Berga concentration camp

An American soldier questions a civilian from a nearby town in the Berga-Elster concentration camp.

Berga an der Elster was a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp.^[1] The Berga forced labour camp was located on the outskirts of the village of Schliben. Workers were supplied by Buchenwald concentration camp and from a POW camp, Stalag IX-B; the latter contravened the provisions of the Third Geneva Convention and the Hague Treaties. Many prisoners died as a result of malnutrition, sickness (including pulmonary disease due to dust inhalation from tunnelling with explosives), and beatings,^[2] including 73 American POWs.^[3][4]

The labor camp formed part of Germany's secret plan to use hydrogenation to transform brown coal into usable fuel for tanks, planes, and other military machinery. However, the camp's additional purpose was Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("annihilation through labor"), and prisoners were intentionally worked to death under inhumane working and living conditions, suffering from starvation as a result. This secondary purpose of extermination was carried out until the war's end, when the prisoners were subjected to a forced death march in order to keep ahead of the advancing allied forces.^[4]

POWs were put to work, together with concentration camp inmates, digging 17 tunnels for an underground ammunition factory, some of them 150 feet below ground. As a result of the appalling conditions, malnutrition and cold, as well as beatings, 47 prisoners died.^[5] The U.S. military authorities never acknowledged the incident.^{[citation needed]}

On 4 April, the 300 surviving American prisoners were marched out of the camp ahead of approaching American troops. After a 2½-week forced march they were finally liberated. During this march another 36 Americans died.^[6]

During an air raid, while the camp lights were extinguished, Hans Kasten, Joe Littel and Ernst Sinner, escaped. They were later arrested and taken to Gestapo headquarters. After their identities as POWs were confirmed they were taken to Buchenwald and placed in detention cells. They were freed when KZ Buchenwald was liberated.^[7]

Berga was run by a reserve army sergeant named Erwin Metz, who was ultimately responsible for the inhumane conditions, and gave the order to take the prisoners on the death march. When the allied forces closed in on the retreating Germans, Metz deserted his post and attempted to escape by bicycle, fearing the consequences of being captured in possession of the remaining Berga prisoners and having to answer for his war crimes. Still, he was captured days after the prisoners were liberated by American forces, and he was sentenced to death, because he had killed a US POW, Pvt Morton Goldstein (Battery C/590th Field Artillery/106 US Division) on March 14, 1945. However, because of the American political climate and the shifting priorities of the American War Department towards defending Western Europe against the Soviets in the lead-up to the Cold War, many German war criminals' sentences were commuted in exchange for intelligence that the Western allies believed could be used against the Soviets. Thus Metz was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, though in the end he only served nine years before being released back into Germany as a free man.^[4]

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