to feed relatives through the wire.7 The prisoner Paul Schmitt was shot in the American camp at Bretzenheim after coming close to the wire to see his wife and young son who were bringing him a basket of food. The French followed suit: Agnes Spira was shot by French guards at Dietersheim in July 1945 for taking food to prisoners. The memorial to her in nearby Büdesheim, written by one of her children, reads: ‘On the 31 of July 1945, my mother was suddenly and unexpectedly torn from me because of her good deed toward the imprisoned soldiers.’ The entry in the Catholic church register says simply: ‘A tragic demise, shot in Dietersheim on 31.07.1945. Buried on 03.08.1945.’ Martin Brech watched in amazement as one officer at Andernach stood on a hillside firing shots towards German women running away from him in the valley below.
The most gruesome killing was witnessed by the prisoner Hanns Scharf, formerly of California, who was watching as a German woman with her two children came towards an American guard in the camp at Bad Kreuznach, carrying a wine bottle. She asked the guard to give the bottle to her husband, who was just inside the wire. The guard upended the bottle into his own mouth, and when it was empty, threw it on the ground and killed the prisoner with five shots. The other prisoners howled, which brought round US Army Lieutenant Holtsman of Seattle, who said, ‘This is awful. I’ll make sure there is a stiff court martial.’8 In months of work in the Washington archives of the army, no court martial of this or similar incidents has ever turned up. Captain Lee Berwick, who was in command of the guard towers at Bretzenheim nearby, has said that he was never aware of any court martial for shootings at Bretzenheim or at Bad Kreuznach.9
The former German prisoners leading the way in new research have been officially ignored for many years, but they are now actively trying to uncover the truth behind the historical forgeries which have been accepted as real up to now. At Lambach in Austria early in 1996, during excavations for a new power plant, a mass grave was opened on an 80 m square site near the river Traun in Upper Austria. One theory is that these were the bodies of Jews who died during transport, but the evidence suggests strongly that these were German prisoners of the Americans. In 1945 there were American-run POW camps in the region, one at Hofau, another at Grüberfeld a little farther to the east, and one for SS men at Kuhweide to the west. Horst Littmann, an expert recommended by the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, concluded that the bodies were the dead prisoners from these American camps, men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, judging from the good condition of their teeth, the shape of their heads and other evidence.
Such in-ground investigations could happen in Austria, and people could dig up mass graves of prisoners at former Soviet camps recently in eastern Germany, but West German Otto Schmitt was prevented by the police from digging a friend’s land for evidence of prisoners on the site of a former American/French camp.10
The official US Army ration book, smuggled out by an exprisoner, for the huge camp at Bretzenheim, shows that these captives who nominally had prisoner-of-war status – supposedly the best-treated of all – got only 600–850 calories per day. The prisoners starved although ‘food was piled up all round the camp fence,’ according to Captain Lee Berwick of the 424th Infantry Regiment, guardians of the camp.11 Martin Brech has confirmed that Eisenhower’s terror policy was harshly enforced down to the lowest level of camp guard. At the time that Brech was ordered to stop feeding prisoners on pain of being shot himself, it scarcely seemed credible to him that the army intended these prisoners to die. Then, seeing the new evidence in 1995, Brech said that, ‘It is clear that in fact it was the policy to shoot any civilians trying to feed the prisoners.’
Of course, individual French and American soldiers like Brech were honorable exceptions to the orders from higher up. The French Captain Julien of the IIIème Régiment de Tirailleurs Algérien, who took over at Dietersheim from the Americans in July 1945, forbade shooting at his camp. In fact, Julien was so appalled at the condition of the prisoners that he immediately organized food to come in from the village. But Julien got into serious trouble with the French Army for quarrelling with a fellow officer, Captain Rousseau, who shot at German women in Julien’s presence, at about the time and in the same place as a French officer shot Frau Spira. Rousseau is remembered to this day in the village as a bad man. At Bad Kreuznach, William Sellner of Oakville, Ontario, one day saw civilians throw food over the wire while guards watched indifferently. And yet, at night, guards would shoot machine gun bullets at random into the camps, apparently for sport. In Bad Kreuznach, Ernst Richard Krische wrote in his diary on 4 May: ‘Wild shooting in the night, absolute fireworks. It must be the supposed peace. Next morning forty dead as “victims of the fireworks”, in our cage alone, many wounded.’12
One American who tried to help the prisoners was Dr John Allensworth, now of Mineral Wells, Texas, who was an officer in the US Army Medical Corps. He was sent to Gummersbach, east of Bonn, just after the Ruhr pocket collapsed in March 1945. ‘There was a huge mass of humanity in a field standing shoulder to shoulder in the mud, and I mean knee-deep. I would estimate that 75 per cent of them were wounded. The conditions were appalling.’ He immediately set up a 150-bed hospital in a tent for the prisoners. He said, ‘My headquarters leaned over backwards to do everything they could to help the prisoners,’ so he was able to get all the supplies he required immediately.13
But the number of prisoners served by the tent hospitals was less than 1 per cent of the total on hand. And this was before the German collapse, so that millions of Allied prisoners were still being held hostage by the Germans. Thus the attitude of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) was probably more conditioned by fear for the hostages than by the Geneva Convention, which was in fact about to be abrogated by the US State Department.14
Conditions in the camps deteriorated further after the hostage system collapsed. Despite the restrictions, other individual American guards tried to help the German prisoners long after the war ended, among them Captain Frederick Siegfriedt. He was detailed as prison officer in an undermanned Prisoner of War Overhead Detachment at a camp near Zimming in eastern France in December 1945, where there were about 17,000 prisoners, ‘all presumably SS ’. According to Siegfriedt, the previous prison officer had been relieved of his duties because of psychiatric problems. A lifelong friend of Siegfriedt was the medical officer for the detachment. ‘Captain L. had been an extremely hardworking and conscientious person all his life. It was evident that he was under extreme stress, trying to cope with the conditions at CCE 27 and receiving no co-operation, no help, no understanding, without even someone to talk to. I was able to serve to fill the latter need. He explained to me that most of the men had dysentery and were suffering from malnutrition. Some men in the cages had as many as seventeen bloody stools per day, he said. He took me to one of the former French barracks that served as the hospital. It had eight hundred men lying all over, on the cold concrete floors as well as on beds … almost without exception the other [US] officers were alcoholics or had psychiatric problems …’
The rest of the men were kept in Nissen huts, made of chicken wire covered with tar paper. Water was supplied by a single tap inside the hut, which was usually frozen that winter. The prisoners slept on the muddy ground, about 180 to a hut. So crowded were they that it was impossible for them all to lie on their back at once. Sometimes at the roll calls in the morning, men fell over dead.
‘The operation of CCE 27 seemed typical of the entire system,’ Siegfriedt has said. ‘When an enclosure got a bunch of prisoners they didn’t know what to do with, or could not otherwise handle, they were shipped unannounced to another enclosure … I have no idea how many died nor where they were buried. I am sure the Americans did not bury them and we had no such thing as a bulldozer. I can only assume that a detail of German PWs would bury them. I could look out the window of my office and tell if the body being carried by was alive or dead by whether or not there was a fifth man following with the man’s personal possessions. The number could have been from five to twenty per day.
‘The officers’ mess was in a French two-storey house. It had a staff of forty-two [prisoners] with the maître d’ of the German luxury liner Europa in charge. Although
