World War II Day by Day

Near Bad Orb, Hessen • December 1, 1939

On this date in 1939, 4 months since the out­break of war in Europe, the German Wehr­macht (mili­tary) estab­lished a pri­soner of war camp, Mann­schafts-Stamm­lager IX B, out­side Bad Orb, roughly 30 miles/­48 km north­east of Frank­furt am Main. Over the course of the war Stalag IX B—Stalag being a con­trac­tion of “Stamm­lager,” or base camp—emerged as the most noto­ri­ous of 42 pri­soner of war (POW) camps for cap­tured Allied ground forces. Other POW camps were estab­lished specif­i­cally for cap­tured air­men (Stalag Luft, 6 camps), offi­cers (Oflags, 4 camps) and naval person­nel (Marlag, 1 camp), to name the prin­ci­pal types of German POW camps. The Soviet Union being the excep­tion, Great Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Japan all signed the Geneva Con­ven­tion of 1929 on the correct treat­ment of pri­soners. The Japa­nese Diet (par­lia­ment) refused to ratify the treaty and the Soviets refused to even sign on.

The legal distinction between POW camps and the thou­sands of con­cen­tra­tion, labor, and death camps in the Reich and German-occu­pied terri­tories is impor­tant. Under the 1929 Geneva Con­ven­tion, captors may assign POWs below non-commissioned rank (i.e., enlisted grade person­nel) to work details that did not sup­port war-related indus­tries. General fac­tory, forestry, con­struc­tion, and agri­cul­tural work was per­mitted; muni­tions, gun, air­craft, etc., manu­facturing and work that posed a risk to a POW’s health and safety were off limits.

During Adolf Hitler’s winter 1944–45 Ardennes Offen­sive (aka Battle of the Bulge) fought in Bel­gium, North­east France, and Luxem­bourg, over 23,000 U.S. sol­diers became enemy cap­tives. This sudden infusion of a quar­ter more Amer­i­cans than were already in the German POW camp sys­tem produced chaos at this late stage in the war, straining the abil­ity of autho­ri­ties to supervise and manage the system adequately.

Bad Orb’s Stalag IX B was negatively im­pacted by the intake of thou­sands of cap­tive Amer­i­cans (mostly privates), the first 976 arriving on Decem­ber 26, 1944. A month later over 4,000 GIs shared Stalag IX B with French, Bel­gian, Polish, Czech, British, Ser­bian, Soviet, and after fall 1943 Ital­ian cap­tives. Camp person­nel had received little to no warning that Amer­i­cans would be arriving (still more would arrive), so they made no prep­a­ra­tions for such. Nearly 1,500 GIs were forced to sleep on bare floors, many with­out blan­kets, in mostly unheated rooms. Toilet facil­i­ties were primi­tive, hygiene facil­i­ties non existent. Over­crowding worsened with fresh intakes of 2,000 British cap­tives. Food rations nose­dived and deaths from dis­ease and severe mal­nu­tri­tion soared. With 10,000 more pri­soners than it could accom­mo­date (maxi­mum capa­city was 25,000), Stalag IX B’s infra­structure was near collapse, never to recover.

Culling the U.S. prisoner population at Stalag IX B occurred in early Febru­ary 1945. That’s when the camp com­man­dant was ordered to relocate 350 self-iden­ti­fied and suspected Amer­i­can Jews, along with noted camp trouble-makers and some Amer­i­can “volun­teers,” to a new labor camp in Eastern Germany. At Berga an der Elster Amer­i­can POWs would engage in mining oper­a­tions for (learned later) a planned under­ground syn­thetic oil plant for the Wehr­macht or, per other sources, a muni­tions factory. The POWs’ trans­fer to an obvi­ous mili­tary pro­ject at Berga vio­lated the 1929 Geneva Convention.

On February 13, 1945, 349 Ameri­cans stepped into a hell beyond imag­ining. Berga was a slave-labor camp to which 3,421 over­whelmingly Jewish wretches were dis­patched from Buchen­wald concen­tra­tion camp. Their tunneling work was extremely hazar­dous and deadly; in fact, Camp Berga was lethal to 20 per­cent of Stalag IX B GIs. (See photo essay below.) Their brutal 9‑week ordeal cul­mi­nated in a forced march of some 1,500 Berga pri­soners that ended on April 23. As recorded by an Amer­i­can sur­vi­vor of the march, 286 GIs departed Berga for Bavaria, 48 died on the walk, 30 were hos­pi­tal­ized along the way, and about 166 were liber­ated by the arrival of Amer­i­can troops. Forty-two GIs were unaccounted for. Their liber­a­tion came some 3 weeks after Stalag IX B, their former POW camp, had been liberated.

