ONE OF THE MOST dangerous moments in combat in Europe in World War II came the instant a man decided he was no longer willing or able to continue combat. He threw down his weapon and raised his hands, or showed a white flag—sometimes alone, sometimes in a group, sometimes in company strength or even more—and thus exposed himself to an armed enemy soldier he had been trying to kill a moment before, and who was frequently mad with battle lust. His chances of getting shot were high. They stayed high until he was safely in the rear in a POW cage.
Most of the men who stuck to their guns until out of ammunition and about to be overrun, before throwing up their hands and calling Comrade! never made it to POW status. The German trick of sending unarmed men on patrols, so that if caught they could say they were trying to surrender, made it difficult and dangerous for individual Germans to give up, as the GIs shot all Germans found between the lines. The Germans were equally unforgiving.
The SHAEF War Crimes Files are stuffed with incidents: “Case 6–123, Company B, 394th Infantry. Near Losheim on 17 December the Germans surrounded a platoon. The GIs raised a white flag, but German tanks nevertheless overran the position, covering some men with earth and firing into the foxholes. Somehow 22 men managed to surrender. The Germans herded them into a nearby draw and gunned them down. Only the aid man escaped.
“Case 6–156. Witness: Pvt. Andrew S. Protz. At Honsefeld, 5 US soldiers raised a white flag and came forward. The Germans opened fire, killing 4 and wounding 1, whereupon a German tank deliberately ran over the wounded man as he begged for help.”1
Pvt. Edward Webber of the 47th Infantry Regiment described a gruesome, but hardly unique, incident. He was advancing on a damaged German tank. The crew had ceased firing its machine gun, opened the turret, and were waving a white flag. Webber and his buddies moved forward. The machine gun began firing again—probably by some young fanatic who refused to give up with the rest. Webber’s squad fired back. “The crew came pouring out of the bottom escape hatch,” Webber said. “They were hollering ‘Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!’ But by this time we were in an infuriated rage. The crewmen were lined up on their knees and an angry soldier walked along behind them and shot each in the back of the head. The last to die was a young, blond-headed teenager who was rocking back and forth on his knees, crying and urinating down both trouser legs. He had pictures of his family spread on the ground before him. Nevertheless, he was shot in the back of the head and pitched forth like a sack of potatoes.”2
Sgt. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd Airborne treated POWs differently. “We had developed an intense hatred for anything and everything German,” he wrote in a memoir. “We were particularly unhappy about sending them, as prisoners, to our rear. We had to stay up there and resented anyone going back to shelter and warmth. So, we always cut their belts and, with our jump knives, cut the buttons off their pants, so that they had to hold up their pants in order to keep them. It was humiliating for them, particularly the officers.”3
Both the American and the German army outlawed the shooting of unarmed prisoners. Both sides did it, frequently, but no courts-martial were ever convened for men charged with shooting prisoners. It is a subject everyone agreed should not be discussed, and no records were kept. Thus all commentary on the subject is anecdotal.
I’ve interviewed well over 1,000 combat veterans. Only one of them said he shot a prisoner, and he added that while he felt some remorse he would do it again. Perhaps as many as one-third of the veterans I’ve talked to, however, related incidents in which they saw other GIs shooting unarmed German prisoners who had their hands up. The general attitude was expressed by Lt. Tom Gibson of the 101st Airborne, who told me in graphic detail of the murder of ten German POWs by an American airborne officer—he shot them while they were digging a ditch and were under guard. Gibson commented: “I firmly believe that only a combat soldier has the right to judge another combat soldier. Only he knows how hard it is to retain his sanity, to do his duty and to survive with some semblance of honor. You have to learn to forgive others, and yourself, for some of the things that are done.”4
For the airmen who had to bail out over Germany the most dangerous moment was when they hit the ground. If local civilians got to them before military officials arrived, they would attack the Americans with rocks, pitchforks, and hunting weapons. Many were killed by noncombatants overwhelmed by anger and hatred.
