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'Berga: Soldiers of Another War'
With Grace Guggenheim
Filmmaker
Wednesday, May 28, 2003; 3 p.m. ET
The documentary film "Berga: Soldiers of Another War," the final work in the long and distinguished career of the late filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, reveals Nazi Holocaust atrocities inflicted on 350 American POWs "classified" as Jewish. Thousands of American GIs, including soldiers in Guggenheim's 106th Infantry Division, were captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge. Those "identified" as Jewish were shipped off to a satellite of Buchenwald concentration camp, where they suffered harrowing atrocities as slave laborers.
Producer Grace Guggenheim, daughter of the filmmaker, will be online Wednesday, May 28 at 3 p.m. ET, to discuss the film and this little known story of World War II.
Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.
Ms. Guggenheim has produced over 20 documentaries for both television and theatrical release. In addition, she acts as Vice President of Guggenheim Productions, Inc., overseeing and managing all business and personnel transactions for the company. She graduated from Carleton College in 1982 and currently lives in Washington, D.C.
"Berga: Soldiers of Another War" airs on PBS Wednesday, May 28, 2003 at 8 p.m. ET. (check local listings).
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washingtonpost.com:
Grace, thank you so much for joining us today. Why was telling this story so important to your father?
Grace Guggenheim: Oh boy, my father felt profoundly obligated to tell the story because he wanted to give back to his fellow infantry men. And the complicated part of it, as you know it's mentioned in the Post article, when I was growing up, Charles always felt introspective about the fact that penecillin saved his life at the last minute. Through training he'd developed an infection in his foot and it turned into blood poisoning. I remember because it was from his lymph node in his ankle to his hip. He described how the doctor came in and said "put this man on penecillin right away." My guess is that he was in the hospital for about three weeks. In those days penecillin was given by an injection in your glute, so you really remembered that. SO I only learned recently that penecillin was only being given to infantrymen going back into battle. SO that was his first introspection. Knowing how he is -- you learn later what could have happened and he learned that his division had been in the battle of the bulge and the 106th had the highest casualty rate -- so as he probably aged, that really hit him also. The question was always what would it have been like for him. He was always inquiring about friends and tried to find an army buddy of his who was a Jewish friend and found out he'd died in a salt mind. And that thought never left his mind.
The interesting thing is that when we were researching. The images of the tunnels at Berga were categorized as salt mines, but they weren't. So the connection was literally there and went backpedaling again and Charles put this story together when he read an article by a Fla. Newspaperman who interviewed four survivors in Florida. And Charles realized his friend had been at this place and that made him want to learn more about it and there were several memoirs and "The Forgotten Victims" by Mitchell Barnes about Americans in WWII, but wrote the most in-depth description of the experience and this confirmed there was a story. So when you're a filmmaker, you're an investigator and Charles had found out another person tried to make a film and didnt' and then we found this military guy named Mack O'Clim who was doing his masters on this topic. He hadn't written his thesis yet, but he moved to Baltimore, so we hired him for six months to help us pull together where these guys were and were able to locate 101 people at Berga and witnesses. And also we cleverly got someone in the Senate to get us permission to get the VA to send a letter on our behalf to the guys. These guys participate in an association and you know what division had the experience, but a lot of guys don't participate in the association. So we spent a number of years pulling together the names. All that.
So that's really what happened. He was possessed by his own inner fate of what could have happened to him and over the years it just grew. The interesting thing is that so many people have tried to tell the story, but it hasn't gotten much notoriety. This is the first time its been told on film.
I think also still now we are still unraveling the real facts of what happened. Because they were really lost due to the fact that people age and I think no one believed this event took place.
Washington, D.C.:
Grace, your dad was unmatched in his ability to move audiences to tears with his films. But I know that he couldn't have done it without your incredible digging and investigative reporting, plus being at his side during the editing process. Can you tell us something of how you went about digging up information and names at the national archives, how you found the guys to interview, what that basic investigative process was like for you?
Grace Guggenheim: You might want to refer to my previous answer because that sort of explains it a bit. Never any one route to unfolding a story and you really have to be open to leads. The Archives were significant because they confirmed the names of the men that went to Berga. The original roster was there. It confirmed names, but not what division they were in. It had their prisoner assignment number. So we had to go through associations and word of mouth and the VA. And then you have to have some luck, too. Some we interviewed were witnesses at Berga, for example, one of the civilians we got through the Holocaust Museum in Washington. And that's why things like that are so helpful.
A sidenote, I just went to the Stalag IX-B reunion in Florida and there was a civilian slave laborer there who worked at the soup kitchen in Berga and he was classically Hungarian and was only 14 and was there as the Americans got their food from the civilians.
I'm hoping that Roger Cohen, who is writing the book, will interview him.
I met a guy at the reunion who was Jewish and he was in the Jewish Barracks at Stalag IX-B and they thought he was dead and they left him there and he wasn't. So he could have been sent to Berga, but didn't because they thought he was dead.
