CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as ‘glory,’ ‘honor,’ ‘courage,’ or ‘hallow’ were obscene.”
-Ernest Hemingway, American novelist and WW1 veteran, in A Farewell to Arms, 1929
POW Camp 63 Brienne le Chateâu, France [Kriegsgefangenenpost 62: POW Post Office], August 29, 1954
Preparations for the move began a week later. Rations were cut to 800 calories. In two days, no one was capable of working, but that was of little concern because the vast majority of the German land mines had been removed, blown up, or otherwise rendered harmless. The Gebirgsjägers largely lay in their ground hollows in misery because of a spate of summer rains. After another screening of the POWs, the Americans began releasing old men and boys of the Volkssturm [Lit. “people’s storm”—which was a German national militia formed in the last months of World War II from conscripted males between the ages of thirteen to sixty years] who were considered to be harmless and even possibly of potential benefit to a new, controlled German economy.
All prisoners were assembled in the open area. A team of army doctors, nurses, and corpsmen made all of the men remove their shirts. Most of them were little more than skeletons.
“Five push-ups,” the sergeant major ordered.
Less than half were able to do even one. All of the Gebirgsjägers were able to eke out five and to struggle back to their feet. About two hundred of the 2,500 survivors were able—barely able—but many of the others just lay down in the mud ready to be shot. They did not even have the strength to protest. The head doctor walked along with a corpsman taking notes. He pointed his finger at the men who had performed the task. He nodded to Sergeant Major Briggs and Major Saunders, then the medical unit returned to the clinic building.
Sergeant Major Briggs barked, “Follow me. No talking in line.”
The two hundred fittest men—a decidedly relative distinction–fell into a queue and followed the senior enlisted man to the front of the building where seven buses were waiting. He ordered them to get aboard and passed out ham and cheese sandwiches and bottles of beer. He even gave each man a package of the Americans’ favorite cigarettes called Camels. Antoine noticed that there were two healthy-appearing men being loaded onto the bus he was on. They were both overweight and were wearing good sturdy working clothes.
“What are your names, gentlemen?” he asked, curious about their late appearance in the Allied concentration camp system, and more than a bit suspicious.
“Berthold Küppers and Rolf Kohns,” the larger of the two men answered grumpily, “what’s yours?”
“Antoine. Antoine Duvalier.”
It was one of the few times Antoine had given his real name out loud in ten years.
“What brings you here? You obviously aren’t POWs. Are you communists or gypsies?”
He laughed when he said it.
“Nein! We are accused of being unrepentant Nazis. We are guilty of suggesting that the general was allowing the black market to steal food from the prisoners to make an obscene profit.
“Are you guilty?”
Antoine asked it with a smile.
“Ja. Ja wohl!”
“Are you Nazis?”
“Ja.”
“Wehrmacht?”
“Nein,” Berthold said with defiance in his face and in his tone. “Schutzstaffel!” he said emphatically, looking Antoine directly in the eye.
“Wie lautet Dein Eid?” [What is your oath?] Antoine asked, posing the central first question of the SS Hitler oath as a test.
“Ich schwöre Dir, Adolf Hitler, als Führer und Kanzler des Deutschen Reiches Treue und Tapferkeit. Wir geloben Dir und den von Dir bestimmten Vorgesetzten Gehorsam bis in den Tod. So wahr mir Gott helfe!” [I vow to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and chancellor of the German Reich loyalty and bravery. I vow to you and to the leaders that you set for me, absolute allegiance until death. So help me God!]
“Also glaubst Du an einen Gott?” [So you believe in a God?] Antoine continued.
“Ja, ich glaube an einen Herrgott.” [Yes, I believe in a Lord God.].
“Was hältst Du von einem Menschen, der nicht an einen Gott glaubt?”
[What do you think about a man who does not believe in a God?]
“Ich halte ihn für überheblich, grossenwahnsinnig und dumm; er ist nicht für uns geeignet.” [I think he is arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid; he is not one of us.]
Antoine was joined by Hugues Beauchamp, Jérôme Christophe Mailhot, and Serge Alain Rounsavall.
Serge spoke for the Gebirgsjägers, “You are one of us. Stay close. We work to protect each other.
Berthold nodded, answering for himself and for Rolf Kohns.
