As soon as Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, the American Military Governor, General Eisenhower, sent out an ‘urgent courier’ throughout the huge area that he commanded, making it a crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed prisoners. It was even a death-penalty crime to gather food together in one place to take it to prisoners. This astounding order contradicted an earlier message from Eisenhower to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 10 March, saying that he would make the German civilians feed the prisoners. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had approved this in late April.
The order was sent in German to the Länder or provincial governments, ordering them to distribute it immediately to local governments. Copies of the orders were discovered in the 1990s in several villages near the Rhine, among them Langenlonsheim. The message, reproduced on pages 42–3, reads in part: ‘… under no circumstances may food supplies be assembled among the local inhabitants in order to deliver them to the prisoners of war. Those who violate this command and nevertheless try to circumvent this blockade to allow something to come to the prisoners place themselves in danger of being shot …’3
Eisenhower’s order was also posted in English, German and Polish on the bulletin board of Military Government Headquarters in Bavaria, signed by the Chief of Staff of the Military Governor of Bavaria. Later it was posted in Polish in Straubing and Regensburg, where there were a lot of Polish guard companies at nearby camps. One US Army officer who read the posted order in May 1945 has written that it was ‘the intention of Army command regarding the German POW camps in the US Zone from May 1945 through the end of 1947 to exterminate as many POWs as the traffic would bear without international scrutiny’.4 Since this fatal order contravenes the order given by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Eisenhower, and since it entailed the deaths of thousands of prisoners, it is important to German civilians, to the prisoners, and to Army records in general. But in the course of six months’ research in the US archives, and also in the Truman and Eisenhower libraries, the author has been unable to locate the original of this order. Nor has he found any trace of an order from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Eisenhower ordering him to reverse the feeding policy agreed on just two weeks before.
The army’s policy was to starve prisoners, according to several American soldiers who were there. Martin Brech, retired professor of philosophy at Mercy College in New York, who was a guard at Andernach in 1945, has said that he was told by an officer that ‘it is our policy that these men not be fed’.5 The 50,000 to 60,000 men in Andernach were starving, living with no shelter in holes in the ground, trying to nourish themselves on grass. When Brech smuggled bread to them through the wire, he was ordered to stop by an officer. Later, Brech sneaked more food to them, was caught, and told by the same officer, ‘If you do that again, you’ll be shot.’ Brech saw bodies go out of the camp ‘by the truckload’ but he was never told how many there were, where they were buried, or how.6
Former prisoners have led the way to putting names to prisoners and one civilian who were shot for the ‘crime’ of passing food through the barbed wire. Civilian women and teenage girls were shot, shot at, and imprisoned for trying to take food to relatives, although the Eisenhower order had purportedly given individual camp commanders a chance to exempt family members trying 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