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Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble
by Roger Cohen
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Anchor (2006-04-11)
ISBN: 0385722311
EAN: 9780385722315
Dewy Decimal #: 358
Paperback: 336 pages
Release Date: 2006-04-11
SKU: 07030124
Condition: New as issued no ja
Comments: New book. Trade paperback with no marks or creases. Appears unread. Beautiful book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
In February of 1945, 350 American POWs, selected because they were Jews, thought to resemble Jews or simply by malicious caprice, were transported by cattle car to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany. Here, the soldiers were worked to death, starved and brutalized; more than twenty percent died from this horrific treatment.
This is one of the last untold stories of World War II, and Roger Cohen re-creates it in all its blistering detail. Ground down by the crumbling Nazi war machine, the men prayed for salvation from the Allied troops, yet even after their liberation, their story was nearly forgotten. There was no aggressive prosecution of the commandants of the camp and the POWs received no particular recognition for their sacrifices. Cohen tells their story at last, in a stirring tale of bravery and depredation that is essential for any reader of World War II history.
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Customer Reviews
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Interesting book that awkwardly shifts between two stories
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-07-12
both of which would have made important books in themselves but in this book the story of one Hungarian Jew and his family is intermingled (for no apparent reason) with the sad story of 350 US POWs that were sent to a small mine labor camp at Berga. The author spends alot of time trying to reason out why some of the 350 were Jews but not all, why the Nazi guards weren't treated more harshly after the war etc... Perhaps a better book would have included Berga and other camps that held US POWs in Germany.
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A great book about great men in dire circumstances
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-04-04
This is a fantastic book. It read slow, but I think that it wasn't written to suck you in. It's all facts and no filler. You get good insight into the people involved. With this book you are going to go through a huge range of emotions. From pure outrage to laughing outloud. There is humor when it's appropriate, and it's downright rage inducing when appropriate as well. The worst part of this story is that the U.S. Government covered the whole thing up. If you like WWII history, this book is for you. Great insight into a piece of the Holocaust no one ever heard of. It'll make you want to punch the Nazi's right in the face.
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Needed to be written
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-03-31
This is a book that needed to be written about a little mentioned concentration camp during WWII--Berga, where many POW's ended up. Some of the soldiers were Jewish, some were thought to resemble Jews, or had Jewish-sounding names. They were put to work as slave laborers, digging tunnels for an underground factory. The death toll was high. The conditions were horrific, and after a death-march to the Czech border, more than 20% of the men left died.
It's about time someone wrote about this tragedy, and it's a book you won't soon forget.
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Interesting and disturbing book about a little known part of WWII
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-04-20
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Let me start by saying that this is a tough book. Roger Cohen's book 'Soldiers and Slaves' goes into the untold story of the American POW's experience at the hands of the Nazi Germans. Not only are they POWs, but many of them are Jewish which as you can imagine, is not a good combination in front of the Nazis.
The story also goes further and talks about austrian and polish jews and their experiences at Aushwitz and Berga. It was disturbing to read the moment of truth when the jewish families were broken up by a flick of an SS's hand on whether they were to go work in the mines or go to their 'safety' of the crematoriums at Aushwitz. You can imagine the confusion that they must have felt as well as the thousands of broken hearts as families were split up in an instant never to see each other again.
The story talks about how the POWs were forced to work long brutal shifts in the mines to build synthetic fuels (the last nazi gamble to be able to get more fuel and energy in the last months of the war). They had no helmets, they had no gloves and they were given little water and one or two pieces of bread. Those that died were discarded. Those that were sick and not able to work, were discarded. By discarded, I mean, executed.
It is great story of survival and of others standing up to the atrocities committed against them. It is a heartbreaking story of the POWs and european jews struck down and without hope as they were literally worked to death every single day. Hope kept many alive and cruelty and hate sent many to their deaths.
It was striking to see how many held out hope until they continued to see their people struck down, shot, beaten and cast aside. You can sense the glee that many of these Nazi soldiers had in punishing and killing the jewish people.
The trials of the nazi leaders responsible for some of these atrocities are brought up and examined. Punishments were light overall for a variety of reasons. Though the book finishes with the discussions of the trials, the heart of the book, to me, is the bravery and the determination of these soldiers and these ordinary people that somehow kept on surviving even with all odds stacked against them. It shows the ruthlessnesses of the nazis that is difficult to even comprehend. It was a dark time for this world.
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Double Indictment.
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-11-08
"Soldiers And Slaves: American POWs Trapped By The Nazis" Final Gamble" By Roger Cohen. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2005.
Roger Cohen has written a book that is an indictment of the Nazi guards and the Nazi work camp system at the small town of Berga, in what was to become East Germany. At the back of the book, he then writes an indictment of the American system of justice which allowed some of the meanest and most nasty German guards to get off with a minimal sentence. The Soviets, on the other hand, quickly and efficiently hanged one of the worst German guards at Berga. See the photo of Willy Hack, facing page 149. (By the way, things are hung, while men are hanged.)
What made the concentration camp at Berga different from many of the other Nazi camps was the presence of American Army POWs. Most of these victims had been selected because they were Jewish or because they looked Jewish. Others had been selected because they were troublemakers. The story about these American POWS makes up about half the book.
The other half of the book deals with the sufferings of the Hungarian Jews who were also unlucky enough to have been shipped to Berga. As other Amazon reviewers have noted, there is a question as to why the story of the Hungarian Jews was included in this book, nominally on American POWs. Despite the excellent writing, I found myself wanting to skip over the Hungarian story to get back to the American story. The story of the German-American, Hans Kasten, was particularly interesting.
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