Word: berga
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...February 1945, Shapiro, then an American GI, entered the Berga concentration camp outside of Weimar, Germany. But unlike the thousands of U.S. soldiers who marched into Hitler’s death camps later that spring, Shapiro came not as a liberator—but as a captive...
...immediate aftermath of the war, the U.S. Army launched an investigation to determine the extent of the atrocities committed against American soldiers at Berga. Two of Hitler’s SS guards in charge at Berga did ultimately face an American military tribunal at Dachau in September 1946. Despite a half-hearted attempt on the part of the American prosecutors—who called not a single survivor as a witness, even though many GIs had volunteered to testify—both SS guards were convicted and sentenced to death. The sentences were later commuted, and U.S. officials hushed...
Cohen discovered his subject matter while serving as the Times’ bureau chief in Berlin. There, he met a filmmaker working on a documentary about the men imprisoned at the Berga concentration camp. This chance encounter was a fitting beginning for the narration of these GIs’ story—a tale of young men caught by chance in a menacing web beyond their comprehension, beyond anyone’s comprehension, really...
...Berga, even the Jewish GIs were kept apart from the camp’s more traditional inmates, but they still experienced the starvation, arbitrary beatings and executions, excruciating work details, and overall dehumanization that characterize what would later come to be called the Holocaust...
...hard to integrate the notion that American Jews were just as vulnerable as the Jews of Europe. The distance our forebears had traveled to escape that insecurity and persecution offered a measure of safety, but that was not enough to save the GIs of Berga. As an American Jew whose grandmother escaped Nazi persecution in Germany, I’d always assumed that it was through her that my connection to the Holocaust was strongest. Upon reading of the GIs of Berga, however, I realized that it could have been my American grandfather, himself a soldier, who ended...