Barbed Wire Legacy

My dear friend Chris Sand is here on this earth because my dad Dr. Leslie Caplan saved her dad Gunnar Sand’s life during the death march from Stalag Luft IV during the bitter winter of 1945. I met Chris via the book I self-published about my dad, called Domain of Heroes, The Medical Journal, Writings and Story of Dr. Leslie Caplan.  The book contains the story of some incredible USAAF gunners who were shot down and bailed out of their B17s and B24s over Europe, and how their beloved doc, my dad, kept them alive against incredible odds. All of them were POWs at Stalag Luft IV and in early February 1945 were evacuated out on foot on an 86 day death march 500 miles across Poland and Germany.

I always knew my dad had been a big hero on the death march, but he never told me much about it. He was a flight surgeon during the war, but he always portrayed himself to me as a flyer. He even had a propeller he had kept in our basement where he shared his stories of WWII with me. He instilled a great love in me for those who flew big bomber missions over Europe during the war. But he died in 1969, without ever sharing his death march experiences with me.

My dad kept a medical journal containing detailed medical notes while he was on the death march. He had used the journal to prepare for his testimony before the US War Crimes Office about the death march. This testimony has been published in numerous veterans magazines and the web, and is much cherished by the former POWs as the most authoritative record there is of what they went through. As my dad had mentioned his medical journal in his testimony, there were lots of former POWs out there who wanted to see it.

Several years ago, those vets started calling me. At their urging and with their help, I self-published the journal along with all of my dad’s writings and the many stories I was told by the men he served. Many of them had never shared their stories with anyone before; not even their families, but they shared them with me to honor my father. Helping me piece together my dad’s story also gave them a chance in some way to say thank you for all he had done for them.

The book became a best seller amongst the former POWs of Luft IV. I spent over a year processing orders and schlepping shopping bags full of them to the post office. Every one of the hundreds of book orders I received contained a personal note about my dad. I heard from men well into their 80s who had lived long and rich lives because of my father. I heard from wives who would never have married their husbands without my father having saved their lives. I heard from daughters, sons and grandkids who wouldn’t have been born without my dad. And now, after all these years, they were bringing my dad back to me.

One day I received an email from Chris Sand of Clara City, MN, who wanted to order the book. Chris wrote: “My Dad, S/Sgt Gunnar Sand, was on the Death March, and I have read the testimony of your Dad's from the b24.net website.  I don't know if your Dad took care of my Dad or not, but I want to say that your Dad seems like a mixture of angel and hero.”

Immediately I looked to see if Gunnar Sand was listed in my dad’s medical journal. Sure enough my dad had noted caring for him on February 24, 1945 at a makeshift barn hospital he had set up along the way. Gunnar was too sick to walk due to weakness from dysentery, so he became part of the sick group under my dad’s protection. 

Chris was ecstatic about this discovery in my dad’s journal and so was I. She wrote me back saying: "Every day this winter, I look outdoors and think of our Dads and their buddies trudging through the snow, the bitter cold, no heat, crappy shoes, swollen frostbitten bodies, starving, malnourished, the despair, the injuries from war and parachuting, the fear, wondering when the damn war will end, endless marching, buddies to carry and hold up and hope they don't (or do) die that day." I had the same thoughts every day myself.

Incredibly, Chris lives just two hours west by car from Minneapolis, my hometown. So I invited her for lunch and when she arrived with a barbed wire pin on her cigarette case, we let loose from our hearts in a non-stop marathon piecing our long gone dads’ stories together. Both of us grew up freezing in Minnesota. So straight away we started sharing our childhood memories of our winters with our dads. I told Chris about the times when we all piled into the car with chattering teeth, which always seemed kind of funny to me. But my dad made it perfectly clear in no uncertain terms that there was nothing funny about it. Chris told me about her dad coming inside on the cold days, going to the fireplace to warm his hands and saying “I’ve got that an-an-an-an-xiety again”. Both of us had never really thought about these things because it was just the way it was in our families. But now we looked at each other laughing, saying hmmm, maybe this wasn’t completely normal.

