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, told JTA in a recent interview. But “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 G.I.s — 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, five days after running out of food and about to run out of ammunition, 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 dogtags, which were marked with a telltale “H” for Hebrew, and American prisoners assigned to do the paperwork when prisoners entered the camp “logged everyone in as Protestant,” Fellman said.
But Fellman 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,” Fellman said.
Also, he said, there had been “a couple of signs of anti-Semitism in my own company. I didn’t want anyone to get so hungry or so desperate that he would turn me in.”
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.
“These guys in striped pajamas were the skinniest human beings I’d ever seen in my life,” Fellman said. “They didn’t make a sound. It was deathly quiet. They just stared at us. The guys were just watching us. It haunts me still.”
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.”
Rubble was loaded onto open-sided gondolas and dumped into the river.
The American prisoners “couldn’t fight anymore, but we sure as hell could mess up,” Fellman said. “We found that if you put the lighter pieces of rock on the opposite side of the gondola, when you flipped the switch the cart would go into the river. When that happened the Germans would go absolutely nuts.
“Then everybody in the place got beat,” he recalled. “But you got beaten anyway, so it didn’t seem to matter. We didn’t want them to be happy.”
“We worked 12-hour shifts. We didn’t talk,” Fellman continued. “Guys were dying. We lost 40 or so men in the tunnels.”
In April, as the war in Europe ended, the men were sent out of the camp on a death march.
“One morning when I got up I found that my leg had blown up and swollen to the point that it burst my boot,” Fellman said. His lice bites had become infected, and he was in the first stage of gangrene.
Unlike civilians, who were shot when they could not keep up, POWs were heaped onto a cart that could safely hold nine or 10 people. The Germans would throw on 25 to 30, and “invariably anybody on the bottom would suffocate.”
Fellman was lucky. He was at the top of the heap. Another soldier died with his head in Fellman’s lap.
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 G.I.s,” he said. “They were the best-looking ugly guys I ever saw.”
Sent to an overcrowded Paris hospital, Fellman was put in the hall.
“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.
His life is filled with their children, grandchildren, family, friends, Arabian horses, dogs and love. But he started telling his story just 10 years ago, and he still finds it hard to retain his composure as he talks.
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.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
