Given Up For Dead by Flint Whitlock

Author:Flint Whitlock [FLINT WHITLOCK]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

One of the barracks at camp Berga Two, circa 1945. (Courtesy National Archives)

Gerald Daub, too, was haunted by the looks on the faces of the inmates in the camp Berga One: “I was really shocked; it was a place filled with all these political prisoners and they stared at us and we just marched by them.”2

The Americans continued marching southward, out of town, toward the hamlet of Eula. The road steepened until, after about a kilometer, the group reached a small, barbed-wire enclosure made up of four or five wooden, tar-paper barracks—a hilltop camp unofficially called Berga Two. The bedraggled men were herded into the compound, given a burlap bag filled with straw to act as a mattress, and assigned to a barracks building.

At first, the prisoners were relieved to find that their new home had many features the old one at Bad Orb lacked. Peter Iosso thought the situation “seemed to be promising—a new compound situated on a hill in a rural area; six large rooms with the smell of freshly cut lumber, with new triple-decker beds and bedding; new eating utensils; a new outdoor sheltered latrine; water, even if transported in a big wheeled tank from town, for personal hygiene and laundry; tea in the morning; a thick potato soup at noon. That impression [of better conditions] did not last, however.”3

Overcrowding quickly became the first problem. Morton Brooks recalled that there were two men per triple-decker bunk, “with maybe sixty people in the room that we were in. There were 350 of us in this compound—350 of us in five buildings.”4

William Shapiro added, “None of us had the slightest clue as to what was in store for us.”5

What was in store for the 350 American POWs at Berga was to augment the thousand political prisoners who were being used as slave laborers to dig a series of seventeen mine shafts or tunnels into the Steinberg (Stone Mountain) on the bank of the Elster River. None of the prisoners at the time knew why the tunnels were being dug, and so speculation was rife. Some prisoners thought the tunnels were going to be used as underground manufacturing facilities for various types of armaments.

Norman Fellman explained that the prisoners “were to dig into the mountain a certain distance—fifty meters or so—then open out laterally both sides and wind up with an underground facility, an underground factory. They had some of those already built and, although it was late in the war, and I’m sure the German generals knew that the war was lost, they were still building these places.”6

Morton Brooks said that, for each POW, “the purpose for the tunnels was a matter of interest. We thought it was some kind of industrial project that they were trying to hide in the mountain. About fifteen years ago, I saw a documentary on TV about POWs. One of the fellows who was in our group was on the program—the producer had gotten him to go back to the site at Berga. I remember the hair rising on my body when I saw him talking at that spot.

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