I guess it also wasn’t completely normal for me to say to myself whenever I encountered a big challenge (like walking over a mile to high school on 28 degrees below zero days) that I could make it because my dad had walked 500 miles across Germany during a ferocious winter without even a decent coat. Chris was the first person my own age I had ever talked with about these unusual Minnesota winter family episodes, and visa versa. We both realized that our dad’s death march experiences had shaped and strengthened us in all sorts of ways.

That was the beginning of a long, animated and vital exploration we are still having about our dads’ experiences during the war and how those events had shaped both them and us. When you share an experience like our dad’s did behind the barbed wire and under the heel of their Nazi guards, you become instant family. And Chris and I did the same. She named us “the barbed wire sisters”, and we quickly expanded the name to our whole larger barbed wire family of former “Kriegies” (short for kriegsgefangenen/German for POW) their families, and other kindred spirits. All of us share this unusual history and a deep understanding that we should never ever take our hard earned freedom for granted.

Thus began the barbed wire sisterhood, along with some great lunches, dinners and barbeques, among other things including this blog. All because my dad saved Gunnar Sand’s life. Now my co-blogger and barbed wire Chris sis is writing her family’s story. Below is her first chapter, with much, more to come as we take our barbed wire legacy into the web.

Chris and Gunnar Sand’s Story Part One

After my mother died in 2005, I became keenly aware of being an orphan.  Dad had died in 1984, having suffered for many months with a cancer that left him skeletal.

My brother Scott and I began the tremendous task of clearing out our family home in Clara City, MN.  For months, we spent one night a week going through boxes and closets and rooms filled with our parents' things.  Our parents grew up in the Depression and experienced WWII first hand as they were 18 and 19 when Pearl Harbor was bombed.  True to the pack-rat qualities of those days, our house was a treasure trove of history.  As we began this clearing and cleaning, Scott and I found tidbits of items from those war days.  Rationing books, letters, photos of men in uniform, clothing items and Army insignia, and when we found the medals and Nazi "booty", we began putting these things in a pile to keep safe and sort through later.  [I know that there were some items we inadvertently tossed or brought to Good Will that should be in this collection and I still become sick-to-my-stomach about with regret when I think of this].

For me, it started with the letters.  There were about 20 letters with red and blue edging addressed to Mom, (though it was her maiden name at the time), from our Dad.  The years were from 1943-1944, and the return address was from an APO in New York City with Dad's Bomb Group (388) and Bomb Squad (562) and his Army Serial Number after his name.  There was also some returned mail from Mom to Dad and some V-Mail.  Thus, after some months of collecting these from various boxes and areas in the house, it appeared I had them all, and one evening, I brought them all out.  I laid the collected letters out on my kitchen table and began sorting them by date.  Some letters were not in their envelopes, and some envelopes were empty, or had other things in them.  Most that referred to having a picture did not have any pictures in them.  Despite many missing pieces, I was able to amass a little vignette of my parents' budding love amidst the horror of WWII.  It took no less than 2 full hours to actually read the letters.  This, of course, included some breaks to cry, blow my nose, smoke and mix a drink as I worked on absorbing this completely never-before-thought-of aspect of Mom-and-Dad.  That evening marked the beginning of a journey that brought me to becoming a "Barbed-Wire Sister" with Laura.

Laura and Chris with her grandkids Aliyah and Jayden, and a B24.

Words Matter

Justice isn’t always easy.

Truth isn’t always black and white.

                    There are lots of other colors.

                                        Lots of other shades.

Just because you think you’re right doesn’t mean you are.

There is so much arrogance in the world today the word arrogant no longer has any meaning.

We need new words for everything.

My dictionary defines the word arrogant as: “Feeling or showing proud self importance and contempt or disregard for others”.

Can anyone who exemplifies this ever see it in himself?