Richmond, Va.:
Ms. Guggenheim,
Why do you think this story took so long to tell? Do you think there are more stories from this period that remain untold even with so many WWII films from the past 50 years?
Grace Guggenheim: I only learned about a month ago that there was a film on allied airmen imprisoned. THey were Brits, Americans -- I haven't seen the film, but what's interesting is that it's a small group of men who were separated from their divisions and got -- the French resistance took them in and they got sent eventually to Buchenwald. So there's another story no one knows that's even smaller than ours.
I met a PR guy who -- apparently there were Americans put to forced labor in Japan, too. These guys -- I think there's another story out there. The name "World War" -- it's hard for our generation to understand it. There were so many countries affected and the story of the Holocaust is a huge part of it, but the stories are endless. Look what happened in the Pacific alone.
Pittsburgh, Pa.:
Grace,
My father was one of the soldiers sent to Berga. He was in the 106th Infantry Division when he was captured during the Battle of The Bulge and initially sent to Bad Orb (Stalag IX-B). He died in 1956 at the age of 40 from his war-related injuries. I was only eight at the time of his passing and have just recently discovered the fact that he was detained in Berga. I am trying to locate those who have survived the atrocities of this camp and who are still alive today. Is a list of survivors and their addresses available? I'm attempting to try and locate anyone who may have remembered my father and who could give me information about him and his injuries.
Grace Guggenheim: You can contact me at my office.
Chicago, Ill.:
Thank you for presenting this story and discussing the film today. Did you research for the film take you back to Berga, or what was once the site of Berga? What kind of feeling did that bring you? Your father?
Grace Guggenheim: Good question. We did go back to Berga. We made a big effort to back to the places that remained. We did film at the original cemetary where the GIs were buried and there were pictures of the original SS headquarters which is now the town hall and the reenactment footage -- along the same road they walked down every day. It was eerie going back to Germany. I thought it might be kind of awkward. I started to feel a question in mind -- because we look Jewish and have a Jewish last name. We'd done a pre-scout before and made friends with people in the town of Berga. And they could not have been more helpful. We could only communicate through a translator, but without their help we would not have had the cast of eastern Germans who played the GIs. There is some resistance to older people because they don't want to be labelled SS. When I did interview a man in his 70s, his reaction was that I wasn't around during the war, so it didn't make sense to him to continue the conversation. There's a lot of German guilt and understandably. You have to live with that burden and I feel for them and in contrast, the survivors who have to use a certain amount of hate to get over their feelings of what happened to them, too. I think overall, once they met us and realized we were nice people... but also things weren't talked about either.
A sidenote... my roots are that my family left in 1847 from Bavaria -- close to where we filmed at the end and the cinematographer who I've worked with for 17 years -- Erish Roland -- it wasn't until we worked on this project that he realized his name had been changed from Rosenberg. So there we were with our pasts. And the location field producer we hired out of Berlin, he was very open to tell me his relative had been under Hess. So the three of us worked together very well and symbiotically, yet we all had a different link to this part of history. Though hopefully with our generation hopefully there's some healing.
Falls Church, Va.:
How many survivors of Berga were you able to talk to for the show?
Grace Guggenheim: Obviously, we've located six years ago a lot of them. But we were only able to AFFORD to interview on tape 40 of them and from those 40 we chose about 12 and about five of those were witnesses. We would have interviewed more.
Not everybody you locate you can interview. Sometimes their unwilling to talk about it in a way you can use. I think that's the hardest thing for the GIs. Some wished they were all on camera, but you can't do it all.
Alexandria, Va.:
What has the response to this film been like?
Grace Guggenheim: I appreciate you asking. Obviously it's such a personal interpretation. But all the GIs we interviewed were sent copies of the film because Charles was still alive. But then he became ill quite quickly and that was an important thing for both parties. But all of them felt indebted to Charles for telling the story and they are grateful to him overall.
In terms of the screenings, we did one at the MPAA for our donors and one at the Center for Jewish History in New York in one Boston and L.A. We had on average between 100 - 250 people at each screening and I think people are speechless basically because it's very intense. I think the film brings different dimensions so it's not all explained. I think it takes you through an experiencal journey.
Germantown, Ohio:
My father was held and escaped from Berga during the Death March on April 20th. He is looking forward to watching the documentary tonight. I am always telling my children how proud and thankful they should be for their grandfather and others like him. Do you think your documentary helps people in being more respectful and patriotic? I think we have let our youth forget what it took to get us to this point of freedom.
Grace Guggenheim: I think it's an important question. I think this gets into a complicated area. I think you're right in that -- first of all, World War II -- the world would have been a different place. We would not live in a democracy now. And our current generation and people today, it's hard to completely embrace the war we've currently gone into. No one wants a life lost. It's complicated when you're in the moment and we don't have full information. All I can say is that we are so lucky to have men, women and journalists willing to serve our country. I hope people get from the film that whether war is justifiable or not -- I think that's the thing about Memorial Day we've forgotten, that those who serve our country need to be given the credit they deserve. We have the freedom because of those who served our country.