In the November fighting, Lieutenant Fussell’s infantry platoon came on a deep crater in a forest where a squad or two of German soldiers, some fifteen to twenty men, were gathered. “Their visible wish to surrender—most were in tears of terror and despair—was ignored by our men lining the rim,” Fussell later wrote. As the Germans held their hands high, Fussell’s men, “laughing and howling, hoo-ha-ing and cowboy and good-old-boy yelling, exultantly shot into the crater until every single man down there was dead. . . . If a body twitched or moved at all, it was shot again. The result was deep satisfaction, and the event was transformed into amusing narrative, told and retold over campfires all that winter.”5
Sgt. Robert Jamison, 90th Infantry Division, recalled an incident during the Bulge: “We stopped a German tank with our bazooka and retrieved two of its crew. One had been very badly wounded in the leg. Some bastard lieutenant queried him about his outfit and he refused to answer. The lieutenant then shoved him out of the door and shot him in the back. That was the closest I came to killing one of our own.”6
Capt. Charles Stockell was in position near Elsenborn Ridge. “We had a young private, a sweet natured 19 year old kid, who had two brothers killed in Normandy. It turned him into a fiend where Germans were concerned. He killed every one he could including any prisoner. It had become a court martial offense to send a prisoner back with Junior.”
During the Bulge, Stockell was standing with the battalion commander outside headquarters. The CO needed to send a note to one of the companies. He called Junior over and gave him the mission. “Junior trotted off down the street. A German who had been hiding in one of the houses for 72 hours appeared at the front gate, bowing, smiling, hands on his head.
“ ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’
“Junior never broke stride, but pulled his pistol and shot the man in the face as he jogged past. The CO swore and dashed his helmet to the ground; Junior had struck again.”7
Most of the shooting stories are not so cold-blooded; generally, they are about front-line riflemen immediately after a firefight in which they had seen buddies killed. On the American side, almost never did officers give direct orders to shoot prisoners. The word the paratroopers spread among themselves before D-Day was, “No prisoners, per orders of General Gavin [or Ridgway, or Taylor],” but I’ve not seen any documentary evidence for this “order,” and in fact the paratroopers took many prisoners on June 6. There is a written order from Headquarters, 328th Infantry Regiment, dated December 21, which reads: “No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but will be shot on sight.”8
The excuse for that order was the Malmédy massacre. That event occurred on December 17. Battery B, 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion of the 7th Armored Division, was moving southward toward St.-Vith when Peiper’s lead elements ran into the unit outside Malmédy. Peiper drove into the column, shooting and creating complete confusion. GIs abandoned their vehicles in panic and dove for the ditches or tried to run to the nearby forest. Peiper ordered them rounded up and drove on.
Whether Peiper gave a direct order to shoot the prisoners or not, is not clear. It is known that he had been an adjutant of Heinrich Himmler and that as a battalion commander in Russia he burned two villages and killed all the inhabitants. The veteran SS troops he led in the Ardennes had long experience on the Eastern Front where shooting POWs was a commonplace. Hitler had issued a directive that in the Ardennes the German troops should be preceded “by a wave of terror and fright and that no human inhibitions should be shown.” This first came to light when Lt. Col. George Mabry, one of the heroes of Utah Beach on D-Day, reported that his battalion had captured a German colonel who had Hitler’s written order on him.9
Over the first four days of the Bulge, when his panzers were on the move, Peiper’s command murdered approximately 350 American POWs and at least 100 unarmed Belgian civilians. But Peiper was not present at Malmédy while the GIs from Battery B were rounded up, about 150 of them. A second panzer column approached. The Germans parked a tank at either end of a snow-covered field near the wood. A command car drew up. The German officer stood up, pulled his pistol, took deliberate aim at an American medical officer in the front rank of the POWs, and shot him. As the doctor fell, the German shot an officer next to him. Then the two tanks opened up with their machine guns on the POWs.
Pvt. Homer Ford was one of the prisoners. He later testified, “They started to spray us with machine-gun fire, pistols, and everything. Everybody hit the ground. Then they came along with pistols and rifles and shot some that were breathing and hit others in the head with rifle butts. I was hit in the arm, and of the four men who escaped with me, one had been shot in the cheek, one was hit in the stomach, and another in the legs.”10 Men took off for the wood, and many made it. Of the 150 POWs, 70 survived.