Everyday we call each other Nazis. The left wing does it, the right wing does it, everybody does it. We are so in love with calling each other Nazis that we might as well put a swastika on our flag.

The truth is, if you don’t want others to hate you, then stop hating them.

 

 

February 14 1945 – Meaningless Deaths in the Last Days of the Third Reich

When you google “February 14, 1945” you will find hundreds of web pages about the bombing of Dresden - and not much else. But the bombing of Dresden was not the only horror occurring in Germany on that day. During the winter of 1945, the Third Reich was literally covered in the shit of hundreds of thousands of prisoners staggering along on death marches and of those dying in concentration camps. Nazi Germany was a death factory right up to the day of its surrender.

Photo from USHMM Photo Archives

On February 6, 1945, approximately 6000 US Army Air Force prisoners of war were forced to march out on foot from Stalag Luft IV, near Gross Tychow, Germany (now Poland) on the first day of an 86 day death march that would take them 500 miles across Germany during the bitter winter of 1945. My father, Captain (Dr.) Leslie Caplan, marched out with the approximately 2600 men of C Lager (one of four compounds of Stalag Luft IV). He was their only doctor and he quickly took command of the column.

The starving airmen staggered up to 20 miles a day through snow in sub-zero temperatures. On a good day they were given a few boiled potatoes. Very often there was no safe drinking water. Disease was rampant, including dysentery of epidemic proportions, severe frostbite, gravely infected blisters, diphtheria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis.

The Nazis shot those who fell behind. For most, it was all they could do just to put one foot in front of the other. Many men were nearly dead and almost too weak to even shuffle along. Some crawled on all fours to avoid being shot.

At night, the POWs were herded by bayonet into crowded barns. Other times they slept in open fields in the snow or rain. The men had only one meager blanket to cover them at night. Their blankets and clothes were covered in filth; their bodies covered with lice. The exact death toll from this 500 mile excursion to nowhere is unknown, but some historians have estimated that upwards of a 1000 soldiers died.

Most Americans know little or nothing of the death march from Stalag Luft IV, or the many others like it that were underway in 1945.  Yet most Americans are acutely aware of the Allied bombing of Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945. Much has been written and said about the meaningless civilian deaths and lack of morality of the Dresden bombings, and others.  Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this in his book Armageddon in Retrospect:

It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children... For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth…

Certainly, enemy military and industrial installations should have been blown flat, and woe unto those foolish enough to seek shelter near them. But the “Get Tough America” policy, the spirit of revenge, the approbation of all destruction and killing, have earned us a name for obscene brutality.

Our leaders had a carte blanche as to what they might or might not destroy. Their mission was to win the war as quickly as possible; and while they were admirably trained to do just that, their decisions on the fate of certain priceless world heirlooms – in one case, Dresden – were not always judicious. When, late in the war, with the Wehrmacht breaking up on all fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt if the question was asked: “How will this tragedy benefit us, and how will that benefit compare with the ill-effects in the long run?”

There can be no doubt that the allies fought on the side of right and the Germans and Japanese on the side of wrong. World war two was fought for near-holy motives. But I stand convinced that the brand of justice in which we dealt, wholesale bombings of civilian populations, was blasphemous. That the enemy did it first has nothing to do with the moral problem. What I saw of our air war, as the European conflict neared an end, had the earmarks of being an irrational war for war’s sake. Soft citizens of the American democracy had learnt to kick a man below the belt and make the bastard scream.

Morality is relative and what Mr. Vonnegut fails to mention here is that while the Wehrmacht may have been breaking up on all fronts, the Nazi death machine and the German people who supported it, along with its slavery system, were still operating at full force. This is the reason that the Allied mission was to win the war as quickly as possible. Germany was still deeply enmeshed in the war and nowhere close to surrendering.

Ultimately, the decision for Americans to undertake carpet bombings of cities was made by President Roosevelt, who surely had more reasons for it than revenge for war’s sake. Whether or not the bombing of Dresden furthered the end of the war in Europe can be debated. But the bombing of Dresden should not be viewed outside of the context of the underlying events within Germany itself that precipitated the Allied desire to end the war as quickly as possible.

