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.
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.
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 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.
Justice isn’t always easy.
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