A well-armed unit of guards walked onto the bus and stood in the aisles with menace on their faces. Sergeant Major Briggs spoke briefly to the first bus driver then stepped off and returned to the field where the weaker men were still lying on the ground. Major Saunders walked across the field to the small set of barracks that housed the known senior members of the SS and presumed war criminals. The regular POWs and Disarmed Enemy Forces personnel had a fairly large area where they could move about fairly freely so long as they remained ten feet from any fence. The senior SS officers had an exercise area measuring about twenty by twenty feet. They were only allowed out at night; so, they were seldom seen. Major Saunders’s detachment ordered the officers out of their barracks and began to talk to them about the changes taking place in the camp. Suddenly without warning, four of the American enlisted men opened fire on the SS officers, who crumpled like wheat being cut for harvest. Behind them a graves registry unit moved in and loaded the corpses into a truck and took them to the center of the open area and dumped them in a pile. The senior NCO ordered the truck to the dump, and his men loaded the long-standing pile of body bags into the back of the truck and dumped them on the other bodies.
Two men doused the pile with ten gallons of gasoline, then another casually tossed and lit cigarette lighter onto the pile, causing an almost explosive inferno. The graves registry unit and the assassination unit left the open area and returned to their barracks. It was all done with Germanic efficiency. Then Gen. Gabler joined Major Saunders and Sergeant Major Briggs in front of the men lying huddled on the ground. Many of them were crying softly, expecting the worst.
“You men are worthless for work, and our orders do not permit us to execute you; so, today you are free. We will open the gates and put you on the street. Do not venture close to the camp again or you will be shot,” the general said; and he, too, returned to his quarters.
The major and the sergeant major gathered the troops and did whatever was necessary to push, walk, or drag the remaining men and to place them on the four streets running alongside the perimeter fences. Perhaps they thought that the populace would provide food, water, clothing, and shelter. Perhaps not. None of those subhuman monsters deserved even a passing thought, each American thought to himself.
Cooperation was not complete. About fifteen men somehow found strength or were crazed by fear, hunger, and thirst; and they made a sad—almost slow motion—dash for the fence, apparently not aware that the gates were open. The sentries opened fire, and all fifteen were dead before they reached the fence. Grave’s Registry was summoned back and added the new bodies to the still crematory-hot fire. The remaining men still able to stand in the queue for the bus each got a swift blow from an American’s club to punctuate the lesson they had just witnessed, as if any further emphasis was needed.
The buses entered the city streets driving very rapidly. It was immediately apparent why: the streets were lined with furious and sullen townspeople who had only a few days before collecting the dead, dying, and severely ill PTWE concentration camp victims from the streets around Bad Kreuznach. The American guards on the buses were afraid the angry crowd was going to block the streets and attack the buses. That would precipitate an armed response with mass killings of German civilians which would lead to an international incident, which in turn would lead to exposure of the deplorable conditions of the camp and treatment of the prisoners, and would result in America being identified as being no better than the Nazis with their concentration camps and horrific POW camps or the Soviet gulags. The bus drivers were ordered to push full speed ahead and not to stop for anything. The people scattered, and a riot was averted.
They drove at breakneck speed to the Bad Kreuznach railroad station. The American guards alighted from the buses, and ten of them ran to the station master’s building and ordered him to ready the train for immediate departure despite the disruption of the schedule all down the line. The rest of the guards force-marched the weary and weak prisoners out of the buses and onto the trains. While the American soldiers were brow-beating the civilian train personnel to get them to hurry away from the station against all regulations, the train master sent two employees to local food stores to empty their supplies of meat, cheese, bread, and beer. In the chaos that swirled around the departure frenzy, the food was rushed aboard and distributed by the Germans to their fellow Germans.
Much to the displeasure of the Americans, most of the food had been consumed by the time order was restored. Some of the prisoners had gobbled the rich food so quickly that they were vomiting in the aisles. Recognizing that it was too late to prevent their prisoners from getting their fill, the Americans decided to forget about it and ordered the train to move out, wishing the prisoners good riddance. The prisoners had learned a thing or two about Americana and almost to a man, stuck their hands out the windows and gave their cruel American keepers the finger.
Six hours later, the train pulled into the station in Brienne le Chateâu, a commune in the Aube department in the Champagne-Ardenne region of north-central France. Its population was 1500 people. The town was located a mile from the right bank of the Aube River and about ten miles from the POW internment camp located on the American AAF base.
The prisoners were herded off the trains and into buses with the same urgency that had attended their boarding them in Bad Kreuznach and for much the same reason. Violently angry French people—men, women, and children—had somehow gotten wind that the German
POWs and Disarmed Persons were going to arrive in the town’s railroad station that afternoon. The towns in the Champagne-Ardenne area had been ravaged by the Nazis well within the memories of all of the citizens except for small children. Even they had been thoroughly schooled in hatred for the Huns.
