Chapter One
The Beginning of the End
January 1945
Alsace, Occupied France
Some guys have all the luck. Some guys have none. Since they survived the war, you might say that Army veterans Norman Fellman and Morton Brooks belong in the former category. But don’t make up your mind just yet—because both these former GIs are among the very few American witnesses to the Holocaust who experienced it from the inside, on the wrong side of the barbed wire. Sent to liberate Europe, Fellman and Brooks would instead personally experience the Holocaust. They would be caught up in the Nazis’ compulsion to eliminate all Jews from the face of the earth.
Norman Fellman was drafted into the Army in the spring of 1942, right out of high school in Norfolk, Virginia. He was a well-built kid, six feet tall and weighing 178 pounds. He was trained as a medic and then transferred into the Army Air Corps but was washed out when the training program was shut down because the instructors were needed to fight the war. The Army was forming the 70th Infantry Division at Camp Adair, Oregon, and since he arrived there on an odd day of the month, he became a scout in B Company, 1st Battalion, 275th Infantry Regiment. Had he arrived a day earlier or a day later, he would have been assigned to the artillery and his entire life would likely have been very, very different.
In early December 1944, the 275th Regiment sailed aboard the troopship West Point, landing in Marseilles, France, ten days later after stops in North Africa. Originally commissioned in 1939 as the luxury liner America, the flagship of the United States Lines, the ship was fast and made the crossing without benefit of convoy. The landing on European soil on December 16 coincided with the German offensive that the Wehrmacht called Operation Watch on the Rhine. The U.S. Army officially named it the Battle of the Ardennes, but it came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. The German intent was to split the British and American line in half, capturing the vital port at Antwerp, Belgium, in the process. It was essential to the Allies that the Germans not succeed, and in an effort to prevent that from happening, they threw every available unit into the fray, whether or not they were deemed combat-ready.
At almost the same time that Fellman’s outfit was landing in Europe, Morton Brooks’s unit, part of the advance elements of the 42nd Infantry Division (designated Task Force Linden for its assistant division commander, Brigadier General Henning Linden), landed in southern France, rushed there after less than two weeks of training in England. The task force included three infantry regiments and a headquarters detachment, but no supporting artillery units.
Brooks had grown up in Brooklyn and enlisted in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) just shy of his eighteenth birthday. He was sent to Syracuse University, but when the program was shut down because the Army needed line troops, he was assigned to the 42nd—the Rainbow Division—as a rifleman.
Instead of having weeks to acclimate and train with its supporting artillery units, Norm Fellman’s 275th Regiment was given just four days, and then loaded onto 40 and 8 railroad boxcars, so named because they could carry forty infantrymen or eight horses, and sent five hundred miles north, arriving in Brumath, France, just north of Strasbourg, on Christmas Eve. The men were now part of Task Force Herren, which would soon be attached to the Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division. They were about to confront well-equipped German army units that would be executing a surprise attack in the snow-
covered ridges of the Low Vosges Mountains. The Germans called it Operation Nordwind. It was designed to cause the Allied armies to shift forces away from the Bulge, where German troop movements had stalled. Nordwind would be the last gasp of the Third Reich, but that would prove to be of little comfort to Norm Fellman.
By January 4, his Company B was tasked to hold Falkenberg Hill, twelve kilometers outside Philippsbourg, a village in the heart of the Alsace region of northeastern France that was valued for the nearby rail lines and road network. Snowstorms began during their first night on the hill. Temperatures plummeted. The winter had already been declared the harshest in decades.
The Germans let loose with constant artillery barrages, supplemented by Nebelwerfer rockets, which the GIs called Screaming Meemies. Communications were cut off with A and C Companies on adjacent hills, and Fellman’s company commander was wounded. B Company held the hill for five nights and six days. “By the end of the third or fourth day,” Fellman recalls, “we were running short of supplies. Food was pretty much gone. Whatever we had in the way of candy bars or rations went to the wounded, which were beginning to pile up. We had water from melted snow, but that was it.”