As a massacre, by World War II standards, that wasn’t much. And Hugh Cole’s conclusion in his official history of the Bulge is: “So far as can be determined the Peiper killings represent the only organized and directed murder of prisoners of war by either side during the Ardennes battle.”11 But the cold-bloodedness of the Malmédy atrocity sent an electric shock through the U.S. Army. The dead were discovered by a patrol a couple of hours after the deed. Cole remarked that “the speed with which the news of the Malmédy massacre reached the American front-line troops is amazing.” By nightfall the word had gone out to the foxholes—over a 100-kilometer front—that the Germans were shooting American POWs. This had two effects: first, many SS troopers who surrendered were shot; second, GIs who were thinking of surrendering changed their minds.12
The Malmédy massacre seemed to many Americans to be the perfect example of Nazi brutality. After the war it was the subject of extensive hearings before a U.S. military tribunal at Dachau. Seventy-three former members of Peiper’s SS command were tried. Forty-three were sentenced to death, twenty-two to life imprisonment, including Peiper, and eight to prison terms of ten years. Many of these sentences were commuted; no one served his full sentence.13
American retaliation for Malmédy had already been extracted, by the treatment of SS prisoners who fell into the GIs’ hands. Pvt. J. Frank Brumbaugh of the 82nd Airborne remembered hiking past the site of the Malmédy massacre. “GIs and some POWs were out in the field. They were digging the solidly frozen bodies of the murdered American soldiers out of the snow, frozen in grotesque positions with arms and legs in all positions.”
An hour or so later, he saw some paratroopers who had a bunch of Germans wearing either U.S. jump boots or infantry combat boots, obviously stolen from captive, wounded, or dead Americans. The American paratroopers shot those wearing combat boots out of hand, on the grounds that if they had taken them from wounded or captured GIs, they may have caused injury or death, because the snow was deep, the weather bitter cold.
“Those German captives found wearing U.S. parachute boots were made to remove the boots and socks, roll their trousers above their knees, and march around in the snow until their feet were totally frozen and they could no longer feel a knife prick, nor walk.” The prisoners were sent back to field hospitals, where both feet had to be amputated.
Brumbaugh commented, “I suppose it might be called an atrocity, but I felt at the time it was a brutal but effective means of teaching the Germans a valuable and necessary lesson, which was, you don’t f——k with paratroopers!”14
During the first days of the Bulge, there were many bizarre incidents involving prisoners. Lt. Walter Melford, a former ASTPer who had earned a commission just before going into combat, was German-born. He had immigrated to the United States with his family in the mid-1930s and grown up in Brooklyn. He was in intelligence and he was in great danger from both sides. When his unit was surrounded, and the colonel was about to surrender, Melford got together with four other native-born Germans who had become GIs. They agreed they could not possibly surrender, and took off. When they encountered an American patrol, Melford called out, “Vee are Americans.” Hands up! was the reply, and the five men with German accents wearing American uniforms were all arrested. Melford told an MP that he was from Brooklyn. Who plays shortstop for the Dodgers? Melford didn’t know. It took him a couple of days to properly identify himself.
Two months later, Melford was with an armored column attacking in the Ruhr industrial area. The American tanks trapped a German battalion in a large factory. The CO turned to Melford. “It would be quicker and easier if you could talk those guys into surrendering,” he said. Melford mounted two loudspeakers on a tank and it lumbered forward. “Ihr seid vollkommen umzingelt . . .” he called out (“You are completely surrounded . . .”). A couple of hundred Germans came out waving white flags. The CO told Melford to march them into a liberated Russian POW compound. “I had them lined up in columns of four, and sitting up there holding the mike I gave the order, ‘Vorwärts marsch!’ and headed them straight into the compound. It was just wonderful.”15
One unknown German solved the problem of surrendering with a nice bit of imagination and guts. Twenty-year-old Sgt. James Pemberton of the 103rd Division led a night patrol near Mulhausen. He started off with nine men. On the way back, he counted ten. “I had a problem, but I said nothing because I thought I knew what was going on and couldn’t do anything about it. As soon as we got back to headquarters and into a lighted room I had my rifle ready and that Kraut started yelling, ‘Kamerad, Kamerad!’ No weapons or anything. He’d been on guard duty, heard us, and decided he’d had enough of the war and just joined my squad and became a POW.”16
The Germans got their first big bag of American POWs in the opening days of the Bulge, some 20,000 (altogether, the Germans took some 30,000 GIs and 26,000 airmen prisoner in Northwest Europe). The largest haul came on December 19, when two regiments of the 106th Division surrendered. At 7,500 men, this was the largest mass surrender in the war against Germany.
Pvt. Ernest Vermont heard his lieutenant call out, “Cease fire,” then, “Destroy your weapons.” For Vermont, “that was the worst thing I ever did in my life.” The Germans rounded his unit up and started marching the GIs to the rear. They would take watches, spit on the Americans, or cuff them across the head. In one village Vermont was stoned by some Hitler Youth. “The humiliation of being taken prisoner was almost more than I could endure.”17
Vermont used a word that seemed apt to many of the men of the 106th. Private Vonnegut refused to obey the order to surrender. He took off with three others to try to make it back to American lines. Tall, skinny, no overcoat, no weapon, no boots. Shots rang out. The GIs dove into a ditch. After ten minutes, “They crawled into a forest like the big, unlucky mammals they were.” Their luck got worse; they were trapped and forced to surrender. But luck returned: they were not shot but marched off to the east. As they hiked, at each road junction another group of GIs joined them. They were going downhill, like water, growing in numbers as they merged on the main highway on the valley floor. Tens of thousands of Americans shuffled eastward, their hands clasped on top of their heads. Vonnegut called it a “river of humiliation.”18
Corp. Roger Foehringer of the 99th Division was marched into a barracks, where a young German soldier approached him for interrogation. “I gave him ‘the glare’ and he gave me the finger. He had good English and the first thing he did was shove his Luger into my stomach and pull the dog tags off my neck.” Then he got Foehringer going in a conversation on his home life, what he did before the war, where he went to school. “It wasn’t a very thorough interrogation,” Foehringer felt. The German almost certainly felt otherwise, that he had gotten everything he could. Corporals don’t have much information, in any army.
The following day, December 19, Foehringer began a four-day march. The first day, “we were marching by rows and rows of German troops, tanks and half-tracks and horse-drawn artillery, every imaginable type.” They bedded down in a straw pile. They were not fed. On the third day, “we ran out into a sugar beet field that had been turned over. I had never seen a sugar beet in my life, but I ran out in the field and grabbed one and the Germans didn’t shoot. And lo and behold it was something that gave me energy, sugar, heat and the strength to go on.”
Eventually the GI POWs reached railheads, where they were loaded onto French railway cars that the Germans had used as cattle cars. The floors were covered with manure. The GIs were sealed in, from 80 to 100-plus to a car, so tightly packed together there was not room for a man to sit, much less lie down. Even the dead remained standing. There were no waste facilities beyond an occasional tin bucket. The stench was unbearable, except that it had to be borne. Sometimes twice a day, sometimes once, sometimes not at all, the Germans opened the cars and gave the men water. The long, slow freight trains made ideal targets for P-47s, and the American pilots continually raked the unmarked cars with machine-gun fire and hit them with rockets. Many died, German and American.
Pilot Lt. Jim McCubbin was in a boxcar that two P-47s attacked. Watching the bombs leave the wings, he said, “That gave me a feeling of life in the infantry. I was much more scared than I had ever been in the air.” He was thankful that the Germans had a flak car that was shooting back. “If it hadn’t been for their firing, the P-47s would have made several more passes. I should know. I had done this frequently.”19
Private Vermont recalled being strafed by machine-gun fire. “The bullets came through the boxcar killing many men. I believe I was the only one left alive. The others had either been killed or were badly wounded.”20 It was the worst experience almost every man who had it ever had.