On February 14, the day the Americans bombed Dresden, the airmen of Stalag Luft IV had one of their worst days on the death march. Dr. Leslie Caplan noted this ninth day of the death march in his testimony before the United States War Crimes Office regarding “the matter of the mistreatment of American prisoners of war at Stalag Luft #4 from November 1944 to May 1945”.

On 14 February 1945 Section C of Stalag Luft #4 had marched approximately 35 kilometers [21.7 miles]. There were many stragglers and sick men who could barely keep up. That night the entire column slept in a cleared area in the woods near Schweinemunde. It had rained a good bit of the day and the ground was soggy, but it froze before morning. We slept on what was littered by the feces of dysenteric prisoners who had stayed there previously. There were many barns in the vicinity, but no effort was made to accommodate us there. There were hundreds of sick men in the column that night. I slept with one that was suffering from pneumonia.

Similar circumstances were occurring throughout Europe. Here are just some of the events generated by the ever diligent Nazis in 1945 that caused thousands upon thousands of meaningless deaths:

Starting in January, over 80,000 Allied POWs were force-marched from their stalags on death marches.

On January 17, approximately 60,000 inmates of Auschwitz were forced out on a death march – ten days before the Russians liberated the camp on January 27.

On February 8, 40,000 were marched out of Gross Rosen slave labor camp.

On February 13, the last remaining 175 Jews of Dresden were scheduled to be deported, but the bombing raids allowed them to escape.

In March 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through a still fully functioning Bergen Belsen and killed approximately 17,000 prisoners. A few weeks before the camp was liberated on April 15, 1945, Anne and Margot Frank both died from typhus in Bergen Belsen.

On April 6-10, 29,000 were forced to evacuate Buchenwald.

On April 8, Dietrich Bonnhoefer was hung at Flossenberg.

On April 11, 1945, American forces liberated 21,000 prisoners at Buchenwald and its sub-camps. Among them were 1,000 children and teenagers.

On April 20-21, 33,000 were marched out of Sachsenhausen.

On April 26, more than 7,000 prisoners were forced on a death march out of Dachau just three days before the camp itself was liberated.

On May 2, the American prisoners of Stalag Luft IV were liberated near Hamburg. Most of them weighed 80-90 lbs. Some of them died that day while eating donuts served to them by the Red Cross because their digestive systems were so damaged by the effects of starvation that they could no longer digest.

Mauthausen slave labor camp was not liberated until May 3 and was still fully operational until that day, just five days before the end of the war in Europe.

Countless prisoners of the Nazis died after suffering beyond comprehension while waiting for liberation in 1945. Among them were many Americans. Every day that shortened the war in Europe saved lives of those suffering unbelievable cruelty under the Nazi war machine. Edward R. Murrow summed up the meaning of the Allied victory to the living dead in a radio broadcast about his visit to Buchenwald on April 12:

Dead men are plentiful in war. But the living dead, more than twenty thousand of them in one camp  (and the country around about was pleasing to the eye - and the Germans were well fed and well dressed) - American trucks were rolling towards the rear filled with prisoners. Soon they would be eating American rations - as much for a meal as the men at Buchenwald had received in 4 days. I was there on Thursday and many men of many tongues had blessed the name of Roosevelt. These men who had kept close company with death for many years, did not know that within hours President Roosevelt would join their comrades who had laid their lives on the scales of freedom. Back in '41, Mr. Churchill said to me with tears in his eyes: "one day the world will recognize and acknowledge what it owes to your President". I saw and heard the first installment of that at Buchenwald on Thursday. It came from men from all over Europe. Their faces with more flesh on them might have been found anywhere at home. To them the name Roosevelt was a symbol. A code word for a lot of guys named Joe who are somewhere out there with the armor heading east. At Buchenwald they spoke of the President just before he died. If there be a better epitaph, history does not record it.