits of Hitler and Goering on the wall, so I immediately went to take them down. When the chaplain saw what I was doing, he said, “No, Harry, leave them up. I want them to see this.”

  Harry Lorch owned Empire State Leather, an importer/distributor of leather products, and now lives in Englewood, New Jersey.

  Chapter 27

  MANFRED GANS

  BORKEN, GERMANY

  3 Troop, 10 Commando

  Manfred Gans was born in Borken, Germany, a town forty miles north of the Ruhr district and twelve miles from the Dutch frontier in Westphalia. Gans was sent to England in August 1938. When the war broke out, he first served in the Pioneer Corps, an unarmed labor unit of the British Army. He then volunteered for hazardous duty and was accepted into the 3 Troop, 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando/Special Services Brigade.

  Gans changed his name to Freddy Gray and was attached to the 41 Royal Marine Commando as a frontline interrogator three weeks before
the D-Day invasion. He landed at H-Hour on Gold Beach the morning of June 6, 1944, and fought in Normandy until the Allied breakout. He earned a battlefield commission in the invasion of Holland, where he was wounded twice in Walcheren landings. He remained at the frontline until the occupation of Germany.

  I was absolutely set on seeing the war through and making sure that I was there to see Germany liberated from the Nazi government. Very often, I thought about what might have happened to my parents and occasionally I got very depressed.

  My father, Moritz Gans, and his four brothers had joined the German Army during World War I, and my father lost a leg and a lung. He was a decorated veteran, extremely well known. After the war he had joined the League for War Invalids War Orphans and War Widows. There was an organization like that in every town.

  He soon became the president of his league. He used his office extensively to write letters on behalf of all the members and their plight for pensions to which they were entitled. At that time people could not afford lawyers, so my father’s office was used for this purpose, in addition to his textile business. He never charged anybody for mailing a letter, and his staff did everything that was connected with it. My mother often complained about this free service because it interfered with his business too much. As a result of his efforts, he became extremely popular and when he ran for town council in our very catholic town, on a social democratic ticket, he was elected. He was the only Jew ever elected to the town council in 750 years of the town’s history.