U.S. POWs at Berga an der Elster Slave Labor Camp, February to April 1945

Above: Berga an der Elster (aka Berga am Elster) was a forced labor sub­camp of the noto­ri­ous Buchen­wald con­cen­tra­tion camp in Thue­ringen, Eastern Germany. Camp Berga was located on the out­skirts of Schlieben, a village in south­western Branden­burg, Eastern Germany. According to most sources the under­ground tunnels and mine shafts at Berga would become a com­plex that would trans­form brown coal into syn­thetic fuel pro­ducts. The Allied stra­te­gic bombing cam­paign had severely reduced the Reich’s abil­ity to pro­duce suf­fi­cient types of fuel for the Wehr­macht in above-ground extrac­tion and refining facil­i­ties, so Germans sought sub­ter­ra­nean loca­tions where slave laborers num­bering in the hun­dreds of tho­usands pro­duced war­planes, ballis­tic mis­siles, and other arti­cles needed for the German war effort. The 2 photos above show some of the 17 en­trances to tun­nels and mine shafts in Zikraer Berg moun­tain where free German civil­ian miners and slave laborers trans­ferred from nearby con­cen­tra­tion camps, including 349 Amer­i­can POWs from Stalag IX B in Hessen, were put to work. Berga is the only known instance of cap­tured Amer­i­can soldiers being used as slave laborers at a Nazi prison camp. German civil­ians drilled and dyna­mited the slate loose; slave laborers broke up the rocks so they could be shoveled or lifted into wheeled mining trams/­carts and dumped into the nearby Elster River. Some of the inter­connected tunnels and mine shafts were 150 feet/­9 m below ground and formed cavernous rooms.

Left: Pvt. Alvin L. Abrams, 20, of Phila­del­phia, Penn­syl­vania, was one of the Jewish Amer­i­can POWs segre­gated at Stalag IX B and sent on to Berga in Febru­ary 1945. After Berga was evac­u­ated on April 4 or 5, 1945, Abrams was found at the prison hos­pi­tal in Fuchs­muehl near the Czech border by sol­diers of George S. Patton Jr’s Third U.S. Army after barely surviving the 2½‑week, 100‑mile/­161 km death march into Bavaria. Only the timely arrival of the 11th Armored Divi­sion at war’s end saved the cap­tives, U.S. and Euro­pean nationals, from cer­tain death. Abrams, head resting on his up­raised arm, is fifth from the bottom in the adja­cent photo. After the war Sgt. Erwin Metz, the sadist who super­vised the Amer­i­can camp and two dozen Berga camp guards and was chiefly respon­si­ble for camp’s chaotic and inhu­mane con­di­tions and April’s forced march, saw his death sen­tence com­muned to 20 years’ impri­son­ment but was freed after a mere nine. Metz’s supe­rior, Capt. Ludwig Merz, who was respon­si­ble for the work details, walked free after 5 years in prison. Pro­ject and con­struc­tions manager for Berga’s mining oper­a­tion, one SS Lt. Willy Hack, was hanged by Commu­nist autho­ri­ties in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany in 1952.

Right: Lying ­on stretchers are some of the 63 ema­ci­ated POWs recently inter­cepted by their Amer­i­can lib­er­ators on the Berga death march. Berga pri­soners had no pro­tect­ive clothing, hard hats, gloves, safety shoes, or masks; many died from pul­mo­nary dis­ease due to dust inha­la­tion from tunneling through white rock using pneu­matic drills, 6‑ft/­1.8‑m-long steel bits, and explo­sives. Severe mal­nu­tri­tion was another cause of death: pri­soners worked 8‑hour shifts (6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.) 7 days a week with no food, water, or rest and were fed only star­va­tion rations—in other words, pris­oners were inten­tionally and method­i­cally starved and worked to death. (Germans had a term for that: Vernich­tung durch Arbeit, “work to death.”) Pri­soners were bru­ta­lized, beaten regu­larly with a shovel, a rubber hose, or spiked with a pick. They slept in ghastly bed­bug-, flea-, and lice-infested triple-decker bunk beds, and they were never allowed to bathe or change their clothes. Diar­rhea, dysen­tery, and typhus raged in the camp; ulcer­ated wounds, pneu­monia, work­site acci­dents, and sui­cides took their toll. Of the 349 GIs in Stalag IX B Febru­ary’s con­sign­ment, 70 died within 2 months at Berga—the highest POW fatal­ity rate of any camp where Amer­i­cans were incar­cer­ated in Europe. In the lead-up to the Cold War with the Soviets and in a per­verse atmo­sphere of post­war polit­i­cal correct­ness vis-à-vis the West Germans, U.S. mili­tary author­i­ties hushed up any talk of Berga’s hor­rific war crimes. Many sol­diers who had sur­vived Berga were required to sign a “secu­rity cer­tif­i­cate,” for­bidding them from ever dis­closing the details of their impri­son­ment. For these rea­sons, Berga is not well known in the literature.

Nazi Labor and Death Camp Berga an der Elster, 1944–1945