new york | Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1944 and taken prisoner in Germany soon before the end of World War II, Norman Fellman didn’t know much about the way the Nazis were treating Jews.
He had heard that “there had been discrimination, and I might have heard of Kristallnacht, but we had no idea” of the extent of the murderous rage directed at the Jews, Fellman, who is Jewish, said. “Certainly we felt that as American prisoners, we would not be treated the way they were.”
He was soon to learn that though the Germans treated no one well, they didn’t share Fellman’s belief that his American identity trumped his Jewishness.
Fellman, who was 20 when he was drafted, was one of 350 American GIs — Jews, non-Jews the Germans thought were Jewish, troublemakers and even some random prisoners taken to fill the barracks — who were sent to Berga, a concentration camp about 60 miles from Buchenwald.
Their story is told in two new books, “Soldiers and Slaves” by Roger Cohen and “Given Up for Dead” by Flint Whitlock.
Fellman was sent to Europe in December 1944, Europe’s “coldest winter in memory.” Defending a hill near the Rhine River, his company lost contact with its battalion.
After six days of fighting and five days after running out of food, members of the company destroyed their weapons and surrendered.
The prisoners were herded onto a boxcar originally designed to hold 40 men or eight horses.
“These cars had been used to move cattle, and hadn’t been cleaned,” he said. “These were the same cars that were used to take Jews to death camps.”
Each car was packed with 60 or 70 men and the doors were closed, not to be reopened for four or five days.
The low-ranking prisoners, including Fellman, were taken to a camp called Stalag 9B in the town of Bad Ohr, later said to be one of the harshest of the prison camps. A few weeks after their arrival, the prisoners were herded into the center of the camp, and any Jews among them were asked to step forward.
Some Jews had thrown away their dog tags, which were marked with a telltale “H” for Hebrew. American prisoners assigned to do the paperwork when prisoners entered the camp “logged everyone in as Protestant,” Fellman said.
But he didn’t want to hide who he was: “I don’t know if it was more pride than brains or whatever, but I had determined to step forward.”
In February 1945, the men, including 80 Jews, were packed onto another cattle car and sent to Berga. They had to walk past a camp that housed civilian prisoners from Buchenwald.
In Berga, the prisoners had to dynamite a hole through a mountain for an underground manufacturing facility.
“You went in before the dust settled. The Germans had masks but you had nothing,” Fellman said. “If you didn’t work fast enough, you got hit. If you looked at one of them cross-eyed, you got hit. If the guy guarding you,” an SS man, “didn’t feel good, you got hit.”
“We worked 12-hour shifts. We didn’t talk,” Fellman continued. “Guys were dying. We lost 40 or so men in the tunnels.”
And then, “one morning we looked around and there were no guards. And then I looked over the crest of the road and there was an American tank with some GIs,” he said. “They were the best-looking ugly guys I ever saw.”
Fellman was sent to an overcrowded Paris hospital.
“People would look at me and I’d see horror in their eyes,” he said. “I hadn’t realized how bad I looked until I saw it in their eyes.”
He survived, he said, because he had been in prime physical condition when he was taken prisoner. He had gone to Germany weighing 178 pounds but was down to 86 pounds when he was liberated.
Fellman has gone on to have a good life. He retired after many years in the shoe business and, with his wife, Ruth, bought a farm in New Jersey’s horse country.
Though Fellman is not fond of organized religion, he is deeply Jewish.
“A refrain used to go through my head,” he said. “It’s from the camps. I’m a Jew born and a Jew bred, and when I die, I’ll be a Jew dead.”