Given Up For Dead: American GI's in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga

Author: Flint Whitlock In December 1944, the Ardennes Forest on the German-Belgium border was considered a "quiet" zone where new American divisions, fresh from the States, came to get acclimated to "life at the front." No one in Allied headquarters knew that the Ardennes had been personally selected by Hitler to be the soft point through which over 250,000 men and hundreds of Panzers would plunge in the Third Reich's last-gasp attempt to split the Americans and British armies and perhaps win a negotiated peace in the West. When the Germans crashed through American lines in December 1944, during what became known as the "Battle of the Bulge," thousands of stunned American soldiers who had never before been in combat were taken prisoner. Most were sent to prisoner-of-war camps, where their treatment was dictated by the Geneva Convention and the rules of warfare. For an unfortunate few—mostly Jewish or other "ethnic" GIs—a different fate awaited them. Taken first to Stalag 9B at Bad Orb,