During the Nazi occupation, the military base had been an SS headquarters. From 1940–1945, men from every country under German control were trained there to become conscienceless SS officers. A subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp was located in the town. It provided labor for the SS-Junkerschule and the Zentralbauleitung [Central Administration Building]. As the need for more and more slave laborers for Nazi projects progressed, the base itself became a major holding area. Most of the inmates died during their stay, but that was of no great interest to the SS men and women who ran the camp because the sources of new slaves were many, and the slaves were both cheap and plentiful.
During the war, the base was also a large medical center. There were persistent rumors that heinous medical experiments were carried out there. A legacy of hatred towards the Germans was created, and no one in the region believed that even the slightest sliver of mercy should be shown by the victors to the vanquished. When the Americans and Free-French began to close in on the airfield, the SS purposely flooded the bottom floor of the headquarters to destroy all of their records. A pond was formed due to water seeping out of the building, and that pond was still standing when the POWs were moved into the concentration camp that now belonged to the Americans.
In November of 1953, the 10th Special Forces Group Airborne arrived at the former AAF base/then SS base. The former SS-Junkerschule became the base of the US Army’s First Battalion headquarters. The French living in the region cared little about what occurred on the base or in the concentration camp. They were happy when the emaciated camp internees were marched out in ever widening concentric circles to clear the Nazi minefields. It made life safer in the fields, on the streets, and in the forests for the French citizens, and they were not dismayed when they heard a bomb go off—one less Hun. Or when they saw the plumes of black smoke come from the southwest corner of the camp—many less Huns.
The arrival of the train was another opportunity for the citizens to vent their pent-up and unquenchable rage. As the men were quickly marched off out of the passenger cars of the trains and into the waiting US Army troop trucks, the townspeople rushed forward to club the POWs with hammers and clubs made from tree branches, picks, shovels, and rocks. Considerable blood was shed in the process, but no one was killed or critically injured–much to the chagrin of the French people. Of the Gebirgsjägers, only Antoine had a wound that left another scar on his forehead.
At the gates of the camp, the buses were met by a contingent of International Red Cross volunteers who—against the wishes of the new commandant of the camp—passed out water, croissants, crusty bread, cheese, fresh fruit, and coffee. The prisoners—knowing this was better fare than they were likely to see for sometime—gobbled down the offerings like pigs at a trough. The Red Cross volunteers were disgusted and dismayed by the spectacle, but made an effort to remain stony-faced. Among themselves, they muttered that it was no more than might have been expected from these vermin. When the prisoners tried to tell the volunteers thank you, they were met with expressionless faces and silence.
At the entrance into the American/British POW camp, they were met by the commandant—currently a British general taking his rotation—and four large and menacing other ranks: a corporal, two lance corporals, and a Fusilier. The commandant’s introduction to the camp was terse and harsh.
“You were sent here to die. You are responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, British, and French soldiers and civilians. Do not expect treatment any better than what you gave to the Jews in your murder camps. Do not make trouble. If you do, you will be shot and then burned on a trash dump. No one will ever know you were here. That is all.”
They were not fed again for two days. During that time, they were required to dig out shallow pits in the dirt by hand for their sleeping arrangements. They were deloused, and their bodies were shaved of all hair except about the groin. They were prodded into the pond by the former SS-Junkerschule—now administration building for the 10th Special Forces Group Airborne—given bars of crude rough soap and brushes. Those who were unable or unwilling to use the brushes on their newly shaved and nicked skin were assisted by camp prisoners already interned there who were promised a hot meal if they were especially vigorous with the stiff-bristled brushes. After drying with rough towels, they were issued prison clothes—bright red and white striped shirt, trousers, soft brimless cap, and shoes with uppers made of canvas and soles made of used and discarded rubber tires.
The Gebirgsjägers had experienced brutality, indifference, neglect, injustice, and all had witnessed wanton murders by psychopaths; but in the British commandant, they saw and experienced an even worse monster. He was a sadist of the worst kind. The Geneva Convention meant nothing. He actually took pleasure when inflicting pain or if a German suffered. Of all of the beasts they had suffered under, the officers of the 33rd Waffen-Grenadier Divison of the SS hated this man the most.
Antoine made the cardinal mistake of protesting when the general whipped a Wehrmacht officer until he was unconscious and covered with blood. For that, he was driven to the ground with an electric cattle prod; until he, too, was unconscious.
When he regained consciousness and found himself lying in the mud, confused, and feeling pain in every muscle and joint in his body, Antoine swore an oath, “This man will pay and will pay dearly. I will stay alive no matter what it takes to destroy him.”