Soldiers and Slaves
American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble
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Narrated by:
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Sam Tsoutsouvas
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By:
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Roger Cohen
About this listen
In February 1945, 350 American POWs captured earlier at the Battle of the Bulge or elsewhere in Europe were singled out by the Nazis because they were Jews or were thought to resemble Jews. They were transported in cattle cars to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany, and put to work as slave laborers, mining tunnels for a planned underground synthetic-fuel factory. This was the only incident of its kind during World War II.
Starved and brutalized, the GIs were denied their rights as prisoners of war, their ordeal culminating in a death march that was halted by liberation near the Czech border. Twenty percent of these soldiers–more than seventy of them–perished. After the war, Berga was virtually forgotten, partly because it fell under Soviet domination and partly because America’s Cold War priorities quickly changed, and the experiences of these Americans were buried.
Now, for the first time, their story is told in all its blistering detail. This is the story of hell in a small place over a period of nine weeks, at a time when Hitler’s Reich was crumbling but its killing machine still churned. It is a tale of madness and heroism, and of the failure to deliver justice for what the Nazis did to these Americans. Among those involved: William Shapiro, a young medic from the Bronx, hardened in Normandy battles but, as a prisoner, unable to help the Nazis’ wasted slaves, whose bodies became as insubstantial as ghosts; Hans Kasten, a defiant German-American who enraged his Nazi captors by demanding, in vain, that his fellow U.S. prisoners be treated with humanity, thus committing the unpardonable sin of betraying his German roots; Morton Goldstein, a garrulous GI from New Jersey, shot dead by the Nazi in charge of the American prisoners in an incident that would spark intense debate at a postwar trial; and Mordecai Hauer, the orphaned Hungarian Jew who, after surviving Auschwitz, stumbled on the GIs in the midst of the Holocaust at Berga and despaired at the sight of liberators become slaves.
Roger Cohen uncovers exactly why the U.S. government did not aggressively prosecute the commandants of Berga, why there was no particular recognition for the POWs and their harsh treatment in the postwar years, and why it took decades for them to receive proper compensation. Soldiers and Slaves is an intimate, intensely dramatic story of war and of a largely forgotten chapter of the Holocaust.
©2005 Roger Cohen (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Roger Cohen has brought us a jewel of a book–a chilling, deeply felt, and powerfully written account of an astonishing episode at the climax of World War II that speaks volumes about human nature, justice, and memory.”–Michael Beschloss
“Roger Cohen, who has already written one profoundly moving book on the Bosnian war and provides some of the best American journalism about Europe, understands that huge tragedies are constituted by microhistories of suffering. In Soldiers and Slaves he follows the fate of Jewish American soldiers, captured in the Battle of the Bulge and thrown into the vortex of the crumbling Third Reich as brutalized slave laborers and death-march victims alongside the remnants of surviving Central European Jewery. This is a beautifully crafted narrative of cruelty, heroism, dismaying postwar indifference, and finally, at last, memory redeemed.”–Charles Maier, Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University
“Before reading Soldiers and Slaves, I had never heard of concentration camp Berga, ‘an ephemeral little hell’ within the larger hell of World War II. But I know it now and won’t ever forget it, thanks to Roger Cohen’s masterful account, wonderfully reported and written.”–Ward Just
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Story
In 1940, the Polish Underground wanted to know what was happening inside the recently opened Auschwitz concentration camp. Polish army officer Witold Pilecki volunteered to be arrested by the Germans and report from inside the camp. His intelligence reports, smuggled out in 1941, were among the first eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz atrocities: the extermination of Soviet POWs, its function as a camp for Polish political prisoners, and the "final solution" for Jews. Pilecki received brutal treatment until he escaped in April 1943; soon after, he wrote a brief report....
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The bar of manhood
- By Rhea on 09-22-13
By: Witold Pilecki, and others
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The Daughter of Auschwitz
- My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope
- By: Tova Friedman, Malcolm Brabant
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful memoir by one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Tova Friedman, following her childhood growing up during the Holocaust and surviving a string of near-death experiences in a Jewish ghetto, a Nazi labor camp, and Auschwitz.
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Very interesting and well told
- By Tracy F. on 03-31-23
By: Tova Friedman, and others
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Escape from Sobibor
- By: Richard Rashke
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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On October 14, 1943, 600 Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war. In this edition of Escape from Sobibor, fully updated in 2012, Richard Rashke tells their stories
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Rashke put a face to the good and the bad!
- By As happy as a monkey with two bananas in his hands on 06-23-14
By: Richard Rashke
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The Long Way Home
- An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
- By: David Laskin
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The United States has always been a nation of immigrants---never more so than in 1917 when the nation entered the First World War. Of the 2.5 million soldiers who fought with U.S. armed forces in the trenches of France and Belgium, some half a million---nearly one out of every five men---were immigrants. In The Long Way Home, David Laskin, author of the prizewinning history The Children's Blizzard, tells the stories of 12 of these immigrant heroes.