At the end of the sixth day, the Germans surrounded his unit with flamethrowing tanks, and the surviving officers decided to surrender. They’d sent three or four patrols out; they later learned that only one man had gotten through to the American lines. Fellman says, “We could starve to death or we could freeze to death, or we could surrender, and that was the choice they made.”
There were no more than forty survivors out of a company of roughly 160 men. As a private first class, Fellman says he had a very limited view of what went on. “I remember that we assembled, there was a cease- fire, and that we attempted to destroy whatever weapons we had. We were then marched down to an area at the base of the hill, and from there we were marched toward a railhead twelve kilometers behind the lines.”
It was during that march that he realized the Germans were probably on their last legs. “They had nothing mechanized. They had horses pulling trucks and wagons. They had no gasoline to use for anything except frontline activity.”
But that fact was of little comfort. “You are their prisoner, and you realize that you have no more control over anything. You’re subject to their whim as to whether you live or breathe. I had my first lesson—we were passing a concrete abutment on the side of the road, and there was an icicle hanging from it. I stepped out of line to grab an icicle, and I got my first rifle butt. So, you learned quick that you had no choice at all. It takes a little while for everything to begin to build up. But your first feelings are the anger and the fact that you just have no idea what’s ahead, so there’s some fear involved. And later on, it becomes just a struggle for existence.”
They were taken to a holding area for prisoners of war, then packed into boxcars—sixty to ninety men to a car. The doors were locked and didn’t open again for four or five days. The train sat on sidings during the day and moved mostly at night. Allied aircraft strafed them, and there were casualties in most of the cars. They stopped in Frankfurt for a day and a half and then moved to the town of Bad Orb, the location of Stalag IX-B, the German’s largest POW camp for low- ranking enlisted men. His memory is more of being cold than of being afraid. “Maybe I was too young or too stupid to know just how bad the predicament was.” He also underestimated the capacity the Nazis had for evil, but in his defense, in January 1945, American GIs in general knew little, if anything at all, about the thousands of concentration and slave-labor camps scattered all across Germany.
They were processed into the camp by other American POWs functioning as clerks who never asked what religious preference was stamped on their dog tags—P for Protestant, C for Catholic, or H for Hebrew. “Everyone was put in as a Protestant, and I said, ‘How come?’ And he said, ‘They don’t like Jews. They don’t like Catholics, either.’ So as far as the German records were concerned, everybody was a Protestant.”
Combat didn’t go any better for Morton Brooks. His company was moved from south of Strasbourg to north of the city, where it was overwhelmed by the more powerful German forces. He recalls, “In a way, I was fortunate. I was in a forward foxhole, and we were overrun. And before I knew it, the Germans were behind us, hitting the town of Hatten.” There were a number of times during those first days of combat when Brooks was terrified. The way he puts it, “I crawled into my helmet.”
The men who survived the initial attack gathered in the command post—a tank trap. Friendly artillery fire was beginning to fall on their position, and their telephone lines were cut. Brooks volunteered to trace the wire back to the breaks to repair it. He made it to a bunker that was part of the French defensive position known as the Maginot Line, but he was unable to make contact with the artillery units that were blasting his unit.
Waiting in the bunker with other Americans, he knew that their situation was dire. They couldn’t remain in the bunker because the Germans were all around them, and they couldn’t get back to the American lines. They were pondering their options when the ranking sergeant looked out into the early daylight and saw a German tank coming up the road. Brooks recalls him saying, “We gotta surrender.” He didn’t want to and said so, but the sergeant said, “Look, they’ll just put the nozzle into this opening, and they’ll blast us to pieces.” It was clear that they didn’t have much of a choice.
“It’s interesting—when you’re in training in the States, they tell you you’re going to know what’s going on, who’s on your right, who’s on your left. But in a combat situation, it’s madness. You really don’t know what’s going on. He felt we better surrender.”
