FadeTheButcher
08-06-2004, 07:14 AM
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=featuresNews&storyID=5610255§ion=news
By Erik Kirschbaum
RHEINBERG, Germany (Reuters) - The nightmares come back to Heinz Gerth when pictures of American soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq appear on television, images that remind him of his brush with death as a U.S. prisoner in 1945.
Gerth had surrendered to American soldiers as an 18-year-old German conscript and was put behind barbed wire in an open field at the end of World War II.
Thousands starved to death, died from disease or exposure -- and Gerth nearly perished with them.
"We thought the Americans wanted us to starve to death," said Gerth, bursting into tears at memories of prisoners dying slow deaths, or of those who were buried alive when makeshift trenches dug for shelter collapsed in rain or of those shot by guards in suicidal runs at the barbed wire.
"It was a death camp," said 77-year-old Gerth, referring to one of the most notorious "Rhine Meadow camps" at Rheinberg, north of Cologne. Rare pictures of emaciated prisoners behind barbed wire bear a resemblance to the Nazi concentration camps, where 6 million Jews were killed. The concentration camps were being liberated as the Rhine camps were set up.
Gerth said his weight fell to 110 pounds from 176 pounds in his month at Rheinberg. "We went days on end without food or water. Eating grass saved me. Those abused in Iraq will be haunted for life."
In Iraq, U.S. military police have been accused of hooding, stripping naked and sexually humiliating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, a scandal that has caused outrage in the Arab and Muslim world and undermined U.S. efforts in Iraq.
Although the origins and scale of maltreatment in Iraq and post-war Germany are vastly different, the images from Iraq have revived memories of the conditions at 16 "Rhine Meadow camps" where thousands of Germans were held in open fields without shelter and a minimum of food in the months after the war ended.
"Rheinberg was a shocking place," said Herbert Schnoor, who spent several months there as a 17-year-old conscript.
"It was a brutalization of human beings," Schnoor, retired interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, told Reuters. "But the whole war was filled with atrocities. In hindsight, we were lucky to avoid the Soviets. That would have been worse."
DARK CHAPTER
Like the controversial detention without charge of 650 foreigners described as "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, the United States classified the Germans "disarmed enemy forces" rather than "prisoners of war." That meant they were not protected by the Geneva Convention.
Under Geneva Convention rules, German POWs should have received the same rations as their Allied captors. As "disarmed enemy forces," they got less.
"We weren't POWs and had no rights," said Dietrich Kienscherf, 77, who spent seven weeks in the Rheinberg camp.
"We had no shelter and hardly any food," added Kienscherf, who saw Americans maltreating German prisoners caught trying to steal food. "They had just discovered Nazi concentration camps and took it out on us. They wanted to do the same thing to us."
With daily rations of a slice of bread and a half quart of soup or an uncooked potato, some prisoners took to eating grass, tree bark, turnip roots or even snails, according to a 1995 report by the town of Rheinberg filled with survivors accounts.
It quoted survivors accusing American soldiers of taking their watches and rings and beating those who complained. Several said those caught stealing food were forced to eat soap.
As the German army's western front collapsed in early 1945, some 5 million Wehrmacht soldiers were captured or surrendered to advancing U.S. forces. Even the wounded, including amputees, were taken from hospitals and put in camps.
Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 20,000 German prisoners died of starvation, disease and exposure.
"The Rhine Meadow camps are a dark chapter in American military history," said Klaus-Dietmar Henke, a history professor at Dresden University. "There were certainly incidents of murder, executions, and thousands did starve to death.
"But contrary to some claims, there is no evidence of a deliberate program of death," he added. "Pictures of just liberated concentration camps probably hardened individual GIs to acts of abuse. But there was no pre-meditated extermination."
Henke and U.S. historians have noted there was a worldwide shortage of food in 1945 and they estimated the death rate of German POWs in American hands was 1 to 5 percent, slightly higher than a 1 percent death rate of U.S. POWs in Germany and far below that for Germans in Soviet hands: 35 to 50 percent. "It was more that the Allies were overwhelmed by so many prisoners and were not prepared for them," said Henke.
