Given Up for Dead: American POWs in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga. Este artículo no está disponible.Given Up for Dead: American POWs in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga

The extraordinary and little-known story of American GIs taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge and forced into unspeakable slavery in the Nazi concentration camp at Berga When thousands of American soldiers were captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, most were marched off to prisoner-of-war camps where they were relatively well-treated. A few hundred others, mainly Jewish, were marched off to the Nazi slave-labor camp at Berga-ander-Elster, where many met an unspeakable fate. This is their story. For over three months, the soldiers worked under brutal, inhuman conditions, building tunnels in a mountainside for the German munitions industry. Many of them died. The others struggled to survive in a living nightmare. Strangely, when the war was over, many of the Americans who had survived Berga were required to sign a 'security certificate' which forbade them from ever disclosing the details of their imprisonment at Berga. Until recent years, what had happened to the American soldiers at Berga has been a closely guarded secret.

Flint Whitlock is a former U.S. Army officer who served on active duty from 1965 to 1970, including a tour in Vietnam. He has been a military historian since 1986 and is the author of Soldiers on Skis, The Fighting First, and the forthcoming Given Up for Dead. He lives in Colorado, USA.