When they finally arrived at the various camps in central and eastern Germany, the POWs had widely different experiences, depending on which service they came from, their rank, and most of all the camp administration and guards. Goering had a romantic view of the Knights of the Sky and a sense of brotherhood with fellow pilots; the Luftwaffe ran the camps holding downed flyers; except for inadequate rations, the Army Air Force POWs fared relatively well.21
But as one prisoner of the Luftwaffe observed, “The German rations were just enough to insure starvation in its most prolonged and unpleasant form.”22 Lieutenant McCubbin, the P-47 pilot, who was shot down and entered a prison camp near Nuremberg on his twenty-fourth birthday, described the conditions: “The good news was that the soup had peas. The bad news was that over half the peas had worms in them. We soon stopped discarding the worst ones, to just squeezing out the worms, to finally just enjoying the protein. We slept on a hard floor in groups to conserve body heat and to share the one blanket. When one person’s pain became unbearable, we would all roll to the other side in unison.”23
To the prisoners, by far the most important provision of the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs was the one on rations, which required that they be equal to the ration received by the soldiers of the holding power. In the United States, there was more than enough food and the provision was met, even exceeded. In Europe, priorities had to be set and POWs came toward the end of the list. Nowhere outside the United States were POWs adequately fed. GIs who weighed 180 pounds when captured in the Bulge weighed 120 or 100 pounds when liberated. Private Vermont recorded, “I weighed 140 lbs when I went into prison and weighed 92 pounds when I was released.”24 And the GIs had been marginally better fed than Russian POWs or concentration camp inmates.
In general, meals consisted of black bread and thin potato soup, twice a day. Col. Joe Matthews of the 106th Division recalled that he sometimes got “green hornet soup,” made of beet tops and horsemeat. It got its name because its surface was covered with maggots stained green from the beet tops. Among the prisoners there were heated arguments over eating the maggots. Matthews, an agricultural chemist, decided they were protein and ate them.25
Enlisted infantrymen fared even worse. One sergeant reported that “I went from 135 pounds to 95 pounds in four months of imprisonment. All we were given to eat was a cup of soup and a piece of ersatz bread each day. This was a systematic brutality to keep us dependent on the next meal and too weak to try to escape. I had frozen feet, jaundice, fleas, lice, dysentery, two foot infections and general malnutrition. . . . The only difference between the concentration camps and the Stalag I was in was that we were not killed off with gas or bullets. . . . I do not remember one act of mercy or compassion on the part of the Germans.”26
There is ample testimony from those who were there that German officers and guards, at some camps, murdered or ill-treated POWs, by forcing them to labor in inhumane conditions, by torturing them and subjecting them to constant, pointless harassment. There is other testimony that indicates the Germans did the best they could in a difficult situation. And there is something ironic about the inhumane conditions under which many prisoners labored—the cause was the Allied air forces. In city after city, following a raid, POWs in camps nearby were brought in to clean up. That’s how Private Vonnegut was brought face-to-face with the horror of a major raid (Dresden, February 1945) and came to write Slaughterhouse-Five.
Corporal Foehringer had a similar experience. He was in Würzburg in March 1945, when the British firebombed the city. Ordered into a cellar, and then out again, he felt “the most tremendous wind you’ve ever felt and the whole sky and city of Würzburg seemed to be in flames. The incendiary bombs had hit the roofs of the buildings throughout the city and set them on fire.” The fires burnt through the roofs, down the floors, the debris falling inward after it, and incinerated the civilians hiding in the cellars. For the next week, Foehringer and his fellow prisoners worked to remove the debris and carry out the dead.27
In most cases, being a POW in World War II was about as bad a human experience as one could have. For certain, there was nothing good to be said about being a POW. Which was worse, being a German in Russian hands or a Russian in German hands? An American in Japanese hands or a Pole in German (or Russian) hands? No one can say, but on a scale of horror they all rank ahead of being an American in German hands.I
How the U.S. Army treated its prisoners is a part of the story of its campaign in Northwest Europe. The Americans took their first big bag of German POWs, over 100,000, in Tunisia in May 1943. Eisenhower complained that they had never taught him at West Point what to do with so many prisoners. The War Department made the commonsense decision to bring them to the States. They could be brought over in troop transports returning from North Africa that would otherwise be empty. They could work on America’s farms, where the labor shortage was acute.
I saw my first German soldiers in June 1944 in Whitewater, Wisconsin. They were members of the Afrika Corps and they were frightening to an eight-year-old—big, strong, blond, hardworking, well disciplined. Next to them the GI guard, even with his tommy-gun slung over his shoulder, looked puny. I watched the Germans work alongside my mother at the local pea cannery, sorting debris out of the shelled peas, and that helped take the Superman image away. These were just farm boys doing what farm boys do.