By Erik Kirschbaum
RHEINBERG, Germany (Reuters) - The nightmares come back to Heinz Gerth when pictures of American soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq appear on television, images that remind him of his brush with death as a U.S. prisoner in 1945.
Gerth had surrendered to American soldiers as an 18-year-old German conscript and was put behind barbed wire in an open field at the end of World War II.
Thousands starved to death, died from disease or exposure -- and Gerth nearly perished with them.
"We thought the Americans wanted us to starve to death," said Gerth, bursting into tears at memories of prisoners dying slow deaths, or of those who were buried alive when makeshift trenches dug for shelter collapsed in rain or of those shot by guards in suicidal runs at the barbed wire.
"It was a death camp," said 77-year-old Gerth, referring to one of the most notorious "Rhine Meadow camps" at Rheinberg, north of Cologne. Rare pictures of emaciated prisoners behind barbed wire bear a resemblance to the Nazi concentration camps, where 6 million Jews were killed. The concentration camps were being liberated as the Rhine camps were set up.
Gerth said his weight fell to 110 pounds from 176 pounds in his month at Rheinberg. "We went days on end without food or water. Eating grass saved me. Those abused in Iraq will be haunted for life."
In Iraq, U.S. military police have been accused of hooding, stripping naked and sexually humiliating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, a scandal that has caused outrage in the Arab and Muslim world and undermined U.S. efforts in Iraq.
Although the origins and scale of maltreatment in Iraq and post-war Germany are vastly different, the images from Iraq have revived memories of the conditions at 16 "Rhine Meadow camps" where thousands of Germans were held in open fields without shelter and a minimum of food in the months after the war ended.
"Rheinberg was a shocking place," said Herbert Schnoor, who spent several months there as a 17-year-old conscript.
"It was a brutalization of human beings," Schnoor, retired interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, told Reuters. "But the whole war was filled with atrocities. In hindsight, we were lucky to avoid the Soviets. That would have been worse."
DARK CHAPTER
Like the controversial detention without charge of 650 foreigners described as "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, the United States classified the Germans "disarmed enemy forces" rather than "prisoners of war." That meant they were not protected by the Geneva Convention.
Under Geneva Convention rules, German POWs should have received the same rations as their Allied captors. As "disarmed enemy forces," they got less.
"We weren't POWs and had no rights," said Dietrich Kienscherf, 77, who spent seven weeks in the Rheinberg camp.
"We had no shelter and hardly any food," added Kienscherf, who saw Americans maltreating German prisoners caught trying to steal food. "They had just discovered Nazi concentration camps and took it out on us. They wanted to do the same thing to us."
With daily rations of a slice of bread and a half quart of soup or an uncooked potato, some prisoners took to eating grass, tree bark, turnip roots or even snails, according to a 1995 report by the town of Rheinberg filled with survivors accounts.
It quoted survivors accusing American soldiers of taking their watches and rings and beating those who complained. Several said those caught stealing food were forced to eat soap.
As the German army's western front collapsed in early 1945, some 5 million Wehrmacht soldiers were captured or surrendered to advancing U.S. forces. Even the wounded, including amputees, were taken from hospitals and put in camps.
Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 20,000 German prisoners died of starvation, disease and exposure.
"The Rhine Meadow camps are a dark chapter in American military history," said Klaus-Dietmar Henke, a history professor at Dresden University. "There were certainly incidents of murder, executions, and thousands did starve to death.
"But contrary to some claims, there is no evidence of a deliberate program of death," he added. "Pictures of just liberated concentration camps probably hardened individual GIs to acts of abuse. But there was no pre-meditated extermination."
Henke and U.S. historians have noted there was a worldwide shortage of food in 1945 and they estimated the death rate of German POWs in American hands was 1 to 5 percent, slightly higher than a 1 percent death rate of U.S. POWs in Germany and far below that for Germans in Soviet hands: 35 to 50 percent. "It was more that the Allies were overwhelmed by so many prisoners and were not prepared for them," said Henke.