All the stories on the news about women whose husbands died, they all talked about how their husbands wanted to be there -- that's what they believed and you have to support them. We would not be this great country.
Washington, D.C.:
What recourse did the U.S. government have when they found out the fate of these soldiers? Were any diplomatic efforts made to have them freed?
Grace Guggenheim: It's just like this story -- not very well known. These guys were liberated around April 20 and 23 of 1945 in two locations, and exactly a month later there was a war crimes investigation committee that went back to Berga to exhume the bodies. There were a lot of unmarked graves. They also went along the deathmarch to find more who died. They collected evidence for a war crimes trial a year later. Depositions were taken -- a man named Vogel whose nephew died at Berga -- he was a lawyer and pulled together a lot of information. The conclusion of the trial, which took place in Dachau, Lieut. Willie Hack was tried by the Russians and hung. He was basically the guy in charge of the construction effort at the tunnels and under him were the two SS that ran the camp, Metz and Marz, and Hack was tried in a different place by the Russians and Metz and Marz were tried at Dachau by the allies. And they were sentenced by hanging. And then their sentence was commuted to life in prison and then again to 15 years for one and five years for the other. My guess is that their sentences were immuted because the U.S. government was bartering for information. My guess is that we still had American POWs in Japan... I don't know. But their sentences were lifted because there was a lot of bartering going on. Lieut. Hack was given over to the Russians and they hung him. So they were known for being really vicious. When we were in eastern Germany and traveled south and stopped off at a restaurant and the rumor was that the home was owned by the SS and that the Russians came in and killed him. Their depositions are available at the National Archives in College Park.
Grace Guggenheim: 1999, there were German reparations transferred to the U.S. for the prisoners of Berga. Until that took place we were held back from interviewing some of the survivors. They were, a lot of them, represented by a lawyer.
The reparations were very uneven and based on primarily how they filed, if they filed, how long they were in the camp, what kinds of injuries they had. And then I just got something from one of the survivors, there was a filing for these guys -- The Conference on Material Claims AGainst Germany. It looks like a group for people who deal with people who have been in slave labor camps. Some of these guys have been rejected because they feel there is no proof. One files and gets money and another is rejected. It's just crazy. They say they've conducted research into their names with lists at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum during the war. The museum doesn't have the material from the war crimes trial -- that's crazy. So because their not using sources without the paperwork. So they are still having to fight for themselves.
My quest is to try -- hopefully the lawyer from 1999 might help -- so I'm going to try to lobby this group on their behalf.
Washington, D.C.:
Grace, that's interesting what you said about the survivors feeling hate. I happened to talk with one of them, just a wonderful old guy, and asked him how he survived the ordeal. He looked at me and said, "Hate. You had to hate to survive, then later you had to get rid of the hate because it would eat you up. I realized there were good Germans, and some of them actually helped us." How was it for these guys, talking with you and your Dad? Was it tough for them, or cathartic?
Grace Guggenheim: First of all, all of these things are journeys and first of all, you do have to create some form of confidence with people before they will talk to you. Charles was a master conversationalist. He was one of these people that made anybody feel at home. He was also a veteran himself. I would say for most of these guys, they never had talked about it. Milton in our film, he died three weeks after we interviewed him, had never talked about this with his family. Phil Shapiro had blocked it out so severely, that when we wrote him in 1996 it opened the floodgates for him that this had happened.
You go through different phases of hate and grief and openess and we're lucky these guys were in a good place to talk. I felt kind of guilty about it because several of these guys really broke down with us. One guy told us he was depressed for three days after he talked with us. We owe so much to them -- they're willing to talk about it and for many of them it's still so hard. Shapiro, has been so dear about taking on interviews from reporters, and you realize they're stepping out on a limb for us to describe what happened. It's a gift they've given to us. Who wants to talk about something that's that awful.
The hate part is interesting, because Phil McCombs talks about it in his article. He's the most loving person, but you realize this one guy had to go through so much hate and forgiveness to be able to talk. It's complicated for everybody.
Pittsburgh, Pa.:
Dear Grace,
Is your telling of the story of the Soldiers of Berga finished, or do you have any future plans to search for more information?
Grace Guggenheim: Unfortunately, it is finished, but because of the publicity of the film -- which we're so lucky to have -- not only Phil's wonderful article, but generosity from other papers -- people are contacting me with information and I'm holding onto it because Roger Cohen is writing this book on it and I want to make sure he has everything he needs. There are still many mysteries. We estimated how many died at Berga based on a medical journal and other peoples' observations. One man went back to find where a relative was buried and because of that we have those names. Another person wrote and said their father died at such and such a place, and that's piecing together the puzzle that no one can find out about. You want to know all the answers but not know if you ever will.
If you know of anyone who wants to have episode two, send them my way. I'd love to see more of these stories recorded and put at the Holocaust Museum. The story has not all been preserved. It would be interesting to get someone from the military to talk about it.
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