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Incredible story of immigration and war
- By Daryl on 01-06-14
By: David Laskin
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Born Survivors
- Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope
- By: Wendy Holden
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Eastern Europe, 1944: Three women believe they are pregnant, but are torn from their husbands before they can be certain. Rachel is sent to Auschwitz, unaware that her husband has been shot. Priska and her husband travel there together, but are immediately separated. Also at Auschwitz, Anka hopes in vain to be reunited with her husband. With the rest of their families gassed, these young wives are determined to hold on to all they have left-their lives, and those of their unborn babies.
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Just an incredible story!
- By PCF on 06-03-17
By: Wendy Holden
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A Lucky Child
- A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy
- By: Thomas Buergenthal
- Narrated by: Thomas Buergenthal, Don Hagen
- Length: 5 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir, A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.
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Compelling Account
- By Simone on 04-23-15
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Hanns and Rudolf
- The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz
- By: Thomas Harding
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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May 1945: In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who is now serving in the British Army. Rudolf Höss is his most elusive target. Hanns and Rudolf reveals for the very first time the full, exhilarating account of Höss' capture, an encounter with repercussions that echo to this day.
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I Read This Marvelous Book...
- By Douglas on 01-04-14
By: Thomas Harding
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Schindler's List
- By: Thomas Keneally
- Narrated by: Humphrey Bower
- Length: 16 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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An “extraordinary” (New York Review of Books) novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally, author of The Book of Science and Antiquities and The Daughter of Mars, uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden — Schindler’s Jews — to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil.
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really well done
- By Neil H. Greenberg on 03-09-19
By: Thomas Keneally
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Judgment Before Nuremberg
- The Holocaust in the Ukraine and the First Nazi War Crimes Trial
- By: Greg Dawson
- Narrated by: Gary Dikeos
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz, of Dachau; and when they think of justice for this terrible chapter in history, they think of Nuremberg. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not a town called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war-crimes trial against the Nazis was in this idyllic, peaceful Ukrainian city, which is fitting, because it is also where the Holocaust actually began.
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Don’t Insult Your Audience
- By Michael Richards on 01-21-22
By: Greg Dawson
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The Railway Man
- By: Eric Lomax
- Narrated by: Bill Paterson
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was emotionally ruined by his experiences.
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From hatred to forgiveness
- By 9S on 05-04-12
By: Eric Lomax
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Avenue of Spies
- A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family's Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris
- By: Alex Kershaw
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.
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Gripping, inspirational, and informative!!
- By Constance M. Specht on 09-26-15
By: Alex Kershaw
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Masters of Death
- The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Neil Hellegers
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In Masters of Death, Richard Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen's role in the Holocaust. These "special task forces", organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into Eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than one and a half million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar.
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Good book...but...
- By Disintegrator on 08-26-19
By: Richard Rhodes
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Leningrad
- The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944
- By: Anna Reid
- Narrated by: Peter Drew
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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On September 8, 1941, 11 weeks after Hitler's brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The German siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a million Leningraders had died of starvation.
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Very Good Look at the History We Were Not Taught
- By Chris Reich on 01-27-14
By: Anna Reid
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Rampage
- MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila
- By: James M. Scott
- Narrated by: Jesse Einstein
- Length: 21 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The 29-day battle to liberate Manila resulted in the catastrophic destruction of the city and a rampage by Japanese forces that brutalized the civilian population. Landmarks were demolished, houses were torched, suspected resistance fighters were tortured and killed, countless women were raped, and their husbands and children were murdered. American troops had no choice but to battle the enemy, floor by floor and even room by room, through schools, hospitals, and even sports stadiums. In the end, an estimated 100,000 civilians lost their lives in the massacre.
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TRUE CRIME OF PURE HELL
- By Steve on 12-18-18
By: James M. Scott
What listeners say about Soldiers and Slaves
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Steven J. Bailin
- 05-31-05
The concentration camp story you never heard
Who would have thought that american prisoners would be caught up in the horror of the holocaust. The book expertly traces the converging stories of Hungarian Jews and Jewish American and non-Jewish American soldiers. More startling that the US Government burried this information. Great and tragic story.
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Overall
- Dan
- 06-12-05
Well Hidden Revisionism
The author has a great writing style and sheds light on many of the less known tragedies of World War II. The American POWs caught up in the 'final solution' reflects the need for America to be ever vigilant against despotism. What I did NOT like about this book is the subtle, but very real revisionist history that the author portrays. At best, he tries to sell that the American government covered up the tragedy, at worse, colluding with the enemy. This part of the book is absolutely absurd and is clearly done to intentionally discredit the American government. Another conspiracy writer...
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1 person found this helpful