Surrendering was a frightening thing to do. “I knew that the Germans would not be kind to us. I had heard about their attitude towards Jews; I didn’t know about concentration camps or anything like that, but I knew about some of the pogroms.” That was going through his mind as the Germans marched their new POWs across the road into a trench where they’d set up a machine-gun nest. That’s when Brooks realized how lucky he’d been not to have been discovered as he approached the bunker.
Once things quieted down, the Nazis marched the prisoners back to a farmhouse where they’d gathered a number of Americans and were interrogating them. Brooks was shocked to learn how much the enemy knew about his outfit, such as the names of the officers and the date they’d sailed from the United States. After a couple of days, all the prisoners were marched to a railhead and packed into boxcars. He was given a bit of food but remembers going at least three days without eating as the train made its way to Frankfurt, parked on sidings during the day, occasionally being strafed by Allied fighter pilots who had no idea that they were wounding and killing American POWs. Ultimately, they arrived at Bad Orb and were marched into Stalag IX-B, a former children’s camp set amid eighty-five acres of pine forest.
The POWs at Bad Orb wore the clothes they’d had on when they were captured. They were ripe—but the good news was that the cold kept down the odor. Their daily ration was a loaf of half-flour, half-sawdust bread, shared by seven to ten men depending upon its size. They had a poor excuse for soup at supper. Brooks remembers it being no better than hot grease with something floating in it on occasion. On the weekends they got what their captors called jelly or jam. The Americans were beginning to know what hunger was like.
On January 27, Norman Fellman marked his twenty-first birthday. It was the day he and his comrades were lined up and threatened with being machine-gunned because some prisoners had broken into the food stores and beaten a guard. According to Fellman, the episode ended when a chaplain convinced the perpetrators to turn themselves in. He never saw the men again.
Early in February, the barracks leaders were told by the guards that at the next roll call, all the men who were Jewish were to step forward. The guy he was closest to knew Fellman was Jewish but advised him strongly not to step forward. He promised to keep the secret, but Fellman still had reasons for being concerned.
“During training, there was some anti-Semitism that we ran into. I didn’t want to tempt anybody into turning me in [as being Jewish] for food or whatever. You get hungry enough, God knows what a person will do. And we were beginning to get on the hungry side. The other thing is, I’ve never been ashamed of what I am—maybe I was cocky or more guts than brains—but I decided to step forward. I told my buddies no, I didn’t want to be on anybody’s conscience.”
At the next roll call, Fellman and somewhere between forty and sixty other men stepped forward. Over the next several days they were transferred to the newly designated Jewish barracks.
Mort Brooks remembers his initial interrogation somewhat differently. The Americans doing the interviewing told Brooks they were required to tell the Germans his religion. Brooks thought about it, then said that he was Jewish. “I wasn’t going to hide it. I felt I was an American soldier. I had to be treated like a soldier.” At the time, his surname was Brimberg, a Jewish-sounding name. Shortly after the interrogation, he was moved to what was designated the all-Jewish barrack, by then holding approximately eighty men.
Strange as it seems, neither Brooks nor Fellman recalls the Germans ever actually inspecting their dog tags. And while some of their fellow Jewish POWs threw theirs away, they didn’t, perhaps because it was tangible proof that the wearer was an American soldier and they clung to the notion that it provided some protection. The Americans were issued German prisoner-of-war dog tags, and at the morning roll calls they had to call out the number stamped on them.
The roll calls for the prisoners in the Jewish barracks seemed to last longer than they did for the general POW population. It was January in the worst winter in decades, and the men had to stand in the freezing cold for hours. They’d been allowed to keep the clothing they were wearing when captured, so many of them still had snow boots and winter jackets. Nevertheless, on their reduced rations, the cold wasn’t easy to handle. Brooks still had several packets of cigarettes that had come with military K rations, and he traded them to other prisoners for their bread ration.
