Research Catalog

Soldiers and slaves : American POWs trapped by the Nazis' final gamble

Title: Soldiers and slaves : American POWs trapped by the Nazis' final gamble / Roger Cohen.
Author: Cohen, Roger.
Publication: New York : Knopf, 2005.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Filter by

1 Item

Item details
Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Request in advance	D805.5.B46 C63 2005	Off-site

Details

Description

303 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

"In February 1945, 350 American POWs captured earlier at the Battle of the Bulge or elsewhere in Europe were singled out by the Nazis because they were Jews or were thought to resemble Jews. They were transported in cattle cars to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany, and put to work as slave laborers, mining tunnels for a planned underground synthetic-fuel factory. This was the only incident of its kind during World War II." "Starved and brutalized, the GIs were denied their rights as prisoners of war, their ordeal culminating in a death march that was halted by liberation near the Czech border. Twenty percent of these soldiers - more than seventy of them - perished. After the war, Berga was virtually forgotten, partly because it fell under Soviet domination and partly because America's Cold War priorities quickly changed, and the experiences of these Americans were buried." "Now, for the first time, their story is told in all its blistering detail. This is the story of hell in a small place over a period of ten weeks, at a time when Hitler's Reich was crumbling, but its killing machine still churned. It is a tale of madness and heroism, and of the failure to deliver justice for what the Nazis did to these Americans."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-283) and index.

ISBN

037541410X (alk. paper)

LCCN

2004057691

OCLC

ocm56111710
SCSB-5183276

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries