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GIVEN UP FOR DEAD:
American GIs in the Nazi Concentration
Camp at Berga

SYNOPSIS:

Given Up For Dead is a true story of survival. During the Germans' winter counter-offensive of 1944-1945, thousands of American soldiers were taken prisoner in the “Battle of the Bulge” and further south, in “Operation Nordwind.” Many were sent to the POW Stalag IV-B camp at Bad Orb, near Frankfurt, described as the worst of all POW camps in Germany. What the prisoners didn't know was that, for 350 of them, their lives were about to become immeasurably worse.

These 350, including most of the Jewish-American soldiers, were separated from the rest of the inmates, packed into the same type of unheated railroad cars that transported millions of Jews to their deaths in extermination camps, and taken to a slave-labor camp at Berga-an-der-Elster, near the Czech border. Here, the GIs worked alongside inmates from Buchenwald, digging a series of massive tunnels that were to be used as an underground, bombproof synthetic fuel plant.The Americans, forced to exist on starvation rations, were subjected to brutal treatment at the hands of their sadistic guards and supervisors, made to work in hazardous conditions, and suffered from all manner of diseases.

As the Allies were closing in on the camp in April 1945, the GIs, by now reduced to living skeletons, were sent on a 3-week, 300-kilometer "death march" as a way of keeping them from being liberated; many died along the route. Only the timely arrival of an American armored division at war's end saved them all from annihilation.

Until recently, what happened to the American soldiers at Berga has been a closely guarded secret. Not a book for the faint-at-heart, GIVEN UP FOR DEAD is a harrowing, heart-breaking story of survival against overwhelming odds—told by the survivors themselves.

ISBN 0813342880 $26.00
Published by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group

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A long file of olive-drab American tanks, the vanguard of the 11th
Armored Division's 'Task Force Wingard,' rumbled southward across eastern
Bavaria along the Czechoslovak border. The April air was alive with a wild
mixture of fragrances: engine exhaust, burning villages, torn-up earth, new
spring growth, decomposing corpses, and victory.

Riding high in the turret of a battle-scarred, thirty-three-ton M-4
Sherman tank was a sergeant whose name has been lost to history. Like the
battle-scarred tank, the sergeant had seen plenty of combat since the 11th
Armored Division first ran into the enemy in Belgium at the end of December
1944. Then came pitched battles at Herzfeld, Leidenborn, Sengerich,
Roscheid, Eschfeld, Reiff, Ormont, Lissigen, Kelberg, Andernach on the
Rhine, Worms, Hanau, Fulda, Gelnhausen, and so many other towns that they
all began to blur into an indistinct, amorphous mass. Then Bayreuth fell on
14 April, the big German armored training camp at Granfenwöhr on 19 April,
and the city of Weiden on 21 April.

The last couple of days, the going had gotten a little easier. Instead
of bullets and tank-busting panzerfaust rounds flying in deadly profusion
from the windows of every town and village they approached, the
"Thunderbolts" of the 11th Armored were now greeted by silent white bed
sheets fluttering from every window, a sign that the Germans, at least the
civilian townsfolk, had had enough of war and were finally admitting defeat.
The German army, if one could even call it an army any more, was retreating
faster than the Americans were advancing.

Heading toward the multi-spired Bavarian city of Cham, Task Force
Wingard suddenly sped up and struck out for the village of Rötz. The
sergeant in the lead tank looked across a fresh-green expanse of farm fields
and saw a most unusual sight. Up ahead, the tank commander could make out what appeared to be a couple hundred stick figures, some of whom began
waving their scarecrow-like arms at him. He ordered the driver to halt and
raised his binoculars for a closer look. Strange, he must have thought; the
stick figures appeared to be wearing the same mustard-colored wool uniform
that he wore, except that their uniforms were torn and stained, covered with
patches of mud. Many of the stick figures were also long-haired and
bearded. If they were soldiers, he thought, they certainly looked like no
soldiers he had ever seen.

One of the stick figures staggered toward him, waving its arms, a ghoulish grin spreading across its emaciated, unshaven face, tears streaming into hollows that were once its cheeks. Who was this sepulchral figure? the
sergeant wanted to know.

The tanker put his hand on the grip of his holstered forty-five-caliber
pistol, unsure of what was happening, of what to do. As the figure drew
closer, the sergeant could hear words, unbelievable words, rasping from the
gaping hole that was its mouth: "Don't shoot! We're Americans!"

And then another aroma filled the spring air, one that blocked out the
fragrance of the verdant April countryside: the terrible stench emanating
from the living skeleton.

What Task Force Wingard had stumbled upon were the remnants of a group
of American GIs who had been taken prisoner some four months earlier and who had been on a death march to nowhere since being removed from their
slave-labor camp 300 kilometers to the north three weeks earlier.

(from the Introduction to Given Up For Dead, ©copyright 2005 by Flint
Whitlock)

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WHAT THEY SAID:

"Whitlock offers an account enriched by the voices of many of the GIs,
captured at the Battle of the Bulge, were spirited away to work in the mines
of southeastern Germany... The best parts are straight from the mouths of
the inmates... A worthy effort."

— Kirkus Reviews

"Whitlock recounts in detail the prisoners' survival strategiesboth
physical and psychological... Whitlock's efforts at rescuing this story from
obscurity are certainly praiseworthy."

— The New Leader

"An important and worthy epitaph to the agony of G.I.'s whose unique
American experience is now finally receiving the attention is merits."

— New York Times

ORDERING INFORMATION:

ISBN 0813342880 $26.00
Published by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group

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