Day, etc. For lunch there was chamber music with four to six musicians and for dinner a choir of fifteen to twenty made up of the stars of the Munich and Berlin operas. In short, the staff was much more concerned with living the luxurious life than it was about the operation of the prison camps.’
Siegfriedt attempted to alleviate the conditions by bribing guards at excess vehicle camps with cigarettes so he could take their trucks to scrounge some hay in the neighbourhood ‘to get the PWs off the ground. When the weather warmed up, the cages became ankle-deep in mud. I located a pierced-plank airfield* and, with a convoy of trucks, brought it back to get the men out of the mud. These, however, were band-aid measures for major problems that no one seemed to be in a position to deal with, nor did anyone seem to care.’
Captain Siegfriedt concluded: ‘Obviously we, the US Army, were not prepared to deal with so many prisoners even when I arrived on the scene in December 1945.’ This was close to the Vosges area of France that US Army Colonel Philip Lauben described as ‘one big death camp’.
Prisoners who survived the camp at Bretzenheim have described arriving there on 9 May 1945. They saw three rows of corpses along the road in front of the camp. Seventy-five dead from Bretzenheim were acknowledged by the Americans to have been buried in Stromberg on 9 May and another sixty on 10 May.15 Not all were killed by the usual disease, starvation and exposure.
The village of Bretzenheim has also been the locale of much new research into the fate of prisoners. Herr and Frau Wolfgang Spietz of Bretzenheim took up a challenge from the local Protestant pastor in 1985 to prepare a display about the local camp which had been under American and later French control. With the official support of Bürgermeister Grünwald, this grew into the present documentation centre. A sensational find came in 1990 with the visit of Rudi Buchal of Grossenhain, in the east of Germany, who had been a prisoner in the American time. Buchal had served as a medical orderly-clerk in the so-called POW ‘hospital’ for prisoners, a tent with an earth floor inside the camp. It had no beds, no medical supplies, no blankets and starvation rations for the first month or more. Later, a few supplies were scrounged at random by American teams ‘ferreting’ the German towns nearby.
Another of the prisoners who have come forward recently to the Spietzes is Jakob M. Zacher, a former teacher and school principal of Bretzenheim. He was especially interested in the fate of the prisoners because he had been held in several camps, including Bretzenheim itself. In the 1980s, he decided to look in the archives for 1945 of the village at Langenlonsheim, which was so close to the Bretzenheim camp that prisoners could see the spires of its churches above the trees to the north. In the town hall under the spires, he found the document showing that the Americans had threatened to shoot anyone who tried to take food to the camps. Other copies of the order have been found since in other villages.16
Also in Bretzenheim in the Spietzes’s house, four ex-prisoners met in 1991 to discuss their experiences. Max Müller of Bad Kreuznach laid on the Spietzes’s dining-room table the water-stained original US Army ration book for Bretzenheim, a hardcover German ledger book with the name of a clerk who had kept it still legible in pencil on the cover. This was Robert Hughson, of the 424th Regiment, 106th Infantry Division. Later in the USA, the Supply Officer of the 106th told this writer, ‘Yes, I remember Hughson.’ And Captain Lee Berwick said, ‘We had supplies stacked all round the camp.’ He could not explain why the prisoners got only about 600–850 calories per day, which was the ration according to Hughson’s records.17 And these prisoners nominally had Prisoner of War status.
Berwick’s statement about food supplies is at odds not only with the official army ration book, but with the reports of ten prisoners and several civilians received by the author. Without exception, they describe starvation conditions prevailing through the seventy-odd days when the camp was under US control.18 The prisoner Herbert Peters has reported similar conditions at the huge US camp at Rheinberg: ‘Even when there was little for us to eat, the provisions enclosure was enormous. Piles of cartons like bungalows with intersecting streets throughout.’19
As the Americans prepared to leave Bretzenheim in July, Buchal was told by drivers of the 560th Ambulance Company, who had carried bodies and sick prisoner ‘evacuees’ away, that 18,100 persons had died in the six camps round Bretzenheim in the ten weeks of American control. The destination of the corpses was not revealed to Buchal. He also heard the figure of 18,100 dead from the Germans who were in charge of the hospital statistics, and from other American hospital personnel. The six camps were Bretzenheim, Biebelsheim, Bad Kreuznach, Dietersheim, Hechtsheim and Heidesheim. The reliability of Buchal has been attested by the US Army itself. When he was finally discharged, Buchal received a paper stating that in the opinion of the US Army officers who commanded him, ‘During the above mentioned period [April–July 1945] he proved himself to be co-operative, capable, industrious and reliable.’20
Captain Berwick said on reading Buchal’s report of 18,100 corpses in a draft of this chapter, ‘That might be true.’ The 18,100 figure is in general confirmed by reports from five prisoners who survived Bretzenheim. Several report deaths of over fifty per day for a long period in the camp alone, apart from the hospital.21 One reported 120–180 bodies per day coming out of the camp, apart from the hospital.22
The death total of 18,100, taken with the known period of ten weeks and the known average population of the six camps, 217,000, means that the death rate was 43 per cent per year. This is much higher than the figure 35.6 per cent apparent from Table X in the Medical History of the European Theater of Operations, which was used to help determine the overall death rates in Other Losses in 1989. A high number of corpses on many days was also observed by several American guards at the camp.23
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