More big bags of prisoners came at Falaise, and in the fall battles, and then during the Bulge. From August through December, the troop ships bringing young Americans to Europe to fight were taking young Germans to America to farm. Some 400,000 each way.
The best place of all to be in the winter of 1944—45 for a German male born between 1910 and 1927 was in a POW camp in the United States. There the German soldiers had security, shelter, and ample sustenance. They had a soft, cushy life—enhanced by hard physical labor in the day, something most Germans love to do—including university classes in subjects ranging from English literature to advanced mathematics; movies; humane guards; a decent camp administration.
Pvt. Josef Bischof was an Austrian captured in December 1944. He was sent to Colorado, where he worked on beet and potato farms. Many of the farmers whose fields he worked were second-generation German-Americans, still speaking the old language and holding to many of the old ways. “They would tell us,” Bischof recalled, “ ‘Now, boys, if you work hard today my wife will have fried chicken for you tonight, with pie and ice cream,’ and we would really pitch in.” When the war ended, Bischof wanted to stay in the United States. Austria was in a shambles, he had no family, and “in America they let you work as much as you want.” Young and healthy, Bischof figured it would only take him a few years to start climbing, owning his own house, running his own business. But in 1946 he and his buddies were sent home.28
POW camps were scattered throughout the United States. Generally the prisoners spent their days in the fields, their nights in barracks previously occupied by the young Americans now sailing to Europe or fighting there. Often, the guards were Negro soldiers.
It is one of the war’s many ironies that the soldiers of the nation fighting for racial purity and the domination of the world were shocked by the way white Southerners treated blacks. They said indignantly that Germans had treated the blacks better in their pre-World War I African colonies. And the planters proved the point by treating German POWs better than they did the local black laborers. In the cotton fields, for example, the daily quota for black pickers was 250 pounds, for the POWs, 100 pounds.
In a camp in Louisiana, the Germans suffered terribly from the heat and humidity in the cane fields, but they prospered with the community. They went to the Saturday night movies downtown, where they sat downstairs while the blacks sat in the balcony reserved for “colored.” They went unescorted (a man would have had to have been some kind of fool—or Nazi, or both—to try to escape and get back to Germany; I know of only one who did so). They attended local dances; there were some romances and even a few marriages.29
The system worked to everyone’s benefit. The crops got planted, cultivated, harvested. The prisoners were better off than they ever would have been in the Wehrmacht. The U.S. Army in its treatment of POWs compiled a record of decency and efficiency in an area in which all other countries, save Britain and Canada, must today hang their heads in shame.
In April 1945 a rebuilt American division that had more of its former members in German POW camps than any division in the Army, the 106th Infantry, was rushed from Rennes, France, to Germany to deal with a desperate situation, the mass surrender of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers. The 106th was needed to guard and care for the prisoners. At one point the division was responsible for 330,000 men. Despite a shortage of food, medicine, and shelter, the 106th carried out its mission well. The men earned the commendation from their CO, Maj. Gen. D. A. Stroh: “Your superior performance has reflected great credit to all concerned.”30
Still there was some brutality, considerable hardship, much illness, and a relatively high death rate. As official Army historian Albert Cowdrey reminds us, conditions in the terribly overcrowded American POW camps in Germany in the spring of 1945 “offer a sobering corrective to any remaining illusion that in World War II all the inhumanity was on one side.”31 But with regard to the widely publicized charge that the United States deliberately starved one million POWs to death, it is a monstrous lie.II
I. For comparison sake, between 34 and 38 percent of Americans held by the Japanese as prisoners died; about two-thirds of Russian prisoners held in Germany appear to have died; and the proportion of Germans captured on the Eastern Front who died has been estimated as high as 80 percent. In the West, .7 percent of Americans held as POWs by the Germans died; 1 percent of the Germans held by the Americans died. For a full discussion, see Albert Cowdrey, “A Question of Numbers,” in Günter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose, eds., Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).
II. As shown in Bischof and Ambrose, eds., Eisenhower and the German POWs.